Global Economy at the Crossroads

China may be on the brink of instability and large scale capital flight

If this dire prediction should come to pass, the repercussions across global markets -- both emerging and developed -- would be severe.

The global drop in oil prices is having a depressing effect on Russian markets and the ruble

Putin's inability to sell high priced Russian natural gas to China is likely to further hurt the wounded bear

Things are bad all over, with people beginning to remark on an exodus of cash from China

A growing problem of capital flight from Russia etc.

Even Europe is beginning to feel the sting of capital flight -- and not just Greece and Spain

Unless the US can get rid of Obama and his ruinous administration of economic saboteurs, and unless the UK and Australia can get rid of their energy starvationist politicians and bureaucrats, even the Anglosphere may be in for some very hard times.

Mainland Europe needs to reverse its demographic decline and enact some crucial pro-energy policies, before it suffers a terminal green dieoff.

It is possible for entire societies to commit suicide. Try not to let it happen to yours.

Why Europe Can't Compete

“The fact that energy is cheap in the US, and probably will be for a long time, is changing the game,” Mr Clamadieu said. “Electricity’s getting more and more expensive in Europe, and some of the decisions that have been announced regarding nuclear energy production will certainly move the price in the wrong direction. For industry this is really a concern.” __Financial Times _via_GWPF

Industrialists and businessmen and women from Germany to France to the UK are becoming worried about the anti-energy policies of their own governments. European business and manufacturing are being put at a distinct disadvantage because of the energy starvationist and carbon hysteric green policies that are dominating Europe at this time.

Germany accelerated its withdrawal from atomic power following last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, while Belgium is considering phasing plants out sooner than expected. In France, the new Socialist president, François Hollande, has promised to cut reliance on nuclear energy from 75 per cent of electricity production to 50 per cent.

The issue of energy costs is acute in France because the country is desperately trying to improve its industrial competitiveness to make up ground lost to Germany.

“The debate on energy is a bit difficult to understand for someone who wants to have a rational approach,” Mr Clamadieu said. “It’s very difficult to replace nuclear produced electricity, which costs about €40 per megawatt hour, with a wind turbine put far away in the sea, which costs €200 per megawatt hour.” _GWPF

The convergence of politics and faux environmentalism is never rational. When politicians and greens get together, watch out.

The New Communism: Let's Kill 1 Billion People This Time Around

20th Century communism only killed 100 million people. But the new communism has set its sights much higher. As one of "New Communism's" leaders told an Occupy Wall Street crowd in Zucotti Park NYC: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Or put more accurately, "Fail bigger."

Occupy Zombies

The mainstream skankstream media would have you believe that the occupy zombie movement (OWS) originates in the grass roots of disaffected populations, particularly the young. But in truth, new communism movements such as OWS originate in the sinecured halls of unlimited hubris, academia. New communism is a denial of history and an elevation of an ever-malleable utopian fantasy as the proper standard of human effort and behaviour.

The communist idea or “hypothesis” is then placed beyond empirical refutation. “The eternal idea of the [Chinese] Cultural revolution survives its defeat in socio-historical reality,” insists Zizek, while for Badiou, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis.” Under scrutiny, it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a communist “hypothesis” at all—that would involve testing and the possibility of falsification—but rather a communist dogma, and the relation of the new communists to that dogma is fundamentally religious, marked by piety and faith, and not at all critical.

...the refusal to face up to the criminal record of actually existing communism as a social system, let alone stare into that abyss until one’s politics and theory are utterly reshaped by it, tells us that the new communism remains within the orbit of leftist totalitarianism. _NewCommunism

But the situation is far more dire than the author of the piece suggests. The movement is not a simple quasi-religious political dogma. New communism has merged with the faux environmental religion of Luddite greenism, to form a far deadlier real-world synthesis than would have been possible had the movement stuck to mere politics and political economy.

With the addition of greenism, new communism is now entrusted with the task of saving the world. Not the human world, but rather the natural world, without humans. Humans are expendable, disposable, in this new synthetic movement.

