On extremism

I will not condemn extremists.

I condemn violence. And these two get conflated so often it is worth asking ourselves why, whose interests are served by this blurring.

Those who use violence in pursuit of their political agenda are regularly labelled extreme. If only they had pursued their goals through peaceful means, we say. Yet this obscures the everyday violence of a system so “normal” that it will never be called extreme.

When multinational banks, fossil energy companies and weapons manufacturers get subsidies, tax cuts, loopholes, political access and nothing more than slaps on the wrist, while indigenous people, single parents, the disabled, elderly, unemployed get austerity, services cut, grievances ignored, working conditions eroded, civil liberties constricted, living spaces polluted, their struggles and small escapes harshly criminalised – that is violence. Holding desperate people in abysmal conditions to stoke and pander to xenophobia for political gain is violence. Suppressing the memory and ongoing legacies of colonial genocide and dispossession is violence. Foreign policy that puts the interests of elites over the upholding of international law, that mutes criticism of useful authoritarian regimes while unflinchingly supporting allied imperialism is violence. Sacrificing a stable climate for the short term profits of a small number of major shareholders is one of the most violent ideas ever conceived. It may not look like a bomb in a market, or a truck ploughing through a crowd of people, but its victims end up just as dead or wounded. The values, assumptions, institutions and practices that sustain it are violent and unjust.

But they are not considered extreme, because they are the status quo. It suits those who benefit from the ways things are to focus our condemnation elsewhere, to channel our outrage into xenophobia, victim-blaming and the relative trivialities of the latest celebrity scandal or sporting upset.

To be extremist is to stand opposed to the status quo. This can be done violently and for unjust goals, but it needn’t be. And when the status quo is itself violent and unjust, then opposing it is the only defensible option. Such opposition can take many forms, but historically, many of the most effective struggles against injustice were considered extreme by the status quo of the time. Martin Luther King Jnr was condemned as an extremist and had the resources of the white supremacist state marshalled against him. Nelson Mandela was gaoled for decades and remained classified as a terrorist by the US even while president of South Africa. Berta Cáceres, the indigenous Honduran environmental activist, was assassinated earlier this year for being an effective extremist. Universal suffrage, the forty hour week, the abolition of child labour, worker’s compensation, basic environmental regulations protecting clean air and water – all these and more were won by movements condemned at the time as extremist.

And the Galilean preacher who disturbed the violence of the Pax Romana with his revolutionary message of the last being first and the powerful brought low, who taught his followers to love their enemies yet to refuse to worship power, to see strangers as neighbours and even the wicked as loved by God, to first take the log out of our own eye, who exposed the collusion between religious, nationalist and imperialist agendas: he was the greatest extremist of all. The movement he began, if it is to remain true to his life and teaching, can never rest comfortably with a status quo where women are killed by their partners, children are forcibly made into soldiers and sex workers, debtors are crushed, whistle-blowers are punished, warmongers profit from their lies, and the habitability of the planet is in peril.

So do not condemn extremism. Condemn violence: especially violence that targets innocents, that targets those who are already suffering, that targets the most vulnerable. Condemn injustice. Condemn the ideologies and practices that uphold a violent and unjust status quo as well as the ideologies and practices of those who oppose it violently and unjustly.

Let us have more extremists: extremists for love; extremists for justice; extremists for peace; extremists for honesty. I am an extremist. Are you?

Five ways to beat the banks

On Monday, I mentioned the documentary Inside Job, which detailed the ways greed, shortsightedness and ideology caused a partial meltdown of the financial industry in 2008. Despite official reassurances, the radioactive material from these events is not safely secured, but continues to poison an ever wider part of the world.* If you have seen the documentary and share something of my anger, you might also share something of my feelings of frustration and impotence. When the scale of the problem is so large, and the corruption of key institutions so widespread, there is no single silver bullet. Especially for those of us outside the US, the issues in the documentary feel even more distant, as we can't vote for a representative promising change.**
*I realise I haven't written on Fukushima yet. A post on nuclear power is coming, one day...
**And who then does nothing about it. On this, as on many fronts, Obama has been deeply disappointing. I can't say I didn't warn myself.

So what can we do? We may not singlehandedly reform or overthrow the vested interests that created the mess, but we can live lives that point to another way. I have listed a few random suggestions, but would also love to hear more.

1. Repent of the love of money. Delight yourself in the goodness of God and open your eyes to the false promises made by wealth. Reject the idea that gaining more is at the heart of your identity or life, or ought to be at the heart of our political vision of life together. This one is foundational to all the others.

