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What Should I Do? – Crash Course Chapter 26
What Should I Do? – Crash Course Chapter 26
Chapter 26 of the Crash Course — the final chapter — is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
If there’s one message to take away from this newly-updated Crash Course video series, it’s this: It’s time for you to become more resilient and more engaged. Things are changing quickly and nobody knows how much time we have before the next economic, ecological or energy related crisis erupts. Nobody knows when, but we do have a pretty good idea of what is coming.
Either you respond to these inevitable changes or they will happen to you. That’s the simple choice we all face.
Yet I really want you to understand that this is not a message of doom and gloom, but one of excitement and hope. How so?
Because it is within your control to enter the coming future with a higher degree of security, prosperity and fulfillment than you enjoy now.
By using the time we still have available to us now, before the trends described within the Crash Course arrive in force, to build resilience. To invest in the practices that will increase your quality of life, whatever the future may bring.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Keep Your Eyes On The Prize: Chris Martenson | Peak Prosperity
Keep Your Eyes On The Prize: Chris Martenson | Peak Prosperity.
At the essential center of the framework of the Crash Course is the almost insultingly simple idea that endless growth on a finite planet is an impossibility.
It is so simple it could be worked out by a clever 4 year-old. And yet it must not be so simple because the main narrative of every economy in every corner of the globe rests on the idea of endless, infinite growth.
Various rationalizations and mental dodges are made in people’s minds to accommodate the principle of endless growth. Some avoid thinking of it all together. Some think that perhaps we will escape into space, and continue our growthful ways on some other yet-to-be named planet(s). Most simply assume that some new wondrous technology will arise that can allow us to avoid pesky limits.
Whatever the rationalization, none stand up well to simple math and cold logic.
At the very heart of endless growth lies the matter of energy. To grow forever requires infinite amounts of energy. Growth and energy are linked in a causal way.
Future Shock – Crash Course Chapter 25 | Peak Prosperity
Future Shock – Crash Course Chapter 25 | Peak Prosperity.
Here at the penultimate chapter of The Crash Course, everything we’ve learned comes together into a single narrow range of time we’ll call the twenty-teens.
What this chapter offers is a comprehensive view of how all of our problems are actually interrelated and need to be viewed as such, or solutions will continue to elude us.
Each of the many key trends and threats mentioned earlier in The Crash Course will take many years, if not several decades, to address. And yet, we find them all parked directly in front of us without any serious national discussion or planning.
With every passing day we squander precious time while the problems grow larger and more costly, if not thoroughly intractable. Buying time, as the central bankers and politicians the world-over have opted to do, is not a strategy. Simply hoping for better times has a much different probability for success than having a well thought-out plan. The mark of a mature adult is someone who can manage complexity and plan ahead. The same description applies to an entire society. Here at Peak Prosperity, our opinion is that with precious few exceptions, the current political and corporate leadership of this country are not adequately managing the complexity of the situation. And they are not planning ahead.
Simply put: We’ve lived well beyond our economic, energetic and ecological budgets. It’s time to change that.
It is time, to return to living within our means. We need to set priorities, set budgets, and stick to both.
The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity
The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity.
Chapter 24 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
Following up on the previous chapter focusing on human-caused resource depletion, the other disheartening part of the story of the environment concerns the things we humans put back into it, and the impact they have on the ecosystems that support all of life — ours included.
Like the economy, ecosystems are complex systems. That means that they owe their complexity and order to energy flows and, most importantly, they are inherently unpredictable. How they will respond to the change by a thousand rapid insults is unknown and literally unknowable.
Like any complex system, an ecosystem will tend to remain in a stable form until the pressures become too great and then they will suddenly shift to a different baseline and exist there for a while. That is, instead of having some magical preferred equilibrium, they have many — and some of those will be decidedly less or more awesome for humans to exist within.
If the world tips from a stable climate to a less stable one, as it has done many times in the past, then growing enough food for everyone will become difficult if not impossible.
An ocean acidified will remain that way for possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Overly-depleted cod fisheries will take many decades to recover, if and only if they are not fished in between. A species wiped out remains that way forever.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…
The Environment: Depleting Resources – Crash Course Chapter 23 | Peak Prosperity
The Environment: Depleting Resources – Crash Course Chapter 23 | Peak Prosperity.
Chapter 23 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
When we wander over to the third E in this story – the Environment – we note two things: both the increasing demand of exponentially more resources being extracted from the ground and exponentially more waste being put back into various ecosystems.
Because we are trying to assess here whether we can justify ever-increasing amounts of money and debt, for now let’s just concern ourselves with the resources we take from the natural world to support our global economy.
Oil is not the only essential resource that is fast becoming more expensive to produce, harder to find, or both. In fact, we see an alarming number of examples depletion of critical resources that almost exactly mirror the oil story.
First we went after the easy and or high quality stuff, then the progressively trickier, deeper and or more dilute stuff.
The bottom line is this: we, as a species, all over the globe, have already mined the richest ores, found the easiest energy sources, and farmed the richest soils that our Environment has to offer.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…
Energy & The Economy – Crash Course Chapter 22 | Peak Prosperity
Energy & The Economy – Crash Course Chapter 22 | Peak Prosperity.
Chapter 22 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
In the past few chapters on Energy Economics, Peak Cheap Oil, and the false promise of Shale Oil, we’ve gone into great detail to show how our economic growth is deeply dependent on our energy systems.
Here’s how it all sums up. There are some knowns:
We know that energy is required for both growth and complexity. We know that surplus energy is shrinking. We know that the age of cheap oil is over. And we know that because of this oil costs will consume an ever-greater proportion of our total budget.
And with these known facts, come along specific risks. There is the risk that our exponential money system will cease to operate in a world of declining energy surplus. It is designed for a world without limits – a world of endless growth.
And there is the risk that our society will be forced to become less complex – a loaded statement if ever there was one.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…
Shale Oil – Crash Course Chapter 21 | Peak Prosperity
Shale Oil – Crash Course Chapter 21 | Peak Prosperity.
If you’ve watch the previous video chapter on Peak Cheap Oil, you may be wondering how any of that could be still be true given all the positive recent stories about shale oil and shale gas , many of which have proclaimed that “Peak Oil is dead”.
The mainstream press has faithfully repeated every press and PR statement made by the shale producers. And if you simply followed the headlines, you might even believe this about the US:
- It is soon going to be energy independent,
- Its oil production will surpass even Saudi Arabia putting it in the number one spot,and
- The US will even be exporting oil again like the days of old.
The only problem with this story is that it is misleading in some very important ways. And entirely false in others.
Here are there are five main things to know about the shale plays.
Fuzzy Numbers – Crash Course Chapter 18 | Peak Prosperity
Fuzzy Numbers – Crash Course Chapter 18 | Peak Prosperity.
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Fuzzy Numbers – Crash Course Chapter 18
Chapter 18 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
What if it turned out that our individual, corporate and government decision-making was based on misleading, if not provably false, data?
As we detail in this latest chapter of the Crash Course series, that’s exactly the case today with the key indicators (inflation, GDP, employment, deficits, etc) our central planners are using to guide the future of the global economy.
The cumulative effect of all this statistical sleight of hand serves only to make things seem rosier than they actually are. If this is not lying to ourselves, then “deluding ourselves” is the next best term.
Keep this self-deception in mind when you next read about how “our robust economy is still expanding”.
We are now in the midst of a worldwide debt orgy, dangerous asset bubbles, the beginning waves of boomer retirements – and solid, credible information is what we need as a beacon to find our way out.
…click on the link above for the rest of the article…
