Oil Crisis Quotes

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station.

Now, now," my father said. "Let's just get the bags." This was typical. My father, the lone male in our estrogen-heavy household, had always dealt with any kind of emotional situation or conflict by doing something concrete and specific. Discussion of cramps and heavy flow at the breakfast table? He was up and out the door to change oil on one of our cars. Coming home in tears for reasons you just didn't want to discuss? He'd go make you a grilled cheese, which he'd probably end up eating. Family crisis brewing in a public place? Bags. Get the bags.

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

Climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is impacting us every day, everywhere.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

We tend to think of environmental catastrophes—such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska—as "accidents": isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?

Traditional Chinese administration was a well-oiled machine, which, barring a crisis, would keep ticking over. Initiatives were not required and rarely offered. State policies depended almost entirely on the dynamism of the throne.

The actionable items were intangible (no, Belen said repeatedly, actually it was very simple, all you had to do was hold corporations responsible for their emissions, but for whatever reason her voice seemed to get drowned out by something, usually heartwarming ads where oil was being cleaned off of ducks with Very Effective dish soap). And also, they noted with importance, where were they supposed to get the money? Belen said wealth tax, and the wealthy said hm sorry what?

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for much of the cleanup of its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the industry to at least split the bill for the climate crisis.

the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world’s debt enforcers—“You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs.” I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the ’70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn’t figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called “go-go banking”); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early ’80s; how, during the ’80s and ’90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on

It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.

Textile production is second only to the oil industry for pollution. It adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

Here at the end of the world, with the climate crisis bearing down like Godzilla over downtown Tokyo, U.S. taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas drilling are now almost literally insane.

By the beginning of the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy was failing. It could not produce the goods that people wanted, and what it did produce was shoddy, except for specific sectors, mainly defense. The oil crisis of the 1970s came just in time.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)

Afghanistan doesn’t have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we’re not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner’s, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man.

Don’t waste time worrying about work/life balance, or looking for your best self, sham “secrets” or any other snake oil being pushed by sloppy hippies who have never built a business, let alone a bankroll, or you will wake up 20 years from now poor, pissed off and primed for a midlife crisis.

the fashion industry has an enormous carbon footprint. Textile production is second only to the oil industry for pollution. It adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Estimates suggest that the fashion industry is responsible for a whopping 10 percent of global CO2 emissions,26 and as we increase our consumption of fast fashion, the related emissions are set to grow rapidly.

Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.

Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

You know full well we are exploiters. You know full well we have taken the gold and minerals and then oil from the “new continents,” and shipped them back to the old metropolises. Not without excellent results in the shape of palaces, cathedrals, and centers of industry; and then when crisis loomed, the colonial markets were there to cushion the blow or divert it. Stuffed with wealth, Europe granted humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: for us, a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself.

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.

It was this intense self-discipline and objectivity that allowed Rockefeller to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life, during the Civil War, and the panics of 1873, 1907, and 1929. As he once put it: He was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster. To that we could add: He had the strength to resist temptation or excitement, no matter how seductive, no matter the situation. Within twenty years of that first crisis, Rockefeller would alone control 90 percent of the oil market. His greedy competitors had perished. His nervous colleagues had sold their shares and left the business. His weak-hearted doubters had missed out.

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage. They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.

What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.

She was theorizing on the Deep State; that enduring Turkish paranoia that the nation really was a conspiracy run by a cabal of generals, judges, industrialists and gangsters. The Taksim Square massacre of three years before, the Kahramanmaraş slaughter of Alevis a few months after, the oil crisis and the enduring economic instability, even the ubiquity of the Grey Wolves nationalist youth movement handing out their patriotic leaflets and defiling Greek Churches: all were links in an accelerating chain of events running through the fingers of the Derin Devlet. To what end? the men asked. Coup, she said, leaning forward, her fingers pursed. It was then that Georgios Ferentinou adored her. The classic profile, the strength of her jaw and fine cheekbones. The way she shook her head when the men disagreed with her, how her bobbed, curling hair swayed. The way she would not argue but set her lips and stared, as if their stupidity was a stubborn offence against nature. Her animation in argument balanced against her marvellous stillness when listening, considering, drawing up a new answer. How she paused, feeling the regard of another, then turned to Georgios and smiled. In the late summer of 1980 Georgios Ferentinou fell in love with Ariana Sinanidis by Meryem Nasi’s swimming pool. Three days later, on September 12th, Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren overthrew the government and banned all political activity.

