KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

    Informal Q and A session with questions from listeners with Jim Kunstler, host of The Kunstlercast. I've enjoyed other people's AMA shows around the web so here we go. This is an experiment, of course,  and I understand now why I haven’t done it before. It’s not easy spouting off into a microphone by yourself and remaining coherent. I hope it works for all y’all. I’ll be back in the usual format with a guest interview in a couple of weeks. Hope you’re having a great summer.

DOUGLAS FARR (FAIA, F-CNU, LEED-AP) is an architect, urbanist, author, and passionate advocate for sustainable design thinking. Doug is the founding principal and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm that plans and designs lovable, aspirational buildings and places. Doug co-chaired the development of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) and has served on the boards of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Bioregional, EcoDistricts, and Elevate Energy. A native Detroiter, he is an architecture graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Doug wrote Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature (November 2007, Wiley) and Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future (April 2018, Wiley).In 2017, Planetizen readers named him one of "the 100 most influential urbanists of all time.”

Jack Alpert is director of Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, a Lab which he started in 1978 at Stanford University. In 1992 the Lab left Stanford and became a non profit research foundation. The research focused on how people gather and process information to understand dynamic systems. Over the years the Lab has transitioned its focus to the relationship between human cognition and civilization viability. The current work is on discovering and implementing behavior that “changes our course” and creates a sustainable civilization. His Website is called SKIL. Or just Google Unwinding the Human Predicament.

Chris Nelder is a Manager in the Mobility practice at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he heads the EV-grid Integration team. Chris has written about energy and investing for more than a decade. He is the author two books on energy and investing, as well as more than 200 articles on energy in publications such as Nature, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Quartz, Financial Times, Greentech Media, SmartPlanet, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. In his spare time, he hosts the Energy Transition Show podcast. He enjoys bantering with other energy geeks on Twitter at @chrisnelder.

Tom Whipple is a former US Intel analyst who has put out the PeakOilNews for more than a decade. His newsletter is now associated with the PostCarbon institute and can be found at Peak-oil.org. Tom is not a tin-foil hat guy, but we get into a discussion in the heart of the interview about exotic alt. energy matters, including new developments in fusion and cold fusion. I disagree with Tom about the role that electric cars might play in the years ahead, but we didn’t have a debate about it per se during this chat, which i believe you’ll find very interesting.

Hayes Martin is President of MarketExtremes. com., which  provides quantitative analysis of stock market psychology, and specifically of extremes of crowd behavior. He has a selective clientele of high net-worth individuals and money managers.   For more information, interested individuals can go to his website: marketextremes.com, or call him at 718-598-5034. This show is sponsored by the McAlvany ICA wealth management team.

Arthur Berman has been an independent oil analyst for 17 years after an earlier 20 years with the Amoco Oil Company. He’s a regular commentator at NBC, CNN, CBC, BNN, OilPrice.com, Bloomberg, Platt’s, Financial Times, and The New York Times. He is a Director of ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA). He was a Managing Director and  frequent contributor at The Oil Drum, and is an associate editor of the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) Bulletin. He was past Editor of the Houston Geological Society Bulletin (2004-2005) and past Vice-President of the Society (2008-2009). He has published more than 100 articles on geology, technology, and the petroleum industry during the past 5 years. His blog commentary  can be found at http://www.artberman.com/blog/.  

David Blittersdorf’s passion for renewable energy and earth-friendly technology started early. He built his first wind turbine at age 14 to light up the small shack where he boiled sap into maple syrup. After he got his driver's license in 1973, the year of the OPEC oil embargo, he vowed to help the U.S. transition away from dependence on fossil fuels. In 1982, after getting his engineering degree at the University of Vermont, he founded NRG Systems—one of the nation's most successful wind-energy companies. Twenty-two years later, he founded All Earth Renewables a leading player in Vermont’s wind and solar scene. David is involved in all aspects of All Earth Renewables' day-to-day operations. He also makes frequent public-speaking engagements and serves on the board of many energy-focused institutions at the national and state levels.  

David Collum, an old friend of this podcast, is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University... but he may be better known these days as a wicked funny commentator on the financial scene. He writes an annual end-of-year wrap-up and forecast, which I interrupted him working on when I hauled him over to Skype to yak about the current situation. There’s some weird Skype background noise a couple of places in the recording -- like the Exorcist working over a couple of demons-from-hell in an elevator shaft. It doesn’t last more than a minute or two, so hang in there. There are apparently strange forces in the Skype-o-verse.  

Richard Fossey is the author of Student Loan Catastrophe: Postcards from the Rubble, published in September, 2017. He’s the Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his doctorate in education policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research concentrates on the student loan crisis; and much of his work is focused on student loans and the federal bankruptcy courts. He is an active blogger on the student loan crisis. His blog sit can be accessed at condemnedtodebt.org