2. Reduce your debt. The apostle Paul tells us to "owe nothing to anyone" (Romans 13.8). The power of the banks is debt-fuelled, and never more so than in the last couple of decades. Perhaps there may be times when certain kinds of debt can be justified; but not when debt is used to fuel needless consumption, or goes beyond one's likely means to repay, or results in driving major life decisions ("I need to work long hours to pay off my mortgage"). For us, this has meant deliberately stepping off the property ladder and not using credit cards - almost everything is now paid in cash or, if we have to, then with a debit card.

3. Join the global movement calling for a Robin Hood Tax - also known as a Tobin tax, after the Nobel laureate who first suggested it forty years ago - that would place a tiny tax on financial transactions in order to make short-term speculative transactions less attractive. The money raised would ideally be earmarked for development aid and climate action, but the existence of the tax as a disincentive to rampart speculation is a distinct question and doesn't depend on where the money would be spent. This campaign is gaining significant traction in Europe, though relatively little in the US. The UK response is key as to whether it grows (and would likely pull in the US, if the previous link is correct) or stagnates. This point can be expanded to include supporting any other genuine attempts to reform the financial system.

4. Take your money from a big multinational bank and put it somewhere else, such as a local credit union or co-op bank. In the UK, try The Co-op Bank. I'd love to hear any recommendations in Australia, since we'd like to switch banks there too. Of course, not all banks are equally bad, but it is difficult to find a large multinational bank where your money won't be financing the arms trade, fossil fuel expansion, environmental degradation and so on.

5. As a church, let us not neglect to encourage, disciple and discipline our members who work in major financial institutions. I asked a while back whether Christians can be bankers, and my tongue was only slightly in cheek. Usury is condemned in scripture and throughout Christian tradition (until the last couple of centuries, when it has been redefined as lending at extortionate interest, rather than simply lending at interest). This is a large topic (and the subject of an upcoming post), but the church needs to ask these questions once more today, particularly in the context of the systemic abuses found in such enormous concentrations of power. When tax collectors asked John the Baptist "Teacher, what should we do?", he didn't tell them to quit their job, but gave the radical advice, "Collect no more than the amount proscribed for you" (Luke 3.12-23). What is the radical advice the church is to give our present day "tax collectors", that is, bankers?

Inside Job: what's the deal with the credit crisis?

Yesterday we finally got around to watching Inside Job (despite having recommended it all the way back here). If you, like me, often feel out of your depth in discussions of banking, finance, stock markets and the global economic instability of the last few years, then this is the film for you. Bringing dry and complex details into vivid comprehensibility, this film cuts through the bafflement factor and, via a series of fascinating and jaw-dropping interviews with key players, lays out many of the key threads that that led to the headline-grabbing events of 2008 and its aftermath (which continues to play out today).

The film won best documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards and currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is easy to see why. Tackling an important subject with insight, emotion and sensitivity, this film is pure outrage mixed with damning evidence of systemic problems in the US financial industry from traders to CEOs, from regulators to investors, from president to ratings agencies, from academic economists to congress. There is plenty of blame to go around. And yet, somehow, no one is in gaol for the greatest inside job in history.

And very little has changed.

A tale of two debtors

Two island nations who experienced enormous economic bubbles on the back of cheap credit prior to the financial crisis that began in 2008 are separated by only a single letter in their names. Yet Iceland and Ireland, while each suffering crushing economic woes in the aftermath, have nonetheless followed diametrically opposed paths in their responses to the crisis. Ireland followed the textbook: a bailout involving huge figures being pumped into the banking industry to keep it going and to ensure international creditors did not miss out, effectively nationalising the bankers' mistakes. These debts then led to austerity cuts. In Iceland, the crisis brought down the government and the new administration did not guarantee the banks' debts. A referendum refused public backing to the bad decisions made by their bankers, allowing them to fail and for this to have its effect on Iceland's overheated economy. They have even now prosecuted the prime minister at the time for criminal negligance in failing to provide adequate regulation of the banking industry.

When debts are defaulted upon, it is not only the debtor who may be shown to have erred. Creditors take a risk and there is such a thing as a credulous creditor. Although it remains difficult to predict what the ultimate outcome will be for both nations, I admire Iceland's willingness to allow the banks to pay for their own mistakes and their desire to hold those involved in causing the problems to account. Despite the staggering sums involved in the credit crisis and the gross negligence of various political and financial figures, Iceland have been the first to bring criminal charges against those responsible.