The largely unstated goal of the great green movement of the late 20th and early 21st century has always been a drastic pruning of the human tree. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is the happy face pasted over this ghoulish enterprise. According to VHEMT, it is the moral duty of humans to go extinct as a species, voluntarily.

Another website, Dieoff.org, portrays a great human dieoff as a fait accompli -- something that is inevitable and imminent. The basis of the human dieoff in this case is a catastrophic collapse of civilisation caused by resource depletion.

But it is carbon hysteria -- catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) -- which is the greatest ally of "the new communism" movement, by its very ubiquitous, state-sponsored nature. CAGW is everywhere, from K-12 to post-grad, from the tabloids to the science journals, from the White House to the UN. CAGW permeates modern societies like a malignant cancer. Not a real cancer, actually, but a hysterical, imaginary cancer that carries the force of reality like a voodoo zombie curse that kills.

Under the spell of carbon hysteria CAGW, governments are empowered to seize, regulate, and prohibit virtually anything that can be portrayed as an agent of climate change. Wielding the hammer of CAGW, nothing is out of reach of the state-sponsored zombies of collective mind clones.

So what is the bottom line? Does the new alliance -- the new communist faux environmental alliance -- really want to kill 1 billion people this time? No. The preferred number is between 6 billion and 6.9 billion humans, to be killed or otherwise made to disappear. Most hard-core lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy greens would like to see the global human population reduced to around 100 million, from the current number of about 7 billion. But there are some who would show mercy, and settle for a 90% reduction to about 700 million surviving humans.

We should not make the mistake of assuming that the new lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgy movement is simply the new enemy of right wing politics, or of the capitalist upper class. This movement-of-many-faces is the enemy of the human future. To these zombies, humans have had their chance and have failed. It is now a zombie world, to do with as the zombies choose.

Hope for the best. But prepare for the worst.

A Question of Human Survival vs. Human Die-Off

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. _Thomas Malthus Essay pub. 1798

From those postulates, Malthus argues that population grows exponentially while food production can only grow in a linear fashion.

Keith MontgomeryOur first indication that something may be wrong with Malthus' argument lies in the colours in the map above.

If population growth were necessarily exponential as Malthus argues, the colors on the map above would be uniformly pink to red, indicating high fertility and likely geometric population growth -- as in Sub Saharan Africa. The fact that several relatively prosperous countries exhibit either very low -- and even negative -- population growth suggests that the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian thesis may be in error.

Edward Morgan 5 Stage Demographic Transition
And indeed, if we look at the 5 stage demographic transition graphic above (extended from Warren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition graphic seen below), we see what happens when Malthusian man meets post-Malthusian woman, and very low fertility rates appear to reverse the earlier Malthusian exponential growth.

Some current trends lead to some fascinating projections of the future demographic make-up of the most technologically advanced factions of our global society. The low birth rate, especially in Europe, has allowed for an empowerment of women unseen before in history. Many are essentially swapping children for careers. _NewGeography

Keith Montgomery: Warren Thompson's 4 Stage Demographic TransitionWarren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition model, seen above, was devised in 1929 -- long before the invention of modern contraception, and the modern demographic collapse. Thompson's model suggests that as societies move through industrialisation and into a post-industrial state, that death rates and birth rates will converge, leading to a stable population.

Despite modern contraceptive methods, and the ongoing demographic collapse of Russia, Japan, and the greater part of Europe, neo-Malthusian doomsterism is alive and well. Mish's Global Economic Analysis presents an extremely coherent and up to date version of the neo-Malthusian vision only today. As you can see from Mish's piece, peak oil (and many other forms of) doomerism is closely tied to the neo-Malthusian vision.

Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do... _Mish

Such thoughts must have occurred to melancholic misanthropes since the coming of Australopithecus, although not in so many words (modern human language not having originated yet).

The neo-Malthusian website of Paul Chefurka is an abbreviated version of what you can find in much more detail at dieoff.org. Wherever you look, such doomerism is solidly based upon Thomas Malthus' kindly but jaundiced vision. Such authors appear not to have noticed the rapid fall in fertility across the developed world. Not having noticed the demographic transition, they are not forced to confront the implications.

