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Fundraiser at Avo’s

The Occupy Fort Collins fundraiser “Coats, Cans, or Cash” will be held at 6.0225 × 10^23 which is also known as Avogadro’s Number. In addition to being a famous constant having to do with molecules in gas this Avo’s is a bar and restaurant at 605 S. Mason Street, Fort Collins. That is where you will find today’s fundraiser, starting at 7:00 pm.

Coats, Cans, or Cash: A
Bailout for Those who really Need it

Live Music and Fun
Sunday, January 29th—7pm
Avos 605 South Mason
Featuring D – Money and
the Funky Tunk Heores, Dunptruck Butterflies and More
Bring a Coat(s),
Non-Perishable Food Item(s), or Cash Donation.

Thanks to Aaron at Cathcart Photography for permission to use copywrited video.

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Home Solar Power Discounts – One Block Off the Grid

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City of Fort Collins and CFORSE Joint Effort

Thanks to my friend Fred Kirsch at Community For Sustainable Energy for publicizing a new effort to reduce VMT.

What is a VMT and why do I want to eliminate it?

VMT stands for: Vehicle Miles Traveled

It is a measurement of how many miles you drive. We are calculating VMT on a weekly basis and working to reduce it as part of a city-wide program to raise awareness and understanding of driving habits, as well as to help participants reduce driving.

Reasons to eliminate VMT: High gas prices, traffic, mental well-being, air pollution (VMT are the leading source of toxic air pollution in Fort Collins), less accident risk, and I bet you can think of some others!

Sounds Great – How Do I Cut My VMT?

Fred has a blog post for this. Here is a heavily edited summary plus a way to say goodby to your car without completely going back to horse and buggy days:

Traffic produces smog, congestion and high costs.
Populations grow, infrastructure lags. While researching
the role electric vehicles might play to improve these problems,
I discovered car sharing and decided to propose a program
for the city. I wanted to include electric cars for short trips.
Also, I suspected that lower weight, lower energy,
lower impact vehicles, operating primarily in bike lanes would
be another terrific addition to the car share menu. People can
choose exactly the vehicle and energy use that is perfect for each trip.

We call it “full spectrum vehicle sharing”. It really is just a car share
menu with more choices. High impact choices cost more,
low impact choices cost less. So, got car sharing approved for
CSU, got Fort Collins CarShare operating, and are ramping Fort Collins
“full spectrum” Vehicle Share up to launch the first program of its kind!
Go to our website at Fort Collins Car Share for a quick look, and contact us for more information, or if you want to get involved.
Help us close the circle and make a positive changes in how people move around.
We have a dream that is so exciting, it makes us feel 14 again!
Shane Miller

Shane makes the point that you could take the bus or ride your bike whenever you need to get to your car share. I like the idea of not having to have my own insurance policy if I only drive a few times a year. I have been automobile free for 16 years and it is a little tough when it snows in Fort Collins. My neighbor said that I gave up freedom when I went auto-free. What I gave up was dealing with DMV, parking tickets, bridge tolls, gas, oil, tires, auto maintenance, car insurance, etc. Now there is another alternative in Fort Collins.

This is Freedom

Related: Sourced from AlterNet Do We Have To Live Like Peasants To Be Truly Sustainable?

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A job creation idea so obviously good even Washington couldn’t possibly say no… could it?

By Jeffrey Leonard

From Washington Monthly

Barack Obama has spent most of his first term as president wrestling with three enormous tasks: kick-starting the economy to create jobs again; standing the banking sector back on its feet; and providing health care to the 40 million Americans who lack insurance. He’s made progress on all these fronts.

But let’s be honest. Despite billions in federal stimulus money, the American jobs machine is barely functioning, and millions of previously hardworking Americans, especially in construction and the “trades,” are sitting idle. Despite billions in bailouts, America’s banks are barely lending, especially to small businesses. And while Obama did pass health care reform, those very reforms actually threaten to overwhelm an already severely strained primary health care infrastructure with a huge wall of new “customers” demanding health care services.