Tunisia, Egypt and the food in your shopping trolley

Popular uprisings as seen recently in Tunisia and currently underway in Egypt usually have a complex network of contributing and enabling causes. One of the triggers in both cases may well have been a spike in food prices. Both Tunisia and Egypt import much of their food and have large segments of the population for whom food purchases comprise a hefty chunk of the weekly budget. A similar price spike in 2008 likely contributed to protests, rioting and unrest in at least sixteen countries.

Why the spike in food prices? That too is complex, but significant elements in the present mix include speculation, high oil prices and a string of weather-related disasters affecting crop production around the globe. Why speculation? Partially because of the cheap money being poured into major economies (or rather, into the financial system) and the unattractiveness of some alternatives in a downturn, that is, such speculation is one manifestation of the ongoing debt crisis that first publicly reared its head in 2008. Why high oil prices? Again, partially due to financial speculation, but this coming on top of long-term supply issues related to the peaking of conventional oil. Why crop failures? Many reasons here too, but among them are a string of destructive weather events consistent with predictions of climate change.

Yes, there are many other causes: repressive governments, rising economies shifting the balance of economic and political power, trends in global consumption patterns, biofuel and agricultural policies, local population growth and migration patterns, corporate interests, and of course the particular contours of various national histories and the actions and beliefs of certain influential individuals. But the triple converging crises of debt, depletion and degradation (also known as economy, energy and ecology) are likely to continue to contribute to these kinds of headlines.

So if you've noticed that some of the food in your shopping trolley has jumped in price recently, don't neglect to join the dots. What is a mild frustration to me in my wealth can mean the straw that breaks the camel's back for a nation closer to the edge. What can you do about it? All kinds of things, because it doesn't have to be this way.

Things may unfold faster than you think

Nicole Foss, one of the authors at The Automatic Earth, on the triple challenges of economy, energy and environment (especially climate in this case). She sees energy as the most significant driver of where industrial civilisation heads next, though economics is the way that it will manifest itself with most speed and violence in a debt-driven economy. Her analysis of the effects of peak oil as being an exacerbation and acceleration of economic swings is an important corrective to those who imagine that peak oil simply means ever increasing price spikes. I think she underestimates the long term significance of climate, but her points about resilient communities of trust and the importance of forward thinking prudence in order to avoid toxic and violent responses are well made. Whether she is right about deflation as the way in which the next financial crisis (the continuation of the present financial crisis, depending how you look at it) is above my pay grade (which, given that it is almost zero, isn't saying much).

In short, she thinks it is very important to get out of debt as soon as possible, to prepare mentally for a different and more difficult world within the next few years and to invest in local relationships of trust. As a Christian, I don't see much to disagree with in this advice.

Barriers are political, not technical

Independent: Feeding 2.4 billion more people without more land. Technically, it might be possible. But then, technically it has been possible for some time to end poverty, switch to a carbon-neutral economy and destroy all nuclear weapons. The barriers in each case are primarily political, not technical.

The Automatic Earth: In the USA, only 47% of working age adults have full-time employment.

NYT: US States on verge of bankruptcy.

NYT: Species on the move due to changing climate. There are physical limits to how far many can go.

Make Wealth History: Bribery isn't just an African problem, not least because the bribes that keep developing countries politically poisonous frequently originate from western corporations.

Bright Green Scotland: Undercover cops: political or commercial? The recent exposure of numerous UK undercover police in green activist groups has raised a host of uncomfortable but important questions about political protest, police surveillance and accountability, the ethics of espionage and the commercialisation of policing and intelligence. This article explores the latter issue.

Debtris

Sometimes, things need to be put into perspective, since our ability to intuit the relative size of very large numbers is generally quite poor.
Video by Information is beautiful. H/T Jeremy, who has also posted a US version.

"The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty"

This is the first of six videos taking a total of 45 minutes to outline the ideas in Chris Martenson's "Crash Course". I don't agree with everything he says (for instance, he reduces "the environment" to "resources", making no mention of climate change or biodiversity decline) and some of the analysis is simplified (what do you expect in 45 minutes?), but this isn't a bad summary of the three interlocking crises on the horizon: economy, energy and ecology (I prefer the term ecology over "the environment").

I would love an economist to evaluate his analysis of debt and how money is created (which he skims over in this short version, but spends twenty minutes on in the full version, available here). This is the area with which I am least familiar and I have heard others characterise our money system in a similar way, but I wonder whether this is how experts would put it.