We should also mention the anti-Malthusians, who feel that the growth of human populations can be a good thing, rather than an unmitigated evil -- as the neo-Malthusians appear to view population growth.

population is not just a factor in consumption. It is the basis for “human capital.” No humans, no human capital. Humans are not just mouths, but also hands and brains. As famously noted by Julian Simon, they are the Ultimate Resource. This is something Neo-Malthusians have difficulty in comprehending. _Indur Goklany

But at this point in time, both the neo-Malthusian doomers and the anti-Malthusian cornucopians may be overlooking important details. Human populations are not uniform in their history of invention, innovative progress, and the creation of widespread health and prosperity. And judging by the map above, it is the populations that have failed most dismally to create prosperity and progress which are reproducing the most rapidly. Given the critical dependency of these rapidly reproducing populations upon the largesse and technological savvy of other populations which are in fact decreasing in fertility, some of the glow could easily pass from the anti-Malthusian rose very rapidly.

In fact, anti-Malthusian cornucopianism applies largely to higher-IQ societies which have the human capital to create prosperity in the first place. Neo-Malthusian doomerism applies largely to lower-IQ societies which are dependent upon other, higher IQ populations for their own ability to reproduce beyond their own ability to feed, energise, and otherwise support themselves.

Here is the crux of the matter: The elite within several advanced societies have uncritically adopted the dismal neo-Malthusian vision -- including peak oil doom, carbon hysteria, overpopulation doom etc. -- despite its many failings when applied to intelligent and advanced populations. The neo-Malthusian policy prescriptions which are being progressively loaded onto the backs of the citizens of these advanced societies are creating a situation of self-fulfilling doom prediction. In other words, neo-Malthusian "solutions" are worse than the original problem would have been, had it been left to human ingenuity to solve.

The anti-nuclear (and anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-oil sands, anti-shale) policies currently in vogue in much of Europe, in Japan, and popular among many pseudo-intellectuals of North America and Oceania, cause government policy-makers to pursue unreliable, exorbitantly expensive, and ultimately destructive power sources such as big wind and big solar. With government policies such as that, there is no need for actual peak oil from resource depletion. "Political peak oil" will do just as well or better in terms of destroying a society's prosperity, competitiveness, and morale, as the real thing would have done, had it existed.

When government policy is based upon models which are not good at matching the realities in the outside world, the end result is likely to be disastrous.

The map is not the territory. The model is not the reality. Your solutions are likely to be worse than the problem. Everything you think you know, just ain't so.

But there is still time for certain enclaves within the more developed world to innovate their way into long-term prosperity, riding the current wave of rapid scientific and technological advances. For these enclaves to escape the destructiveness of the more likely occurrences of neo-Malthusian doom (the coming anarchy), they will need to be areas of relatively high average population IQ and high trust among citizens, which requires relative homogeneity of culture and language. They will also need abundant reliable affordable energy supplies. And those are only a few of the crucial things to consider, if you are thinking about relocating.

Things can go very badly for most of the planet -- largely due to political ineptness and corruption -- and yet things can turn out well for humanity in the end.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

Originally published on Al Fin blog

After the Collapse of Advanced Civilisations, Comes a Greater Die-Off

The idea of a coming great human die-off is gaining popularity among those of the lefty-Luddite green enviro persuasion. Whether the die-off will be triggered by resource scarcity, by a voluntary reduction of human fertility, or by more aggressive means, such a great die-off is being seen more as a positive event by the more trendy and green forces which have taken over most media outlets, Green NGOs, funding agencies, and large segments of academic institutions.

Advanced societies are considered "soft targets," because their populations have become so accustomed to things running relatively smoothly. Just a bit of disruption can go a long way toward upsetting such societies.

It is becoming easier for individuals and small groups to trigger events which can lead to momentous calamity in the advanced world. Increased networking of vital infrastructure is making it easier for hackers to commit cyber-terrorism:

Cyber Terrorism

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Government pressure to create "smart power grids" to replace traditional grids, provides malicious hackers with a wide range of new targets to attack, at various scales.

