Back to Blogging…………..
Now that the sun is well into its descent here north of the equator I may find some time to post some thoughts about lots of things, agricultural and non agricultural. I think I will steer clear of long screeds on the politics of descent into chaos which seems to be playing out not just here in the US but virtually worldwide. I have repeatedly said this current decade will tell the tale of our likely trajectory for the rest of the century. The driver will be energy depletion and decline but that is as of yet almost never mentioned by the MSM because they are tied to the political propaganda machine and the corporate business model of growth, expansion and surveillance, as well as digital tracking to sell us stuff we don’t need or can’t afford.
The noise emanating out of Scotland at COP already looks to be just more of the same tap dancing and dodging of what needs to be done to really combat climate change. Nothing of consequence will come out of it to change anything to reduce emissions to any meaningful extent. The obvious proof to me at least are the terms they use: Net Zero by such and such a date, usually 2050,60 or 70. Their silly meaningless pledges of course will not be met because there is absolutely no will to reduce carbon emissions in the near term, say in the next year or even the next decade. We need to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and that will never happen unless we see emissions starting to decline this year, next year and the coming years. Their solutions are more electric cars, heat pumps, expanded solar panels and wind farms to shift electrical output from fossil power plants to these misnamed RE sources. I have stated why this cannot and will not happen and I will return in future blogs to expand on this opinion as necessary if I have the time. The emphasis on climate change as the great and only evil of our industrial emissions is also ignoring all the equally significant related interconnected changes going on in the world: Overpopulation, rampant accelerating pollution of land and water, overproduction of chemical poisons which are wiping out organisms like mycorrhizae at the bottom of the food chain to all manner of animals at the top(The Sixth Extinction), vast income inequality and corruption of politics and the financial and corporate technocracy, digital surveillance and tracking of our every word and keystroke, destruction of the middle class by off shoring of our industrial base and no sign of any awareness of the need to limit “growth and progress” in the economy which has brought us to this point. There are many other factors because this economy is complex beyond any possibility of understanding or control. This hyper complex civilization has blown past into the realm of diminishing returns and I think some form of collapse is baked into the cake. Don’t ask me when as no one can possibly know. Is there any hope? Of course there is hope but not until this complexity implodes to a lower energy level and a simpler structure. There will be hope when oil, gas and coal deplete far enough to stop the machine which can only run on fossil carbon. There is no will among the major emitters to cease use of carbon based energy and some countries like India have almost all their energy eggs in the carbon basket and stopping coal emissions would crash their economies and explode into revolution in the streets. A few countries do have enough varied sources of energy to reduce emissions if everyone else did. Norway is an example as well as some small island countries but not the big players like the US, Russia, China, India and Brazil.
Well this post is long enough. I would like to post our little tales of trying to farm in a harsh mountain climate and how we are trying to feed ourselves and some friends by the sweat of our brows and the oil in our Kubota tractor. I also would like to start short serialization of my analysis of our energy economy civilization in as much detail as I can muster. I do this mostly for my benefit to try to understand what is going on and why. I have hope of only limited success.
Rendezvous Mountain Farm 