KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

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, Fin...

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 t...

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 McAlva...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 l...

     Neil Howe is a renowned author and speaker on economic, demographic, and social change in America. He is the nation's leading authority on social generations—who they are, what motivates them, and how they will shape America's future. Howe is the originator of the term "Millennial Generation" and has written over a dozen books on generations and generational research, a field of research he si...

 Richard Heinberg published his excellent and influential book, The Party's Over , the same year as The Long Emergency and we met many times since then on the conference circuit. Richard is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He's the author of 13 award-winning books, including six on the subject of fossil fuel depletion. He has written for Nature , The Wall Street Journal , Reuters , and...

John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society. He published the Archdruid Report blog for many years, focusing on many themes that overlapped my own in The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic . He has moved on to a new blog, Ecosophia , which explores spiritual and intellectual repercussio...

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, an...

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, an...

 In this bonus episode, James Howard Kunstler reunites with former KunstlerCast host/producer Duncan Crary for a behind-the-scenes discussion of JHK's personal connection to the wildly popular S-Town podcast, a This American Life spinoff program. Back around 2010-2013, John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series began an email correspondence with JHK. John B was a real person,...

Our pal and frequent guest, Dave Collum, suggested we have a chat with his pal Tony Greer, an independent global market analyst with 25 years of trading experience in and around Wall Street. He graduated from Cornell University in 1990 and spent the first ten years of his career trading currencies, commodities, and precious metals at UBS and Goldman Sachs.  In February of 2000, he left Goldman Sac...

I'll be chatting with Rocky Rawlins who is the man behind The SurvivorLibrary.com , a phenomenal website that contains scans in pdf-file form of hundreds of books on basic technology and the skills for applying them, mostly dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. It's hard to overstate the scope of this vast trove of practical knowledge — everything from bee-keeping to wagon and coach-bu...

[embed]http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3[/embed]   Today I'm yakking with return guest David Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, who has become a popular presence on the internet commenting on the financial system and the related predicaments of our time. He's also been involved in the campus culture wars and is not too shy to talk ab...

This episode's featured interview is with transportation expert and urbanist Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Taras writes: "In the 20th century, our greatest cities were almost ruined by the automobile. Only a global revolution in transportation can bring them back from the brink." He consults on these matters and reports from cities aroun...

    It's a pleasure to welcome back Piero San Giorgio who came on the podcast some time ago to talk about his previous excellent book Survive the Economic Collapse, a Practical Guide.       Today I'm catching up with Piero on Skype at his home in Switzerland to talk about his new book, Women on the Verge of A Societal Breakdown — Preserving Hard-won Victories During an Age of Uncertainty . The boo...

It's a pleasure to welcome back Jasun Horsley, who presides over the blog Auticulture and The Liminalist podcast . Jasun is a UK ex-pat now living in rural British Columbia, Canada. He describes himself as a "high-functioning Aspergian" and his work often takes readers and listeners to the further outposts of culture where neuroscience and the occult shake hands with politics and show biz. Jasun i...

Today I'm chewing the gristle of finance with Byron King. Byron is a geologist who currently writes a newsletter, in association with economist Jim Rickards, entitled Rickards Gold Speculator with Byron King.  It's published by Agora Financial, of Baltimore, www.agorafinancial.com.  Over the course of his career, Byron worked in the oil industry, and has had extensive experience with other natural...

Today I'm yakking with Kate Wagner, the antic voice behind the marvelous website Welcome to MacMansion Hell , a humorous and opinionated blog that aims to educate the general public about architecture, design, and urbanism by making examples of America's most despised architectural style. She is currently a master's student in Acoustics as part of a joint venture program between Johns Hopkins Univ...

283  Today I'm chatting with David Collum of Cornell University. Dave is Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Chair of Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He's better known in the blogosphere as a witty and dauntless forecaster of finance and politics, and it's always good to check in with him during times of turmoil The Jonathan Haidt lecture at Duke, Oct, 201...

Dmitry Orlov is back to talk about his new book, "Shrinking the Technosphere," which can be ordered at his website: cluborlov.com . Dmitry is the author previously of "Reinventing Collapse," "Communities That Abide." "The Five Stages of Collapse," and several books of essays. The video trailer for his new book can be viewed by clicking THIS . Dmitry is a leading voice in the effort to think clearl...

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002.  Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper as...

Dmitry Orlov, the author of "Reinventing Collapse" and many other books, has become a publisher lately and, in his capacity as publisher and publicist, Dmitry and I will be chatting about the new book he just brought out, 150 Strong; A Pathway to a Different Future by Rob O'Grady. 150 Strong is a valuable handbook for understanding the proper scale to successfully manage human affairs in the polit...