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical cause the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons.

I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next cock-I mean, messiah-I will shit into my oatmeal. Who among us will be asked to lead the people out of bondage, only to say, 'God, I have never been a good talker. Ask someone else. Ask my brother instead of me.

Many people believe that it is OK to be like China for a time, because when the crisis ends we can go back to being like Britain again. These people are making a serious mistake. We cannot switch in and out of totalitarianism at will. Because a free society is a question of attitude, it is dead once the attitude changes.

Western alliances can mobilize a million men to go to war against a dictator who snatches a few oil wells from his neighbor, and will invest trillions of dollars in such a war. But faced with a crisis that threatens to cause famine and death on a global scale, they sit and talk, question the validity of the evidence, discuss economics and blame, have conferences and recommend recycling plastic bags…

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

Of all the places in the world, you ended up in New Orleans?” I asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice. Michael nodded. “Yes,” he agreed, apparently not registering the sarcasm. “Please,” I muttered, pulling a face. “Hurricanes, poverty, homes that are never going to be rebuilt, oil spills... this city has had so much crap thrown at it, and you’re telling me that there are angels here?” Again, Michael nodded. “Yes. Regardless of what has happened or what is happening, this city fights.” Okay, he may have had a point. The citizens of New Orleans were resilient; I’d give him that.

Age of Extremes" delivers its fundamental argument in the form of a periodisation. The ‘short 20th century’ between 1914 and 1991 can be divided into three phases. The first, ‘The Age of Catastrophe’, extends from the slaughter of the First World War, through the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, to the cataclysm of the Second World War and its immediate consequences, including the end of European empires. The second, ‘The Golden Age’, stretching approximately from 1950 to 1973, saw historically unprecedented rates of growth and a new popular prosperity in the advanced capitalist world, with the spread of mixed economies and social security systems; accompanied by rising living standards in the Soviet bloc and the ‘end of the Middle Ages’ in the Third World, as the peasantry streamed off the land into modern cities in post-colonial states. The third phase, ‘Landslide’, starting with the oil crisis and onset of recession in 1973, and continuing into the present, has witnessed economic stagnation and political atrophy in the West, the collapse of the USSR in the East, socio-cultural anomie across the whole of the North, and the spread of vicious ethnic conflicts in the South. The signs of these times are: less growth, less order, less security. The barometer of human welfare is falling.

Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

We tend to cling to what we know and resist what is new—even when the new brings tremendous benefits. Opposition to onshore wind turbines in the UK is a good example. Even though onshore wind is now the cheapest form of energy6 (cheaper than coal, oil, gas, and other renewable sources), rural landowners have significantly resisted it, keen to preserve the appearance of the countryside. When the Conservative Party (which derives much of its support from these rural communities) came to power in 2015, it slashed subsidies and changed planning laws for onshore wind—leading to an 80 percent reduction in new capacity.7 Only now, with climate change awareness rapidly rising among the UK public, is support for onshore wind starting to outweigh an attachment to yesterday’s aesthetics.

The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?” A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans: I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.

Why Westerners are so obsessed with "saving" Africa, and why this obsession so often goes awry? Western countries should understand that Africa’s development chances and social possibilities remain heavily hindered due to its overall mediocre governance. Africa rising is still possible -- but first Africans need to understand that the power lies not just with the government, but the people. I do believe, that young Africans have the will to "CHANGE" Africa. They must engage their government in a positive manner on issues that matters -- I also realize that too many of the continent’s people are subject to the kinds of governments that favor ruling elites rather than ordinary villagers and townspeople. These kind of behavior trickles down growth. In Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is the problem. In South Africa the Apartheid did some damage. The country still wrestles with significant racial issues that sometimes leads to the murder of its citizens. In Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya the world’s worst food crisis is being felt. In Libya the West sends a mixed messages that make the future for Libyans uncertain. In Nigeria oil is the biggest curse. In Liberia corruption had make it very hard for the country to even develop. Westerners should understand that their funding cannot fix the problems in Africa. African problems can be fixed by Africans. Charity gives but does not really transform. Transformation should come from the root, "African leadership." We have a PHD, Bachelors and even Master degree holders but still can't transform knowledge. Knowledge in any society should be the power of transformation. Africa does not need a savior and western funds, what Africa needs is a drive towards ownership of one's destiny. By creating a positive structural system that works for the majority. There should be needs in dealing with corruption, leadership and accountability.