The threat of an EMP attack -- capable of taking out continental scale power grids -- is likewise increased, as nuclear proliferation proceeds across the Pakistan-Iran-N.Korea axis (aided by China and Russia). As many as 90% of an advanced society can be expected to die within 1 year as a result of a large-scale EMP attack.

Chemical terrorism is another way in which advanced cultures could be targeted specifically. Coordinated chemical attacks using various vectors could decapitate leadership and expertise in several vital areas, leading to widespread paralysis of normal infrastructure. Such a paralysing strike might well be a set-up for a more devastating followup attack.

Increasing sophistication of inexpensive tools for "bio-hacking" are also making it more likely that individuals or small groups will create novel microbial agents of mass contagion.

Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,” said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. “Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.” _WaPo

It is not necessary to target the third world, in order to achieve a high magnitude die-off such as is depicted in the chart above. The third world has become so dependent upon the technological infrastructures and products provided by more advanced societies, that if the advanced world goes, most of the third world will quickly follow.

The resulting world of much lower human population, will also be much less technologically capable than the world at present, in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, however, most of human technology will be saved in digital and book form. This means that within 1 to 2 centuries after the great die-off, the higher intelligence populations of the presently advanced world will grow to a large enough size to begin implementing modern technologies on a global scale once again.

In other words, if lefty-Luddite greens are engineering the great human die-off for purposes of saving the world -- or simply out of hatred for the human species -- their efforts will ultimately fail.

But that will be cold comfort for your children and grandchildren who will have to suffer through the bloody mess aftermath left to them by the possibly well-intentioned greens.

It is up to you to make sure that they survive that bloody mess. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

More On Obama's Green Crony Crusades

Putting green lipstick on a pig doesn’t turn that pig into Ralph Nader. A full generation after the movement kicked off, too many greens are still clueless babes in the woods, regularly taken to the cleaners by cunning and clever corporate interests who know how to say all the right words. Like ethanol, solar and subsidy.


There may be a dumber mass movement in the country than the fuzzy minded sentimentalists of the great green herd, but it isn’t easy to figure out which mass movement that would be. _WalterRusselMead

There is no pig like political pigs feeding from the public trough. And no one lays on a better pigfest for his supporters and cronies than the current US President, Barack H. Obama.

at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers ... a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over. _Newsweek

Obama's Grand Green Jobs Strategy a Total Disappointment

Besides healing the planet and returning the rising seas to their natural beds, then-Senator Obama promised that his administration would create beautiful green jobs: well paid, stable, abundant jobs, unionized, with full benefits and making the earth healthier and the American people richer. As President, he stayed on message: even after the truther-enabling “green jobs czar” Van Jones left the administration, green jobs have been one of the President’s signature policies for putting the American people back to work. _GWPF_WalterRussellMead

Cranach: Garden of Eden (Wikipedia)
Something unexpected happened on the way to the Garden of Eden. Despite massive spending and stimulus, the green jobs revolution fizzled. Wind energy failed to meet expectations, as did solar. Electric vehicles were not ready for prime time, because electrical storage batteries are still 3 breakthroughs away from being up to the task. And the "smart power grid" is proving to be one more way that government and malicious hackers can monitor private activity, and shut it down.

Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs within ten years. Investors’ Business Daily has a list of that plan’s successes so far.

- On his recent jobs tour Obama stopped at a Johnson Controls plant in southern Michigan, which received $300 million in green grants and plans to create a whopping total of 150 jobs, at a cost of $2 million per position.

- Evergreen Solar Inc., which received unknown amounts of green stimulus funds on the hope that it would create “between 90 and 100 jobs” two years ago, filed for bankruptcy this week, $485.6 million in debt. Their Massachusetts plant once employed 800 people; in March it was replaced with a factory in Wuhan, China.

- Green Vehicles, an electric car “maker” in Salinas, California, took $500,000 from the city and almost $200,000 from the state but has failed to produce even one car.

