{"id":59818,"date":"2021-10-11T08:08:46","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T13:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59818"},"modified":"2021-10-11T08:08:46","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T13:08:46","slug":"that-untraversed-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59818","title":{"rendered":"That Untraversed Land"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/that-untraversed-land\/\">That Untraversed Land<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>It\u2019s been just over a month since\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/a-prayer-for-nonbelievers\/\">I started talking<\/a>\u00a0about how the predictions set out in 1972 by\u00a0<em>The Limits to Growth<\/em>\u00a0were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark and shutting down yet another round of factories on which the West\u2019s consumer economies depend, while China\u2019s real estate market lurches and shudders with bond defaults.\u00a0 In Europe, natural gas supplies have run short, sending prices to record levels, while in Britain, the fuel they call petrol and we call gasoline is running short as well.\u00a0 Here in the United States, visit a store\u2014any store, anywhere in the country\u2014and odds are you\u2019ll find plenty of bare shelves.<\/p>\n<p>Insofar as the corporate media is discussing these shortages at all, they\u2019re blaming it on the shutdowns last year and on a lack of truck drivers to haul goods to market. They\u2019re not wholly mistaken. During last year\u2019s virus panic, many firms closed their doors or laid off employees, and production of energy resources, raw materials, and finished goods fell accordingly.\u00a0 Now that most countries have opened up again, the energy resources, raw materials, and finished goods needed for ordinary economic life aren\u2019t available, because the habit of just-in-time ordering that pervades the modern global economy leaves no margin for error.<\/p>\n<p>The shortage of truck drivers is another product of the same set of policies.\u00a0 During the shutdown period, many people\u2014truck drivers among them\u2014got thrown out of work. Because of the same\u00a0 regulations that deprived them of work, they couldn\u2019t look for other jobs, and the assistance programs meant to help people deal with the impact of the shutdowns weren\u2019t noticeably more effective than such programs ever are&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That Untraversed Land It\u2019s been just over a month since\u00a0I started talking\u00a0about how the predictions set out in 1972 by\u00a0The Limits to Growth\u00a0were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[15417,260,265,1758,485,512,607],"class_list":["post-59818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","tag-ecosophia","tag-employment","tag-energy-crisis","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-limits-to-growth","tag-media","tag-pandemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59819,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59818\/revisions\/59819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}