The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity. A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.

To show just how all pervasive the Committee of 300 is, a few words about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a Club of Rome creation and the test it ran against a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island (TMI) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems in order. Termed “an accident” by a hysterical media, this was not an accident, but a deliberately designed plot to reverse favorable public opinion to nuclear power generated electricity. TMI was a crisis test for FEMA. An additional benefit was the fear and hysteria provoked by the news media, which had people fleeing the area, when in fact they were never in any danger. Bear in mind that nobody died as a result of the TMI “accident,” nor were any serious injuries reported. The stage-managed incident bore all the hall marks of a similar incident when Orson Wells scared New York and New Jersey half to death with claims that the world was being invaded by alien beings from Mars. Actually, the radio play was an adaptation of H.G. Wells “War of Worlds.” TMI was considered a success and gained favor with the anti-nuclear forces, as it provided the rallying point for the so-called “environmentalists,” well financed by Atlantic Richfield and other major oil companies and

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Presidents rise and fall according to how they handle a crisis - an invasion, a depression, a massive oil spill - but there's no glory in prevention, in foreseeing and forestalling and keeping the bad from getting worse. We know what happened when each president presided; they are often just as proud of what didn't happen.

Production of concrete is the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions after electrical power production and automobiles. Moreover, the process used today is essentially the same as that used 150 years ago. Since cement manufacture is responsible for about 5% of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy requirements for concrete manufacture could have a significant impact on both energy and the environment.

On the other hand, there are a number of cases where economic growth did not produce better governance, but where, to the contrary, it was good governance that was responsible for growth. Consider South Korea and Nigeria. In 1954, following the Korean War, South Korea’s per capita GDP was lower than that of Nigeria, which was to win its independence from Britain in 1960. Over the following fifty years, Nigeria took in more than $300 billion in oil revenues, and yet its per capita income declined in the years between 1975 and 1995. In contrast, South Korea grew at rates ranging from 7 to 9 percent per year over this same period, to the point that it became the world’s twelfth-largest economy by the time of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The reason for this difference in performance is almost entirely attributable to the far superior government that presided over South Korea compared to Nigeria.

The uncertainty of weather-dependent harvests, particularly after the 1950s decision to exploit virgin lands, and the continuing low oil prices made the foreign trade balance catastrophic. This, not Mikhail Gorbachev’s personal qualities or the errors made by his team, was the first cause of the crisis in the Soviet political and economic structure.4 Taking the measures necessary to handle that crisis threatened not only the leadership in power but the entire Communist regime. Rejecting them, if the changes in the world market were long-lasting, would make the crash of the socialist economy and the Soviet Empire inevitable.

Catalyzed by an international economic crisis that crystallized with the oil crisis of 1973, in essence it was a crisis of the dictatorship’s domestic political legitimacy.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for want of care about a horseshoe nail.” The excuse for the profound economic crisis that provoked the collapse of a superpower was the fall of oil prices in the mid-1980s, which for all its significance is incommensurate with the consequences. Developments on the oil market were, for the Soviet economy, not the reason but the excuse for its collapse.

What's your economic forecast for 2015? The world's improving. The U.S. economy is going to grow a little faster than last year, though probably a little weaker in the first quarter. Europe's going to be incrementally better, because they've fixed their banking crisis. They've benefited from a very weakened euro. And then you have economies like India, which was stagnating at around 5-ish percent GDP growth a year ago, and now they're going to receive the benefit of lower oil prices. That's going to add at least 1 percent to India's GDP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reforms will probably add 1 or 2 percent more growth to overcome all the weakness in China.

Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn't a proletariat. It isn't the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand I call it the "whitetariat". Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like "unions" and "working class" a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the "Internationale" seems to play in the background. Even many anarchists seem to fall into a daze and to magically transport themselves back to seeing the militant socialist workers of Marx and Engels' day. Forgetting that there have been many different kinds of working classes in history. Forgetting that Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of the late 19th century as a "bourgeois proletariat", an aristocracy of labor. He pointed out how you could tell the non-proletarian, "bourgeois" strata of the English working class – they were the sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the "bourgeois" sectors were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn't he? (which he sure wasn't). So that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been understood by those willing to see reality. (the fact that we have radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger crisis than any one issue).

