Mel K is a conservative journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster known for her well-researched, thought-provoking work. With a background in journalism and film from NYU, she has spent over two decades in Hollywood crafting meticulously researched historical dramas for film and television. She launched the Mel K show in 2020, which has become a platform for intellectually rigorous discussions and analysis of pressing issues. Central to Mel K’s work is a commitment to intellectual honesty, personal empowerment, and the principles of a free and transparent society. She’s the author of the forthcoming book: Americans Anonymous: Restoring Power to the People One Citizen at a Time. Her podcast can be found at: the Mel K Show on Rumble.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

David McAlvany is CEO Of McAlvany Financial Services, which includes wealth management and precious metals advisors for retail investors. David’s own excellent podcast, the McAlvany Weekly Commentary comes out Tuesdays and is available at Apple Podcasts. Full disclosure, David’s company is a sponsor of this podcast. And fuller disclosure, I invited him on because he offers some of the clearest views of financial doings to be found on the Internet. His company website is https://mcalvany.com.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

Catherine Austin Fitts is the president of Solari, Inc., publisher of the Solari Report. Catherine served as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc.; as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the  Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration; and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group. She blogs for the Solari Report at solari.com.

Raul Meijer runs The Automatic Earth Website. He puts out the Debt Rattle news aggregator there every day, and posts his own frequent commentaries on a broad range of current events, especially on subjects of finance and economy. He’s based in Europe,  dividing his time between Athens and the Netherlands. He lived in Canada for many years.

Jasun Horsley is an English cultural critic, metapsychologist, conspiracy researcher, and podcaster, and the author of several books, including Seen and Not Seen, Prisoner of Infinity, and the upcoming The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. To earn a living, he currently runs a thrift store in Canada with his wife. This is the link to Jasun’s excellent podcast, The Liminalist. Here is the link to his Auticulture Blog.  And here is a link to Jasun’s fascinating essay series on the sexual confusions and hysterias of our time: The Age of Advanced Incoherence: Identity Politics & Identity Crisis, which is at the center of today’s conversion.

Doug Henwood is an American journalist, economic analyst, and financial trader who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective. His own excellent podcast, Behind the News is available at iTunes. He is a contributing editor at The Nation Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

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 assets, and the overall economy. His website with frequent postings is: https://srsroccoreport.com.

    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.

Geert Vanden Bossche is a globally renowned virologist working in Belgium. He predicts a “hyper-acute crisis” of Covid-19 illness among highly-vaccinated populations emerging shortly across the world. He argues that scientists and politicians have turned a natural viral pandemic into a crisis of disastrous immune escape. The author's arguments are compelling and indicate that Nature will correct this mistake, but at a substantial cost to human lives in highly-vaccinated countries. He is the author of The inescapable Immune Escape Pandemic. Dr. Vanden Bossche’s papers and talks can be found at the Website Voice for Science and Solidarity dot org.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

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

     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 single-handedly invented. His landmark 1997 book The Fourth Turning (co-authored with the late William Strauss), has become an indispensable lens for viewing world political history.
     Howe is also a recognized authority on global aging, long-term fiscal policy, and migration. He served as Senior Policy Advisor to Blackstone Group and has testified on entitlement reform many times before Congress. 
     Howe is currently the Managing Director of Demography at Hedgeye Risk Management and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he helps lead the Global Aging Initiative.

 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 The Christian Science Monitor among other publications, and has delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences around the world. You may be interested in his latest essay at the Post Carbon Inst website: There's No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss. His latest books are: Our Renewable Future (with David Fridley) Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.

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 repercussions of the collapsing industrial paradigm. This conversation is based on his recent blog, “Hate is the New Sex.” He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.

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, and sustainability of Oberlin.

Orr is the author of seven books, including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has authored nearly 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.

In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Bioneers, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute.

He has been awarded seven honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

While at Oberlin, he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy.

 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, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure. He was also a fan of Jim’s books, and, after getting his phone number off his website, took to calling him on the phone. The two probably had a dozen long phone conversations. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled JHK with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. To Jim, the place sounded like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch.” Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, Jim tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going. They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. Jim thought JB had just gotten tired of advising him to move. As it turns out, what happened to John would become the subject of an audio documentary that has broken all the records in podcasting and stirred up a bit of controversy. Because so many of the concepts McLemore espouses in the series are inspired by JHK’s blogs and writings (sometimes John uses Jim’s exact phraseology), Duncan suggests the early KunstlerCast years are a bit like a “prequel” to S-Town. (Note: You can listen to all the previous episodes on the KunstlerCast feed for free, and you can purchase a book of based transcripts from the first five years.) 