Can Christians be bankers?

The parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18.23-35 is justly famous as an illustration of the gratuitousness of divine forgiveness. The debt of the first servant is larger than the entire GDP of multiple Roman provinces at the time (or so I have heard). Don't ask how this man had amassed such a debt; dodgy loans are apparently nothing new. Perhaps someone got a tasty commission and knew there was little regulatory oversight. But I digress...

The main point of the parable, however, is not the enormity of the debt forgiven the first servant, but the failure of that servant to treat his neighbour in the light of the forgiveness he himself had just received. It is a striking image of one of Jesus' central teachings: that we are to forgive others as we have been forgiven by our heavenly Father.

Yet listening to this parable in church last Sunday made me wonder: the image is financial; is the application also financial? That is, when Jesus warns against a failure to cancel the debts of one who cannot repay us and says that God will not forgive us if we do not forgive others, is he only talking about moral or relational debts? Are actual monetary debts excluded? I see no reason that they should be. And Jesus isn't talking about restructuring bad debts, or recovering what can be recovered. The entire debt is forgiven.

This is a profound teaching and would, it seems to me, effectively make it impossible for a Christian who takes the teaching of Christ seriously to work at any of the major banks. Thoughts?
I also cannot see how a Christian can work in (much of) the advertising industry either, but that is for other reasons and is perhaps a post for another day.

What shall we do? Twelve responses to converging crises

Responding to contemporary converging crises
Human society faces a series of converging crises in our economy, energy and ecology. It is very difficult to know exactly how these will interact and pan out. The depth and breadth of the problems can be overwhelming. Recently, a Christian friend asked me for personal advice as to what he can and should do to take these matters seriously. I made the following suggestions (what have I missed? Or how would you improve this list?):

1. Give thanks for the good world. There is so much going wrong with the world and yet it remains a good gift of the Creator. It is right to grieve, but a healthy grief requires the nurturing of our wonder and appreciation for the goodness of the creation that our actions are degrading.

2. Repent of the patterns of consumption and acquisition that lie behind so much of our destructiveness. Billions are spent every year in a largely successful effort to corrupt our desires, convincing us to covet the cornucopia of stuff that pours out of the world's factories. Learning contentment is at the heart of a good response, since it frees us from feeling the need to protect our toys or way of life and so enables us to focus on what is important and worth preserving (the glory of God, the welfare of our neighbour, communities of trust, the richness of God's creation, and so on). This may not end up "saving civilisation", but it helps us keep our heads when all around us are losing theirs.

3. Stay rooted in the gospel of grace, hope, peace and joy that celebrates Christ's death and resurrection so that you are free to grieve, yearn, groan and lament, that is, to pray. The temptation is to look away or harden our heart to the damage and the danger because it hurts too much.

4. Reject false hopes. We are not going to make it out of this place alive, either personally or as a society. The goal is not to secure immortality, but to love, trust and hope. Society is likely to change significantly or even radically during our lifetimes. The myths of endless growth, progress and individualism are likely to be unmasked for the illusions that they are (though this will be resisted because people hate to lose their dreams, far less to admit that their dreams were actually a nightmare). New illusions are likely to replace them. Survival is not your highest goal. Self-protection is a secondary consideration.

5. Assess your life and habitual patterns to see where your ecological footprint can be significantly reduced: eating less meat, flying less frequently or not at all, driving less or not at all, switching to a renewable energy provider, investing in insulation and local power generation, avoiding all unnecessary purchases and buying responsibly (e.g. food that hasn't been strip mining the soil, local products, durable products, and so on).

6. Invest in communities of trust. If and when things get difficult or there are significant disruptions to "normal", then people tend to distrust strangers, but to keep their friends closer. Get to know your neighbours and people in your local community. Strengthen your ties to a local church.

7. Engage organisations seeking to transition to a more resilient and less destructive society (such as the Transition Network, concerning which I'll have more to say soon).

8. Get out of debt, as far as possible. Debt is a bet that the future is going to be more prosperous than the present so that I can incur debt now and will have plenty to pay it off later. This assumption is becoming increasingly dangerous. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another (Romans 12.8).

9. Petition governments and corporations as citizens, not simply consumers. The roots of our problems are far larger and more systemic than consumer choice or personal greed. Structural changes are required to reduce the damage we are doing. Here is a good example of a letter to banks that briefly makes the case for disinvestment in fossil fuel projects on both ethical and business grounds. Such engagement may begin with petitions or letters, but it certainly needn't end there. Civil disobedience has a noble history in reforming unjust laws and practices.