When we look beyond the conventional matrix, we will realize that we do not actually have an energy crisis. If we can look beyond the illusions created by big energy corporations, we will realize that we already have the necessary technologies to solve the energy crisis. Right now we have technologies that can give us an abundance of clean energies, such as cold fusion (non-radioactive) and magnetic motors. Even better, we have the technology to tap into the limitless energy in space, such as zero-point technology. These alternative energy methods have been suppressed and hidden from us for two main reasons: profit and control. Many inventors who tried to build technologies to utilize free energy were manipulated, bought off or even assassinated by the people who control the big energy corporations. Unless we wake up and take actions to stop them from controlling us, the energy crisis will get out of control and many people will perish. The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is a wake-up call for all of us. If we do not learn from this mistake, there will be major consequences for years to come.

One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests—actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash programs that provide their families with heating oil, who savage their schools and privatize their Medicare. To some degree the reason is simply that the scraps the Democratic Party is now willing to throw its “base” at this point are so paltry it’s hard not to see their offers as an insult: especially when it comes down to the Bill Clinton– or Barack Obama–style argument “we’re not really going to fight for you, but then, why should we? It’s not really in our self-interest when we know you have no choice but to vote for us anyway.” Still, while this may be a compelling reason to avoid voting altogether—and, indeed, most working Americans have long since given up on the electoral process—it doesn’t explain voting for the other side. The only way to explain this is not that they are somehow confused about their self-interest, but that they are indignant at the very idea that self-interest is all that politics could ever be about. The rhetoric of austerity, of “shared sacrifice” to save one’s children from the terrible consequences of government debt, might be a cynical lie, just a way of distributing even more wealth to the 1 percent, but such rhetoric at least gives ordinary people a certain credit for nobility. At a time when, for most Americans, there really isn’t anything around them worth calling a “community,” at least this is something they can do for everybody else. The moment we realize that most Americans are not cynics, the appeal of right-wing populism becomes much easier to understand. It comes, often enough, surrounded by the most vile sorts of racism, sexism, homophobia. But what lies behind it is a genuine indignation at being cut off from the means for doing good.

Christ, our example, demonstrated that one must possess the oil before the crisis hits. Christ’s victory on Calvary was obtained in the garden of Gethsemane. The word “Gethsemane” literally means “oil press,” and it was in fact, located in the “Mount of Olives.” According to the book of Exodus, the oil used for the lamp was obtained from “beaten” olives. “Thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always” (Exodus 27:20).

During the energy crisis and oil embargo of the 1970s, Dutch researchers began to pay close attention to the country’s energy usage. In one suburb near Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners used 30 percent less energy than their neighbors—despite the homes being of similar size and getting electricity for the same price. It turned out the houses in this neighborhood were nearly identical except for one feature: the location of the electrical meter. Some had one in the basement. Others had the electrical meter upstairs in the main hallway. As you may guess, the homes with the meters located in the main hallway used less electricity. When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08 represented the greatest financial downswing of my lifetime, and consequently it presents the best opportunity to observe, reflect and learn. The scene was set for its occurrence by a number of developments. Here’s a partial list: Government policies supported an expansion of home ownership—which by definition meant the inclusion of people who historically couldn’t afford to buy homes—at a time when home prices were soaring; The Fed pushed interest rates down, causing the demand for higher-yielding instruments such as structured/levered mortgage securities to increase; There was a rising trend among banks to make mortgage loans, package them and sell them onward (as opposed to retaining them); Decisions to lend, structure, assign credit ratings and invest were made on the basis of unquestioning extrapolation of low historic mortgage default rates; The above four points resulted in an increased eagerness to extend mortgage loans, with an accompanying decline in lending standards; Novel and untested mortgage backed securities were developed that promised high returns with low risk, something that has great appeal in non-skeptical times; Protective laws and regulations were relaxed, such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which prohibited the creation of financial conglomerates), the uptick rule (which prevented traders who had bet against stocks from forcing them down through non-stop short selling), and the rules that limited banks’ leverage, permitting it to nearly triple; Finally, the media ran articles stating that risk had been eliminated by the combination of: the adroit Fed, which could be counted on to inject stimulus whenever economic sluggishness developed, confidence that the excess liquidity flowing to China for its exports and to oil producers would never fail to be recycled back into our markets, buoying asset prices, and the new Wall Street innovations, which “sliced and diced” risk so finely, spread it so widely and placed it with those best suited to bear it.

THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop. The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

It proved no more possible to really turn everyone in the world into micro-corporations or to “democratize credit” in such a way that every family that wanted to could have a house (And if you think about it, if we have the means to build them, why shouldn’t they? Are there families who don’t “deserve” houses?) than it had been to allow all wage laborers to have unions, pensions, and health benefits. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. It is ultimately a system of power and exclusion, and when it reaches the breaking point, the symptoms recur, just as they had in the 1970s: food riots, oil shock, financial crisis, the sudden startled realization that the current course was ecologically unsustainable, and attendant apocalyptic scenarios of every sort.

The Great Depression, the 1973 oil crisis, the rapid inflation of the late ’70s, the British sterling crisis of 1976, Black Monday in 1987, the dot-com bubble of 2000, the housing bust in 2008, the 28% drop in gold prices in 2013—all of these surprises caught most investments professionals way off guard.

The Amazon forests?” Webb asked, opening the medicine box. He looked at the label, then put a med patch on his arm. “Yes, yes, the forests. Mostly gone, turned into savannah and gold mines and palm oil plantations and beef ranches. Oh yes. The natural moisture pump is gone, don’t you know? Far more moisture gathers out over the sea instead, along with the growing heat, and that increases wind shear. And then . . . then . . . Why, the Gulf Stream weakening as the ice caps melt . . . Of course, that’s a good way north of here but it’s all one system, domino effect of weather cells, do you see . . .” His eyes lost focus; his voice drifted away.

The strategy was to frame energy as the heart of the economy while destroying environmentalism in the process. Here is how the strategy was carried out in the first months of the administration. • Put pro-business, pro-energy-development people in charge of the most environmentally sensitive agencies: the Interior Department (Gale Norton) and the EPA (Christie Whitman). • Cut funds for research and development on conservation (e.g., fuel economy, which would vastly lessen the need for oil) and environmentally responsible energy sources (biomass, wind, solar, and so on). • Announce a national energy supply crisis and call it a matter of national security. Develop a plan to respond to the “crisis.” • Frame the “crisis” so that environmentalists are defined as the problem: their regulations impede the development of supply. • Appoint commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) who would refuse to cap electricity prices overall, even though FERC’s mission is to guarantee reasonable energy prices. The

Just before Thanksgiving, I met with Bunker Hunt, then the richest man in the world, at the Petroleum Club in Dallas. Bud Dillard, a Texan friend and client of mine who was big in the oil and cattle businesses, had introduced us a couple of years before, and we regularly talked about the economy and markets, especially inflation. Just a few weeks before our meeting, Iranian militants had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. There were long lines to buy gas and extreme market volatility. There was clearly a sense of crisis: The nation was confused, frustrated, and angry. Bunker saw the debt crisis and inflation risks pretty much as I saw them. He’d been wanting to get his wealth out of paper money for the past few years, so he’d been buying commodities, especially silver, which he had started purchasing for about $ 1.29 per ounce, as a hedge against inflation. He kept buying and buying as inflation and the price of silver went up, until he had essentially cornered the silver market. At that point, silver was trading at around $ 10. I told him I thought it might be a good time to get out because the Fed was becoming tight enough to raise short-term interest rates above long-term rates (which was called “inverting the yield curve”). Every time that happened, inflation-hedged assets and the economy went down. But Bunker was in the oil business, and the Middle East oil producers he talked to were still worried about the depreciation of the dollar. They had told him they were also going to buy silver as a hedge against inflation so he held on to it in the expectation that its price would continue to rise. I got out.

