1) I’m with anon-10:20. This sounds to me like rationalizing. i.e. the American consumer is now being forced to stop consuming due to contracting credit and stagnant wages, and he/she is rationalizing this with some newfound appreciation for the environmental costs of their previous habits. In other words, “I’m not bankrupt, I’m just being environmentally conscious.” As soon as the credit spigots open again (if they ever), the American consumer will start spending again.

2) The decline in luxury goods is due to a number of factors, including the economic conditions. But another important factor is that “luxury” goods once meant quality of manufacture, durability, etc. Now, “luxury” is a marketing term. Luxury brands fell prey to the marketing guys from the 80s on, who basically said that there’s much “brand value” locked up in luxury brands, and that they can exploit that value by selling cheap goods under luxury brands. This has worked so far, but as it dawns on people that the Armani jeans, Levi’s jeans, and Walmart house brand jeans are all made by the same factory in China with different labels affixed to them, people have started to rightly question the value of luxury goods and the emptiness of the marketing behind luxury brands.

3) WRT dd’s post. Everyone seeks self-validation. America (not uniquely, but I’m an American and so I’m most familiar with American culture) seeks self-validation through consumption. There are plenty of other ways to gain self-respect, e.g. through the work you do, your relationships with other people, your own personal goals, etc. It’s very amusing to find marketing efforts, for example, that promote people to essentially identify themselves as “I’m a Barney’s girl” or “I’m a BMW guy”. That your identity is composed almost entirely of the sum-total of brands that you consume. While other cultures may have similarly superficial measures of self-validation, that doesn’t excuse Americans from developing this habit which is now destroying their economic health.

At any rate, I’m not so sanguine that conspicuous consumption and the ills of our attachment to it are forever gone. Just forcibly halted by external factors for now.

At the risk of offending our host — who rightfully doesn’t like snarly commentary here — I’ll simply say that until you read and understand Olah (et al), you are simply talking out of your butt on this subject.

Honestly.

anon @ 16:56: Cool, let’s make the planet a radioactive wasteland for centuries to come, so that 10% of the world’s population can maintain its lifestyle!

May I ask you do at least a small amount of research? Wikipedia has a semi-reasonable article on molten salt reactors (and other approaches). Lots of references you can check.

Not only was the hostility unwarranted, dd’s anger renders him unable to read or reason. Neither Yves nor the article said that retail therapy was an exclusively American phenomenon. And shopping as we have to the point where the country is over its head in debt IS pathological. The post didn’t say that, but overconsuming to the point where you put your safety at risk (consumers are now cutting back on prescriptions because they cannot afford them) says something is amiss, big time.

The comparison to Thaliand is also deranged. Poor people do what they need to survive, including selling their children. I know women in the US who had held white collar jobs who briefly turned to prostitution to make ends meet when their industry went into the toilet. and they could not find work of any kind. The fact that you conflate what people do to survive when their backs are to the wall with SHOPPING, something that people do with discretionary time and money, is a staggering leap of illogic.

And Asians do not have our moral hangups about sex. Middle class Japanese girls turn tricks for pocket money and think nothing of it. Of course, they can exercise much greater control over who they choose to service than Thai girls in brothels, but the point is that sex work is not held in as low esteem there as here. But some Thai sex workers are de facto slaves, that is a separate issue. Of course, you have girls here who are kept on drug habits by their pimps that puts them in much the same position, but we don’t like to think we have de facto slavery here.

Delusional optimism doesn’t lead you to being correct.

Methanol involves taking harvestable forests, growing patterns, and annual per acre yields from tree farms (there goes the paper and lumber industries) and generously using the BTU content of wood as a fuel instead of using the diminished BTU content of the methanol conversion, this quick and dirty analysis determined that wood could sustain at most 7% of US electricity demand.

Yes 7%.

Cool, let’s make the planet a radioactive wasteland for centuries to come, so that 10% of the world’s population can maintain its lifestyle!

I guess the issue is one of relevance, not correctness. For example, 1+2=3. Are we now doomed? More to the point, the guy at 08:28 said (among other things) “No so-called “renewable” energy system has the potential to generate more than a tiny fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels!”

Technically true, but a straw-man, since only the crazy would attempt to scale up wind, solar, etc, systems to industrial levels. There are much more concentrated, and essentially infinite, sources of energy that will scale.

Richard Heinberg’s ‘The Party’s Over,”

Heinberg is a hardcore doomer; he has people to scare into buying his books. You would do much better to read up on liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) and other nuclear options. Perusing a copy of Olah’s “The Methanol Economy” would also be well advised.

Of course, I buy hardly anything as a matter of course.

Don the libertarian Democrat

Yes.

The energy content of crude oil is about 45 megajoules per kilogram.

It takes 10 joules of energy to lift a kilogram one meter.

The anon at 08:28 is a doomer; we can start to take him seriously the day he kills himself.