10. Learn to garden or some other useful skill that you can share with others and which keeps you grounded in the material basis of our existence.

11. Keep learning more about the world and its problems and opportunities. We live in a novel period historically and we currently have the benefit of a large and growing body of research into these matters. Having some idea of the major threats and what they might mean for you, your community, your society and the world helps to orient your practical reason and will make you a more responsible citizen and neighbour.

12. Proclaim the good news, using every means you have, that Jesus is the true and living way, the dawn from on high that has broken upon us who live under the shadow of death and ecological disruption, and which guides our feet in the way of peace.

Forgive us our debts

Australian economist Steve Keen predicted the global financial crisis years ahead of when it broke, and doesn't think it is over yet, not by a long shot. He has given a somewhat lengthy and graph-heavy interview over here, in which he doesn't have a great deal of good news to offer.

For those without time to read it, he thinks the government response to the crisis (throwing lots of stimulus money at it) has mainly just masked the underlying debt problems (or rather deferred and increased them). America is already in a depression (hidden by misleading unemployment figures). A significant further period of deflation is inevitable. Australia (largely) avoided the bullet in 2008-09 through propping up a speculative property bubble which will come back to bite us (as speculative bubbles are wont to do). And he claims that the only responsible mitigation policies at this stage would be perceived to cause a crisis when really they would simply be unmasking the crisis that is currently ongoing. Here is his graphic analogy:

"[I]f my preferred remedies were enacted now, they would be blamed for causing an ensuing crisis, when in fact all they would do is make the existing crisis more obvious. I make the analogy between my situation and that of a doctor who has as a patient a comatose mountaineer who climbed too high without sufficient insulation and now has gangrene. If you operate before he regains consciousness, he might only lose a foot, but he’ll blame you for making him a cripple. If you wait till he regains consciousness and sees what the alternative might be, he’ll thank you for saving his life when you remove his leg.

"America in particular — but also much of the OECD — has substituted essentially unproductive Ponzi speculation for real productivity growth in the last four decades, which the rising debt bubble has obscured as it simultaneously allowed Americans to live the high life by buying goods produced elsewhere using borrowed money. There’s no way to come to terms with that without suffering a substantial fall in actual incomes."

He's a cheery chap. But then we get to the kicker: "I regard Peak Oil and Global Warming as far greater challenges to our species than the financial crisis — which I refer to sometimes as Peak Debt".

Keen is articulating something similar to the idea I put (briefly) here, namely, that of the three crises of economy, energy and ecology, the first is most immediate temporally, but is actually a smaller threat than the second, which in turn is closer to us but likely less significant in ultimate ramifications than the third (which, I would argue, is broader than climate change).

Fasten your seatbelts.

The party's over? Living on credit

So just how big is one trillion dollars? If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

- Michael Snyder, "3 Charts That Prove
We Are Living In The Biggest Debt Bubble In The History Of Our World".

Over the last few months, I've been starting to get a sense of the significance of a debt-based economy and why it is such a ludicrously bad idea. Effectively, living on credit only makes sense if you are confident that the future will be (economically) bigger than the past. This has proven to be true for the last sixty years (and especially for the last thirty, which is when the credit society has really got going), and yet the comforting image of year-over-year global economic growth has been fuelled by the creation of ever larger mountains of debt. Check out the linked article to get a sense of the scale of the issue in the US, though remember that many other countries have debts of proportional size (or larger).

While the bet we've been making with the future has held up so far, what was revealed in 2008 is the downside of this scenario. If we don't keep piling up more debt, we face a very nasty period of deleveraging, which could make the Great Depression look like a party. But the higher the debt levels get, the worse the hangover when we stop drinking from the debt bottle.

If infinite growth were actually possible, then perhaps this wouldn't be a problem (though it would still face the risk of systemic shock being made much worse by all the debt hanging around). But infinite economic growth on a finite planet is not possible. We are betting against the future and keep doubling down, making our ultimate inevitable loss many times greater.

I am not an economist nor an economist's son and perhaps I'm missing something crucial, but this doesn't really sound like good news to me.

October: buy nothing new

The challenge from the Salvos: don't buy anything new (apart from essentials) in October. Buy secondhand, barter, swap, loan or do without and make your own fun.

My birthday is in October, but I still support this idea. No need to multiply the amount of stuff in the world. No need to go deeper into debt. No need to seek meaning and fulfillment in a shopping trip. Buy nothing new in October.

