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HOMBREDELATIERRA Profile
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Re: jumping on the activist bandwagon


'"It is better to be ignorant in these times, you don't complain, get blamed and don't have to play the game."

Multiply that by 100 million idiots and what do we have? A sad ending.'


    Willful ignorance in action!
 
    But don't forget, each ending is the start of something new..
 
    Point of reflection: what comes AFTER the crunch..
 
    IF there is life after the crunch, what can we do to inflect the new beginning in our chosen direction (the side of Life, not Death)? That is, how do we "program" the genetic code of the new seed that is forming within the growing chaos..
 
    Even if we can't be assured of the outcome of our actions, as MORAL beings we are COMPELLED to act AS IF our actions had verifiable outcomes..

      One of the hideous tricks of fascism is to make people feel / believe they are disempowered, that they are ruled by destiny. Check it out!: "The Authoritarian Personality" (book title, on wikipedia). The most defining characteristic of nazis - and authoritarians in general - was found to be the belief that MAN IS RULED BY DESTINY, has no free will.

     In this context, it is interesting to note that N. America, in the 1950s and 1960s, re-invented academic psychology to exclude the possibility of free will: Skinnerian Behaviorism, for example, reduced man to a "biological automata". This toxic worldview has now metastasized into the "market-as-god" or "market-as-fatality" determinism of the neocon idiotology..

     I have to admit that living in Québec is probably a bit easier for a green than Florida emoticon Here, at least, we give more lip service to the environment.

      Whether or not our faith extends beyond lip service is another question! In Montréal, our biggest city, the car population grows slightly faster than the human. WHY? Logically speaking - if we were serious about our green orientation - the car population should have been slowly DECLINING relative to the human population for 20 years or more. The public should have forced the governments (municipal, provincial, possibly federal) to increase funding to public transport. emoticon

Last edited by HOMBREDELATIERRA, 6/10/2009, 4:09 pm
6/10/2009, 3:30 pm Link to this post Send Email to HOMBREDELATIERRA Blog
 
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10 june, 2009, wednesday
 
      Not much news to report. None of my emails to public green supportors bore any fruit, yet..
 
      In the meantime, I will continue to build up my list of potential contacts. I will promote my green energy writing circles project on the on-line publications and blogs of groups promoting Sustainable Development (SD). For the moment, I will concentrate my efforts on the big Canadian provinces: Québec, Ontario, British Columbia but will also look into the maritime provinces and neighboring New England. California is also always a possibility, of course..
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RE: your comment that auto ownership should be declining and replaced with public transport.

I dont see a comming decline in auto ownership. As petrol prices go up, more people will shift to flex fuel and electric vehicles and the increase of autos on the road will march steadily foreward. It almost makes me think that promoting these new vehicles wasnt the wisest choice I could have made. Of course if I had chosen to promote public transport, only, it would have just given my adversaries another bone to pick with me. Strangely, the one elected official in my area that is battling tooth and nail to get a commuter rail line up and running is a Republican.
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RE: decline or not in auto ownership. This is a hard one to predict. Prophets are often wrong: I try to see them as symptomatic of times of transition. Rather than counting on specific prophecies, I try to catch the common themes of a bunch of prophets (they tend to cluster around troubled times).

    However, I am willing to go out on a limb here because I think we have waited too long to find ways to salvage the auto industry (at least as a mass industry). So my prediction here is based on a straightforward, short term extrapolation of our current trajectory (which is obviously a head on, high speed crash with reality emoticon). Not too much "rocket science" or crystal ball gazing there..
 
    As economies "recover" (temporarily, since the system is sick at the root), the big emerging economies like India and China will drive up the price of oil. I don't think we will have the time to redesign the private auto to fit the new price regimen. There is worse, much worse..
 