Oh, oh Try not to think so much about The truly staggering amount Of oil that it takes to make a record All the shipping, the vinyl The cellophane lining, the high gloss The tape and the gear Try not to become too consumed With what's a criminal volume Of oil that it takes to paint a portrait The acrylic, the varnish Aluminum tubes filled with latex The solvents and dye, oh Let's just call this what it is The jealous side of mankind's death wish When it's my time to go Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose Try not to dwell so much upon How it won't be so very long From now that they laugh at us for selling A bunch of fifteen year olds made from dinosaur bones singing, "Oh yeah" Again and again Right up to the end Let's just call this what it is The jealous side of mankind's death wish When it's my time to go Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose, oh I'll just call this what it is My vanity gone wild with my crisis One day this all will repeat I sure hope they make something useful out of me

HOW TO PLAY WORLD WITHOUT OIL At heart World Without Oil is very simple. It’s a “What if?” game. What if an oil crisis started today—what would happen? How would the lives of ordinary people change? What would you do to survive the crisis? How would you help others? Let’s play “What if?” and find out. Create your own story of life during the oil crisis—and share it with us by e-mail or by phone call, by photos or by blog post, by videos or podcasts.

Then join our citizen “nerve center” at worldwithoutoil.org to track events and share solutions. Every day, we’ll update you with news about the crisis, and highlight our favorite stories from across the country and around the world. No expert knows better than you do how an oil shock could impact your family, your job, your town, your life. So tell us what you know. Because the best way to change the future is to play with it first.

Those who slip into this illusion ignore the signs of impending disaster. The physical degradation of the planet, the cruelty of global capitalism, the looming oil crisis, the collapse of financial markets, and the danger of overpopulation rarely impinge to prick the illusions that warp our consciousness,.

Beyond the industry’s medium-term goals, we need a plan for fossil fuel companies to pick up their pace and eliminate methane emissions by 2025. Oil and gas companies need a strategy for field measurement and monitoring and equipment upgrades. Many companies still operate with valves that are designed to release methane, based on the pressure of gas running through the valve. This legacy equipment can easily be replaced with modern valves that don’t bleed gas. The technology exists today and costs only three hundred dollars per valve.

In the United States, buildings use nearly 75 percent of our electricity. They must be heated and cooled—most often, for the moment, with two separate appliances—a furnace powered by natural gas or oil and an air conditioner powered by electricity. The next leap is to get rid of the old appliances entirely and install an electric heat pump that provides both services in one device. These clever systems both heat and cool and turn one unit of electricity into three units or more of heat, with industrial versions available for large buildings. While this technology still needs to drop in price, it’s ready and waiting at your nearest authorized dealer.

General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third of a trillion dollars. It had either been first or second each year for the previous decade, capitalism’s shining example of corporate aristocracy. Then everything fell to pieces. The 2008 financial crisis sent GE’s financing division—which supplied more than half the company’s profits—into chaos. It was eventually sold for scrap. Subsequent bets in oil and energy were disasters, resulting in billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 by 2018. Blame placed on CEO Jeff Immelt—who ran the company since 2001—was immediate and harsh. He was criticized for his leadership, his acquisitions, cutting the dividend, laying off workers and—of course—the plunging stock price. Rightly so: those rewarded with dynastic wealth when times are good hold the burden of responsibility when the tide goes out. He stepped down in 2017. But Immelt said something insightful on his way out. Responding to critics who said his actions were wrong and what he should have done was obvious, Immelt told his successor, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.

In the background, given my commitment to the outer ecology of environmentalism, I replaced all the company cars with diesels, which used less crude oil and lasted longer than gasoline engines. The diesel cars did pay off briefly during the Second Energy Crisis of 1979, but they gave us a lot of trouble in the long run because the diesel-powered Oldsmobile station wagons that General Motors rushed into production had nothing but a beefed-up gasoline engine (internal pressures are much greater in a diesel) and they were in the shop more often than on the road. We aggressively redesigned the stores to conserve energy. To this day, Trader Joe’s stores don’t have very many windows, and all panes of glass are very small, an idea that had an accidental payoff in every subsequent earthquake and riot. As the young lady said back there in the God of Fair Beginnings chapter, I did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

For the same energy output as from coal or oil, methane combustion releases only half as much carbon dioxide. This implies that powering a nation entirely by gas reduces emissions of carbon dioxide by half.

The growing attention to risk was reinforced by what happened in 2004: the unanticipated jump in both Chinese and global demand for oil and the rapidly rising prices. An energy problem had already become evident in China from late 2002. But initially it was a coal and electricity problem, not an oil problem. China depends on coal for 70 percent of its total energy and about 80 percent of its electricity. The economy was growing so fast that tight supplies of coal turned into shortages. At the same time, electric power plants and the transmission network could not keep up with the demand for power. The country simply ran out of electricity. As brownouts and blackouts hit most of the provinces, a sense of crisis gripped the country.

Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.

Data showed that over 60% of business closures during the COVID-19 crisis were permanent, amounting to more than 97,000 businesses lost in the U.S. alone.[552] Half of Black-owned small businesses in the U.S. were wiped out.

About 230 million Indians fell into poverty—defined as living on less than $5 a day—in the first year of the crisis. Around 15%—including 47% of female workers—had failed to find employment by the end of 2020.

Do yourself a favor and run down the list of businesses started during depressions or economic crises. Fortune magazine (ninety days after the market crash of 1929) FedEx (oil crisis of 1973) UPS (Panic of 1907) Walt Disney Company (After eleven months of smooth operation, the twelfth was the market crash of 1929.) Hewlett-Packard (Great Depression, 1935) Charles Schwab (market crash of 1974–75) Standard Oil (Rockefeller bought out his partners in what became Standard Oil and took over in February 1865, the final year of the Civil War.) Coors (Depression of 1873) Costco (recession in the late 1970s) Revlon (Great Depression, 1932) General Motors (Panic of 1907) Procter & Gamble (Panic of 1837) United Airlines (1929) Microsoft (recession in 1973–75) LinkedIn (2002, post–dot-com bubble) For the most part, these businesses had little awareness they were in some historically significant depression. Why? Because the founders were too busy existing in the present—actually dealing with the situation at hand.

Climate Activists (not all) have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list. BLM activists don't go about abusing white people, Pride activists don't go about harassing straight people, and yet, that's precisely what has become the norm in climate protests. Vandalism isn't activism, you morons! If you want to help the climate, help the green energy industry become mainstream.

Climate Activists have turned into Climate Karens, which has done nothing for the climate crisis, but has only added one more crisis to the list.

If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social, and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.” The looming oil crisis, said Carter in one of the more memorable lines of his presidency, “is the moral equivalent of war.

So, for example, at one end of the spectrum there’s something like iceberg lettuce. There are sixty calories in a pound of iceberg lettuce. At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum there are oils, like olive oil or canola oil. A pound of oil has four thousand calories,” Kashey explained.

That left one last task before they could tell the world about their deal. Manchin, who now had his own case of COVID, needed Biden’s formal endorsement of their agreement. All along, Manchin was convinced that the White House was going to hate provisions in the deal expanding oil and gas leases. But many in the White House, like Brian Deese, were perfectly comfortable with what Manchin wanted. Given the conflict in Ukraine and the spike in energy prices, they were happy to expand domestic production of energy. It was politically expedient, at the very least—and might help lower prices in the middle of a crisis. When Biden came on the line and greeted Manchin, he purred, “Joe-Joe!” After nine months of emotionally exhausting back-and-forth, they were done.

The shared deadlock faced by all our cases is of course that created by our global capitalist order. Part of the challenge of a universal politics is precisely keeping an eye on this target, given the overwhelming ideological tendency today to focus on the symptom (climate “change,” refugee “crisis,” patriarchy, etc.) rather than the cause (market-created inequalities, unevenness, environmental destruction). The insidiousness of neoliberal capitalist universalism is that it manifests in multifarious ways—police racism and brutality as the embodiment of state violence aimed at protecting and reproducing the status quo; anti-immigrant racism as a displacement of popular revolt against austerity; Islamophobia to justify brutalizing Palestinians or invading Iraq and Afghanistan to take over their oil and gas fields; and so forth—making it difficult to connect the dots. Systemic contradictions always manifest in specific ways, and the test of a universal politics, as we have been claiming, is bringing out the universal-antagonistic dimension of each particular.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

What is Sapiens (The Sonnet) Soil can survive without sapiens, But there is no sapiens without soil. There is no us if nature goes off the rocker, Yet way more than nature, we value gas and oil. We started off using clothes as cover for privacy, And we ended up prioritizing clothes over integrity. Instead of loving people and using the products, We ended up loving products and abusing humanity. Sapiens is supposed to mean wise and aware, But in practice, sapiens is code for shallow. Sapiens has become just a synonym for show-off. Neither wise, nor aware, sapiens just means narrow. However, no error is ultimate if we're willing for reform. An expanding heart is the antidote to all narrow norm.

On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms. So, if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.