Or anytime, really.*
*As much as possible.

Maxing out the credit card

I will return to yesterday's quote soon, though I note with interest the discussion about whether "urgency" is a theological category.

In the meantime, here are two interesting pieces by SMH economist Ross Gittins. The first from a few months ago, argues that "we have been paying off our economic credit card by racking up debt on our environmental credit card", an idea not unrelated to the idea of an ecological credit crunch. The second article, from a few days ago, is about the shortsightedness of government subsidies for middle class status symbols.

The coming financial crisis and peak oil: two interviews

"I think a lot of governments are taking it very seriously but they are not mostly talking about it in public because nobody wants to frighten anybody. [...] But I think they understand perfectly well that peak oil is a reality."

- Nicole Foss (a.k.a. Stoneleigh from The Automatic Earth).

This podcast makes for sobering listening. It consists of two interviews. The second, and cheerier, one is with Antony Froggatt, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House, who lays out the key trends in global energy resources. Froggatt helped to write a recent white paper by Lloyd's of London, titled "Sustainable energy security: strategic risk and opportunities for business" (executive summary can be found here).

From the forward: "We have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility and how much we will have to pay for it. [...] The bad times have not yet hit." In the interview, Froggatt discusses the problems with an economy based on just-in-time supply in a world that is no longer able to rely on cheap energy. He believes we may be heading for more supply crunches like 2008 in which the price spiked to almost US$150 (a five-fold increase in a matter of years). He then partially attributes the following economic downturn to this spike.

He points to three fundamental trends in the energy sector:

(a) Declining oil output from existing wells: "the current output from existing oil production globally is decreasing by about 4% per year. So just to maintain the current output for oil will require the discover and exploitation of a new Saudi Arabia every three years."

(b) Surging energy consumption in emerging economies: "If we carried on using energy in the same way we do at the moment, we would need 40% more of it by 2030."

(c) Increasing international recognition of the threat of climate change largely due to fossil fuel combustion.

All three combine to mean that "the age of cheap oil is over. [...] The current energy system will have to change". The only questions are when and how abruptly and smoothly this energy transition occurs. Previously, a transition on anything like this scale has only been achieved about once per century, and with momentous social and economic implications. We have mere years to achieve a larger transition than we've managed in the past only with concerted effort over many decades.

But that is the optimistic interview.

The first interview (transcript here) is with Nicole Foss (her background and credentials are summarised here), who calls herself a "big picture person". She also speaks of possible interactions between a further financial crisis and peak oil. However, rather than seeing rising oil prices undermining global economic growth, she sees a dangerous relationship in the other direction. She expects the next few years will witness a larger global credit crunch leading to a "greater depression" in which we'll look back at the 1930s as the good old days. She argues that the various government stimulus packages in 2008 merely postponed and made worse the inevitable deflationary period.

She is also very concerned about peak oil, but believes the timeframe for finance is shorter than for energy and so "finance is going to re-write the energy debate. [...] Demand collapse is going to set up a supply collapse. [...] Low prices are going to mean no investment, no exploration, no maintenance." So she predicts a double-whammy: a financial crisis for the next few years, which in turn will set up a longer and larger energy crisis. And she reminds us that being in debt during a major credit crisis isn't likely to be pretty: "When you have a large amount of indebtedness, the civilised methods of getting out of debt are likely to disappear." She is primarily talking about the US situation, but we live in a globalised world.

Listen with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure we can safely ignore these warnings.
The German article mentioned briefly in both interviews is here.

The ecological credit crunch

We are living beyond our means, running up a debt of up to US$4,500,000,000,000 every year. The parallels between the credit crisis and the ecological crises are not accidental. Both are symptoms of the myth of infinite growth.

The differences, however, are crucial. The financial crisis is primarily (as far as I understand it) a crisis of trust: financial institutions who are no longer sure from whom it is safe to borrow. The responses by governments have been to act as a kind of credit backstop, stopping (or slowing) the corrosive effects of cycles of mistrust.

The ecological crises are a crisis of life: of too many human lives living lifestyles that undermine the stability of all living things. This helps give some idea why governments have not responded with a similar urgency and zeal as they have done in relation to the credit crisis. Not because the problem is smaller or less pressing, but because it is far larger and more difficult. How do millions and millions of people radically change their assumptions and consumptions?
H/T Box the Jack. Make sure you also read this post on his blog boxologies: GDP is a speedometer, the question is "where are we headed?".
Photo by ALS.