In 2014, a little more than two short years away, the provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that are designed to expand coverage will kick in, initiating a deluge of insurance-card-carrying Americans into the health care system. These disproportionately low-income, newly insured people will live in every state and community in the country. Unless we act now, they stand to join the ranks of the “medically disenfranchised”—the more than 50 million already insured Americans who have no regular access to primary health care for lack of physicians and facilities in their local communities. Think our transportation infrastructure is under stress? Our health care infrastructure is like an already clogged highway system that’s about to take on 32 million new vehicles overnight.

These three problems—the economy’s failure to create jobs, the banking sector’s unwillingness to lend, and the health care system’s lack of capacity to meet an accelerating rise in demand—might seem intractable, especially in a deadlocked Washington where no new money is likely to be put on the table. But if we could take off our ideological blinders for a moment—if conservatives could stop seeing every federal action as an assault on freedom, and liberals could get beyond their belief that spending more federal money is the way out of every problem—we would find a modest answer to all three of these problems staring us in the face.

Part of the solution is relatively uncontroversial. As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years.

Community health centers may sound like a liberal pet project—they originated under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, after all, and offer care regardless of patients’ ability to pay—but they have long enjoyed the steadfast support of Republicans and Democrats alike. President Obama invested $2 billion in health centers through his stimulus package, and the ACA—his signal legislative achievement—rightly carves out a huge role for them in handling the brunt of the newly insured patient load in 2014. But before the age of Obama, perhaps the greatest recent champion of health centers was, of all people, George W. Bush, who doubled their capacity under his watch. Richard Nixon, the first President Bush, and generations of GOP lawmakers also supported them.

Republicans like health centers in part because many of them serve the kind of rural districts that make up the conservative base, but also because they represent a fundamentally cost-effective institutional model. By providing comprehensive care under one roof, with primary care doctors at center stage, heath centers treat patients at a cost that is 41 percent lower than what other providers rack up, according to a recent study by the National Association of Community Health Centers. This translates into savings for the entire health care system of up to $17.6 billion annually. A low-income patient served at a community health center costs the federal government just $125 a year in direct subsidies. Moreover, that patient is far less likely to flock to the emergency room of a private hospital to receive basic care. (For this very reason, private hospitals also love community health centers.)

Today there are about 1,200 registered community health centers in America, serving 19 million patients with branches in 8,000 towns and cities. To meet the coming wave of patients newly insured under the ACA, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates that community health centers will have to serve more than twice as many people as they do now—going from 19 million today to 40 million in 2015. To help them meet that goal, the ACA sets aside $11 billion to fuel nationwide health center expansion. There are two big problems with the ACA’s approach, however.

One is that big pots of money in Washington are always vulnerable to having their bottoms drilled out. In a fit of budget-cutting zeal in April, Congress slashed the annual funding that supports the operations of existing community health centers by $600 million. Hence HHS, which administers all the federal aid to health centers, has had to raid the “new expansion” piggy bank just to keep the old health centers running. This August, HHS was slated to announce grants to 350 health centers so they could open new branches. Instead, it named only sixty-seven.

Courtesy of www.gardnerpath.com

Note that rookie Congressman Cory Gardner voted for these cuts.

The other problem with the funding set aside by the ACA is that the vast bulk of it can only go toward paying the operating expenses of a center, not its construction costs. That means a new center may use that federal money to pay rent on a new facility, but not to build or buy one. Thus the new centers will wind up operating as many do now, in make-do spaces like defunct big-box stores, rickety trailers, and even—in at least one case—a retrofitted gas station.

This is a very inefficient and, over the long run, expensive way for centers to expand. Needless to say, a converted gas station is hardly the ideal physical plant for a medical facility. But more importantly, rents only go up with time. If centers could build, own, or sign long-term leases for their own space, they would level out their occupancy costs, rather than watch those costs threaten to eclipse revenues year in and year out. Better yet, if health centers did so now, they would buy into a depressed real estate market with rock-bottom prices.

