"Actually, at least in the case of the United States, arguably that mindless consumption leads to a lower quality of life."

I think that mindless population growth in the United States leads to a lower quality of life. Imagine if we could wave a magic wand and go back to having only 200 million people like in 1970. Transportation would be so much faster and housing would consume so much less of one's income. But as it stands now, we will add another 100 million people in the next 30 years. Apparently, as hard as it is to believe, Americans want to be more crowded.

It's not a random or subjective comment. He's talking about the Human Development Index, and provides a link that explains it.

If you have particular beefs with the HDI, then by all means, share them.

" They consume simply because they can without improving their quality of life any further."

I was going to comment on this by saying there were a rabidly wealthy few that did improve their quality of life and then I thought of Paris Hilton and gave up.

Professor Cellier,
Enjoying your article and as well your moustache, it is a fine job too.

Well, as an European who has visited the US, I was shocked at how poor the US is! On TV you only see the nice pictures, but i saw the real US:
..whitetrash-trailerpark
..blackslums
..spanishonlyspeakingpoorvillages

So yes, a lot of US people could improve their lives.

Roger from The Netherlands

I believe on average that Americans consume more simpply because they can. Huge cars, SUV's, homes, mostly badly designed and inefficient - this is consumption simply because the US can.

Most other countries can't, so they don't, yet in the UK and France at least, there is a better quality of life.

Actually, this is not entirely true. The reason is that the available footprint has been calculated with reserve forest needed to remove the CO₂ in a sustainable way. Evidently, some wildlife can live in that forest as well.

Leanan, I can only see the left half of the first graph (the one that is supposed to show Cuba in the box). I am using Firefox. Can you help?
Thanks.

Consider too that Cuba is only in that box at TODAY'S POPULATION! By the end of the year, the population will have gone up, the box will have shrunk, and no nations will be within that box. In fact, by the time we reach say 7.5 billion, no nation on that graph will have a sustainable ecological footprint, no matter how primitively they live. This is where the collapse comes in.

The point at which this article really brought everything into perspective for me was where he said that it would take a death rate 6 times higher than that of Iraq for 50 years to bring us back down to a 1 billion population. I guess I'd never been clear on what collapse would really look like. I thought anything stretched over 50 years couldn't be that bad.

Eco-systems get rights against humans

cfm in Gray, ME

The problem with models is that the underlying assumption(s) may be weak. When this occurs, the model becomes invalid. It is sometimes useful to vary the assumptions, thereby discovering which assumption(s) is most critical to the result, and, from society's perspective, discovering where attention and resources should best be spent.

This is certainly true, and this is exactly what world modelers are doing these days. No modeler with any sense will claim that he or she can predict the future. All they can do is to explore the envelope of all possible futures that are compatible with the model. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis can be applied to identify the set of model parameters to which the simulation results are most sensitive.

Evidently, the model still contains an underlying structure. For this reason, it is important that different modelers develop independently different world models that are based on a different set of base variables and different internal relationships.

If it now happens that separate models constructed in this fashion cover essentially the same trajectory space, then the confidence grows that these models don't contain any further hidden assumptions that may in themselves be invalid.

Worldwide, we consume the energy equivalent of about one Gb of oil every five days from nuclear + fossil fuel sources.

During George Bush's eight years in office, the world will have consumed from nuclear + fossil fuel sources, in round numbers, the energy equivalent of about 600 Gb of oil.

It takes decades to fully deplete a field like East Texas (largest oil field in Lower 48), Prudhoe Bay (largest oil field in North America) and Ghawar (largest oil field in the world).

600 Gb = 100 East Texas Fields or 50 Prudhoe Bays or 10 Ghawars (production to date for Ghawar, URR for other two). And this is in eight years.

1 The application of this statement to social security has been obvious for years. You did not make as good a case that other current economic systems are not sustainable.

This is also true.

Let us play another little game. We are visiting one of the casinos in Las Vegas, where we choose a special version of the game of Roulette.

We can set on either red or black. For simplicity, we want to assume that the likelihood of hitting either red or black is exactly 50%. We also want to assume that, if we bet correctly, we get twice as much money back as we bet, whereas we lose our money if we got it wrong.

As long as we can guarantee exponential growth forever, we can make an infinite amount of money at that Roulette table. It works as follows:

We start out betting $5 on red. If we win, we just made $5. In this case, we'll bet once again $5 during the next round.

If we lose, we double our bet to $10 on the next round. If we win, we once again made $5 over the two rounds. If we lose again, we bet $20 the next time around, etc.

Since the likelihood of a run of infinitely many blacks is infinitesimally small, we'll eventually make $5. Then we start afresh.

Probability calculus tells us that, on average, we'll make $5 on every second game. If we play infinitely many games, we make infinitely much money.

Of course, every casino owner knows that, and for that reason, they'll limit the amount of money that you can bet at the table. They claim that they do it to protect their customers, but in reality, they are protecting the bank.

The scheme works once again because of exponential growth. By doubling your bet each time, you follow an exponential growth pattern.

If you hit the allowed limit, or if you run out of money, that's when you lose your shirt, and if you play long enough, this will invariably happen.

Economic systems are good at exploiting every feature there is. If money is to be made, it will be made, because if you don't do it, someone else will. That person will get rich, and therefore, will need to reinvest his or her money in the market. By doing so, the former door gets squeezed a little tighter, until every opportunity has been exploited. This is called the efficiency of the markets.

Exponential growth patterns always offer opportunities to make money. For a simple game, a simple strategy can be designed. In reality, the strategy may not be that obvious. Yet all exponential growth patterns offer possibilities for making money on them. Hence the markets will invariably exploit those. When the exponential growth pattern ends, the opportunity goes away, and the market will start losing money.

2 TOD is mostly concerned about oil, you are logically concerned with all energy. Current distaste with nuclear power will disappear as societies discover their limited options for base loaded power, and actinide breeders will appear if and when uranium becomes overly expensive, and usefully burning the long lived bits of modern day nuclear wastes. Meanwhile, imo cheap solar is coming soon, <$1/w, cheap enough for rooftop systems to replace most of their daily consumption, feeding excess daytime generation to the grid as is already allowed in 34 US states. Studies that assume affordable nuclear/solar are worthwhile in generating a more optimistic, and probably realistic, future.

No, this is not true.

Firstly, I am not concerned with all forms of energy ... I am concerned with sustainability. The planet has finite resources, and no exponential growth pattern can continue forever without being accompanied by growth in resource utilization. Since many experts agree that we are already now (since roughly 1984) using up resources faster than the planet can resupply those, we'll need to reduce our resource consumption rate in order to becme once again sustainable.

