Gail the Actuary Tells it Like it Is

Here's another brilliant summary of our current global economic and energy situation by Gail the Actuary. It's a synopsis of the peak oil thesis and how it plays out as a 'growth ceiling' and economic decline. It doesn't even take into account catastrophic environmental crises caused by climate change (storms, floods, droughts, fires), causing mass migration, starvation and conflict, but that would be almost too much to contemplate at once. What I love most about Gail's presentation is that she finally concludes that "there is no solution." This is the conclusion I came to almost a year ago. When you put the whole ball of wax together, you have to face that fact that there really is no solution. Solutions that work for one complex set of arrangements tend to wreak havoc somewhere else. And there doesn't seem to be any set of solutions that can forestall even a partial collapse of the world's economy. That's either a 'bad thing' or a 'good thing' depending on what is collapsing and whether you're invested in keeping the whole system going. What is collapsing is globalized Capitalist civilization, and frankly, I'm not sorry to see it go.

Included in the presentation is a series of nifty charts and graphs. The most troubling, though, is the graph which shows a strong correlation between oil prices and the price of food.