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 Sachs to start his own firm, Machine Trading, in the belly of the dotcom bubble.  After 2 years and a great experience, Tony segued into a fifteen year career as a top producing equity sales trader at several different broker dealers including Stuart Frankel & Co., Dahlman Rose & Co., and Bank Hapoalim, where Tony ran equity sales and trading.  The common denominator across shops, as the equity market evolved and electronic trading became more prevalent, was the subscriber growth of the daily note Tony wrote to his clients.  As Tony’s subscriber list grew to over 1,000 market professionals he decided to leave the execution business and launch the Morning Navigator, as a subscriber model newsletter.  He describes the Morning Navigator, steeped in technical analysis and behavioral finance, as “the morning note you will read first” and he has met with great success thus far.  Tony lives in Atlantic Beach, N.Y. with his wife of 17 years, Gerianne, and their 3 children.

Matt Bracken graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training class 105 in Coronado California. He served on east coast UDT and SEAL teams, taking a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut in 1983. Mr. Bracken left active duty after Lebanon, upon completion of his obligated military service, but he remained in an active reserve status through the remainder of the 1980s. Since then he has lived in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, Guam and California. Matt is a self-described freedomista who loves ocean sailing for the pure freedom it permits. He is a constitutionalist who believes in the original intent of the founding fathers of our country. He lives with his family in North Florida and longs for the wide blue ocean.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

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-building. In other words, what you need to meet The Long Emergency. The scientific elegance of these books and monographs is something to behold, the clarity of the language and precision of the instructions is breathtaking. I think you’ll like Rocky very much. A straight-up good dude.

World Made By Hand (Fourth and Final)

Amazon Hardcover | Kindle Autographed Copy Battenkill Books Northshire Books

New Interview with JHK about The Harrows of Spring

My local indie booksellers… Autographed copies Battenkill Books   Northshire Books or Amazon

Also: Published as an E-book for the first time! The 20th Anniversary edition With an entertaining new introduction by the author

Bargain Price $3.99

Amazon Kindle

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!

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 around world from, Paris, to Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bogota, Vancouver, Phoenix. Taras Grescoe lives in Montreal. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to the podcast.

This episode also features a mini-yak with my old podcast sidekick Duncan Crary. Duncan has been working tirelessly, and making great strides, in promoting an urban Renaissance in the small upstate city of Troy, N.Y., where he lives. This March 30 & 31, 2017 he will be offering a New Urbanist-themed two-day class on “The Art of Small City PR & Spectacle,” at a school in Manhattan. For more information, visit his website: DuncanCrary.com

    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 book's published by the Club Orlov Press — and yes, that’s our chum Dmitry Orlov, author many splendid books on the subject of how we’re going to greet the future. You can find it on Amazon. 
    Yeah, i can hear some of you muttering — the effrontery! Two dudes talking about women! Well, There’s no against it, at least not yet, and we’re gonna give it a shot. Let us know if you think it was a fair discussion. 

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 is a hard-working professional intellectual who brings an original worldview to the events of the day. We recorded two podcasts in this session: the one in which I interview him for my podcast and one in which he interviews me for his podcast, the Liminalist (click here).

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 resource sectors. He also served for over 30 years, active and reserve, in the US Navy.  He holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard and the US Naval War College.  

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 University and Peabody Conservatory. Merry Christmas everybody!

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, 2016, referenced in this podcast, “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice,” can be accessed here:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justice/

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 clearly about the predicament of our time.

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 assets, and the overall economy. His website with frequent postings is: https://srsroccoreport.com.

Jason Horsley produces the Children of Job Blog and Podcast. He is the author most recently of Big Mother: the Technological Body of Evil, and many other books. He was born in Britain and has lived in Morocco, British Columbia, and now Spain. Jasun’s work is an excursion into the uncanny valley of philosophy where good and evil battle on a landscape of linguistics, technology, demonology, crime, transgenderism, liquid modernity, identity politics, the surveillance state, virtual reality, transhumanism, Satanism, medical totalitarianism, and a new world religion of scientism.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

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 political scene of the coming decades, when the economies of everyday life contract to a far more local level than has been the case in late-stage Modernity. Rob O’Grady is an engineer and father of three who has been stirred to action by his reflections on environmental issues and his everyday encounters with the perversity of our current system. Trained in the discipline of “sustainability engineering,” he discerned early in his career that to talk of sustainability in the world of business and politics was “to pour from the empty into the void,” because the underlying context is subversive of such efforts.

Kirk Bostrom is the Managing Partner and Chief Portfolio Manager of Strategic Preservation Partners LP, located in Silicon Valley. Kirk began his career as a teenage “runner” on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and has spent over 30 years in the securities investment realm. He was named repeatedly as one of the top-performing investment advisors in the nation as a member of the Chairman’s Club at Citigroup (Nation’s Top 1%) and Piper Jaffray’s “Baker’s Dozen” (Nation’s Top 13 Advisors).

#278 Alice J. Friedemann is the author of "When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation.”  She is also the creator of the excellent website: http://energyskeptic.com/. Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for “Peak Soil,” edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of “Geodestinies”). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her interest in oil began at 10 on a family vacation when the car was running on empty in Death Valley and it was 120 F in the shade.  After researching Hubbert's Peak in 2000, Alice realized the world couldn't run on empty beer-cans-painted-black solar collectors like the one she'd help build in the 1973 energy crisis, and became a science writer, focusing on Peak Oil and related issues.