Secondly, your assumption that fossil fuels can be replaced by nuclear and/or solar is a bit cavalier. We are currently consuming 13 TW of power. Out of those, 83% or roughly 10 TW are from fossil fuels.

Let us assume that the fossil fuels go away over a period of 50 years. Hence we need to replace 10 TW of power over 50 years. Let's do it with nuclear power plants.

Let us assume for simplicity that one nuclear power plant generates 1 GW of power. Hence we'll need to build 10,000 additional nuclear power stations over 50 years, i.e., 200 power stations per year. This means, we'll need to build one new nuclear power station every other day over the next 50 years ... assuming that the world power consumption remains constant, which the Chinese and the Indians will contest heavily.

There certainly is enough solar power reaching our planet, no question about it. Yet, the numbers stay about the same, i.e., if we go for big solar towers in the desert regions (the more economical solution), we'll need to build one of those every other day, and if we go for photovoltaics and collectors on our roofs, the problem gets even worse. There is no way that we can produce enough of those in a sufficiently short period of time to catch up. It ain't gonna happen.

Nuclear fuel must be mined and transported. Currently that requires fossil fuel. Nuclear power only works on a large scale. When the fossil fuel is gone, most nuclear power plants are going to cease operating. The only ones that might continue operating will be close to their fuel supply.

There do exist regional models, so-called open exchange models. The way they work is that only the interfaces are defined between the regional models, not the models themselves.

It is then left up to the individual countries to code their own regional model. For political reasons, each country is allowed to keep its own model secret, i.e., they use input data coming from other neighboring models, and they produce output data to be used by these other neighboring models, so that they can be simulated together, but how the output data are being produced remains a secret.

Yet this was not the case with either WORLD2 or WORLD3. These are (fairly simple) global models.

Indeed, WORLD2 and WORLD3 are gobal models, not compartmentalized models. Such models do exist though.

Furthermore, these models do not account for social unrest and similar phenomena. All they do is to look at population dynamics, resource depletion, waste management (pollution control), capital markets, and agricultural markets, defining a set of proposed significant interactions between those. In addition, the regional models also account for migration patterns influencing the local population dynamics.

The "carrying capacity" is not fixed, but there is certainly an upper limit. Let me explain this statement once again by means of looking at the case of Switzerland.

During WW-II, Switzerland was completely surrounded by the axis powers. We could import very little and therefore had to produce everything that we needed on our own.

Almost immediately, most of our farm animals were slaughtered, because you can feed more people per acre of arable land on potatoes and beans than on beef and chicken. Only in the high alps were farm animals allowed to graze, because at those altitudes, nothing grows in Switzerland except grass.

Secondly, the Swiss were not allowed to have any lawns any longer. Every patch of grass or lawn had to be plowed under and planted in order to produce enough food.

Thirdly, every inhabitant had to help with working those fields. Those who held a regular job had to work the potato fields during the weekend, and those without a job had to work in the fields all week long.

With those measures, Switzerland was able to feed every inhabitant a diet of 1800 calories per day. The food wasn't very good, and it certainly wasn't rich, but at least, no one was starving.

In those years, Switzerland had a population of 4 million people. 15% of the population were farmers.

Today, Switzerland has a population of 7.5 million people, only 2% of the population are farmers, and roughly half of the former arable land is now urbanized.

Thanks to cheap energy, less people are needed to work the fields, and thanks to the green revolution (fertilizers), the average yield per acre has been increased by about 65%.

Yet, Switzerland can only live in luxury, because we can afford to import whatever we need. If globalization breaks down, i.e., if and when we once again have to produce everything that we consume locally, there is no way that Switzerland will be able to feed 7.5 billion people. The population density is simply too high.

The same holds true for most of central Europe, and even a simpler lifestyle won't overcome the limit that each person needs a minimum number of calories to survive.

Yes and no.

The models do fairly well in terms of taking into account the levels of consumed energy. When less energy per capita is available, the models adapt themselves to a simpler lifestyle, where less energy is also needed.

Yet the models don't account for wars or other forms of social unrest, and they certainly don't account for a reduction in "carrying capacity" due to the side-effects of such wars or social unrest (e.g. contaminated water, agent orange, or similar effects).

Theoretically, we aren't going to run out of energy any time soon. Solar input alone provides plenty of energy for everyone.

The problem is not available energy, but rather energy density. Solar energy is unfortunately very diluted. Concentrating it to make it useful is costly. The same is true with your Florida phosphate rock.

It's a race against time that we are likely to lose, because we have a tendency of delaying preparations for as long as we can get away with.

I think 2kW is an unrealistic goal. Rising entropy costs will probably offset any efficiency gains, and 5 kW is the least people will ever consume. This is only 125m2 of solar panels per per person, and quite realistic.

This is not true. Switzerland is currently consuming 5.5 kW, and we live almost as wastefully as the Americans. The reasons why we nevertheless consume less energy is:

1. We are driving smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.
2. We have a much better public transportation network that we actually use. For example here at ETH Zurich, 96% of the professors, students, and other employees come to work by public transport.
3. We don't use much air-conditioning yet, and frankly, we don't need it with our climate.
4. Few Swiss have private pools.
5. A larger percentage of the population lives in rentals, rather than in single family dwellings.

More can certainly be done to save energy.

1. Many Swiss live in older buildings that are not energy-efficient. A lot can and should be done to thermally insulate houses better. Germany and Sweden for example have done a much better job at getting the people to upgrade the buildings in which they live.
2. Most of the Swiss use central oil heating systems.

The envisaged 2kW of energy only account for centrally produced energy, and don't include the energy that the individual person may produce locally.

For example, my wife and I have already replaced our central oil heating system by a heat pump that is on its primary side supported by a geothermal system and on its secondary side by thermal solar collectors.

Thus, the government will only count the electricity that we are buying off the grid, ignoring the geothermal and solar energy that we produce locally.

Hence when energy gets rationed, we'll (hopefully) have more energy available, because we produce some of it locally.

Whether 2 kW is realistic or not is beside the point. I frankly don't believe that Switzerland will be in any position to produce more than 2 kW per capita by the year 2050 (excluding strictly local production).

Up until now, we have "cherry picked" the low-entropy resources, those that nature has expended energy in the past to concentrate. As those are depleted, we will substitute less concentrated alternatives that require more energy to collect and use.

This is very true, except that when "the goods" is energy itself, there truly is a limit--collection energy can't exceed delivered energy.

