Taste The Pain

My wife has been predicting an economic collapse for ten years now, just on general principles, and she's sort of happy her predictions are finally coming true. Her favorite blog (I am apparently not even in the top 10) has recently become The Layoff List. Run by a fellow in New York State, its purpose is to

...highlight the ever deteriorating job picture and to list smaller layoff announcements that don’t get the attention of main stream media. There is a great deal of scattered job loss information, but I want to try and gather as much information as I can and present it in a manner that is concise, informative and somewhat easy to read.

The site traffics in both news and rumors, and these latter tend more often than not to be born out. For example, LL called Microsoft's last round of layoffs several weeks before they were confirmed in the MSM. Quite a bit of Canadian content as well.

Reminds me a bit of that great old website, F***ked Company, that narrated the collapse of the tech bubble in the late 1990s.

So give it a visit, because things are far, far worse then you think.

Tar Sands Dead? The Upside Of Economic Collapse

So Says Gwyn Dyer:

"I was up in Fort MacMurray recently to give a speech about climate change. About half the audience was from oil companies. None of them were the least surprised by anything I said. They are watching this like a hawk. They know the Americans are moving towards banning the imported tar sands oil.

"The tar sands are probably dead anyway, but if Harper's gone, they're dead for sure. The day Obama got elected he came out with the offer of a joint Camadian-American emissions control treaty, with a small clause about not touching the tar sands.

"This is now going to move very fast over the next few years. The log jam has broken because the Americans are now on board. When they weren't, countries were bending over backwards to try to soften Kyoto to get them to sign on. Now we're stuck for the next 15 years with this watered down, badly mutilated treaty. A lot of wasted time. Now Obama's up to his ass in alligators, and he knows he has to drain the swamp. He'll be looking for low-cost initiatives that show America has its heart in the right place, and the tar sands are low-hanging fruit."

A bit of wishful thinking Dyer's part, I think. What will kill the tar-sands is under-40$-a-barrel oil.

In fact the current economic collapse is having all sorts of salutary effects on carbon emissions. Get a load of this graph of Chinese power generation.

Remember, for every three starving peons you can save a polar bear.

Alberta To Become Have-Not Province?

Petro-Canada VP Neil Camarta holds a conference call to make official what has been obvious for weeks.

The Sturgeon County upgrader portion of the Fort Hills project has been 'put on hold".

I will refrain from gleeful cackling, but....

A blue-eyed sheik in Calgary somewhere is gonna be hawking their gold plated beer mugs!

Because an economic collapse is a kind of natural carbon tax.

Sorry, I cackled.