This article, written by Joanne Poyourow (initiator of Transition Los Angeles), connects the big issues confronting us, which cannot be handled separately. The original article (with active links) can be found here or here.

To the 1Sky board of directors:

In your open letter to all people and organizations working to combat global warming, you ask how to move forward with urgency and clarity of purpose.

1) Understand the full scope of the problem.

Global warming is not a standalone issue. At the same time as we are trying to decarbonize our entire society and cope with the erratic weather events of early climate change, we are simultaneously being hit with peak oil and economic contraction.

The BFP asked the candidates for governor of Vermont for their ideas on how to replace lost jobs if Vermont Yankee (VY) closes. All of them proposed a biomass plant at the VY site, and other alternative energy projects, to replace not just the lost jobs but the lost energy. (Except for Dubie, who just kept on muttering "taxes are too high".) They mentioned various employment numbers, but none of them mentioned any energy numbers. That way they try and sustain the illusion that renewable energy will allow us, not only the same lifestyle that we had based on nonrenewable sources, but increasing prosperity into the infinite future.

Since I've learnt about the concept of Catabolic Collapse I notice examples of it happening around me. One such example arrived today in the form of this headline: Water bills go up in down economy as usage drops.

In the eastern Maine town of Baileyville along the Canadian border, residents faced the prospect of both lost jobs and higher water bills when the local pulp mill announced it was closing. Baileyville's water utility proposed raising rates 80 percent after the Domtar Corp. mill, the utility's largest customer by far, said it would close because of the poor global economy. Domtar accounted for 52 percent of the utility's total sales, and residents would have seen their minimum quarterly bills go from $55 to nearly $97.

As our economy reveals its unsustainable nature, more and more infrastructure will prove to be unaffordable, from the Interstate highways to the Internet.

More than 2 years ago I looked like a nutcase predicting that electricity prices will rise significantly when the contracts with Hydro Quebec (HQ) and Vermont Yankee (VY) expire, whether VY is closed down or not. Now we are starting to see what the new deal(s) will look like. The offer from VY was for an increase in price of more than 40% to start with, followed with an upwardly adjustable price later. Below is a letter I sent last week to the BFP in response to their report on the HQ deal that was outlined in talks that included Vermont's governor visiting Quebec to help it along.

As I predicted here a while back, the volume of passengers passing through the Burlington airport has declined in 2009. The BFP reports that:

"In January, 50,490 people flew from Vermont's largest airport, a 5.5 percent decline from January 2009 -- and the weakest January tally since 2004. The decline marked the 10th consecutive month of sagging year-over-year results at Burlington International."

A day after listening to Obama's cliches, vague talk about what ails us, and his hard clasping onto our tired old misdirected values and nonsolutions, I was rather surprised to read what the French president Sarkozy said in the opening address of the G20 World Economic Forum at Davos. This is after all the gathering of the world's top capitalists and globalizers. Moreover, in the French political scene, Sarkozy is the "right winger" whose election was a sore point with leftists there, to the point of strikes and riots. And yet, he apparently has both the brains, and the political breathing room, to make statements that Obama would not dare to utter. The annotated excerpts below will demonstrate the kind of re-thinking that the Western world desperately needs, but that the American Empire is least able to contemplate. I am not bringing Sarkozy up as the best thinker and talker on these issues, but rather as an anti-hero who is drawn into, and able, to bring up these issues that are forbidden by Obama's puppetmasters. Sarkozy also threw in the obligatory nice words about capitalism, globalization, finance, and the G20 institution, and he lied about what happened in Copenhagen, but that didn't stop him from clearly stating his main points.

Yes, in the world of tomorrow, we must again reckon with citizens, with the demands of morality, the demands of responsibility, the demands of dignity for citizens. We must see this not as yet another problem, but as part of the solution; not as an additional difficulty, but as something healthy and virtuous, that may, perhaps, allow us to feel happier with what we are, happier with what we accomplish.

The article quoted below, originally posted on opednews.com, strikes me as a forceful expose' of how and why the federal situation is badly broken. It also shows why, as Vermont chooses (or is forced) to "go it alone", we should abandon the assumption that keeping the state "business friendly", in the sense of give-aways to out-of-state corporations, will result in any benefits to us here.

The Path Not Taken
By Siegfried Othmer

Historian Kevin Mattson just wrote a book about the famous speech by President Jimmy Carter given on July 15, 1979, "the speech that should have changed the country." It was a time of yet another gasoline crisis, a time of high interest rates and of raging inflation, in an atmosphere of uncertainty about where the country was going, or needed to be going. Many of things Carter said at the time ring true today, and other things remind us of opportunities missed, and yet to be taken up.

Enough with the nickels and dimes, let's go the whole hog: make it a $10,000 annual fee on taxpayers filing as single, and $20,000 for married filing jointly. That'll pay off the national debt within a decade or so, assuming no more bankster bailouts.

But seriously, per-head taxes with no regard for income have caused riots and revolutions through history. Small versions of such fees are just as unfair as large ones. But that's what we keep getting hit with here in Vermont. Higher auto registration fees, fees on telephone services, etc etc. Recently I've read that a $1 "per meter" fee is to be attached to the monthly electric bill, to fund reduced rates for some people (low income seniors). I am not sure whether that has passed or is just proposed. But it sure is nutty. If you're going to reduce rates for some, fund it by raising RATES for others, not a "poll tax".

The thinking about debt ("credit"), savings, and investment has become so distorted that one must deconstruct statements carefully to realize how absurd they are. One blatant example is the recent talk about funding the future decommissioning of nuclear plants around the country by waiting (decades) for investments of the funds to gain in value.

In a recent posting Dan Weintraub explained why the "Stimulus" cannot succeed:

Most consumers and businesses are deeply in debt. ... And so what happens to that money? That money disappears. It does not circulate. It has no velocity (in economic lexicon). It is simply used by banks and other lending agencies to pay down their own debt...

The aim of the Stimulus is the restoration of "growth", which is assumed to be a good thing if it were achievable. It is useful to delve a little deeper into the meaning of this "growth".