Perhaps for some it is denial, but on the other hand some conclusions are pretty obvious even though they would be taboo to discuss openly in a PC world.

In the US, we will do nothing useful to deal with the coming horror.(crisis and catastrophy did not seem strong enough words for what we face) Those in power will accrue as much wealth as they can right up to the moment of collapse. They will prevent anything that will interfere with them accruing as much wealth as they can right up to the collapse. They will do everything in their power to keep the game going as long as possible, which includes decieving everyone about the actual state of affairs as long as possible. AND, I believe they will kill as many people as necessary to ensure their own survival afterwards.

"but probably without a good deal of panic."

Don't you mean "but probably NOT without a good deal of panic"?

I find it astonishing that in your otherwise excellent article, which speaks of the important concept of the ecological footprint, you completely fail to mention the words Permaculture, Vegetarian, Vegan, Meat, or Dairy (maybe I missed it).

Indirectly, I did. I wrote that the idea of a fixed carrying capacity is flawed. The footprint depends very much on how we utilize our available resources.

Yet, the article couldn't cover every aspect explicitly. I had to keep it sufficiently concentrated to preserve its digestibility.

In one of my subsequent comments, I mentioned the issue explicitly in the context of feeding the Swiss populace during the years of WW-II. I mentioned that most of the farm animals were slaughtered at the onset of WW-II, because more people can be fed on an acre of arable land on a diet of potatoes and beans than on a diet of beef and chicken.

It looks like we are at a turning point and there is not alternative that will save us from disaster, except disaster itself. Perhaps future generations would be better off with an asteroid and a few truly major volcanic eruptions and a several tsunamis. Get the dying over quickly and then rebuild.

It is too late for the required collective species consciousness. We will refuse to get down to the cuban footprint and we will have too many people to get to the European footprint.

We might have had a chance about 35 years ago. While it is beneficial to warn of future limits, once you reach them, which we may have, it is too late to do anything but a lot of dying.

I've used the metaphor of the Titanic's architect, in the most recent movie, walking, after the ship hit the iceberg, about the ship in wonderment that the ship would soon be at the bottom of the Atlantic and that the majority of the crew and passengers would soon be dead--and in wonderment at how oblivious everyone was to the looming disaster.

Except that I don't expect a nice steady decline rate in human population, Cherenkov. When we do it, we will find ways to do it in staggering bursts that are probably going to embed themselves in human mythos for thousands of years due to the sheer horror of it all.

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett

You have been hammering these points home, but really, what's the point? It is too late to even stabilize and we will not accept negative growth. No amount of warning will do anything of use because the warning is too late.

rings of precognitive nostalgia

What a great phrase!

The analogy I generally use is from the movie Terminator 2 where Sarah Conner has recurring dreams/visions of the playground and the nukes going off. She shouts warnings but no one can hear her.

This isn't really relevant, since Japan post-WWII had the US Occupation to restore order, and import raw basic needs whenever necessary. This will not be available in the collapse phase of oil decline. As James Kunstler says, don't worry about the Feds, as they won't be able to even answer the phones when times get bad.

ciao,
Bruce

Take another 64k barrels off the market for a week or so...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4809382.html

I think you missed the main point: there will not be enough resources (such as food) to keep most people alive. Infant and child (and adult) mortality will therefore rise. Poverty will deepen. Not by choice. And moving people from farms to cities will make the situation worse. Instead, people will move back to the farms, as manual labor there will partially compensate for lack of fossil fuels, resulting in some food. People in cities will have to offer something worthwhile to those in the farms in exchange for surplus food, if any.

Fortunately, the lessons of the past 60 years are unequivocal: there is a way, and it requires (a) lifting families out of poverty, (b) reducing infant and child mortality, and (c) inducing more people to move to cities.

I think you may be confusing cause and effect here a bit. In order to reach the desired effect (lifting families out of poverty, reducing infant mortality, urbanization, etc.), you need to have the social and economic conditions in place that will favor those outcomes.

In my view, history indicates that rule-of-law, widespread literacy, and broad reproductive rights for women are the most critical ingredients. Trying to paternalistically "lift" a backward society out of poverty solely through foreign aid (however well intentioned) is doomed to failure if it is not accompanied by a concerted effort to address these factors. It will also fail when such efforts are viewed as being imposed imperialistically by force, without the consent of the aid recipients (i.e., our current efforts to "help" the Iraqis).

Simply throwing more money after bad governments and bad reproductive policies is not likely to make much of a positive impact, either on quality of life or population growth. In fact, it is likely to make a bad situation even WORSE (e.g., throwing gasoline on a raging fire). As long as most 3rd World inhabitants still operate with a Medieval mindset and culture (esp. with respect to fertility and breeding), we are wasting our time and money trying to "help" them.

I'm sorry, Loren, but I think you are very mistaken with your remark about how Dr. Cellier "and many others so desperately want" a population decline as described. What we want (not this situation we are in) versus what will (eventually and more than likely) happen is still worth considering, even if it's ghastly.

What I firmly believe tho, and I think Cellier's essay reasonably postulates and attempts to address, is that the ability of the earth to support homo sapiens is not at all ecologically practical as presently practiced; which is to say, it is not sustainable for us as a species living on a finite planet. You may seem to believe that this is not the case, but whatever your fantasies are about earthly ecological reality, I refuse to harbor any such misguided beliefs or understandings about how bad off our ecologic base of necessities are.

It may well be that we get a lot more population growth (even if at a slower rate) over the coming years, but it will not be a pretty or happy ecological (never mind social) reality humans will inhabit, and the strains upon the earth's rapidly diminished natural capital resources that we are absolutely dependent upon (clean earth to till, clean water to drink, and dependable weather/climate to survive by, etc.) will ultimately fail us, and our population will crash shortly thereafter. Although I do hope this scenario will not be so un-repairible that our species, and much else of creation, goes extinct.

The primary mistake I think you've made is the assumption that the population reducing lessons of the past 60 years will apply in the future. Much of these improvements have been very dependent upon the bounty that FF, particularly oil, have granted us. Thus the future that will have to adjust to less FF inputs, as well as ongoing loss of ecological diversity and resiliency, climate change, and vast social unrest as these features gain traction, will not result in the same successes as you've described. If you really think about it, you'd understand this.

One way or another, the harsh reality of earth bound limits and natural rules will prevail and our numbers will decline. There is no celebration in believing or stating this, just an honest appraisal of what is due for a species that falsely believes it is immune from earthly realities.