But direct spending from the federal government won’t get them there. Recently, a firm called Capital Link, which helps health centers put together the financing necessary for expansion, estimated that, to sustainably meet the goal of 40 million patients, 5,775 facilities would need to be built or refurbished, at an average cost per health center of $14 million. That amounts to about $16.6 billion in capital spending. Combined, the ACA and the stimulus only provide about $3 billion in grants for capital improvements, and friends in Congress have told health centers not to come looking for more. That leaves a gap of more than $13 billion for health centers to come up with on their own.

When left to their own devices, community health centers can succeed in building new facilities without grant money from the federal government. But a variety of factors conspire to make it devilishly hard for them to raise capital. I saw firsthand how arduous and time consuming this can be when I recently spent six years on the board of the National Cooperative Bank, which makes loans to health centers and other similar nonprofits. Generally speaking, health centers have steady revenue streams but tight operating margins, which means they don’t have large balance sheets for down payments, and they can’t afford to take on very large debt burdens. Therefore, when contemplating a new building project or the acquisition of an existing commercial property, they often have to start by raising as much as half of the cost through donations. But securing those donations isn’t easy. Universities have wealthy, grateful alumni, and big hospitals have wealthy, grateful ex-patients, but community health centers have no natural fund-raising constituency, since almost all of their patients are poor. It can take years and years of bake sales, silent auctions, and phone drives just to raise enough money for a down payment on a new building. In my conversations with the leaders of health centers serving Latino communities in the San Diego area, low-income groups in the inner city of Detroit, and farm communities in the rural heartland, I’ve heard tales of fundraising drives that lasted eight years or more, just to come up with the 50 percent of equity capital necessary to buy or build a new facility.

Nor is it easy for health centers to secure loans from banks once they have raised their equity capital. When examining any particular community health center—a clinic, say, in an economically distressed inner-city neighborhood serving a mixture of Medicaid patients and the uninsured, or one in a depressed heartland town where real estate prices are spiraling downward—a lending institution may balk. (Health centers also report that banks are made skittish by Washington’s erratic attitude toward Medicaid.) When a health center finally does manage to arrive at a financing package, the deal often pulls together an alphabet soup of government or not-for-profit agencies that have provided small slices of funding—resulting in complex arrangements that always incur substantial legal fees. At times the mere cost of structuring such a deal can run to more than 10 percent of the total project cost. Normally, in property development, you’d expect such non-construction costs to account for just 2 or 3 percent. The upshot: community health center projects get financed and constructed through a remarkably inefficient, costly, and time-consuming process that—when looked at from a business perspective—simply makes no sense.

And yet there is no reason why community health centers could not be financed more efficiently in the private sector. Out of the 1,200 community health centers in America today, only one or two have ever defaulted on a loan. As modest as their revenue streams are, they are nothing if not reliable. And health centers’ cash flows are only going to improve with time. Today, some 38 percent of health center patients are uninsured. By 2015, that number should be down to about 20 percent. (After Massachusetts passed its health care reform legislation five years ago, the proportion of uninsured health center patients dropped from 36 percent to 20 percent, and the patient base at health centers across the state increased by about 30 percent, as more people flocked to receive the primary care they couldn’t afford before.) If health centers were businesses, they would have a stellar outlook.

Nevertheless, given the current tools at their disposal, health centers are hobbled in their attempts to build capital. Looking to the federal government to come to the rescue with more direct spending—as the debacle with the ACA funding shows—is not the answer. Unless someone can figure out how to appropriate $13 billion more from the federal treasury (good luck with that), we need to find another way.

