This article is an attempt to extend part of the thesis of the book.

Excellent thread everyone!

It's so pleasant to see an intelligent discussion without the sniping and nastiness that even TOD can exhibit nowadays.

The problem is Stoneleigh is using funky quotation marks. HTML doesn't recognize them.

I will try to fix them.

irrelevant theories like EROEI

Right. 1 unit consumed to produce 100 units (99 net) in the early days of oil. 1 unit consumed to produce (maybe) 1.3 units (0.3 net) for corn ethanol. No relevance whatsoever. Sheesh!

Oh, please. One of the biggest debunkers of ethanol is from Cornell, hardly in California. There are no energy islands in America. California, unlike some other parts of the country, recognizes that the globe, not just California, is in trouble, and is taking steps to pursue alternative energy sources. Any ethanol rhetoric found here comes from places like Montana (Rapier) and elsewhere. This has nothing to do with California. Your analysis reflects some sort of weird, reflexive hate of California that has nothing to do with reality.

As far as stored solar energy in the form of food, most of the country is heavily dependent on California, not the reverse.

I thought the flyover states were arcane and irrelevant.

I suspect that wood--a critical energy resource--depletion played a major role in the decline of Rome, and other civilizations as well. See John Perlin's book, "A Forest Journey," where he explores the role of wood in civilization in-depth. If you chose to read this text, you'll discover very disturbing parallels between wood scarcity in the past and the idea of oil scarcity today. This text is an eye-opener.

-best,

Wolf

I have argued (in relation to Spain rather than Rome) that empires feed those they have close connections with, sometimes to the extent that they become effective competition for resource concentration. Those regions which benefit from the export of capital from a political centre are therefore arguably in a third category of their own.

If they are able to reach a certain 'critical mass', then they may survive the loss of exported capital from a fallen empire and go on to become centres in their own right. Arguably one could follow a rough progression of economic and thereafter political power, for instance (beginning at an arbitrary point) from Arabia to Spain to the Netherlands and Britain to America and perhaps on to China, with each new centre capitalizing (pun intended) on its connection with a previous centre of power.

Of course the same process going on concurrently with regard to other geographical centres, their surrounding areas and their distant peripheries complicates the picture.

So, is rome/germanic an example for us/china?

The latter two must compete now in becoming more energy efficient, and fast.

There is also the aspect that the various peripheral social groupings learned how to deal with Rome on Roman terms - that is, their military abilities grew, while Rome's remained static. In areas along the Rhine, this meant that the people living there learned well enough to follow the Roman military roads back to Rome - often as mercenaries, and then as people with the drive to go into business for themselves, instead of being employees (a bit of twisted humor there, if you know anything about real estate guru speak).

And notice how these discussions tend to focus on Rome, and not such minor parts of the 'Roman' Empire as Alexandria or Constantinople, as they don't fit anywhere near as well in the narrative of a declining Rome requiring ever more conquests to maintain a highly structured society - after all, Constantinople was essentially newly founded while the city of Rome began its decline.

And nobody much talks about the Persians throughout this entire period - their culture and achievements were notable, but are generally ignored.

Rome is a metaphor for many things, and within Western societies, this has a major effect. Facts are less important than perceptions, which itself is a perfect metaphor for our current framework.

The flaw in this article is that it says that the collapse was a food induced collapse. This was not the case at all for Rome. The collapse was the result of a decline in the effectiveness of the Roman military's ability to extract tribute from an increasingly large empire due to simple logistical issues and the increasing military sophistication and revulsion of barbarian tribes.

I would say that Tainter holds up well because he effectively contrasts the method of Diocletian and other later Roman rulers for dealing with the fall of the Western Roman empire with the methods that the Eastern Roman Empire(Byzantines) used. The former tried to tighten the screws by raising taxes and hereditarily binding farmers and other professions to their duties. The latter completely reorganized their society into a far simpler and more efficient structure and survived for 1000 years.