The preparation the wise made was in studying the character of Christ. This was the focus of the classroom sessions. Character is made up of thoughts and feelings. Therefore, to obtain the character of Christ is to obtain His thoughts and His feelings. By meditating upon Christ’s life, His character (thoughts and feelings), and by beholding those thoughts and feelings, a mind transplant occurred where the wise, over time, assimilated Christ’s character. So when the crisis came, when the time of trouble hit, the wise were able to respond with Christ’s thoughts and His feelings and not their own. Just as Christ was calm and dignified when His captors took Him from Gethsemane, so the wise will reflect his peace in the storm. It is in this way that we receive the “mind of Christ” (see Philippians 2:5), thus, becoming wise and having the thought reflexes of Christ.

the failure of the established order of industrial society, and of the political classes who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the world’s leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or nearly any other recent crisis you care to name: in each case, it’s a broken-record sequence of understating the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some actual leadership.

A second important difference between the international environment that shaped Western states and the one that is now shaping post-colonial Middle Eastern states is that many in the latter category can trade petrodollars (or strategic rents) for Western arms, which artificially increases the ability of the rulers to coerce the ruled.[8] At the turn of the century, the Middle East already spent more of its GDP per capita on defence than any other region. Between 1999 and 2008, that spending increased by another 34%.[9] With this difference in mind, it is unrealistic to insist, as Western diplomats and leaders have done following the removal of Mubarak, that transitions from dictatorships to fledgling democracies must be orderly. This is particularly unrealistic given that the international weapons trade, the international reliance on oil and the Western tendency to view the region through a lens of counter-terrorism objectives have all helped to sustain these regimes, but cannot realistically be altered by those who take to the street in protest.

A smaller, deterrent force could have been kept in place long enough for the sanctions to have had a significant effect; an army of half a million couldn’t. The purpose of the quick military build-up was to ward off the danger that Iraq might be forced out of Kuwait by peaceful means. Why was a diplomatic resolution so unattractive? Within a few weeks after the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, the basic outlines for a possible political settlement were becoming clear. Security Council Resolution 660, calling for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait, also called for simultaneous negotiations of border issues. By mid-August, the National Security Council considered an Iraqi proposal to withdraw from Kuwait in that context. There appear to have been two issues: first, Iraqi access to the Gulf, which would have entailed a lease or other control over two uninhabited mudflats assigned to Kuwait by Britain in its imperial settlement (which had left Iraq virtually landlocked); second, resolution of a dispute over an oil field that extended two miles into Kuwait over an unsettled border. The US flatly rejected the proposal, or any negotiations. On August 22, without revealing these facts about the Iraqi initiative (which it apparently knew), the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was determined to block the “diplomatic track” for fear that it might “defuse the crisis” in very much this manner. (The basic facts were published a week later by the Long Island daily Newsday, but the media largely kept their silence.)

committed a small oversight, and yet one that almost destroyed their venture. They had assumed that they would deliver the kerosene in bulk to various localities, and that the eager customers would line up with their own receptacles to be filled. The customers were expected to use old Standard Oil tin cans. But they did not. Throughout the Far East, Standard’s blue oil tins had become a prized mainstay of the local economies, used to construct everything from roofing to birdcages to opium cups, hibachis, tea strainers, and egg beaters. They were not about to give up such a valuable product. The whole scheme was now threatened—not by the machinations of 26 Broadway or by the politics of the Suez Canal, but by the habits and predilections of the peoples of Asia. A local crisis was created in each port, as the kerosene went unsold, and despairing telegrams began to flow into Houndsditch. In the quickness and ingenuity of his response to the crisis, Marcus proved his entrepreneurial genius. He sent out a chartered ship, filled with tinplate, to the Far East, and simply instructed his partners in Asia to begin manufacturing tin receptacles for the kerosene. No matter that no one knew how to do so; no matter that no one had the facilities. Marcus persuaded them they could do it. “How do you stick on the wire handles?” the agent in Singapore wrote to Samuel’s representative in Japan. Instructions were sent. “What color do you suggest?” cabled the agent in Shanghai. Mark gave the answer—“Red!

using incantation as a nonchemical tranquilizer to ward off stress, and to assure yourself that everything is fine when everything is emphatically not fine, is much more problematic. In a time of crisis when keeping a level head and going on with life is crucial, it can have a valid place, but if it’s being used to drown out the still small voice that warns of approaching danger, it’s an invitation to disaster.