sure somebody’s gonna figure it out
Check out these when resources will run out images:
sure somebody’s gonna figure it out
Image by Kalense Kid
Our economy has even less appetite for reducing the rate of consumption of non-renewable resources.
Oil is the most spectacular example of heedless consumption, but not the only non-renewable resource we rely upon.
Increasingly effective ways of extracting non-renewable resources make them increasingly cheap and more available.
This trend will continue up to the moment at which a key irreplaceable resource runs out, or becomes so difficult to extract that it is in effect exhausted.
Up to that point, most other non-renewable resources will continue to increase in apparent availability and get cheaper.
The economy collapses for want of one irreplaceable non-renewable resource in a time of plenty.
To an ecologist, this is a familiar concept. To an economist, it may seem almost heretical.
Heretical or not, global production of gold, silver, lead, tungsten and zinc will soon fail to satisfy demand, but there seems to be no unambiguous way to predict whether the key limiting resource might be one of those metals, or tantalum, antimony, indium, beryllium, scandium, gallium, germanium, platinum, or perhaps some other obscure and alien-sounding element.
Collapse? Huh?
Some examples. Nuclear reactors need control rods, and control rods need indium, dysprosium, europium, and holmium. Some also need samarium.
Hafnium and gadolinium are needed to make computer chips, while gallium and indium are used to make liquid-crystal computer monitors and terbium is used in optical computer memories and hard drives.
Much of modern technology depends on rare elements. Despite what one infamous (and now dead) economist thought, you can’t make elements.
When they’re gone, they’re gone – and with them, computers, or monitors, or nuclear reactors, or superconductors, or gasoline, or a host of other things we think are pretty neat, and without which our civilization will get awfully wobbly.
Nine Inch Nails – Capital G
Put CHASE on the RUN!
Image by meme_mutation
It’s not bad enough that these giant multinational banks get huge amounts of corporate welfare and outright "government bailouts" when their corrupt practices are proven as failures… they also get to fleece us in so many more creative & roundabout ways… JP Morgan Chase, in particular, is the top financier of "mountain-top removal" strip-mining in Southern Appalachia AND in a tragic irony they’ve been allowed by our greedy plutocratic government[s] to ‘manage’ the social assistance programs` in some of the poorest states in the nation. SO, while they are allowed to destroy one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Americas (robbing us of our only REAL wealth; our ecological inheritance) by replacing men with machines and turning mountains to moonscapes, they’re also given the task of doling out the food stamps to the people they disable and downsize. Their war on the environment is a racket… just like all of the other wars they finance. Their real war, as always, is on the poor… and the battlefields are generally the home lands of ‘the poor’. That’s HOW the rich get richer and ensure that the poor stay poor… stealing their land and its wealth and then forcing the children to abandon the land or work for scraps.
And, whether you choose the Blue Party or the Red Party (and probably even the Green Party), the government is totally complicit in using wild nature (in conjunction with human and mechanized labor) as a ‘resource’ for ‘profit’. Indeed, protecting the profits of a few very rich cabals seem to be the government’s only reason for existence… National Forests are more properly ‘tree farms’, banks can rob us and be rewarded for it. We’ve seen that more clearly than ever in these past few years.
The hogs once ran free and fed on an endless forest full of chestnuts. Now the great forests are gone and bits of pig are parceled in little pieces of plastic… like the patches of pine dotting denuded hillsides. Ginseng is a rarity, mighty Chestnut trees grow to the size of Chinquapin bushes, and remain barren… native trout no longer spawn, alien trout are stocked after being cloned. Now the generations of outhouses and black lung disease could be confused for "the good ol’ days"… Back then, work strikes could really be effective at forcing improved conditions, because the land could really support the people who lived there while "the company store" was not supporting them… but what will be left of Appalachia when the peaks are flattened and the creeks are filled. And, when you destroy the oldest mountains on Earth, what will happen to the sea? We’re all connected, and all responsible. JP Morgan Chase, however large, is just a thread in a web.. and those who care for life need to be as diligent in their efforts as those who prefer to care for money. Put all the bastards on the run… everywhere that the Earth and its people are suffering in the name of ‘profit’ and everywhere that wealth & privilege try to silence that suffering..
Save the Endangered Hillbillies!
Digital Reflections
Image by seriykotik1970
Alice in Wonderland reflected in a floppy disc. Once at the cutting edge of digital data storage the floppy disc is rapidly becoming obsolete- while "Alice" in book form is timeless. Which leads me to wonder- how timeless or permanent are all our digital books, internet encyclopedias, virtual photoarchives…? Will they still exist when we have run out of oil , when we can no longer generate electricity, or when the technology to read them has been forgotten? When our technophobic grandchildren curse us for squandering their planet’s resources, will they also curse us for leaving so few records on paper and so many of our records,so much of our knowledge, our creativity locked away in a form that can no longer be read? At least the Babylonians wrote their cryptic- and long indecipherable- records on tablets of clay. What do we use?
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