I recently read Heather's "Fall of the Roman Empire," and I have very mixed thoughts. Yes, he brings in a lot of interesting counter arguments from recent archaelogy, etc., and paints a very different picture from that which we have been used to.

On the other hand, it is clear that he has a very definite agenda, and that this book is part of an ongoing quarrel with other historians. I'm not convinced he is being intellectually honest.

After reading his (perhaps selective) documentation of how allegedly robust Rome was, it seems inexplicable that Rome collapsed as it did. As soon as the barbarians penetrated the Rhine frontier, they no longer encountered any significant Roman resistance, either from the center or the rural elites.

Heather shows how the rural elites cut a quick deal with the newcomers, who demanded far less taxes, thus depriving the center of revenues, food and resources. But one definitely gets the overpowering sense that Italy itself was stripped down, bankrupt, and incapable of raising forces to defend itself. The center fell with very little resistence, after which little remained except the culture.

One additional observation: Heather says the population of the city of Rome was 1 million under Ceasar Augustus (just before Christ); while Prof. Daileader of William & Mary documents 400,000 in the 4th century, and 15,000 in the 8th century. Thus, Rome as a city peaked when the empire peaked, and had declined considerably by the era of barbarian invasions.

(by the way, hi folks, after a month and a half my server is working again...)

I must admit i am somewhat under-whelmed about this energy analysis of roman decline not least the idea social complexity dissolved as described.

agriculture decline was a factor of thoughts in some regions but not others, moreover the centralization of the Roman empire was not as focused as the writer makes out. many regional cities had there own hinterland.

Rome collapsing was the function of many things including a transition into something else..essentially the eastern empire never imploded as the western empire did. Political corruption was a large part of it, that and population pressure displacing people into the empire

you could argue overshoot of some kind but the analogy to our present situation is stretched

statements that the crisis of the third century and diocletian reforms de-powered the hinterland of the empire to pre invasion levels strikes me as a UK based archaeologist as largely fiction. It is possible that trade across the roman world contracted to more local distances but this really was a good thing in some ways... the increasing use of local wares rather than Samian pottery made In central gaul can be looked at a increased complexity at alocal level or a breakdown in the cohesion of the roman empire (was it a good thing anyway?)

the abandonment of Roman cities in the UK occurs in the main in the fifth century and is preceded by 2 centuries of fortification dating back to the crisis of the third century.

local conditions can have a major bearing on abandonment and economic success in the roman era.

However some arc of truth may exist in the argument concerning entropy in a more general sense in that the concentration at a local level was interrupted by growing anarchy and warfare and thus its effect on commerce.

I believe there is some evidence for agricultural decline on environmental grounds in Roman North africa but I'm no expert on such matters. I saw some stuff concerning deforestation but would be interested to know how such calculations were done?

I think my main point is its too easy and perhaps unhelpful to make these direct comparisons

Boris
London

Asebius,

Yes, I am familiar with that line of thinking, and it's another one that seems to have repeated through history....and explains a great mystery...

The Greeks likewise had created offshots that eventually learned all their tricks, built organizationally/culturally away from the center, and then came under assault by those using a dynamic that the Greeks themselves had set in motion to take over from where Greece left off. One of these was of course Persia....and another? Rome itself.

The Vikings and Nordic cultures likewise set in motion forces which would create the replacement empire from the edge of it's old influence sphere....The British Empire and the Francs.

It seems that the real issue here is cultural and has very little to do with energy per se. Now to the great evidence of this, and the great mystery:

There is a people that by virtue of geography, were blessed for a longer time span with access to more calories, kilo-joules, kilowatts.....I don't care what measurement you use....but each person had access to more raw energy than any people on the face of the Earth per capita, in biosphere to conquer and harvest, in land space to farm, in sunlight and mild warm weather....even from the sea by virtue of a HUGE coastline....all of this shared by a tiny relatively peaceful people, for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years.

And what was the result? NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!