You are buying the "rising tide" argument of liberalism. But the rising tide is not working. Krugman does the numbers and shows it's not working here in US. It's clearly not working in Africa or any other place subject to our technology (technology IS terms of trade). A rising tide in India or China will drown everyone.

cfm in Gray, ME

Fortunately, the lessons of the past 60 years are unequivocal: there is a way, and it requires (a) lifting families out of poverty, (b) reducing infant and child mortality, and (c) inducing more people to move to cities.

Those are well and good, but don't make a damn bit of difference unless people have access to easy, cheap and effective birth control, and also access to abortion services. If we lose easy birth control, you will see the population quickly reverting to normal state of birth rates and death rates, which are much higher than current levels.

"Fortunately, the lessons of the past 60 years are unequivocal: there is a way, and it requires (a) lifting families out of poverty, (b) reducing infant and child mortality, and (c) inducing more people to move to cities."

You know, the problem with this, as I've noticed, is that it's highly correlated with vastly increased energy use, which sort of undercuts the whole point of reducing population in the face of declining finite resources.

"lifting families out of poverty..as India and China are demonstrating"
Only a small part of their populations benefits from the industrial boom, and they are able to grow because the downward pressure they put on wages.

It seems like the article was intended as an introduction to a field of research, not an exhaustive proof. You've become spoiled with SS's work lately.

You don't see how people will die off with dwindling energy to produce food, sustain the economy and leading to resource wars?

Sorry, but that's not "doomer porn" that's part of a Hollywood movie. It's something that happens today already to a degree, whether the models in this article are accurate or not is beside the point. The premise of population overshoot is well grounded in reality. To think that die-off won't happen when already we're looking at massive energy shortfalls and geo-political instability, on top of economic collapse given the state of the dollar among other things is quite naïve and certainly not invalid by throwing around doomer monikers as if that refutes anything.

I experienced the same confusion.

Thanks for pointing this out. I understand your confusion. I guess, I didn't explain myself so well on this issue.

What matters in the model is the availability / non-availability of energy. As long as enough energy is available to fuel the economy, exponential growth will continue.

Having a slow utilization of the available resources is thus identical in its effects to using the resources up faster, but having more of them available than previously thought.

You are right. The market solution is to use up the available oil as fast as the market will permit, and then extend the energy bonanza by building more coal firing plants.

In the model, these additional energy resources lead to an extended generation of pollutants, which ultimately produce the collapse.

The "good" (not market-conform) solution is to use the energy resources up rapidly, and not replace them by others, as this will stop the exponential growth earlier.

An even better (and even less market-oriented) solution is to not use them up at all, but to restrict their use voluntarily to get out of the exponential growth pattern, while still having the energy resources available to work with them where they are most needed and beneficial.

This was my nirvana moment of the day. To simplify, think of growth like a car. Growth increases demand every day. Every day we go faster, therefore the sooner we crash into the wall, the gentler the crash. If my memory is correct, the energy in the crash is a function of the square of the velocity. The sooner the better.

I don't really see a practical application yet; what, I should buy drums of gasoline and torch them in the back yard?

cfm in Gray, ME

To play Devil's advocate: I think nukes would do just fine.

If we correctly targeted pop centers of 500k or more we could use our 10,000 warheads to wipe out 5 billion. Of course we would spare our friends, except maybe France.

Problem solved. The 1 trillion barrels of oil left and only 1 billion people. Now we can begin to make the sustainable society we should have but didn't because of lack of scientific knowledge.

Lets hope Shrub isn't thinkin like this...

Bob,
I keep reading about the wheelbarrows and bicycles.

I sometimes wonder what infrastructure , if any, will be the supplier of parts for those items.

Just to be on the safe side I brought at auction a very neat little chrome air hand pump for $2.00 . Understanding that the wheelbarrow I use daily to mix my stonesetting mortar in will not function long if my air compressor is dead in the water due to grid failure.

Ditto the innertubes and tires. How will one maintain those after the fast crash sceanario you believe in(as will as myself).

I once owned a rather large collection of blacksmith tools. 4 forges and 9 anvils plus several leg vices. Stupidly I let them go at MY auction........
Its said that only a blacksmith can make his own tools and bootstrap upwards. So how does one function with rubber tires and innertubes?

Wouldn't it be best to build them , like in the past, of metal rims and wooden spokes? There were some very fancy buggies in the past. Some very lightweight. It only requires a horse or mule , which only requires a bit of pasture and a tad of corn and hay to keep a horse or mule.

I past the Amish on the roads constantly around here and they appear to be doing fine. Hitch the horse to a tree at the auction and carry their belongings back and forth in the buggy. Works very well for them.

Unless we do something about the use of draft animals in the future chaos then WE will become the draft animals and I must tell you that I would far prefer to ride and animal than function as an animal.

My immediate future plans call for sectioning off a piece of pasture and putting a mule and a horse on it as well as buy a used buggy from the Amish and some tack.

regards,
Airdale-- A fine Kentucky FiveGaited SaddeleBred is hard to beat for fine traveling,,,just ask William Shatner who owned a horse farm not too far from mine in Versailles,Ky.

Invisible Sky-Being bless you, Oscar.

The amazing tunnel vision/myopia of the scientific community is often mind-blowing. As one techno-worshipper wrote earlier, and I paraphrase: thank god we have someone using facts and figures to tell us the obvious otherwise it is just handwaving.

That anyone with a smidgen of cognitive ability cannot see the ramifications of a FINITE system makes me lightheaded. That a blog full of techno-wonders can't see this obvious fact makes me think that our teaching paradigm is creating monsters.

The problem with a scientific inquiry method that isolates its subjects from the holistic reality field, is that it no longer accurately models anything except the model. Kinda like quantum physics, spooky effects at a distance. You know, Heisenberg uncertainty.

It does not matter what color the bandaid, it is still loaded with poison.

human inventivenes, technological fixes or prayers to your god aren't going to solve this one.

If by solve you mean allow us to go on as is, then true, But if you scale it back to "deal with", then I don't agree. Human inventiveness will be required, but it will need to be applied globally as well as locally. Science isn't just about more gadgets, it's also about how the earth works and how we can adjust to the constraints it imposes on us. That kind of science will be more important than ever.

Is there yet some distance to go before we are able to deal with these problems however great they are? Yes. But in this one sense I'm not a doomer: once we have a good idea of what the planet can hold, there's no reason humanity cannot ultimately use its collective brains to adjust to that reality. But I maintain the collective brain is situated in the butt. We learn by getting kicked there real hard.