- And as reported earlier on this site, Seattle was one of a handful of cities that received $20 million in federal grants as part of Retrofit Ramp-Up, a program designed to refit houses with more energy efficient materials. Unfortunately, as KOMO4 of Seattle reports, after more than a year “only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program.” _WalterRussellMead

As noted above, many of Obama's expensive green stimulus programs cost $1 million to $2 million per job. Unfortunately, these were largely make-work, administrative jobs, rather than the entry-level practical jobs as promised.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter…

The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one. _NYT_via_WalterRussellMead

A very sad commentary on what was once considered a grand crusade. Read the entire article at the link above.

The ongoing Obama recession has not helped the green revolution take off, of course. But if you look at the green revolution as just one more way for Obama to divert government spending from the private sector, into the pockets of friends and supporters, the entire effort makes a lot more sense.

...green trends suffer when a listless economy sends old-energy prices into a rollercoaster spiral.

This possibility is reflected in the less-than-impressive growth in the “green jobs” sector, which was supposed to lift America out of the recent recession. The New York Times’ Bay Citizen project surveyed the field and found some rather disappointing numbers in job growth, job training programs and even something as simple as weatherization projects. _PopSci

Perhaps the green revolution was always just about appearances, and not about results, like so many other aspects of the current US administration. Just enough hoopla! to satisfy the rubes, without the need to accomplish anything productive.

In the eyes of such political machinations, it is enough just to get re-elected. If the news on the street is not as good as the public wishes, a great communicator can always make enough excuses, cast enough blame in other directions, and toss out enough goodies, to keep the plantation operating.

Adapted from an earlier article at Al Fin

Making Predictions About the Future

The price of oil will soar to $200 per barrel. A bioterror attack will occur before 2013. Rising food prices could spark riots in Britain. The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 2015. Home prices will not recover this year. But who cares about any of those predictions: The world will end in 2012.

The media abound with confident predictions. Everywhere we turn, we find an expert declaiming on some future trend, concerning nearly every activity. Should we pay much attention? No, says journalist Dan Gardner in his wonderfully perspicacious new book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, And You Can Do Better. Gardner is previously the author of The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. _Reason

The only thing you can say for certain about the future, is that once it becomes past people will still not be sure exactly what happened. So how stupid is it to predict the future? Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine thinks it's pretty stupid (via Dennis Mangan):

As oil prices ascend once again, naturally many predict that the end of oil is nigh. Back in 1980, Gardner reminds us, The New York Times confidently declared, “There should be no such thing as optimism about energy for the foreseeable future. What is certain is that the price of oil will go up and up, at home as well as abroad.” By 1986 oil prices had fallen to around $10 per barrel. On the accuracy of oil price predictions, Gardner cites U.S. Foreign Service Officer James Akins, who said: “Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.”

...In this excellent book, Gardner romps through the past 40 years of failed predictions on economics, energy, environment, politics, and so much more. Remember back in 1990 when Japan would rule the world? MIT economist Lester Thurow declared, “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economic honors of owning the 21st century.” Thurow was far from alone. Back in 1992, George Friedman, now CEO of the geopolitical consultancy Stratfor, predicted The Coming War With Japan. Twenty years later, for those hungering for more predictive insights from Friedman, he has recently published, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.

...Back in 1968, Ehrlich notoriously predicted in The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….”

The famines didn’t happen. And Gardner notes that the world death rate was 13 per 1,000 when Ehrlich wrote his book. Every decade since it has fallen and is now 9 per 1,000 people. “In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted to making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” observes Gardner. It is almost not too much to say that Ehrlich has never been right about anything that he has predicted. _Reason_via_DennisMangan

Experts typically suffered academic lobotomies sometime in their careers, which not only leaves them totally amoral as to the effect their predictions may have on real people's lives, but also makes it unlikely that they can ever learn from their inevitable mistakes. No wonder they are so consistently wrong.

And since experts are so highly valued in government, media, and academia, societies which allow themselves to be slapped around by government, media, and academia are going to suffer some hard times -- until they wise up to what they are letting be done to them.

Peak oil doom, climate catastrophe, overpopulation apocalypse, etc. etc. Today's conventional wisdom is a crock of shite. Perhaps it is time for people to learn to think for themselves. But can they still learn to do that?

