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The first thing to understand about
Chris Martenson, the respected financial consultant
and commentator, is that he's a PhD in pathology who is, as a result, very
comfortable with complex, technical ideas. He's also a clear, concise writer.
In Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy,
Energy, And Environment he'll toss off sentences like "Money
is a tertiary abstraction that gets its meaning from real forms of
wealth," and by the time a reader sees this, the meaning is both clear
and profound because Martenson has done such a good
job of laying out the necessary building blocks.
The "gloom and doom" genre
is pretty crowded, of course, beginning with Robert Prechter's
Conquer the Crash and running through
heavyweights like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers and James Turk, all critiquing basically the same
financial train wreck. For a book to join this list it has to present new
information in a highly engaging way. Martenson
pulls this off. His chapter on the myriad lies the US government is telling
us is, by itself, worth the price of the book. One tidbit: 35% of US GDP is
fictitious, thanks to statistical tricks like hedonic adjustments and "owners equivalent rent."
His take on energy covers the
obligatory Peak Oil but also lays out a Peak Coal thesis that isn't yet
common knowledge. Turns out that just as we're running out of cheap oil,
we've already mined the best coal and are now working our way through the
less desirable grades. So despite rising volumes of coal mined, the total
amount of energy the US is getting from coal has plateaued.
He also explains how fossil fuels produced such a radical change in developed
country lifestyles in less than a century: Gasoline is such a concentrated
form of energy that one gallon is equivalent to 350-500 hours of human labor.
A middle class American family thus owns an army of "energy slaves"
that dwarfs the resources of the richest ancient kings.
Another surprisingly useful chapter
covers the power of exponential growth. Pretty much every half-serious investor
thinks they already understand compounding (I certainly thought I did), but Martenson's rigorous, data-rich analysis held my
attention. Did you know, for instance, that when something is compounding at
a steady rate each doubling produces not just twice the previous total, but
more than all previous doublings combined?
The power -- and destructiveness --
of this final doubling is the book's underlying theme. Debt, of course, is
growing exponentially and this alone could destroy the world as we know it.
But the problem goes far beyond debt. The US money supply, global population
and energy use, the depletion of topsoil and fisheries are all heading into
final, catastrophic doublings. This convergence of crises could, says Martenson, produce more than a financial crash. We're
looking at the end of exponential growth -- while living in societies built
on the premise that exponential growth will never end. Here's the Amazon link.
John Rubino
DollarCollapse.com
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