A good start would be to look beyond the nonprofit world, to see how certain small private-sector businesses put together capital for expansion. One of the most successful devices the government has to stimulate commercial development in low-and moderate-income communities is the Small Business Administration’s 504 loan program. Here’s how it works: When a small business wants to expand by buying, building, or renovating a facility, it approaches a local Certified Development Company (CDC)—a nonprofit lender that is approved by the Small Business Association to issue low-interest, fixed-rate, government-backed bonds to finance up to 40 percent of a project. Provided the small business meets certain criteria—that it can promise to create or retain one local job for each $100,000 loaned, for instance, and that it will occupy the facility being built—the CDC approves the deal and then partners with a bank, which puts up another 50 or so percent of the project financing. That leaves the borrower—the small business—needing to put down as little as 10 percent as a down payment. The program has one of the government’s most exceptional track records of providing return on public investment. And it is a self-funding loan guarantee program, so its cost to the government is virtually nil.

The problem is that the SBA 504 loan program is only open to certain for-profit businesses. In order to make it available to community health centers, Congress would have to change the statute governing the program. Here’s how: explicitly list community health centers as eligible to receive 504 loans, and further designate that a private developer or holding company may also qualify to receive a 504 loan if it signs a long-term commercial lease, equal to the term of the loan, with a community health center. If Congress decided to promulgate these minor changes, with one stroke it could set off a minor building boom in America.

Banks, which have been sitting on the sidelines of the commercial real estate market since 2008 for lack of demand and good deal flow, would almost certainly jump at the chance to fund the construction of new community health centers. They are already well accustomed to working with CDCs and the Small Business Administration. And financing health centers under this arrangement would allow banks to amass “community reinvestment credits,” thus meeting a federal requirement that they contribute a certain amount each year to the development of low- and middle-income communities.

At the same time, local real estate developers and construction companies across the country— which were doing a brisk business building strip malls, doctor’s offices, and the like before the recession—are dying to get back to work. Faced with a growth industry and access to capital, these commercial developers could be counted on not only to build what’s handed to them, but also to take the initiative to get as many projects as possible moving. Private developers could put up the equity themselves, design and build the facilities in joint venture partnerships with community health centers, and then rent out the facilities to the nonprofits on a long-term lease or through various lease-to-own arrangements. Indeed, hungry developers and construction firms would find any number of ways to get the hammers swinging—in small towns and blighted cities across the country—faster than Congress could ever ordain.

And of course, going the SBA route would alleviate many of the headaches and inefficiencies that currently make it so vexing for health centers to fund construction and expansion capital projects. Because SBA 504 loans are routine and efficient to process, the cost of structuring a new project’s financing would plummet. And the interest rates available to beneficiaries of an SBA 504 loan are among the lowest on the market. Right now, they are better than ever.

All those factors would dramatically lower the total cost of any given health center’s commercial real estate acquisition or construction project, which means centers would be able to finance a much higher proportion of the cost through loans. And that, in turn, means many fewer years running silent auctions and bake sales to scrape together a down payment. This is good, because time is of the essence. With real estate values depressed and interest rates at record lows, any health center that managed to receive an SBA 504 loan for a construction project today would wind up with a bargain. Better yet, the center would wind up with a debt burden that would only become more manageable with time, as the center’s revenues rise with inflation, but its payments remain fixed.

It’s hard to imagine Congress appropriating any more direct spending to fuel the construction of health centers. But there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t change a few words in a statute to achieve the same end. Not only would it quickly create much-needed jobs in the construction trades, it would also spark economic activity over the long run in some of the places in America that need it most. In a climate in Washington that is consumed with rhetoric about reducing government expenditures, creating jobs, and the need to get the private sector moving, this small change is one of the most surefire steps that Congress could take to show that government can both lead and get out of the way.

Jeffrey Leonard is the CEO of the Global Environment Fund, a growth capital-oriented investment firm, and the chairman of the Washington Monthly board of directors. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on issues relating to energy, the environment, and economics.