From a Distance, the Hockey Stick Looks Unimpressive

Prolific and innovative thinker and scientist J Storrs Hall takes a look at where the climate has been, compares current climate with similar climate curves in the past, and slyly invites readers to guess where the climate is likely to be heading.

First -- Where the climate has been over the past 10,000 years or so... :

Images from WUWT
Next -- Comparing our current climate curve with similar climate curves from the past, to get an idea of a possible trajectory... :

Here I’ve plotted the 400 years following each minimum in the record that leads to a sustained sharp rise. There were 10 of them; the first five are plotted in cyan and the more recent 5 in blue. You can see that in the latter part of the Holocene the traces settle down from the wilder swings of the earlier period. Even so, every curve, even the early ones, seems to have an inflection — at least a change in slope — somewhere between 200 and 250 years after the minimum.

The hatched black line is the average of the 5 recent (blue) spikes. The red dots are the uptick at the end of GISP2 and HadSST, spliced at 1850. Note that ALL the minima dates are from GISP2. _WUWT

Then Josh invites readers to guess what will happen next, if history is any guide.

For some parts of the northern hemisphere, it may be time to get out the summer parkas.

Climate simpletons who believe that the global climate is controlled by one trace gas which constitutes less than 0.04% of the planetary atmosphere, have controlled the microphones, printing presses, funding agencies, and public stage for far too long. It is time for science to displace the politically convenient (and economically lucrative) climate hysteria, so that ordinary people can make rational plans.

Previously published at Al Fin Potpourri

A Fantasy Politics Based on Wishful Thinking

GWPF

When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driven by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for a time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses in, it leads to a “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.


Recent events show us two huge examples of this cycle moving to its final stages. One is the belief, which took hold 20 years ago, that the world was in the grip of runaway global warming, caused by our emissions of greenhouse gases. The planet could only be saved by abandoning fossil fuels and drawing our energy from wind and sun. For a while (the dream stage), all seemed to go according to the theory. As CO2 levels rose and the Earth continued to warm, our politicians started to propose every kind of drastic measure to reduce our emissions, such as building thousands of wind turbines. But in all sorts of ways, in the past few years, this dream and the theory behind it have begun colliding with reality.


Carbon dioxide levels continued to rise, but global temperatures failed to follow. Three times in the past 13 years – in 1998, 2006 and 2010 – they spiked upwards, thanks to periodic shifts in a major Pacific ocean current – the phenomenon known as “El Niño” – which brings warm water to the surface and boosts temperatures across the world. Each time it was trumpeted as “the hottest year ever”. But each time, as the ocean current reversed into “La Niña”, the spike was followed by an equally sharp cooling.


In 2007, temperatures fell by 0.75C, more than the entire net rise recorded through the whole of the 20th century. After they rose again to a new El Niño peak in 2010, we were told, only three months ago, by the compilers of the two chief surface-temperature records – the UK Met Office, in association with Phil Jones of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and James Hansen of NASA – that 2010 was the “equal warmest” or “second warmest” year ever.


Last week, however, with a new La Niña, it was reported that global temperatures, as measured by satellites, had fallen by 0.65C since March 2010, making the world cooler now than its mean over the past 30 years. Yet again the computer models, predicting that, thanks to rising CO2, the world should have warmed in the past decade by 0.3C, have proved hopelessly wrong.


... the 3,168 turbines we have built, at a cost of billions of pounds, contributed on average, if very irregularly, only 1,141 megawatts to the national grid last year – less than the output of a single large coal-fired power station. From the DECC figures it is possible to work out that, for this derisory contribution, we paid through our electricity bills a subsidy of nearly £1.2 billion, on top of the price of the electricity itself.


