ORIGINAL BLOG POST

We are now in a permanent downard resource depletion spiral of gargantuan proportions.

 It is my opinion that the “trigger events” leading up to global food shortages have now occurred. There are many reasons for this, but I base this opinion on the news articles now being reported around the world. Even the U.S. media if finally, if belatedly getting on board.

It is also my opinion that this situation is far more extreme than most people can rightly imagine. I say “rightly” because there is nothing in their experience that would tell them otherwise. In short, based on all of the information I have attempted to assimilate, we are facing famine in many parts of the world and food shortages and unbelievably high prices in America.

This situation is beginning to take notice in the public eye and is causing a huge upsurge in demand for food products. Not only food, but survival gear of all types, candles, seeds, solar power, fuel storage and anything and everything else you can think of. This panic alone has caused every supplier in the country to be overwhelmed with orders.

Personally, I have updated my shipping times page at least three or maybe even four times in the last week alone. Presently, we are over 1 month out on all products and longer on some products, such as Alpine Aire. Every cannery in the country has been overwhelmed, most are sold out and are scrambling for new supplies.

This is not uncommon for this industry. We ship out many tons of food per week as an industry, I don’t have the exact figures, but it’s quite a lot. Even so, there are only a handful of canneries like my suppliers in the entire country. We cannot handle even 1% of the population. We cannot handle even 1/10 of 1% of the population if they were all to order.

This is unfortunate, but true. Many of us have been in this business for a very long time. My main supplier has been doing this for over 50 years for example. Me, over 13 years now. I’ve “seen this before”, but because of the news on global food supplies, resource depletion, energy stocks, fuel stocks, increased population and global resource demands that are spiraling clear out of site — I’ve never seen it like this. Nor do I ever expect to see it like this again.

In other words — this is the ‘event’ all have been wondering about and some of us have been waiting for.

We are now in a permanent downard resource depletion spiral of gargantuan proportions.

The world news has reported that without record breaking crops every single year from here on out we are facing famine. This is not my opinion, this is the assessment of researchers and scientists.

More research and scientific reports have been pouring in all of last year and this year. Few Americans seem to be aware of their significance. Global climate change is real, the world will be ice free in the Arctic in just a few more years. This will cause gigantic and massive crop failures all over the world, low land flooding, sea level rises and huge numbers of global refugees pouring forth from inundated lands. Increased hurricane severity, drought and even flooding in many areas is also anticipated by scientist and climatologists. This is already happening; I cannot stress this enough.

In addition, the energy crisis is quite severe and getting worse. Not a single significant discovery of oil has been found to my knowledge that will last more then six months at the present world consumption rates. Food = oil, and all the energy and fertilizer inputs in-between. Without cheap energy, we will never produce even a fraction of the food we produce today. This all by itself, discounting the effects of climate change, have doomed our future chances of survival by a very huge percentage. As a guess, at least 50% of all human life on earth will suffer quite dramatically as our energy supplies become increasingly scarce and expensive and our ability to produce food plummets.

This will mostly affect the developed countries in various and sundry ways. Our modern agriculture industry is already suffering under these conditions. Some farmers cannot afford the fertilizers due to its high costs. Much of our existing farmland has been plowed under to make room for biofuel crops. These crops, like corn, are being converted into bioethanol for our automobiles. This has caused a huge upsurge in price and global food shortages, along with food riots in some countries.

In addition, countries like China and India have increased their demand rather significantly for food products and energy. Their populations dwarf the United States many times over. This and all these other conditions have helped contribute to the wildly fluctuating food prices on the world markets.

By now, you should have noticed that you are paying about twice as much for food in the supermarket as you did one or two years ago. Not every single product has doubled, but it will. It will because it is all a downstream output of cheap energy, which is no longer cheap and not easily replaced.

Not a single alternative energy source “discovery” or invention has the capability to produce the cheap and abundant energy that petroleum offered. Despite the hype and so-called ‘promises’ we’ve all seen, you should take special notice of the fact that none of them have come to market in ways which are even remotely impacting our global energy consumption.

Most alternative energy efforts are actually bogus, mostly smoke and mirrors and they do not remotely come close to paying for themselves in reasonable time frames. Investigative articles and research on this blog and in magazines such as Mother Earth News, Backwoods Home and others have revealed that converting to solar or wind energy has payback times in decades.

Not everyone believes this, so do your own research and convince yourself. The point is — we do not have any other cheap, plentiful resources to convert to energy. Not sunshine, not wind, not methane hydrates, not nuclear, not anything. This will all mean the energy — and all of its downstream ‘outputs’ will cost more and more and more as time goes on.