Related: Gardner Hates Community Health Centers

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Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, recently wrote an article for The Nation titled “Capitalism vs. The Climate.” In that article, Klein argues that “responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.” She goes on to say that “climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.”

During the salon on Friday, January 13th, Kevin Cross will lead a community discussion of Klein’s article. We will examine her analysis of climate change denialism, her recommended “climate agenda”, why she believes progressives have so far not been successful in presenting a comprehensive climate agenda, and how she thinks progressives should move forward.

Reading the article in advance (available at Capitalism vs. The Climate) would be helpful, but not essential to participating in the discussion.

Salon duc Tape, a public forum sponsored by Strength Through Peace, meets on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month from 7:00 — 9:00 p.m. in the basement of Mugs Coffee Lounge on 261 South College, the NW corner of College and Olive. The January 13th salon will be co-sponsored by the Fort Collins Sustainability Group. The formal program begins with introductions at 7:20 p.m. For those in need of an elevator, there is one through the Armstrong Hotel, to the north of Mugs. For more information, email Strength Through Peace or call us at 419-8944.

Naomi Klien - Nation Magazine photo

About the Author Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, fellow at The Nation Institute and author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Published worldwide in September 2007, The Shock Doctrine is slated to be translated into seventeen languages to date. The six-minute companion film, created by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, was an Official Selection of the 2007 Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals and a viral phenomenon as well, downloaded over one million times. Klein’s previous book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was also an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty-eight languages, with over a million copies in print. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in 2002. Klein’s regular column for The Nation and The Guardian is distributed internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004 her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. The same year, she released a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories, The Take, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. The film was an official selection of the Venice Biennale and won the best documentary jury prize at the American Film Institute’s Film Festival in Los Angeles. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

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by Craig A. Severance
December 15, 2011

Courtesy of Dmitry Orlov

As recently as a year ago it was considered heresy to suggest economic growth would not soon resume. Now, however, as The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks. Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth is failing.

Anger and fear are widespread, as the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary Americans are being destroyed. Anger runs among the “99%” over economic injustices that favor the “1%”. Fear, however, may run among 100% over this question: How do we live when economic growth fails?

How Do We Live?

These three articles will briefly lay out our current predicament, and discuss ways we can cope. Today’s post will cover four major reasons — dubbed here “The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse” — why nothing seems to work anymore. In the second post, next week, “Out With the Old”, will cover the inevitable end to seven unsustainable practices. The final post in this series, “In With the New”, will discuss seven ways of living which we can embrace in a world with failing economic growth.

If we act purposefully now as individuals and as a society, we may help to avoid the most chaotic and destructive effects of collapse. First, we need to understand what has gone wrong — which we will discuss in today’s post. The adaptations laid out in the next two posts represent ways we may find a “softer landing” — but we cannot expect a return to what we came to believe was “normal”.

Three Years to Get Back to 2007 Levels.

After the close of 2nd Quarter 2011, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis published its official estimates of U.S. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By the end of 2nd Quarter 2011 the U.S. economy was officially producing about the same as its end of 2007 peak — in other words, essentially no overall economic growth for 3 1/2 years.

Less Per Person.

Though the economy was no larger, U.S. population had increased, so as of the end of 2nd Qtr 2011 there was 3.5% less GDP to go around per person in the U.S. than at the end of 2007. (By comparison, there was a 35% increase per person in China over this same period.)

Heading Into Decline Again?

Having just officially climbed back to 2007 GDP levels, it seems like a really bad dream the economy could once again start heading backwards. Yet that is exactly the prediction experts are now making. On November 7th, the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a group with a stellar record of predicting recessions, re-affirmed its recent call the U.S. economy is once again slipping into recession. So that no one would mistake what that means, in its September 30 press release, the group said bluntly, “Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet.” Also, on November 25th, Deutsche Bank revised it projections and is now warning of a “deeper” Eurozone recession.

Even Worse Than We’re Being Told?