I am of course referring to the mystery of the Australian aboriginals. The religion and stories of these people prove that they had great minds. These were not and are not stupid people. They are inventive, they are resourceful, and yet, they never moved beyond the stage they reached probably 50,000 years ago. Why? It certainly wasn't lack of energy, this new catch all explanation for all of history. (How silly....there are too many examples that repudiate this simplistic "energy based" view of history to go into here), but the Australian aboriginals seemed to suffer from that most culturally deadly of all ailments: Lack of cultural cross pollination and competition. It is this that creates goals, comparisons, competition and new synthesis. Energy is ALWAYS there. Without cultural drive and goals, energy is garbage.

I have tried to tell you all.....it's the GOAL, the AESTHETIC that matters.
The energy is here, we are awash in the slop. (NOTICE, I said "energy", not oil.
Oil is just one form of energy, and when you really look at it, not that great of one either)

"According to Heather, Rome did not run out of gas, it was overwelmed. And the forces that overwelmed it were in great measure a product of a dynamic that the Empire itself set in motion."

Or as the Ancient Egyptians said in their declining days of the Helenistic tourists trysting around on the pyrimids...."to think, we taught these upstarts all they know...."

It's called history. It's still going on. There will be wealthy, high tech cultures a dozen years from now, and one hundred years from now, probably one thousand years from now. They will find the energy. Because they will have the goals, the drive, to do what we say cannot be done. The only question remaining is will we, or some variation of us culturally be among them. or will we, like Carthage (gee, did they run out of energy....?), be put out of our whining and complaining by some outsiders who still believe that there are things that can be accomplished? Our offspring will judge us by the path we take now.

Roger Conner Jr.

Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom

This article is not a review of Homer-Dixon's book, although a link to a review of the book can be found near the beginning. It is an attempt to explore the further implications of applying thermodynamics to empire.

I detect a bit of Marxist "zero sum" thinking in the above article.

I'm not a Marxist, but only entropy is really a positive sum game.

"For example, wine grapes were grown as far north as the Midlands in England, a place with no present production."

Um, there's at least one vineyard in Scotland, and there's plenty in England.

See here.

The English have, improbably enough, been winning awards with their wines lately, so I don't know why this whole "no English vineyards" stuff persists.

Medieval warmth and English wine
Filed under:
Climate Science

Paleoclimate
— gavin @ 10:00 am
Never let it be said that we at RealClimate don't work for our readers. Since a commenter mentioned the medieval vineyards in England, I've been engaged on a quixotic quest to discover the truth about the oft-cited, but seldom thought through, claim that the existence of said vineyards a thousand years ago implies that a 'Medieval Warm Period' was obviously warmer than the current climate (and by implication that human-caused global warming is not occuring). This claim comes up pretty frequently, and examples come from many of the usual suspects e.g. Singer (2005), and Baliunas (in 2003). The basic idea is that i) vineyards are a good proxy for temperature, ii) there were vineyards in England in medieval times, iii) everyone knows you don't get English wine these days, iv) therefore England was warmer back then, and v) therefore increasing greenhouse gases have no radiative effect. I'll examine each of these propositions in turn (but I'll admit the logic of the last step escapes me). I'll use two principle sources, the excellent (and cheap) "Winelands of Britain" by geologist Richard C. Selley and the website of the English Wine Producers.

Are vineyards a good temperature proxy? While climate clearly does impact viticulture through the the amount of sunshine, rainfall amounts, the number of frost free days in the spring and fall, etc., there a number of confounding factors that make it less than ideal as a long term proxy. These range from changing agricultural practices, changing grape varieties, changing social factors and the wider trade environment. For instance, much early winemaking in England was conducted in Benedictine monasteries for religious purposes - changing rites and the treatment of the monasteries by the crown (Henry VIII in particular) clearly impacted wine production there. Societal factors range from the devastating (the Black Death) to the trivial (working class preferences for beer over wine). The wider trade environment is also a big factor i.e. how easy was it to get better, cheaper wine from the continent? The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the English King in 1152 apparently allowed better access to the vineyards of Bordeaux, and however good medieval English wine was, it probably wasn't a match for that!

