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July 03 2019 Finished up reading my latest review book a week ago but a recent round with the dentist has left me with a distracting amount of pain such that I've barely wanted to do anything that requires even moderate attention. Conversations on Collapse [0] is a selection of transcripts from the C-realm [1] podcast, the brain child of one KMO, real name Keven Michael O'Conner. Several notable interviews are included, people such as Dmitry Orlov, Albert Bates, James Kunstler, and Bill McKibben. KMO has a background in philosophy, an easygoing demeanor, and generally poses intelligent questions to his guests and I found almost all the interviews interesting, particularly those with Sharon Astyk and the late Joe Bageant, neither of whom I was familiar with. All of the C-Realm podcasts in the book and many, many more are available from the show's archive [2]. KMO is kind of an interesting character. A cartoonist, he describes himself as a "recovering Singularitarian [3] and Libertarian" that became aware of Peak Oil sometime after 2000 and apparently made some rather drastic life changes, cashing in his Amazon.com shares for an off-grid homestead in the hills of Georgia. Not sure if this course correction was before or after his partaking of various psychedelics -- 'C' stands for Consciousness in "C-Realm" -- but clearly he dove down the collapse rabbit hole head first. He wasn't the only one but many have since renounced their conviction that Peak Oil will be much of a factor in any civilizational collapse, as has apparently KMO; several of his recent posts from his YouTube video blog OuttaMyHead [4] suggest that his infatuation with technology -- he was a Singularitarian after all -- has led him to conclude AI is a much greater near-term risk to humanity. KMO seems to have expected a sudden and significant collapse once production rates of conventional oil were reached (conventional oil production peaked roughly around 2008) which of course didn't happen. There was a kind of collapse, mostly financial in nature those fuel prices did spike, not helping the situation. Shortly after oil from the so-called fracking revolution came online which made it seem like oil and gas constraints were no longer an issue. The truth is fracking has bought us only around a decade or so extra of "happy motoring"; recent revelations [5] have confirmed what many skeptics suspected, that tight oil and gas is only economically viable when prices are fairly high and once they rise enough to be profitable consumers cut back and the price falls back into the red. The fracking revolution was largely driven by cheap money and BS; drillers borrowed heavily from duped investors at near zero interest, lobbied and got waivers from various safety and environmental regulations and drilled the sweet spots like there was no tomorrow. Even so, most drillers failed to turn a profit; many that have are actually making their money on the re-sale or sub-letting of leases. Much more could be said about the illusions spun by America's fracking revolution but Richard Heinberg, David Hughes, Art Berman and others tell the story better and have [6]. - - References: [0] https://c-realm.blogspot.com/2010/10/conversations-on-collapse-c-realm.html [1] https://c-realm.com/ [2] https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator:"KMO" [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_singularity [4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2N0_6TmngztwzkX3ktImiQ [5] http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2019/06/shale-oil-and-gas-destroying-capital.html [6] https://shalebubble.org/ ; https://youtu.be/zkzQRiiN1Jw