By Jim Kunstler (author of the book the future after peak oil, The Long Emergency)
A summary of his commentary:
remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it.
other means will materialize.
of the kind that Americans are in the habit of enjoying.
A lot of families will lose everything. They will sift and disperse into the housing
owned by other family members -- parents, siblings -- and a strange new not-altogether comfortable kind of togetherness will become common. Over time, a lot of people will go looking for casual work "under-the-table"( and probably low-paying). To some degree, these workers will begin to look and act like a new servant class, and before too long they may be absorbed into the households of people who employ them. There will be plenty of room for them there.
2009 may be the point where we begin to understand what kinds of places will be more hospitable to human society further ahead. I maintain that our giant urban metroplexes have way overshot their sustainable scale and will contract severely. With all the economic hardship, we ought to expect a lot of demographic churning, people leaving hopeless places and moving on to something more promising. I believe we will see them move to smaller towns and smaller cities. The reorganization of the rural landscape into smaller-scaled farms has not begun to occur -- though 2009 might be very hard on
agribusiness, given the shortage of capital and if oil begins to march up in price by late winter. Eventually, the rural landscape will require the labor of many more people than is currently the case. Whatever else happens, 2009 will surely see a massive return to home
gardening as budgets become strained to the extreme.
Mexico's super-giant Cantarell oil field, the second-largest ever discovered after Saudi
Arabia's Ghawar field, has shown a 30 percent depletion rate in the past year alone.
Mexico is America's third largest source of imports My prediction for 2009 is that we will see two things occur, possibly at the same time: a resumption of rising prices, and spot shortages.
around the world, but they are still susceptible to vagaries in the oil markets and Black Swan events. As the U.S. consumer economy falls into a coma, and the shipping containers from China to WalMart get sparser, the Chinese government will face the wrath of millions of unemployed workers. I believe they will struggle through 2009, perhaps growing more surly as the U.S. dollar inflates and their holdings of Treasury bills begins to look more like a swindle.
Russia may be suffering economically for the moment due to the crash of oil prices, but they are energy resource-rich -- at least for the next couple of decades -- and if they don't like the current price, they can keep more of their oil in the ground until the price looks
more attractive.
NOTE: Also see the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, "The Great Crash, 2008," subtitle, A geopolitical setback for the West, by Roger C. Altman.
The over-arching geopolitical theme of 2009 will be the end of robust globalism as we've known it for some time. Reduced trade, competition for energy resources, sore feelings over debts and currencies will drive the nations inward or, at least, direct their energies toward their own regions.
will become clear that the Long Emergency is underway.
· the second on the 81st floor of the South Tower.
support more weight. The entire floor was then filled with server-
size Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) batteries.
These units were bolted to a raised floor about 3 feet above the
reinforced 81st floor. "The whole floor was batteries," he
said, "huge battery-looking things." They were "all black"
and "solid, very heavy" things that had been brought in during the
night. They had been put in place during the summer prior to 9/11,
he said.
data center," a secure computer room along the north and east sides
of the tower. And that's exactly where the plane hit the north wall
of the 95th floor.
NIST researchers were unable or unwilling to provide any description
of the contents of these crucial floors four years after 9/11.
http://www.rense.com/general75/thrm.htm
Examination of the forensic metallurgy of WTC steel “reveal a phenomenon never before observed in building fires: eutectic reactions, which caused ‘intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.’”
| The simple facts of temperatures:
Diffuse flames burn far cooler. Oxygen-starved diffuse flames are cooler yet. The fires in the towers were diffuse -- well below 800ºC. Their dark smoke showed they were oxygen-starved -- particularly in the South Tower. |
| Steel doesn't begin to melt until it reaches temperatures of between 1500 and 2000C, and it does not literally flow like lava until it gets towards 3000C, much hotter than the temperature jet fuel, or in the case of building seven, office material fires burn at. a far more extensive fire occurred in WTC 1 itself, prior to enhanced fireproofing of the building, on February 13, 1975. The fire burned at much higher temperatures for three hours and spread over six floors, including 65% of the 11th floor and the building core, yet it caused no significant damage to the steel structure and no trusses had to be replaced. |
November 22, 2004
In an effort to better understand the conditions that led to complete collapses of the World Trade Center Towers and WTC 7, we apply scanning-electron-microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (XEDS) methods to analyze the dust generated, with an emphasis on observed micro-spheres in the WTC dust.