However, for the sake of argument, let's assume that climate is actually the dominant control - so what does the history of English vineyards show?

The earliest documentation that is better than anecdotal is from the Domesday Book (1087) - an early census that the new Norman king commissioned to assess his new English dominions, including the size of farms, population etc. Being relatively 'frenchified', the Normans (who had originally come from Viking stock) were quite keen on wine drinking (rather than mead or ale) and so made special note of existing vineyards and where the many new vines were being planted. Sources differ a little on how many vineyards are included in the book: Selley quotes Unwin (J. Wine Research, 1990 (subscription)) who records 46 vineyards across Southern England (42 unambiguous sites, 4 less direct), but other claims (unsourced) range up to 52. Lamb's 1977 book has a few more from other various sources and anecdotally there are more still, and so clearly this is a minimum number.

Of the Domesday vineyards, all appear to lie below a line from Ely (Cambridgeshire) to Gloucestershire. Since the Book covers all of England up to the river Tees (north of Yorkshire), there is therefore reason to think that there weren't many vineyards north of that line. Lamb reports two vineyards to the north (Lincoln and Leeds, Yorkshire) at some point between 1000 and 1300 AD, and Selley even reports a Scottish vineyard operating in the 12th Century. However, it's probably not sensible to rely too much on these single reports since they don't necessarily come with evidence for successful or sustained wine production. Indeed, there is one lone vineyard reported in Derbyshire (further north than any Domesday vineyard) in the 16th Century when all other reports were restricted to the South-east of England.

Wine making never completely died out in England, there were always a few die-hard viticulturists willing to give it a go, but production clearly declined after the 13th Century, had a brief resurgence in the 17th and 18th Centuries, only to decline to historic lows in the 19th Century when only 8 vineyards are recorded. Contemporary popular sentiment towards English (and Welsh) wine can be well judged by a comment in 'Punch' (a satirical magazine) that the wine would require 4 people to drink it - one victim, two to hold him down, and one other to pour the wine down his throat.

Unremarked by most oenophiles though, English and Welsh wine production started to have a renaissance in the 1950s. By 1977, there were 124 reasonable-sized vineyards in production - more than at any other time over the previous millennium. This resurgence was also unremarked upon by Lamb, who wrote in that same year that the English climate (the average of 1921-1950 to be precise) remained about a degree too cold for wine production. Thus the myth of the non-existant English wine industry was born and thrust headlong into the climate change debate...

Since 1977, a further 200 or so vineyards have opened (currently 400 and counting) and they cover a much more extensive area than the recorded medieval vineyards, extending out to Cornwall, and up to Lancashire and Yorkshire where the (currently) most northerly commercial vineyard sits. So with the sole exception of one 'rather improbably' located 12th Century Scottish vineyard (and strictly speaking that doesn't count, it not being in England 'n' all...), English vineyards have almost certainly exceeded the extent of medieval cultivation. And I hear (from normally reliable sources) they are actually producing a pretty decent selection of white wines.

So what should one conclude from this? Well, one shouldn't be too dogmatic that English temperatures are now obviously above a medieval peak - the impact of confounding factors in wine production precludes such a clear conclusion (and I am pretty agnostic with regards to the rest of the evidence of whether northern Europe was warmer 1000 years than today). However, one can conclude that those who are using the medieval English vineyards as a 'counter-proof' to the idea of present day global warming are just blowing smoke (or possibly drinking too much Californian). If they are a good proxy, then England is warmer now, and if they are not.... well, why talk about them in this context at all?

There is a bigger issue of course. For the sake of argument, let's accept that medieval times were as warm in England as they are today, and even that global temperatures were similar (that's a much bigger leap, but no mind). What would that imply for our attribution of current climate changes to human causes? ....... Nothing. Nowt. Zero. Zip.

