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by Chris Martenson

With a new site and a number of new irons in the fire, Adam and I thought it a good time to revisit and renew the mission behind this movement.

Simply put, our mission is to create a world worth inheriting.  By this we mean a clean, healthy living environment, a durable economy, and prosperous opportunities for all who participate with us. That's our big, lofty aim. 

At heart, our view is that our policies, uses, and practices in all of the Three “E”s are unsustainable.  One cannot forever grow non-renewable resource use in a finite world.  The exponential nature of that growth just hastens things along.

Because of hard constraints, our exponential money and debt systems are on a collision course with reality.  We will first and most immediately — and personally — experience the deleterious effects of this in what we call 'the economy' in the form of stagnant growth, rising unemployment, and various ills and maladies within the financial markets. 

This is just another way of saying that very big changes are coming our way.  In fact, they are here already.

The simple conclusion is that we must either change our habits and ways on our own terms — or on Nature's.  We face a future that will be shaped either by disaster or design.

Here at Peak Prosperity, we are solidly behind the idea of positive change made on our own terms and that we are each responsible for whatever future is created. 

There are a number of things that we absolutely have to do in order to achieve our mission. And at the top of the list is reaching and influencing a lot of people (millions upon millions) and doing so effectively.

Creating a World Worth Inheriting
by Chris Martenson

With a new site and a number of new irons in the fire, Adam and I thought it a good time to revisit and renew the mission behind this movement.

Simply put, our mission is to create a world worth inheriting.  By this we mean a clean, healthy living environment, a durable economy, and prosperous opportunities for all who participate with us. That's our big, lofty aim. 

At heart, our view is that our policies, uses, and practices in all of the Three “E”s are unsustainable.  One cannot forever grow non-renewable resource use in a finite world.  The exponential nature of that growth just hastens things along.

Because of hard constraints, our exponential money and debt systems are on a collision course with reality.  We will first and most immediately — and personally — experience the deleterious effects of this in what we call 'the economy' in the form of stagnant growth, rising unemployment, and various ills and maladies within the financial markets. 

This is just another way of saying that very big changes are coming our way.  In fact, they are here already.

The simple conclusion is that we must either change our habits and ways on our own terms — or on Nature's.  We face a future that will be shaped either by disaster or design.

Here at Peak Prosperity, we are solidly behind the idea of positive change made on our own terms and that we are each responsible for whatever future is created. 

There are a number of things that we absolutely have to do in order to achieve our mission. And at the top of the list is reaching and influencing a lot of people (millions upon millions) and doing so effectively.

by Gregor Macdonald

Executive Summary

  • Escalating energy costs (direct and indirect) create a vicious cycle in the economy that further hinders growth/recovery
  • Overspending and other poor capital allocation decisions by state governments are compounding the problem
  • California spends $1 on public transit vs. $10 on automobile-related investment, a gap that energy costs will soon painfully reverse
  • Solutions are hard to come by and harder to fund, but without investment, alternative systems won't ever achieve scale
  • California's future is increasingly easy to predict; individuals and other state governments better take notes or suffer the same fate

If you have not yet read Part I: Dawn of the Great California Energy Crash, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

A key feature in the post-war industrial success of countries like South Korea and Japan, given that they had virtually no domestic energy supplies, was the ability to turn a profit from manufacturing powered by imported energy. This favorable equation relied on three key factors:

  • That imported energy remained a cheap input cost compared to the high margin value of exported goods
  • That energy producing countries had cheap energy to export
  • That purchasers of the exported goods were growing, and were running their own economies on cheap energy

These are the exact same assumptions still being made — and extrapolated into infinity — about California's economy.

Are we really to believe that California's GDP can forever deindustrialize, requiring fewer and fewer energy inputs, while growing in profitability, thus providing the capital to access/import energy — at any price?

California: The Bellwether for the Rest of America
PREVIEW by Gregor Macdonald

Executive Summary

  • Escalating energy costs (direct and indirect) create a vicious cycle in the economy that further hinders growth/recovery
  • Overspending and other poor capital allocation decisions by state governments are compounding the problem
  • California spends $1 on public transit vs. $10 on automobile-related investment, a gap that energy costs will soon painfully reverse
  • Solutions are hard to come by and harder to fund, but without investment, alternative systems won't ever achieve scale
  • California's future is increasingly easy to predict; individuals and other state governments better take notes or suffer the same fate

If you have not yet read Part I: Dawn of the Great California Energy Crash, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

A key feature in the post-war industrial success of countries like South Korea and Japan, given that they had virtually no domestic energy supplies, was the ability to turn a profit from manufacturing powered by imported energy. This favorable equation relied on three key factors:

  • That imported energy remained a cheap input cost compared to the high margin value of exported goods
  • That energy producing countries had cheap energy to export
  • That purchasers of the exported goods were growing, and were running their own economies on cheap energy

These are the exact same assumptions still being made — and extrapolated into infinity — about California's economy.

Are we really to believe that California's GDP can forever deindustrialize, requiring fewer and fewer energy inputs, while growing in profitability, thus providing the capital to access/import energy — at any price?

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