As bad as the official numbers noted above may seem, the actual story is likely even worse. John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics notes that government methods of counting inflation in prices have chosen to statistically ignore many price increases, and thus count a misleading share of observed sales as economic growth. Calculating the same way the government previously used to measure the inflation rate, SGS shows a much higher inflation rate that is more in keeping with everyone’s experience of skyrocketing fuel and food costs, health premiums, etc. With distortions removed, SGS estimates the U.S. economy has actually been stagnant or shrinking for most of the last decade:

Image Source: ShadowStats.com

Why Nothing Seems to Work Anymore: The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalyse.

The news that a bad economy is now expected to get even worse is particularly crushing with so many still out of work, and after so much money has been spent. Leaders debate austerity or stimulus, but common sense says something more must be happening.

The “Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse” have been revealed by many astute observers. Researchers and analysts such as Chris Martenson ( “The Crash Course” video course, and book) and Richard Heinberg (“The End of Growth“) have written extensively about the first three Horsemen. The original Tea Party movement (which began as anger over government bailouts of Wall Street), and the Occupy Wall Street movement have focused attention on the fourth Horseman. To know what lies ahead, we need to know what is wrong:

The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse

1. Too Much Debt.

Chris Martenson has plotted a striking pattern of total private and public debt in the U.S. doubling roughly every 30 quarters since the early 1970′s — five doublings of total debt levels in four decades. This might have been fine had our incomes grown that fast and we could support the extra debt — or if the debt had been used for investments that would now save us money. Instead, like a teenager who ran to the mall with Mommy’s credit card, we racked up debts with no way to pay them back. We were living high, but it was all phony, fueled by more, and more, and more borrowed money.

Now, families, small businesses, local and state governments, and even the Federal government are reaching a condition of debt max-out. Our incomes would need to suddenly grow much more rapidly than we have seen to be able to handle so much debt. However, with everyone weighed down making burdensome debt payments, where are the customers who could kick-start economic activity and cause such increases to income? The Federal Reserve’s policy of encouraging people to consume by taking on even more debt is failing, as banks aren’t loaning to consumers and businesses who already have too much debt.

The day of reckoning has arrived. Because our incomes are not rising fast enough to service this much debt, our spending must shift into reverse. Running up the debt allowed us to spend more than our income, but now we have to cut our spending to less than our income if we are to pay back the money we borrowed. Many observers expect this “de-leveraging” process to take at least a decade.

2. Resource Limits.

If we had just run up a big credit card bill and now need to pay it off, that would be hard but perhaps possible as long as we still have our jobs. Now, however, we literally may not be able to afford to fill our gas tanks to get to work. Peak Oil — reaching the limit of world oil production — changes everything.

Oil is just one example of how the economy is merely a way to channel real physical wealth. Physical scientists regard the very idea of endless economic growth on a finite planet as ludicrous. Growing the economy, after all, is just another way of saying we are going to keep converting more and more energy, physical resources and labor into more and more — and even more! — goods and services.

What happens when there isn’t more?

Rapidly Increasing Prices for Key Resources.

The high consumer price inflation noted by John Williams is likely one sign of increasing resource prices recently noted by GMO, a major asset management firm. GMO principal Jeremy Grantham’s April 2011 report Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices are Over Forever plotted real prices for a mix of resource inputs to the global economy since 1900.

Though the last century achieved huge increases in the use of natural resources, technology allowed an average 1.2% per year decline in real prices throughout the 20th century. However, with massive new demands from China and other emerging economies, Grantham writes of resource prices “they are now rising, and in the last eight years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year decline!”. With analysis indicating the trend of abundance has now reversed to scarcity, Grantham calls this “one of the giant inflection points in economic history”.

The Wolf at the Door.

Hitting resource limits means that growth has a new limiting valve: escalating resource prices. For instance, if companies begin to hire more workers, they will want to drive more and use more gasoline. However, when we have reached physical limits on world oil extraction, more demand will drive up gasoline prices — for everyone.

from Wikipedia Commons

The increased gas prices act as a “Wolf at the Door” to steal prosperity. Paying more for gasoline means people must cut back on other purchases. The economy then sinks back into recession and many of the new jobs will be lost.