Many countries are already going dark — and I mean “lights out” as their powerplants shut down for a lack of fuel. The fuel they use is natural gas, coal and petroleum. They simply cannot find nor buy the fuel that they need to keep their power on. This situation is growing around the world.

In addition to this, we have many other factors in the world now taking place. Global resource depletion is severe and getting worse as populations keep growing. Our fisheries are in collapse in most if not all locations around the world; our levels of pollution, acidification and debris that we are causing in the world’s oceans is unbelievably bad. There are continental sized trash heaps now floating in the Pacific Ocean for example. Coral reefs and mangrove forest, home to the breeding ground for many fish species are in a state of collapse throughout most of the world.

We have overfished and depleted most of the wild ‘table fish’ stocks throughout the world. Ocean trawlers, in demand for global food supplies, are literally scraping the bottom of the ocean ‘barrel’ in attempts to meet world demand for fish products, going farther and farther out and are now found in some of the deep parts of the oceans, having already scraped everything else clean.

Over 40% of the world depends on the worlds oceans for protein sources. There is absolutely no doubt that this cannot continue as fisheries collapse. Moreover, attempts at aquaculture to meet world food demand have actually hurt the world’s wild fish populations and are contributing to the depletion of game fish throughout the world.

It gets worse. Topsoil losses are already severe throughout the world and are the cause for flooding, mudslides and reduced crop losses. Without the heavy application of fertilizers, a petroleum based product, current crop productions are simply not possible. Top soil depletion and salinization (salts) is already the cause in countries like Australia for significantly reduced harvest. Other countries are actually dealing with starvation as a result.

Drought is also now found throughout 1/3 of the entire globe and is also behind much of the severe food production drops. Drought is caused by many factors, including global climate change as our ice caps melt. Drought and the lack of fresh water will ultimately be the #1 factor facing most of humanity as our planet warms up.

The IPCC has constantly changed its estimates time and time again as it scrambles to record and update its data on global climate change. What was expected to take 100 years is now thought to take as little as 10. We are in serious, serious trouble and I’ve not even covered all of the factors and effects yet.

There’s more. Sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic is melting at an unbelievable rate. This is causing huge amounts of fresh water to dump into the oceans changing its chemical composition and makeup. Greenland and other sources, such as the glaciers found all over the world are fast disappearing at unbelievable rates. Gigantic sized “moulins” the size of Niagra Falls have opened up in the ice, dumping huge quantities of water into the ocean and below the ice itself. There is a very real possibility that entire sections of glacier the size of entire states could float right off into the ocean. In some places, the glaciers are already gone, forcing entire villages and towns to relocate in an effort to find drinking water.

The same is occurring now in the Antarctic too. Huge near continental-size ice shelves are cracking and breaking off from the Antarctic ice sheet. The rate at which this is happening is very frightening to climatologist because it signals an irreversible trend that bodes serious danger for all life on earth.

This fresh water “dump” is contributing to the global climate change in several ways. The natural currents found in the oceans themselves are changing or even stopping. England for example is facing the effect of the North Atlantic current (thermholine) right now as its climate changes. Plankton are dying in huge numbers, an absolutely critical food element at the very bottom of the food chain. All life in the ocean is dependent upon this. Jellyfish are dramatically increasing as they take over new niches in ocean sea life as natural predators are eliminated. The salinity of the oceans is changing, taking with it everything we’ve come to know and rely upon as the world’s ice continues to melt.

Ice also causes an albedo effect (reflection); less ice means less reflection, and the planet heats up even more. Also, frozen in the Siberian permafrost is methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas. Just a few degrees more of warming will cause billions and billions of tons of greenhouse gas to “burp” out into the atmosphere, an exceedingly dangerous tipping point that will push our planet headlong into accelerated and irreversible warming.

The Amazon rain forest is in severe peril from over-logging and the practice of slash and burn procedures to open up farmland. Huge tracts of land (80,000 acres per day) are being wiped out to grow “temporary crops” that deplete the soil in less then 3 years, irreversibly depleting the soil and leaving a dry savanna behind. As the lungs of the Earth, the loss of the most critical biohabitat on the planet will have absolutely huge effects on all life on earth, including us. Rain forests contain most of the worlds species of all life forms and help clean the air, absorbing gases like carbon dioxide and creating oxygen. Without the world’s rain forests - we will all die.

It is my opinion, and that of many other world renown and respected scientist and researchers, that we have already passed many tipping points. In other words, it will only get worse, as we and our children deal with all of these effects. In fact, it is expected to get much, much worse.