Why? Well, warm periods have occured in the past, and if not the medieval period, then probably the last interglacial (120,000 years ago), certainly the Pliocene (3 million years ago), without question the (Eocene 50 million years), and in particular the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago), and so on. Current theories of climate change do not rely on whether today's temperatures are 'unprecedented'. Instead they examine the physical causes of climate change and match up what we know about their physical effects and time history and see which of the multiple drivers or combination can best explain the observations. For the last few decades, that is quite clearly the rise in greenhouse gases, punctuated by the occasional volcano and mitigated slightly by the concomittant rise in particulate pollution.

Understanding past climate changes are of course also very interesting - they provide test cases for climate models and can have profound implications for the history of human society. However, uncertainties (as recently outlined in the NAS report) increase as you go back in time, and that applies to our knowledge of the climate drivers as well as to temperatures. So much so that even a medieval period a couple of tenths of a degree warmer than today would still be consistent with what we know about solar forcing and climate sensitivity within the commonly accepted uncertainties.

My oenological research project has not then lead me to any profound insights into climate change in the past, but it has given me a little more respect for the dedciation of my winemaking compatriots. So next time I'm in the area, I'll drink to that!

"First, becoming embedded in a larger system can create efficiencies in energy production that benefit both the hinterlands and the center. One or two Roman legions can provide peace, security, and stability..."

Can't stop myself from quoting Monty Python here where the Judean People's Front, oops I mean People's Front of Judea debates the pros and cons of being under Roman rule:

Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Attendee: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace - shut up!

Our middle-class lifestyles are supported by the labor of a lot of poor people.

*clap clap*

If you didn't have someone cleaning and pressing your white shirts at $0.99 or $1.50 - how would that effect your $75 an hour gig? How about that $4.99 meal at lunch?

Listen to the 'hardcore rap' lyrics - not alot of joy to be found.

A relevant question might be, then, how did the Eastern Empire round Constantinople avoid the problems of peak wood and flourish/survive for another 700(?) years?

Peter.

I love the lines, ever more frequently stated these days, "I'm NOT a doomer . . . but I'm 'this close' to realizing society is f--ked bigtime."

However, if peak production and centuries-long decline on a renewable resource could slowly bring down Rome, what will peak production and decades-long decline on our primary non-renewable energy resource do to modern civilization?

It is interesting to note that Britain encountered "Peak Wood" circa the 17C. The reasons were those given upthread.


The response was to obtain wood from North America and the Baltic but the British were fortunate to be sitting atop a significant supply of solid FF. They were doubly fortunate in that the internal river system and coastal transport provided a low cost shipping system. Coal permitted Britain to continue its economic expansion and it resulted in a phase change in the nature of human society associated with innovations in the application and use of inanimate energy.


Circa the turn of the century, Britain made another transition to liquid FF and much of the rest of the world has followed her development pattern.


To go back to your observation, we still face the problems associated with Peak Wood. We have simply forestalled them for 400 odd years through FF developments but now the "solution" presents us with a whole host of other problems and still requires that we face the original issue.


As for not considering yourself to be a doomer, this may be true of you; it will not be true of your children.


Cheers!

You are so fly,(sorry, I couldn't resist).

"And that is also the tragedy of America: waving flags to support troops that are sent out to die for procuring resources, not for the flag-wavers, but the emperors who live somewhere else. What happens to the flag-wavers matters no more than what happens to the civilians in the lands that are conquered."

"The non-productive part of the population will be discarded. A new world order indeed. And when we remember how once it was said that the American way of life is not negotiable, we'll realize we never understood who was on which side of the negotiations. The true reason it's not negotiable is that was designed to collapse"

This is so true. I find it so hard to believe they don't get it. Probably never will get. Maybe has something to do with, if you admit it, you are them forced to admit you were a sucker to buy it for so long; you would have to admit you were WRONG. It appears people would rather die from their own misconceptions than admit they were wrong or had been ripped off because they were foolish.