Traditional economics would argue the extra money we spend for gasoline should simply loop back and be spent again. However, with increased energy needs to extract harder-to-get new oil sources such as deep ocean drilling and tar sands, much is literally burned “up in smoke”. Also, the money we send abroad for imported oil has no guarantee of returning.

Peak Oil is just one example of limited resources curtailing our hopes of affordable expansion. There are now warnings of Peak Coal and limits to many other key resources. For instance, dreams of a greatly expanded electric grid may be costly given short supplies of copper recently noted by Goldman Sachs.

3. Destruction and Decay of Infrastructure.

Richard Heinberg has noted that destructive forces from climate change, oil and chemical spills, and other environmental effects of producing more and more goods are acting as a third major drag on growth and prosperity.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider this: has New Orleans been fully restored? What became of the homeowners and farmers, many who were uninsured, affected by massive Australian wildfires and floods? What of U.S. communities affected by the record dozen billion-dollar-plus weather disasters so far in 2011? FEMA is now essentially broke, and cannot provide enough assistance to help communities fully recover. Looking ahead, how will major ports continue operations once sea levels begin to rise?

From NOAA

The already inadequate responses to destructive events are highly visible. We are even in denial about basic maintenance. As our cars jolt down decaying roads, we can ask ourselves whether we ever considered what it would cost to maintain all the roads, bridges, electric lines, satellites, schools and other critical structures we built on the run-up to where we now stand. Will we repair our crumbling infrastructure and be able to keep building even more?

4. Greed.

With average citizens deeply struggling, it is particularly galling that a powerful elite are stealing money, power, and hope away from the middle class.

publicity photo

In the last Great Depression and at least through the 1950′s, even the wealthiest saw the need to preserve a robust middle class, and a path for the poorest Americans to improve their lot. This was not altruism but a pragmatic sense that customers who can afford to spend are the real “Job Creators”. Today, however, the levers of power are jiggered to funnel contracts, bailouts and tax breaks to the most powerful, protected by enormous corporate bribes campaign contributions.

The greatest harm done by this political corruption is our inability to address problems. In the financial arena, the option of letting reckless banks fail and protecting depositors, rather than preserving banks and bonuses, was never seriously considered. Regarding energy and climate, the depths of avarice may be seen by campaigns to confuse the public. Similar to the well educated cigarette lobbyists who knew perfectly well the real scientific evidence, today’s oil and coal lobbyists are willing that energy shortages, harmful pollutants, and climate disruption will inflict great suffering (even on their own grandchildren), merely to reap current profits.

While the most pyschopathic behavior has been exhibited by an amoral few, we must also admit that any extreme “con job” is fueled by encouraging greed in the victim. How many who are now burdened with debts they cannot repay, wondered at the time why the bank was willing to lend them so much money? Too many of us succombed to bubble madness, and the desire to have more than we could afford.

Offering Nothing but “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”?

The above four challenges point to a stark future with severe changes ahead. It is long past time for someone to sound a wake-up call like Winston Churchill’s famous speech to the British House of Commons shortly after the outset of WWII. We need such a frank talk that lays out the real prospects ahead, pulling no punches. However, with the quality of today’s “leaders”, such truth won’t come from a politician.

Instead, the public must look to the experts themselves. Gail Tverberg, Editor of Our Finite World, has just such a presentation, which she gave this year to her church group, posted at Energy Bulletin here. By the time you read to the end, you feel a real sense of the onslaught of an entirely new reality. She concludes “there is no real solution to our predicament”. She might just as well have said, as Churchill, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Too Scary to Think About?