Some people use "Cuba" as a synonym of "Hell", and some people understand that foregoing mileage, heating and dishwashers is "Cuba". And examination of the facts shows that Cubans spend a lot of time on participatory arts and sports, life there is not all empty toil. I would not deny there are downsides to Cuban life. But it sure beats North Korea, Zimbabwe, or Iraq.

To All The Geeks, Gamers, And Non-Attention Payers

Yo kids.

I doubt you will ever read this warning because you are either too wrapped up in Warcraft, Halo, or some other shoot 'em up game with ultra-realistic bloody graphics to care. I mean, don't get me wrong... I'm super stoked about the new Transformers movie that's coming out as well (which may teach you about Energy, since that's what the robots are fighting over).

The fact is - you are woefully unprepared for the very real and bloody video game coming your way, which includes more guts and gore than you can ever imagine. Man, how cool will it be when you get to not only feast your eyes on the very real world scenario of people shooting one another in the streets - but that you might actually get to truly fight for your life? Wow. How rad that will be.

You see kids - while you are busy playing online games and watching movies (yes, I watch movies too), there is a really messed up situation in the world you need to pay attention to right now. Your very REAL life (the one you don't get to start over) now depends on you paying attention to what I'm about to tell you, so listen up.

1) Your video game units are powered by energy
2) The world is about to explode in a big firefight over the earth's remaining energy (it could even be nuclear war)
3) Re-read the intro paragraph

That's right kids, the time is nearly here! You will be most likely be able to open up your window or stand on your front lawn and watch chaos go down, just like you see in the movies. It will be pretty scary to you when the power goes out, and your video games or Internet connection no longer work.

When lines start forming at gas stations and grocery stores start running out of food because prices have risen too high, you won't know what to do. That's ok... I'm not trying to finger wag - it's all our fault. You are growing up in an energy intensive world with lots of people in it. Humans became too dependent on energy sources that power our cars, food system, electricity and everything that allows us to live the way we do, and now it's just about run out.

What's going to happen is that war will only continue to get worse around the world as the fight for energy increases. You won't be able to ignore this as food becomes more expensive, gas stations run out of fuel, and things break all over the place.

Again, don't freak out too much, there are those of us who have known this was coming and it must be quite a shock to you. The faster you get over the shock, the faster you should be able to see this as the opportunity you have been waiting for. You DO want to be a hero, I assume, after all that gaming and all those movies you watch, right?

This is your chance to be Superman or Wonder Woman - Obi Wan or Luke Skywalker - Optimus Prime or some other super hero. Be whoever you choose... but I ask you to fight for the force of good - which means recognizing that everyone is pretty much in the same boat as you and it's time to help everyone else, which means that people will be willing to help you back.

So what are things you can do?

I'll make it easy for you. First, watch this quick video I made for you. It will help you understand some of the basics of what's called "Peak Oil". Once you start to grasp the concept that the world you think will go on forever is just about to come to an end, only at that point will you start to see the new world we will be forced to live in.

I will keep making videos to help you learn what you can do. But you must first start by putting down the games for a while and learn to start growing food at home. It's the magic power that could help save your life so you make it to the second level.

www.lawnstogardens.com

Crop yields per hectare have increased by a factor of about four in the past century. This and bringing more hectares under cultivation through irrigation and mechanical plowing-harvesting have resulted in the means to produce growth.

http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/51/342/1.pdf

The incidence of violence has threatened life as we know it and is a bigger problem than times they raised the price of gasoline. Eliminate the killing and you get a much more stable society. Buddha taught this. Jesus also taught this.

Birth control is legal in the U.S.A.

Detroit might have to cut prices on SUV's again ... had not quite recovered from the Katrina gas price spike. Daimler sold Chrysler as it did not need the pain of financial loss. Excessive litigation and allegations of unsafe cars drove the US auto industry to try to sell monster size vehicles. The talk about tort reform was mainly talk. Honda had sold motorcycles for years. They are able to cash in on a surge in demand for small gas efficient vehicles.

That's not strictly true. The theory is that in the process of overshooting, the Earth's environment is degraded, and causes at least a temporary reduction in carrying capacity.

Catton goes into this in "Overshoot" - my recollection is that LTG does as well (my copy is in storage at the moment, so I cannot look it up easily).

Japan imports food and fuel and raw materials. A lot of food is grown in Japan but with huge amounts of fertilizer and pesticides applied. At the same time, Japanese live rather efficiently in small houses using little power, lots of mass transit.

Interestingly, Japan has a very low birthrate, currently about 1.25 children per woman's lifetime. About 2.1 is needed for a static population. Given enough time Japan's population would drop to manageable levels. The interim portion will be difficult as they have to manage the bubble of elderly. It is not just the idea of the cost of care but the the demand for able bodied people to act as nurses and other caretakers.

Japan is completely reliant on exported primary energy source.

Remove that source and the society collapses.

The problem is the champions of the singularity are lunatics like Kurzweil who managed to coincidentally time his predictions of technology to save his life at the end of his natural life (not to mention his hippie zillion vitamin a day nonsense) do their best to discredit the idea of technological advancement with outrageously optimistic claims.

Sure I think its all eventually acurate, just stretch out the timeframe a bit.

Hello Cultura_Sublimation,

Thxs for posting this fictional and hypothetical info. I counter with a cold, verifiable, factual Singularity of a Winter of Discontent:

http://dieoff.com/page80.htm

Feel free to read everything on Dieoff.com, then try to scientifically dispute the Thermo/Gene Collision. I would argue that achieving a realistic 'Peakoil Outreach Singularity' would be a more effective course of mitigation on a finite little blue marble floating in the universal vastness.

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

Michael Spertus and I were discussing Peak Oil and the Singularity a few years ago when he told me that "the Singularity would be worse than collapse". I think I know what he meant.

Easy! I don't suffer from a "Jesus complex," i.e., I don't believe that I must be able to save the world.

I chose the profession of educator, and so, I see it my duty to fill that job as best I can by educating people in the best way that I know.

What can I do personally?

1. I can help reduce my dependence on fossil fuels by upgrading my own local infrastructure. I have already done so by throwing out the central oil heating, replacing it by a heat pump with geothermal support on the primary side and solar (thermal) support on the secondary side. My house is about as well thermally insulated as a farm house built around 1850 can possibly be. We also have a wood stove in the living room as well as a cooking range that can be operated both on electricity and on wood. We get our water from two wells on our own property coming out of the hill behind our house with gravity feed. My wife and I also recently bought a Renault Kangoo (1.6 liter engine) in order to reduce our fuel consumption.
2. I can help the local infrastructure by buying local produce from the farm across the road and from local mom-and-pop shops (whenever possible) instead of frequenting the supermarkets, even if the food is a bit more expensive this way, because by supporting these local shops I contribute to keeping them afloat.
3. My wife recently started gardening a bit, trying to educate herself in the art of growing organic veggies - not so easy for a bunch of elderly egg-heads like ourselves.