Did Britain enter anything resembling catabolic when the Romans left, or did it just collapse?

Britain heaved a sigh of relief and began to rebuild. They had natural resources and farms and stuff. Took a few centuries, since they still had the Catholic Church to reckon with, but they did recover.

Greer's Catabolic Collapse does not so much predict a dystopian empire as a sort of feudal system. Your local warlord will be collecting tribute and dealing out punishment.

And there's some good news in this: as the Empire falls apart, people will start conserving (whether they like it or not). No, they won't share everything all nice-like, but they'll learn to get along, doing whatever they can so that the largest number can survive. They'll naturally organize into small to medium town-sized groups and make war on the next town over, just like in olden times.

The bad news is, we've overshot sustainable population levels by so much that the remnant population will still be unsustainable in the long run, and they'll eat every blade of grass and dog and cat as they die out over several generations. (think Central America circa 1000 CE) In the end, the environment will have been so ravaged that the remnant population will have a really tough time of it. It will take a lot more centuries than Britain took to recover; humans may not even be quite the same species at the other end of the tunnel.

I think that's what Greer means by Catabolic Collapse.

Geez, I'm glad you showed up!

Note that the thermodynamic argument here really doesn't follow.

Yes and no. Scientifically, the idea of high-entropic peripheries, albeit a nice construction, doesn't really lead anywhere.

But when you say:

In our particular dissipative system (the biosphere), the low-entropy external input is sunlight, and the higher entropy output is infrared radiation out into space. There may be no relationship at all between order in a thermodynamic sense and order in a political one.

That is not a complete picture either. There in entropy within the system, not just in input and output. And higher forms of organization are necessarily speeding up the entropic process. Which in turn does suggest a relationship between order in a thermodynamic sense and order in a political one.

It's the higher entropy output that stays within the system that's the culprit. Climate change. Peak Oil.

The argument needs to be made on historical and economic grounds, not thermodynamic ones.

The problem with this proposition is that it rests on the assumed benefits to be derived from two descriptive conceptual systems. History is testable to a degree; we can locate physical facts to buttress an arguement.


Economics fails to incorporate any sense of limits. It is a system of axioms which must be accepted in their entirety else the conceptual model fails. And the conceptual model cannot be reconciled with other conceptual systems such as thermodynamics. Western economics is an ideology.

Many parts of third world periphery - stripped of resources and burdened with externalities - now verge on anarchy, as there is too small a concentration of energy left locally to support an ordered state.

The relationship would be via economics, yes. If it's impossible to maintain a viable economy, it will be hard to maintain a political system. One of Leanan's links today, Understanding Empire goes into that. So does Vail and Robb at GlobalGuerrillas. New Orleans might be an example. Is that thermodynamics - that there is not enough money/energy to maintain the system?

That it is the core vs the periphery doesn't make much sense as physics - though crystals grow that way don't they? A hierarchy is always going to have a more structured core and that will require more energy.

Do we suck so much out of impoverished areas of the world that they devolve into chaos? Conversely, what do we so often hear is the best way to deal with environment, population and security - enable a reasonably prosperous lifestyle. Odd physics.

cfm in Gray, ME

I like the notion that civilizations channel a continual flow of energy into order in the centre but are vulnerable to increasing disorder in the bigger system. It needs to be said that life itself, depending as it does on sunlight energy, acts to slow down the accumulation of entropy by organising and concentrating matter and energy. Most of the sunlight energy that falls on the earth passes quickly to entropy, reflected unused, or absorbed to be radiated as heat. The small portion used in photosynthesis cascades through the food web in a diversity of ever-narrowing channels, with each tributary slowing the rate at which entropy accumulates until, finally, the last little quantities flow out into that featureless, entropic sea of tranquillity.

As expansion and peak wood pushed economies into fossil fuel consumption, we began to transform the stored energy of the ages into entropy. Like America today, our global society has generated a negative savings rate for energy and a positive trend towards disorder. Sooner or later, and I hope well before we go broke, our banker at Kelvin-Planck will call us.