The formation of molten spheres with high iron contents along with other species in the
WTC dust required extremely high temperatures. Our results are compared with those of other laboratories. The temperatures required for the molten sphere-formation and evaporation of materials as observed in the WTC dust are significantly higher than temperatures associated with the burning of jet fuel and office materials in the WTC buildings.
The temperatures required for the observed spherule-formation and evaporation of materials observed in the WTC dust (table 1) are significantly higher than temperatures reachable by the burning of jet fuel and office materials in the WTC buildings (table 2). The temperatures required to melt iron (1,538 °C) and molybdenum (2,623 °C), and to vaporize lead (1,740 °C) and aluminosilicates (~2,760°C), are completely out of reach of the fires in the WTC buildings (maximum 1,100 °C). We wish to call attention to this discrepancy: the official
view implicating fires as the main cause for the ultimate collapses of the WTC Towers and WTC 7 (FEMA [13], NIST [15] ) is inadequate to explain this temperature gap and is therefore incomplete at best.
The formation of numerous metal-rich spherules is also remarkable, for it implies formation of high-temperature droplets of the molten metals, dispersed in the air where they cool to form spherules. We observe spherules with high iron and aluminum contents, a chemical signature which is not consistent with formation from melted steel.
The data provide strong evidence that chemical reactions which were both violent and highly-exothermic contributed to the destruction of the WTC buildings. NIST neglected the high-temperature and fragmentation evidence presented here: it appears nowhere in their final report [15]. Proposed new building codes based on the WTC disaster must address all available evidence for what caused the complete and rapid destruction of these skyscrapers. Understanding the mechanisms that led to the destruction of the World Trade Center will enable scientists and engineers to provide a safer environment for people using similar buildings and benefit firefighters who risk their lives trying to save others. Thus, a thorough investigation which considers these data, showing extremely high temperatures and severe fragmentation in the formation of small metal-rich spheres
during the WTC Towers destruction, is highly motivated. In particular, the repeatedly-delayed report on the destruction of WTC 7 on 9/11/2001 [21] should address these striking facts.
The extensive evidence that explosives were used at the WTC includes witness testimony (MacQueen 2006), overwhelming physical evidence (Griffin 2005, Hoffman et al 2005, Jones and Legge et al 2008) and simple common sense (Legge 2007). There is also substantial evidence that aluminothermic (thermite) materials were present at the WTC
(Jones 2007), and the presence of such materials can explain the existence of intense fire where it would not otherwise have existed. Additionally, despite agreement from all parties that the assumed availability of fuel allowed for the fires in any given location of each of the WTC buildings to last only twenty minutes (NIST 2007), the fires lasted much longer and produced extreme temperatures (Jones and Farrer et al 2008).
It turns out that explosive, sol-gel nano-thermites were developed by US government scientists, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) (Tillitson et al 1998, Gash et al 2000, Gash et al 2002). These LLNL scientists reported that --
"The sol-gel process is very amenable to dip-, spin-, and spray-coating technologies to coat surfaces. We have utilized this property to dip-coat various substrates to make sol-gel Fe,O,/ Al / Viton coatings. The energetic coating dries to give a nice adherent film. Preliminary experiments indicate that films of the hybrid material are self-propagating when ignited by thermal stimulus"
(Gash et al 2002).
The amazing correlation between floors of impact and floors of apparent failure suggests hat spray-on nano-thermite materials may have been applied to the steel components of the WTC buildings, underneath the upgraded fireproofing (Ryan 2008). This could have been done in such a way that very few people knew what was happening. The Port Authority’s engineering consultant Buro Happold, helping with evaluation of the
fireproofing upgrades, suggested the use of "alternative materials" (NIST 2005). Such alternative materials could have been spray-on nano-thermites substituted for intumescent paint or Interchar-like fireproofing primers (NASA 2006). It seems quite possible that this kind of substitution could have been made with few people noticing.
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf
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