"How do you stay sane?"

All of this has been pretty obvious to those of us with open eyes since the mid 1970's.(Athough becoming radioactive ash was first on the list back then.) I had no kids, kept my life simple. I'm just here to watch. Should be a pretty good show. Also, I see this as just a playground within eternal existence. We don't die, we come back to play some more. And there are infinite playgrounds.

"Where does the admission of finite limits come in?"

I suppose only on the day they die.

And even then, there's the question of where to bury all these people.

Which brings to mind an article published in the Boston Globe back in 1997 I wrote a reply to that they published. My letter was as follows:

Re: "Quincy cemetary expansion encroaching on snake habitat."

Following the logic of "I have to meet the growing needs of the city," as expressed by Thomas B. Koch, Quincy's director of parks, forestry, and cemetaries, and evidenced by the cutting down of forest acreage (never mind the life forms therein), one wonders where this endless civic duty to provide burial plots ends?

After the forests are gone - now turned into cemetaries - does the future director turn next upon the parks?

Strict adherence to this civic logic might finally be felt by the living souls when a neighborhood is leveled to make room for the dead ones - until, ultimately, Quincy is one vast graveyard of honorary citizens.

I mean no disrespect, but I wonder when the citizens of Quincy and elsewhere are going to figure out a way of honoring and remembering the dead while still leaving room for the living - including anything as rare, beautiful, wild, and mysterious a creation of God's as a timber rattlesnake?

I'd guess that God would prefer we honor our dead by acting as shepherds of all creation rather than as gravediggers.

The indignant tone of Dezakin is no less surprising, since we presumably all know about exponential functions at least as well as we recognize PO or soil depletion. Aren't the deniers of population crash really arguing about whether it will happen in 2030 versus 2060?

No, only that population will plateau due to falling fertility.

Where does the admission of finite limits come in?

Many times, no need for the strawman.

We only disagree on what the limits are.

Naive extrapolation of an exponential can give some surprising results that map quite poorly with reality.

Thanks for posting the link to this essay. It is fascinating reading. I'm a natural-born skeptic so I started reading it, convinced that there would be little I could take away from it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the cogency and relavance of her arguments.

Unfortunately, our current paradigm (economic growth) seems so entrenched, that it's difficult for me to imagine changing the rules without disrupting our entire political and social system.

I recently watched the documentary "A Crude Awakening" and one of the interviewees was Matt Savinar. Savinar explained that the only way to avert disaster from PO was to slow economic growth. But he posited who would vote for slowing economic growth as it would mean economic upheaval, unemployment, lowered standard of living etc.? Posing in front boxes of survival drinking water, Savinar stated that he himself would probably not vote for a person that suggested slowing growth.

If a doomster like Savinar is hesitant to change the current paradigm, how do we convince the hundreds of millions of people that also have a vested interest in the current system? Worse still, how do we fight the disinformation and power of corporate controlled media and the entrenched major political parties? Democrats and Republicans are simply different wings on the same bird. Third-party candidates have an abyssmal record in our political system.

It strikes me that the current system is so rigged in favor of the status quo, that nothing short of a major upheaval will be able to affect change. Viral marketing may work for pushing a new TV show or product, but it hardly seems appropriate for convincing people to make a paradigm shift in economic or social systems.

I hope we can manage somehow to muddle through the next few years/decades without facing the horrors predicted by Savinar and other doomsters. Those "cornicopians" or technophiles that believe that the economic growth will provide a solution will forgive me if I don't share their optimism.

It is difficult for me to imagine the same free market which has brought us such wonders as the Monchichi, American Idol, and vehicles that are less fuel efficient than their counterparts from 30 years ago, will provide a solution to our future energy crisis.

... for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. -- Kurt Vonnegut

If one is strictly and coldly logical....any day now.

Even the Oil Drum has realized that there is NO way 7 billion humans can survive on this planet now. Maybe 1-2 billion. Now if you were the POTUS wouldn't you know this as well? If you had the best minds and resources on earth and realized the Finality of it all what would you do?

Choice 1: Let humanity just walk into the abyss and emerge in 75 years with billions upon billions dead and only and small fration left to carry on, but with no energy resources and little infrastructure and knowledge. Medieval age here we come.

Choice 2: Accelerate the Die-off (1-2 yrs). Educate the remaining 1 billion of the shitstorm we are in and procede to build a truly sustainable world based on the scientific knowledge we have.

Either choice is horrific and I am not vouching for either but....

What is better for the human race?

Thanks for these comments. They are certainly very much to the point.

We don't know how Cubans' consumption compares to the actual resources in Cuba, so the graph doesn't demonstrate Cuba is sustainable. Graphing individual countries' footprint against their actual arable area would give a better picture of which countries are closer to sustainability.

This is true. In fact, Cuba will probably survive PO relatively unscathed because they are living pretty much "off the grid" already now - thanks to the 800 pound gorilla next door.

By ostracizing Cuba, the U.S. has probably perpetuated a regime that otherwise would have falled long ago, as they kept viable alternatives away from Cuba.

The net result is that Cuba is importing/exporting comparatively little; they produce most of what they need locally; and consequently, they'll be doing relatively well, as long as they are left to their own devices.

One additional point in their favor is their climate. Their vegetation period is 12 months out of 12. They don't have to survive any harsh winters. Thus, as long as they can keep population growth under control, they should be doing fine.

I don't think the current level of fossil-dominated energy use is viable for future sustainability, so treating it as a goal is pointless. Given existing persistent inequalities, adopting a world per-capita average is doubly pointless.

This is correct also. This is why I pointed out that, without FF, Switzerland will have difficulties producing even 2 kW in a sustainable fashion at current population levels. Each country will have to figure out for themselves, how much energy they can produce locally without FF.

On the other hand, Switzerland is overpopulated anyway. It is simply not feasible for Switzerland to feed 7.5 million people over extended periods of time from local resources only. More realistically, Switzerland can feed 2 million people from local resources with an acceptable HDI value; and with a population of 2 million people, there will be enough per capita energy available to live comfortably.

Models such as World3 undoubtedly generate plausible trends, but if the model doesn't explicitly include concrete factors such as soil quality, deforestation and water availability for each region then it can only be used qualitatively. We need quantitative models and long-term planning. Are there any open-source quantitive models or parameter sets available?