Thus, in return for less than 3 per cent of our electricity, nearly 7 per cent of our billls were made up of hidden subsidies to the wind developers, a percentage due to treble and quadruple in coming years as the Government strives to meet EU “renewables” target by building up to 10,000 more turbines, at a cost of £100 billion. The dream of using the wind to keep our lights on is being shown by reality to be one of the most absurd fantasies of our time. _GWPF Christopher Booker

The advanced world is immersed in fantasy politics, fantasy economics, fantasy energy planning, fantasy carbon hysteria, and fantasy education. Reality has little to do with the workings of the govenments of Europe, the Anglosphere, and the other advanced nations which are caught up in the vortex of debt, demography, and delusional ideology.

That being the case, it may be time to take a less on from "Atlas Shrugged" (Atlas Shrugged The Movie Part I coming to theatres this weekend): Going Galt.

Going Galt means to find (or create) a community of competent fellow independent-thinkers who are willing and able to create a "shadow government". A shadow government is nothing more than a group of cooperating individuals and families who can provide essential services for themselves so that the government is rendered irrelevant and unnecessary.

This concept is different from conventional survivalism where individuals and families often attempt to go it alone without necessarily cooperating and trading with outsiders. Such purist forms of survivalism are essentially unworkable. A far more workable approach is the formation of nuclei (or foci) of competence which cooperate with each other on terms of mutual advantage. One individual may form the nucleus of such a nucleus of competence -- or at least the initial motive force. But such efforts are only workable to the extent that they can enlist the cooperation of ever larger numbers of competent persons, families, and groups.

We are seeing the end-stage terminal dead-end of the nanny state approach to government. It is unsustainable and doomed to collapse. Debt, demography, and delusional ideology are growing to dimensions which were unimaginable a generation or two ago. And they are accelerating -- or "doubling down".

Time to look to alternatives to the mainstream.

Will We See These Faces on Wanted Posters?

Every month, more US citizens wake up to the fact that their own government is killing them slowly, through regulations, taxes, and business-strangulating policy. All agencies of the Obama regime have gone all out to damage the US private sector economy, but the environmental agencies are particularly destructive.

Who's doing the most to hobble the productive power of the U.S. economy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson or Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar? President Obama's top two Cabinet appointees on environmental issues are running neck and neck in their race to see who can issue the most job-killing, growth-suffocating bureaucratic edicts. Regardless of who "wins" their contest, of course, the losers will be the rest of us. We will have to endure long-term double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing energy and utility costs, and the loss of individual freedom that inevitably accompanies the growth of government regulation.

Jackson temporarily nosed ahead early last week when she got a green light from the White House to move forward with new regulations to combat greenhouse gases. Jackson threatened to issue these regulations last year if Congress failed to approve "cap-and-trade" legislation sought by Obama. Cap and trade was decisively defeated by a bipartisan coalition in Congress earlier this year, and now Jackson is making good on her threat. Her move elicited a chorus of pre-Christmas squeals of delight from the legions of Big Green activists angered over congressional rejection of cap and trade. She promises to issue a draft rule next year and a final rule in 2012 that will establish new "performance standards" for power plants and refineries. These standards will drive up the cost of energy, especially the electricity that lights our homes and powers our computers and the gas that keeps our cars and trucks running.

Not to be outdone, Salazar countered toward the end of the week with an audacious end-around play of his own. The Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority to manage U.S. public lands. Thus, the wilderness areas, national parks system and other public lands are overseen by Interior only because Congress authorized the executive branch department to do so. Big Green environmentalists went nuts in 2003 when Gail Norton, Salazar's predecessor in the Bush administration, liberalized Interior's public lands management process to enable more energy development. So Salazar has invented out of whole cloth a "Wild Lands" designation that entirely circumvents the congressionally sanctioned process. _Examiner

Carol Browner, climate czar, is equally destructive to the private sector, working behind the scenes from her White House office to subjugate US industry and business to international climate law.

Until Obama, the US has never had a presidential administration that actively worked to diminish the US in as many ways as possible. As conditions grow worse for average Americans, it is an open question as to when American resentment will grow strong enough for ordinary persons to begin striking back against a government that is increasingly seen as the enemy.

The best form of resolving the problem is through the ballot box, and through revocation of the destructive legislation and regulatory landmines that Obama's people have so carefully and maliciously laid across the landscape. Hope that such a peaceful approach will be enough.