Though we can intellectually accept that resource limits will inevitably shut down economic expansion, the idea this is already happening is terrifying. It is hard to contemplate without a deep fear settling in one’s stomach. Will I lose my job? Will my children ever be able to find work? Will we be reduced, like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind after the South’s defeat caused the devastation of her life, to scratching hungrily in the dirt for a lone turnip?

Before We All Start Scratching for Turnips…

Before we allow our society to sink into a chaos of devastation and deprivation, there are many unsustainable practices we will jettison, and new ways of living we can adopt in a world with failing economic growth.

In the next two posts, we will cover these “Out with the Old” practices that must end, and “In With the New” options — for individuals and for our nation. We can and will adapt, which is what humans do best.

Our prosperity — the ability to live comfortably in an advanced culture — will not long continue to be measured by owning more and more things, and living in bigger and bigger houses.

It will be much better than that.

Copyright 2009 – 2011 by Craig Severance, CPA

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Dramatization and political commentary, as citizens say farewell to the Bill of Rights, by Occupy Fort Collins, on Dec. 17 2011 in Fort Collins, CO. The demonstration and protest is in response to Congress passing the 2011, National Defense Authorization Act and loss of Civil Rights. The mock-funeral is a protest of NDAA.

The NDAA, allows Americans be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or jury of their peers.

Related: New Bill Allows Military to Detain You Indefinitely

Related: We Are a Police State

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teaching how-to to the next generation

Thanks to our friends at BeLocalNC.org we have the following item from their Community News November 2011.

National Center for Craftsmanship is seeking construction, general carpentry, remodel & repair projects for our ReConstruct youth career development training program. If you are considering an addition, tenant finish, or remodel of your home or office, including kitchen, bath, basement, doors, windows, decks, patios, etc., please contact us for a free consultation. We welcome large or small projects and promise quality & integrity in all we do. We are highly experienced craftspeople mentoring youth in all aspects of remodel & new construction projects including design, development & management. We provide licensed & insured services as well as expertise in green building & sustainable practices. We offer state & federal tax incentives for qualifying donors & clients. For more information please contact

Neil Kaufman at 970-215-4587 or email

Related: City Adopts Green Energy Standards

Related: 10 Good Reasons to Shop Local

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What is Transition Fort Collins?

The old paradigm of our culture, based on limitless growth, endless acquisition, and the belief that more is always better is rapidly changing as we run up against the limits of a finite planet.

We are all in transition right now.

If we wait for someone else to solve the problem, we may be too late.
If we act as individuals, it may be too little.
If we act as communities, it might be just enough, just in time.

We don’t have all the answers. We believe in multiple paths, ideas and possibilities. We’re going to make mistakes. And we will learn from them.

Bring what you’re passionate about to the table. We’ve got a seat for you. We’ll work together because that’s the way we unleash our collective genius and start the transition.

If you’re curious and want more information, please read on.

Transition Fort Collins will foster local resiliency, sustainability and culture by building a sustainable local economy, nurturing community spirit and cooperation, and sharing best practices as we learn from and teach each other how to live in a world of finite resources. We want Fort Collins to be ready for our future, not struggling to react to it.

General meeting of Transition Fort Collins on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 7:00pm.

Fort Collins Mennonite Fellowship
300 E Oak Street
Fort Collins, CO 80524

More Information: Our Stories

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Unidentified Chase Bank honcho shoos protestors off property

shoo [?u?]
interj
go away!: used to drive away unwanted or annoying people, animals, etc.
vb shoos, shooing, shooed
1. (tr) to drive away by or as if by crying “shoo.”
2. (intr) to cry “shoo.”
[imitative; related to Middle High German sch?, French shou, Italian scio]

And so it was. This is what happened when peaceful Occupy Fort Collins protestors did a ‘move your money‘ event at Chase Bank College Avenue on November 17, 2011. We were directed to the sidewalk so as to be completely off bank property. Then the manager called Fort Collins Police Services. Seems like TBTF banks are getting a bit sensitive.

Photo by Forrest W.

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