WORLD3 does some of that on a global level, whereas WORLD2 does not. There are much more detailed partial models available, but they are not currently interlinked. That is what we are working on at the moment. We now have the computational tools to do so.

Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room

A similar article by Paul Chefurka

"
The model warns us that the involuntary decline of the human population in the aftermath of the Oil Age will not happen without overwhelming universal hardship. There are things we will be able to do as individuals to minimize the personal effects of such a decline, and we should all be deciding what those things need to be. It's never too early to prepare for a storm this big. "

http://www.321energy.com/editorials/chefurka/chefurka051207.html

You can't experiment with planets, we've only got one. To set up useful experiments, you should know what you're going to use that data for. Science requires thinking, not only moving stuff around in white coats.

Right wing?

Communist = liberal = neo-con

Same platform, same pillars, same people.

This has the potential to turn a classic science-fiction story into a survival guide for many. Definitely a "non-cosy" catastrophe.

First, the 1.8 ha limit. A good part of this is to neutralize the carbon that FF produce. Ofcoarse I am aware of the GW situation, but how sure are we we need this amount of land to do this? Can't we use currently unused land to do so? Plant trees in dry parts of the world, provide irrigation etc. A back of the envelope calculation shows it could be rather cheap to do so.

This is partly correct.

The 1.8 ha limit (the available footprint) is simply the available land on this globe divided by the current population. This is independent of CO₂ neutralization.

However, the 2.2 ha of consumed average footprint depends heavily on CO₂ neutralization. If you look at the Powerpoint presentation that is referenced at the end of my article, you'll find a graph that shows the composition of the footprint. The only reason why we are already that much over the top is because there isn't enough rainforest left to capture the CO₂ that we emit into the air. If we were to reduce our CO₂ emissions, our consumed footprint would go down, because we would need less forest to compensate for our CO₂ emissions.

Can we plant trees elsewhere? Sure, but there isn't really much unused land of suitable quality. Our consumed footprint is computed by the land that we actually use for something plus the forest reserves that would be needed to remove the CO₂. That number is already higher than what is available.

Second, about PV. It seems to me that PVs are waiting for a 'tipping point'. Currently, PV are 2-3x as expensive as electricity from FF, but the price has come down with a factor 10-20 the last 2 decades. What if it falls below the FF price? Then suddenly, PV go from 'treehuggerstuff' to a 'no brainer', reducing the price even more. With the current economic system, that may go very fast. Look at the introduction of mobile phones, that didn't take more than a decade.

I think a factor of 2-3 is a bit optimistic. When we built our PV system in New Mexico in 1999, we paid roughly $30,000 to produce 6 kWh of energy per day, and this was in a region with lots of sunshine and short contiguous periods without it. We had:

1. 24 Kyocera 80W PV panels at a cost of $400 each = $9600.
2. A Trace (full sinusoid) inverter to produce 120V AC = $5000.
3. 20 golfcart (deep-cycle) batteries to store energy for two full days at a cost of $80 = $1600.
4. A tracker for 12 panels = $1000.
5. A Kohler propane generator (backup) to recharge the batteries in case of more than 2 days without sunshine = $5000.

These were the major items. In addition, we needed two transformers for conversion from 120V to 240V (our AC water pump ran on 240V); two charge controllers for the batteries; and I had to pay a guy to help me put the system together.

If you do it all by yourself, you may be able to get away with $25,000. The prices may have come down a bit, but not all that much really.

I calculated at that time that the electricity prices would have to go up by at least a factor of 5 to make this system financially profitable.

More importantly though, you cannot build such a system e.g. in the midwest, where you don't see the sun for 2-3 months at a time during the winter. Also here in Switzerland, a system with batteries to store the electricity makes no sense for the same reason.

What can be done, and is being done by some people, is to put together a system without batteries yet with a transfer switch that allows you to dump your produced energy onto the grid. Your electricity counter will count up while you buy energy from the grid, and will count down while you sell energy to the grid.

Such a system doesn't make you independent of the grid, but is quite a bit cheaper, in particular because you won't need any backup device (propane generator). You can probably put together such a system for somewhere in the order of $18,000.

Let us calculate for simplicity a life-time of 18 years. Thus, you need to make $1000 per year from selling electricity to the grid in order to draw even. Let us say, you don't consume any electricity youself, but sell everything to the grid. You make 6 kWh per day (assuming you live in a sunny part of the country), i.e., you sell about 2000 kWh per year to the grid. Thus, you would need to get about $0.50 per kWh in order to draw even. Yet, you currently only get about 10 Cents per kWh. Hence the price of FF would have to go up by a factor of 5.

I can only echo your hope that Dr. Cellier continues to contribute.

The response to this post and my own much more meager effort was startling. There is a deep vein of pent-up concern about the clarifying implications of oil decline. Peak Oil analysis has ceased to by a purely analytic exercise. Even the feeling of being on the inside regarding this knowledge has stopped being fun. We have a pretty damn good picture of what's going to happen (at least in broad general terms) with the oil supply. That's all that most of us need to start getting very, very worried.

While I would hate to see the technical strength of TOD diluted by too much emphasis on "soft topics" like TEOTWAWKI, I think the need to have some discussion of consequences is unavoidable and is welcomed by most.

Thanks Dr. Cellier for offering his thoughts on what will likely remain an unpopular subject.

Second, I think it is quite remarkable that Switzerland's government has adopted a "2000 watt" plan, or a reduction in per capita energy use by 64%, even if the target date is a relatively out-there 2050. Can you imagine the US government with such a plan? The Europeans are really thinking about all this differently. I think Europeans are more aware of their pre-fossil fuel history, while Americans tend to think that Life Began with the construction of the interstate highway system. I appreciate Dr. Cellier's tales of Switzerland's own Special Period during World War II, when, somewhat like Cuba today, it was effectively cut off from outside trade.

I personally don't see such a 64% reduction in energy use as a great hurdle. People in cold climates with superinsulated houses have reported that their living spaces can be heated with waste heat from electric devices, and body heat, alone. I think we may return to the idea of a "winter apartment," a small and easy-to-heat living space for winter use (500 square feet for example), which was the rule for almost all of human history. Even the Kings and Queens kept close to the fireplace in winter.

It is quite possible that technological improvements will bring the price of solar power way down, to the point where it may cost $1000 or so of today's dollars to cover one's entire roof with solar panels. That could provide more than enough electricity for a family's use, even at relatively low efficiencies in northern climates.