     Oil prices will be extremely volatile (due to Peak Oil compressions in SUPPLY). When supply can't keep up with demand, prices don't just rise, they become extremely skittish (they jump around a lot). This is a real killer as it makes megaproject prospects very hard to predict (this is because volatile prices fluctuate wildly on the short term while megaprojects require a stable long term business and economic environment to plan, finance, construct, and then recuperate their original investments). Trust me: volatility is a real killer for megaprojects.

    Now, oil refineries, autoplants, new auto types, alternative fuels.. all these fall, more or less, into the "mega" category, hence are susceptible to disruption by oil price volatility.
 
    This is why - going out on a limb - I feel that the long term perspective for the private auto is not good. People simply waited too long to get their act together..
6/10/2009, 7:01 pm Link to this post Send Email to HOMBREDELATIERRA Blog
 
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You could be right, at least about the American auto industry. People are starting to grumble about the increase in the price of oil already and the formally big 3 have no affordable alternatives ready to roll.

India and China on the other hand are rapidly working towards electric vehicles priced for the masses. If they are successful,all of Asia and Europe could become their market.
 
I think the U S will feel the brunt of the oil volitility first because we have few large public transit systems to fall back on in most states. This will drive us towards more drilling (such as off the coast of FL). Of course that will necessitate ever increasing oil prices to fund such efforts. It will be interesting to see if people resort to car pooling to save money.

As I see it, were headed for a roller coaster ride but this roller coaster only goes one way, down. With increased oil prices, inflation will set in. People who still have jobs will have less to spend. Sales will decline. Tax revenues will decrease. Government both large and small will default on their debts. Eventually the U S empire will crumble.

Perhaps then we will see the beginnings of prosperity without growth?
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       These are interesting times. When you are in interesting times, it's not easy to see where things will go. You can't see the forest for the trees, for lack of perspective. It took about 7 centuries, at least, to see the real impact of the crusades: the rebirth of scientific thinking in the West with the scientific and industrial revolutions as result.. God/dess knows what the long term effects of this time will really be: the sky's the limit!
 
     I have a gut feeling that the neocon ideology will turn out as wrong minded economically and ecologically as in the realms of Sustainable Devlopment (SD) and geopolitics. The stupid, tragic failure to engage the path of small-scale, equitable, SD in the six decades following WW II is now coming back to haunt the neocons (even under liberal administrations, F-All was done; the neocons were simply more up front about it.)
 
     The even more tragic times ahead of us may, if wisely handled, work to the advantage of those who believe that a more just, more equitable society is, in reality, the more viable option, and not just a pipedream of "idealists". That's why I tend to see a hidden, bright side to all the bad news: we finally have proof that the Business-as-usual school of Everything doesn't work (any longer). In a sense the ball is now in the court of the progressives (at least more than it has been in about 4 decades !! emoticon )
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I dont see the Progressives as being the solution. They are just as blind as the neocons to SD. I think we should name ourselves the GreenEarthers.
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Hi Agnes,

    I agree with you about "GreenEarthers".

    When I used the term "progressive", I was simply employing a contrasting term to "reactionary". I did not mean to refer to any particular group. Sorry about that !!! emoticon
 
    You should know me by now: I don't think any of the political agendas in place today are worth the price of the black powder it would take to blow them to hell with. This is why I refer to our local parties as "Conservatives (Neocon Lite)" and "Liberals (Neocon Xtra Lite)".
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30 june, tuesday, 2009
 
    Not much to report. None of the "big shots" or groups involved in green energy replied to my project proposal (writers' circles for the promotion of Green Energy: letters-to-the-editor, op-ed pieces, other media contacts..).
 
     Weekend past: went through a list of contacts I found in a recently published book promoting small scale, community initiated, wind energy projects in the province of Québec (L'éolien: pour qui souffle le vent?, Écosociété). Found about 20 new potential contacts. Today I began checking out the sites and whittling down the list.. emoticon
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Maybe everyone is suffering from the summertime blues. :-(
6/30/2009, 4:29 pm Link to this post   Blog
 


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