How much worse? We are already facing the near-extinction of human life on planet Earth. Within the next 100 years, billions of humans will die by other then natural causes. Most will die violent deaths or die by slow starvation, dehydration, disease, pandemics or war. This is exactly what the Pentagon has predicted in a secret report suppressed by the Bush Administration. Already, the world’s military powers and their governments are orchestrating themselves to commandeer the world’s remaining resources. This is exactly what the U.S. did in Iraq and exactly what is now occurring in the Arctic.

The demand for energy, food, water, soil and a habitable climate will be (and already is) so great that nations will war against other nations as they fight over the scraps that are now left. We have entered into a time where we have consumed too much, too quickly and created anthropogenic climate change (human caused) and it is neither reversible, or stoppable at this point. We utterly failed to listen to the warnings that were given decades ago, and now it really is too late.

Even the so-called Green movement or sustainability movement cannot stop this. It’s simply not possible anymore because of the tipping points we have already passed on population, pollution, energy, resource destruction, resource consumption and global climate change. These things are all our fault; they were caused by humans. There are other factors at work such as increased solar energy from the sun, but these have been broadly discounted as being the only factors that have caused the effects I have described. Almost everything now happening today can be directly attributed to human activity on Earth.

In essence, life as we know it is actually over. From this point on, we will decline. The meaning and the significance of this statement ought to be as well understood as we can allow. We have killed the planet as we knew it and what we have required and needed to sustain ourselves. We could have lived here indefinitely, but we didn’t. In the process, we have overpopulated the world with billions and billions of people that we can no longer feed, no longer provide enough medicine to, no longer properly clothe, house or even protect. It simply is not possible or desirable for us to go on doing what we’ve done before, because this is in fact, the root cause of all of these problems.

Starvation and war are already a way of life in many third-world countries. Most Americans have grown up and become accustomed to this, never really realizing exactly why this has happened. At the very core of these conflicts, is resource depletion. Humans demanded too much, too soon and have suffered as a result.

There are many other factors of course, but they all trace to a source issue and that issue is how humans have behaved on and towards this planet we call home. Where we are at today, and how we got there, and what we can do about any of it is the real issue.

It is my opinion that we can do little about any of it because the tipping points described above and their causes are now decades old. This is not something that “just happened” or happened even recently; this is something that was caused decades ago, but it has taken this long for these effects to show themselves with our present levels of severity. Our present “effects” are almost totally unknown, but we can easily see how they could be worse since there are now so many more of us (at least 2 - 3 times the number).

This also means that the future effects will be significantly worse, which is exactly what is being predicted by climate scientists, research analysts and even investigative efforts by the Pentagon and many other sources.

All of the “above” has been based upon published data and reports and none of it is hearsay or wild speculation. Many Americans have never heard such things and many that do, simply do not believe them, or do not want to. There is very high levels of rampant and ridiculous denial taking place because what this all signifies is that life on Earth as we know it is over. This is all true. It is over and we are about to find this out.

Denial does not make any of this go away. Denial only means that you choose death over life, because that is what is really at issue here — your life. The planetary effects are already underway and unstoppable, immutable and utterly indifferent to your denial. The only thing you can change is yourself and what you alone are willing to do about it.

It is my opinion that there is indeed, very little that you can do. Underlying all of these issues is the human-centric ego that does not want to change. Even if you change, would it be enough? In a word — No, most definitely not. Like voting, your one vote doesn’t even matter, making you simply a part of something that is much, much bigger than yourself. A lifestyle change now will not change the outcome I have described. But regardless of this, if you intend to survive this coming catastrophe, you will still need to change. It is the only option any of us have.

Therefore, I suggest you seriously consider these things with the utmost urgency. This is not “news” to some people, but it may indeed be news to you. Normal reactions are anger, denial, numbness and apathy. This is, believe it or not, part of the process of your assimilating this information. I suggest you don’t stay in any one stage too long, because you do not have time to dink around with this. You need time to assimilate, but you also need time to do what you can, while you still can.

Either you will resign yourself to this message, or you will discard it out of hand. The choice is yours. Resignation means that you can now move forward in your life and start figuring out what you intend to do about it. No rescue or plan is forthcoming from the powers-that-be (government) despite the empty promises and rhetoric they are all known for. This is something you alone are going to be responsible for, and it is entirely up to you and nobody else what you intend to do about it.

The mainstream media is only reporting a fraction of this news. This is unfortunate, but true. The American media is one of the most highly controlled and censored news sources on Earth. You can use the Internet to dig for information on all of these points if you like, or you can simply read all the sources linked on this and other blogs. Whatever you do, get information and get it now.

You can choose to resign yourself to your future fate, or you can choose to take responsibility for your life. I cannot sum this up any other way. I have attempted to keep this blog entry short so that you will read it — and take actions for your life. The choice is yours. There is a tremendous amount of information on this site to help you out. Read it.