Steve Ludlum is a native mid-westerner who has spent most of his 65 years on the East Coast. Steve is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who has also been at various times an amateur naturalist, artist, designer and writer. He currently studies economic issues, resource- and energy depletion, monetary policy and the cause-and-effect relationship with American-style culture. His excellent and original blog, Economic Undertow is at http://www.economic-undertow.com. Don’t forget the hyphen! Steve is currently working on a book on macro-economics.

“Christopher Cornelius” is the nom de guerre of a black American international humanitarian aid worker who has put years of service in some of the world’s most dangerous places: Pakistan, Afghanistan, West Africa, Kenya, the Balkens, Cambodia, Sudan,and others. We have that “conversation about race” that the US race commentary pundits have been promising for years — but never actually ventured to have. We could have covered even more territory, but as it is, this is a long interview for this podcast. Christopher Cornelius continues to work in dangerous lands overseas and is concealing his identity to protect himself and his wife. We spoke over Skype from his current perch in East Timor.

#275 Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 37 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector. Berman has published more than 100 articles on oil and gas plays and trends. He has been interviewed about oil and gas topics on CBS, CNBC, CNN, CBC, Platt’s Energy Week, BNN, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He worked 20 years for Amoco (now BP) and 17 years as consulting geologist. He has an M.S. (Geology) from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.A. (History) from Amherst College. 

His website is artberman.com

Bill Kauffman is a founder and contributor to the Front Porch Republic website. He’s also the author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette; Ain’t My America; and the recent collection of essays, Poetry night at the Ballpark. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 motion picture Copperhead, about community strife on the home front during the Civil War. He’s a supporter and defender of the American small town and its economic interests. Just out of college, he joined the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and he is deeply acquainted with Inside-the-Beltway culture. He abandoned Washington DC to return to his hometown of Batavia in far, far western New York (near Buffalo) where I chatted with him by phone.

Charles Marohn is the Founder and President of Strong Towns (Strongtowns.org), a non-profit advocacy organization focused on the financial predicament local governments find themselves in as a result of America's suburban experiment. Chuck has a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute. Chuck and Jim are active members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU.org) dedicated to improving the human habitat America.

A Conversation with Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart, authors of Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting. Both Chris and Adam were corporate executives who dropped out to pursue more a resilient way of life in a rapidly and increasingly hazardous changing world. Chris Martenson began that phase of his career with the video and later book titled The Crash Course, which undertook to explain the dangers of contemporary banking, finance, and money-creation. Chris and Adam maintain the front and back ends of the PeakProsperity.com website, which features weekly articles and two excellent podcasts on issues pertaining to what I have called The Long Emergency.

A conversation with Gail Tverberg of OurFiniteWorld.com. Gail Tverberg is an analyst who has been researching the connection between oil limits and the economy for nearly 10 years.  She writes a widely-followed blog called Our Finite World. Her background is as an actuary, working as a consultant to insurance companies. She also has a foot in the academic world, where she has lectured and written academic articles. Gail was in China in March-April of this year lecturing at China University of Petroleum in Beijing and is scheduled to return next spring, to teach another class.

With 45 years in petroleum geology, Art Berman describes himself as an energy realist who integrates energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior into his view of the industry and society. He routinely gives keynote addresses for energy conferences, boards of directors and professional societies. Berman has published more than 100 articles on energy and the effect on earth systems including climate. He has more than 40,000 followers on Twitter (@aeberman12) and dozens of free posts on his website artberman.com.

     This chat was more contentious than I figured on going into it, but that’s okay. I don’t like to filibuster my podcast guests. Let’s just say there were a few times when we disagreed about some things. Listeners can take what they will from that.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unge

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. His technical expertise is in organic chemistry, but he has gained recognition for assorted podcasts and annual surveys focusing on politics and economics. Some of this latter content can be found at http://collum.chem.cornell.edu/dbc6/DBC_rogue.html

Also known as Steve From Virginia, this week’s guest has a unique take on the nexus of energy, capital, and the destiny of industrial civilization. Steve writes: “The credit regime is falling apart under the weight of its own costs, not just in Europe. Government issue money ends a monopoly over a vital private good so that it becomes a public good, in this way the power of the banks to run our affairs is reduced. As a necessary component of this effort, the establishment must hold the financiers accountable for their crimes and negligence. The present conditions and schemes cannot be endured any longer. If the establishment refuses to act the citizens will take matters into their own hands, there will be revolutions.”

--From http://www.economic-undertow.com

Catherine Ingram is the author of In the Footsteps of Gandhi, Passionate Presence, and A Crack in Everything.  Since 1993 she has internationally led public events called Dharma Dialogues as well as retreats focusing on secular ways of inducing more wisdom, service, and well-being in one’s life.  She founded and is president of Living Dharma, an educational nonprofit organization and she serves on the boards of The Burma Project (a human rights organization) as well as Global Animal (an animal rights organization).