"Consider that rome had no ability to become more fuel efficient."

Actually, they did, and they took a few steps in that direction. Glass windows, for example, were first used in the early empire, "Glass windowpanes were first made in the early imperial period, and used most prominently in the public baths to prevent drafts."

But even here, the advance was also a problem. They had to burn lots of wood to make the glass...

*Much* more importantly, the Romans had no concept of patents. That was a key point from Stuart's post of a few days ago. With no printing press and no patent system, science and technology weren't Roman strong suits.

polytropos,

See my response to Stuart's similar irritation above. Specifically track down any book by Howard T. Odum (specifically Ecological & General Systems) and C.S. "Buzz" Holling's book entitled "Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems."

Though I am no archeaologist and can make no claims as to the causes of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, make no mistake, virtually all self-organized systems (ecological or social) exist in the context of their energy management.

-Panarchist

Hello JeffVail,

Excellent writeup! My theory behind an 'Empire of the Sun' is that by concentrating biosolar inputs from an initial starting point, such as Phx, then controlling a metered flow slowly outwards allows a good way to sustain societal complexity--All spiderweb flows come outward from the Phx center. Not much different than the subsea cluster of life around deep geothermal vents--the outward energy flows is the determinant of bio-complexity and outward spread concentration. No exurbs or suburbs possible, just barren seafloor because the limitations of the energy flow.

Compare to yeast in a bottle of grape juice--energy everywhere! Imagine the control possibilities if the sugar came in at only a single point.

Of course, easier said than done with humans, that is why I am on record as a fast-crash doomer.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Guys: Don't want to upset anyone but seriously, talking of "empire" and comparisons to Rome for a country with 20% of world GDP is ludicrous. Why isn't Europe "Rome". China? The USA is the world's largest, richest, most powerful banana republic. The USA circa 2007 is Mexico on roids. It is not 1960, when this talk of empire was at least plausible. As some posters have noted, the important Americans are not motivated to create an American "empire", they are too busy creating a global village, a very elite one that makes Beverly Hills look like a slum. Just my view.

The puzzle is solved now.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to this one too.

all greek to me

Just a few, from the W list -
draft avoidance, instituted defenselessness (couldn't find a good translation), escapism, world mastery, loss of will ('will crippling' is the literal translation), prosperity

As you can see, the contrasts in even these six poorly translated terms is humorous.

Addendum
3.5) the sole job of the CEOs and managers(Rome) is to make sure the system is working.

I agree. IMO the same principle applies at a variety of scales - from empire to country to province/state to city to company - simultaneously, which makes the overall picture quite complex. Plus a great deal of energy is converted to waste heat everywhere, which contributes to global warming. The places most strongly affected by the externalities of that process are not necessarily those most strongly affected by the externalities of resource extraction, hence another overlay of complexity. The article concentrates on the simple version of the model.

I gave "Upside of Down" a quick look-over at the bookstore last week. I didn't purchase it because it seemed to be more a list of complaints and worries than a cohesive serious exposition.

In other words, it pushed a leftist agenda.

I'll look again in case I'm wrong but my brief look did not increase my respect for it.

I see a parallel between the surplus of food generated in the Roman example and the current ethanol debate. Rome in its expansion days had a positive Food Return on Food Invested or FROFI. How large that FROFI was is not known by me but I doubt it was as great as the EROEI claimed by ethanol advocates. In pre-industrial times almost everyone, or say 90%, lived and worked on a farm. Therefore a FROFI of only 1.12 would have provided enough food for civil government, skilled tradesmen, the religeous hierarchy, and the military. 99% of all people were also very poor by our standards. Ownership of your own chair was quite a status symbol back then. What this tells me is that civilisation can be maintained with a very low EROEI. Considering the excellent EROEI of wind and solar power that a decent standard of living as well as civilisation can be maintained post-peak oil.