A run through of the highs and lows of 2009.
Awakening
One of the main themes of this site is that sufficient of us need to awaken, so we reach a critical mass that changes the context of human civilisation i.e. recognise who we really are, how we are related to each other and the rest of life in all its aspects.
I’m not sure but I think there are signs that the awakening is spreading, although in overall numbers it it still a small proportion of the population.
Unfortunately, I think awakening is our only chance. We’re too far down the path to self and environmental destruction to find our way to sustainability by driving hybrids, recycling plastic bags, adding insulation in the roofspace, planting a few trees, or changing to more efficient lightglobes within the context of current society.
Awakening has a multi-layered meaning. Firstly it means lookig at the world through new eyes to understand what is really going on. Ultimately it suggests a spiritual journey to arrive at an awakened state, which is a very personal experience and one that is different for everybody.
For me, awakening is different to and broader than religion, which usually provides a narrower, prescriptive viewpoint. Nor is it about my God is bigger and better than yours, or the only true God (sigh).
Unfortunately, most religions typically embody the same power and hierarchy-based limitations that plague most human institutions, although the essence of being awakened may be present in the original teachings on which the religion is based.
The Economy
Personally I lost money trading in the stock market, by going short when it went long, long, long. What a pisser!
Hindsight being a wonderfully annoying thing, 2009 was one of the best trading opportunities for 10-15 years. The double bottom went in in March and it was up from then on.
That’s the trouble with seeing the big picture and thinking you know what the market should do, it takes you away from what it is actually doing.
On any sane measure using traditional fundamentals, the economy and the favourite mantra “economic growth” appear to be irretrievably f–d in the long term, but in the shorter term all the money that was printed had to go somewhere and the stock market turned out to be the place.
Simply, economic growth is now constrained by the physical limits of the planet and it’s various resources, plus the growing physical / mental /spiritual sickness afflicting more and more people who are caught up in the citizen-as-consumer model.
Peak Oil and Energy
Traditional crude oil production has been bumping along the plateau it’s been on since 2005 at around 85 million barrels per day. There is talk of Iraq raising production to 10 mbpd in a 10 to 20 year timeframe, via the development of dormant fields by foreign oil companies that obtained leases in recent auctions.
However, even if Iraq did reach 10 million mbpd in this 10 to 20 year timeframe, this would only offset the global production decline that is building momentum.
Traditionally in recessions, oil drops to $20-30 a barrel, but it’s stablised around $70-80 this time. If renewed economic growth does (temporarily) occur, oil is likely to go back above $100, throwing the economy back into recession.
Natural Gas
The big change in energy supplies was the uplift in natural gas production in the US obtained through new drilling techniques (fracturing).
There have also been large, new natural gas fields discovered in the US, in particular the Marcellus field (#27 in the map), which holds as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – the equivalent of total US gas consumption for 25 years. Even if this estimate is off by 50% or so (and that 500 trillion cubic foot number might be on the LOW side), it’s still a lot of gas.
You’d think this will have to shift the US energy picture, but it’s not clear how yet.
Many cars and trucks can be converted to run on natural gas, but the infrastructure to supply the gas at traditional gas (petrol) outlets doesn’t exist yet.
Politics
How many people now realize that Obama is not the new Messiah, but just an empty suit fronting the same old system?
If you’re one of these people and you can take that on, the next step is to start looking behind the facade of a lot of other stuff to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes.
Given something like 75% of the people making decisions around the US President are the same as the Bush era, how could you get a different outcome?
The same system of “bait and swap” i.e. election flipping between 2 supposedly different political parties “left” and “right” that in reality deliver almost identical outcomes, prevails in most (sic) democracies.
Collapse
The mistake made in late 2008/early 2009 was to predict a straight line descent. Although for some unfortunate people, collapse is here and now, for others it’s business as usual.
Again, at the heart of everything are the fundamental limits of the planet to provide sufficient resources for continued economic growth and hyper consumption. You can print as much money as you like, but that doesn’t create more oil, coal, iron ore, rare earth metals, forests, clean water or topsoil.
Who knows what a collapse timetable will look like? It could be a slow degradation in living standards, or there may be a “black swan” (a major political,’social or environmental disaster) that triggers a sudden change.
Alternative /Alien Energy Technologies
More and more studies suggest that so-called “zero point energy” is available from the “ether” or “vacumn”, in the same way that atomic energy is available from atoms. The prevailing mainstream cosmological theories postulate the existence of this “dark energy” or “dark matter” to explain the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of the observed Universe.
Several sources suggest that the technology to extract this zero point energy is already available on Earth in “black ops” labs and operations, possibly derived from alien technology, but is kept underwraps for military-political reasons. See www.projectcamelot.org
Again, without an awakening more / free energy isn’t going to solve the planet’s problems. Either we’ll consume ourselves and the planet to death in a different way, or we’ll use it to create even deadlier weapons e.g. the oft written “planet buster bomb”.