We have seen that it is entirely possible to enjoy sustainable high yields from Natural Farming techniques, which involve zero fossil fuel inputs and not a lot of human labor input either. I am apparently the first person in the United States to obtain the "Happy Hill" natural rice seed variety from Masanobu Fukuoka's farm in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. He grows it in dry fields without cultivation or weeding. Fukuoka himself -- a commercial farmer -- has all of one full acre of rice in production, which he has farmed continuously for thirty years with increasing yields. That is about the size of the lawn here.

As far as transportation, recent motor-assisted bicycles provide about the best efficiency/cost ratio you can find today. For $1200 investment (bike plus motor) you can make a 225mpg 30mph scooter-bike which would also have minimal maintenance and no insurance. Sure, it seems like a joke today, but full-size SUVs will be a lot funnier in the future if you ask me.

Stuart:

Dennis Meadows does a calculation here for nuclear plants showing how EROI limits rates growth if you hope to keep the system energy positive.

http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Meadows_ASPO...

• Assume 4 year construction time.
• Assume 40 year operating life.
• Assume energy payback is 10.
• One plant starts to give net energy in the 9th year.
• A system building one plant/year gives positive net energy
in the 13th year.
• A system building 10% more plants each year gives
positive net energy in the 15th year.
• A system building 20% more plants each year never breaks
even.

I'm coming late to the thread here, but let me post a couple of questions. The first is that I have not studied the details of the ecological footprint calculations, but I'm a bit dubious that such calculations could be done without huge error bars. Could you point me at whatever is the optimal succinct but technically detailed reference on how the values you quoted are calculated, so I can go educate myself?

You are right, and I am afraid I don't have access myself to such a document.

On the one hand, there is the WWF Living Planet Report that I already referenced earlier. This document is very detailed, but not technical. It lists the composition of the consumed footprint as well as of the available footprint (biocapacity) individually for each nation. However, it doesn't explain, how these figures have been obtained.

On the other hand, there is a Powerpoint presentation by Mathis Wackernagel that he discussed during this year's annual meeting of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, a collaborative research effort of Chalmers University (Sweden), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), MIT (USA), and Tokyo University (Japan). Most of the graphs of my own Powerpoint presentation that I referenced at the bottom of my article are taken from presentations made at that conference. Wackernagel's presentation is somewhat more technical, but unfortunately not very detailed.

In his Powerpoint presentation, Mathis showed the compositions of both the global consumed footprint and the global available footprint, i.e., the biocapacity. This slide is shown below:

The graph shows that we are already using almost all of the good (arable) crop land. There is still quite a bit of grassland available (roughly 50%). This land is currently used by wildlife. However, this is marginal land, i.e., if it is being converted to crop land, it degrades rapidly. The graph shows further that we are already fishing our oceans out a bit faster than they can resupply them with fish. The graph also shows that about one third of all forests are currently being used for logging (timber and fuelwood), whereas two thirds of the forests are still pristine, i.e., can be used by wildlife.

The big problem is the removal of CO₂. We would need almost twice as much forest as we have currently available to remove all of the CO₂ from the atmosphere that we are currently emitting into it.

If we reduce the amount of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere, e.g. by burning less FF or by carbon capture techniques, our consumed footprint will shrink.

Secondly, in one of the comments above, you made an argument that had the form of a reasonable sounding calculation of the number of nuclear power plants or solar power plants per day required to replace fossil fuels. You then leapt to the conclusion that such rates were absurd and couldn't possibly be managed.

This leap doesn't seem to me to follow of necessity. If the nuclear power plants or solar panels (hopefully the latter!) were energy positive, and financially profitable, and did not depend critically on some resource in inadequate supply, then the industry that supplied them could grow exponentially to whatever size was required to fill the need.

So my question is, for these cases of nuclear/solar, what specific constraints do you see that would prevent them scaling as needed?

The main obstacle is time. It takes at least 10 years from the moment a building request for a new nuclear powerplant is submitted to the authorities until the powerplant can be taken on-line. We are running out of time at a faster pace than that.

Furthermore there is still no political will to go down that road. What I most fear is that we'll wait until we don't have enough electricity any longer. At that time, it will be too late to build new nuclear power stations. Yet by then, the political pressure will be huge to generate more electricity at all cost. Hence old nuclear power stations, whose operation license has expired, will be kept on-line beyond their safe operational period, and that is when accidents (meltdowns) are likely to happen. It is not the nuclear technology per se that is unsafe ... but the operation of old nuclear power stations beyond their projected life span is truly dangerous.

Each country needs to judge its own situation independently. As far as Switzerland is concerned, what should happen immediately is that Switzerland should build two new nuclear power stations next to each of the seven existing ones, this time using the excess heat for heating the houses and factories in the vicinity rather than heating the local rivers. Then, when the operating licenses for the existing plants expire (the first license [Beznau] will expire in 2016), new plants will be ready to take their place.

Yet, this is not politically feasible at the current time. Instead, Switzerland is talking about building a bunch of new gas-firing plants, thereby enhancing rather than reducing our dependence on FF.

Concerning solar technology, solar thermal systems pay for themselves rapidly, even in countries with reduced sunshine, such as Switzerland. What Switzerland should do immediately is to pass a law that makes the granting of new building permits dependent on placing solar collectors on the roof. A new single-family dwelling here in Switzerland costs roughly $1,000,000 to build. Adding solar collectors to the roof increases the cost by roughly $15,000. Whereas it may not be acceptable to force people who may not have the cash available at the current time to upgrade their buildings, it is perfectly reasonable to ask people who are going to spend a million dollars to add 1.5% on top of their expenses.

Unfortunately, photovoltaic systems don't pay for themselves, and won't even pay for themselves if and when the cost of FF triplicates. Counting the amount of energy that is consumed by making the PV panels, it is not even clear, how much energy can be saved in this fashion.

Efficient and effective solar electric systems require high-temperature installations, such as solar towers. Unfortunately, those can only be placed in regions with lots of sunshine, preferably in desert regions, like the Sahara. Some countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Libya, would have the cash to build such systems, whereas others, like Algeria or Mali, don't.

What should happen is that international organizations, like the World Bank, offer substantial bank loans to these countries for the construction of such power plants. Once they are operational, these countries will easily be able to pay back these loans.

Whether or not we can win the race against time is actually irrelevant. I personally believe that it is already too late, i.e., that we can no longer avoid energy shortages by replacement technology. However, any and every bit that we can do will soften the impact of these energy shortages and therefore should be done. The sooner we start with it, the better it will be.