Bottleneck by William Catton - A Review
Posted by nate hagens on November 24, 2009 - 10:35am
Humanity's Impending Impasse?
Book ReviewBottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr.Reviewed by George MobusFirst I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves. To a growing number of people it is looking more and more like mankind is about to undergo a most unpleasant transition. One might write such views off as being what kooks and apocalyptic religious fanatics hold to, and we know they are crazy. But over the last five years many deep thinking and well respected people have been sounding some alarms that are not as easily put aside. In 2004 Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in Britain and clearly no intellectual harebrain, wrote Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning, Basic Books. In it he gives humanity about a 50/50 chance of surviving through the century. Not really good chances when you think about it. Last year James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, wrote a sobering call for a massive revision of capitalism and an end to growth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Yale University Press. Like many authors have done, he painted a picture of what was wrong and why, but then pointed to remedies that might presumably fix the problems. That is, if only our leaders and our citizens would see the light and do what is necessary we might avoid total collapse. Most of these authors offer humanity an escape hatch, but point out that we have to be willing to sacrifice substantially, in terms of material wealth, for it to work. The realization that mankind is damaging its planet is certainly not new. Rachel Carson (The Silent Spring, 1962) may have started the trend in increasing awareness that we are doing things, in our zeal to control nature, that were starting to backfire, threatening to leave us worse off if we didn't change our ways and attitudes. Environmentalism has largely operated on this theme for decades. We've been warned of environmental degradation, global warming, and peak oil, and how these are interlinked. We've been made immanently aware of the dangers we have ourselves created. Now William R. Catton, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology at my state's other PhD granting institution, Washington State University, brings on the sequel to his first book in this genre, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, in which he sounded an alarm being heard more frequently. Like Speth, Catton, in that earlier book, pointed out the problems as he saw them, from the viewpoint of a sociologist, and then declared that if we heed these warnings we might yet escape the worst. In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called an population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct. Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return. As to why we are in this state of affairs, Catton calls on several sociological theories surrounding the evolution of culture and especially the development of over-specialization or 'division of labor'. The latter was touted by Adam Smith as the reason we were so efficient in our manufactures. And Catton, like many authors who deplore modern capitalism and corporatism, recognizes that at a time this was indeed a beneficial capacity. Today, however, he says that we overdid it and that the tendency toward deep specialization has tended to dehumanize and isolate each of us from the benefit of interpersonal relations. He further argues that we have come to think of others as instruments, mere means to our own ends. This he says is the end result of taking the abstraction of money as representing wealth too far in our thinking. This idea that once things like money and capitalism, etc. fulfilled good purposes and were good for society as a whole, but have simply been overdone in our modern technologically-driven world, is actually one of the common themes sounded by many writers. It is certainly something I have subscribed to in my evaluation of human affairs. Early in mankind's history, these inventions, these institutions, served a purpose to make man more fit as a species, to quell the negative selective forces of nature and allow humans to succeed evolutionarily. But somewhere along the line humans failed to recognize that too much of a good thing is actually bad. The failure to recognize this is the lack of wisdom, to which I will return in a bit. But to understand how humans got so carried away it is important to recognize, as Catton and others have done, that humans, like all animals, have a biological dictate to maximize their access to energy. For humans this took the shape of learning to control fire, making clothing, building shelters, and later finding additional external energy sources to supplement their bodily abilities. This included the invention of tools and agriculture. And it essentially culminated in the discovery of fossil fuels that allow modern humans incredible power over their environment. Catton renames a subset of Homo sapiens as a 'quasi-species', Homo colossus, those being the people in developed countries who consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to motivate and control machines that do orders of magnitude more work than a human can do with muscle power alone. To achieve this we are combusting carbon to produce CO2 and returning fossil carbon deposits to the atmosphere and oceans after sequestration for millions of years. And it is the rapidity with which this is happening which leads Catton, and others, to conclude that it is infeasible to put the brakes on for this train. That is, you can try to brake, but you won't stop in time to avoid a crash. Unfortunately for mankind, there are now far too many of Homo colossus in the global population. And the damage is done. NASA climatologist James Hanson has claimed that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere should not be over 350 parts per million (ppm) in order to avoid calamitous climate shifts. But we are already at 385ppm and climbing, even though the global recession has slowed the burning of fossil fuels. It just isn't enough to stop let alone reverse the growth in carbon in the air. But beyond the damage done already, and the potential damage to come due to climate changes and sea level rise, Catton sees an impending threat from the fact that we are going to run out of this magical fuel one day. Or at least we will hit a barrier where the cost of extraction exceeds the benefit of having the fuels. When that happens what becomes of Homo colossus? Indeed what happens to Homo sapiens in toto? Even though peoples in developing and underdeveloped nations don't burn the fuels directly, they still rely on the developed world for aid produced by burning those fuels. Catton bases his analysis on the idea of carrying capacity. Fossil fuels have artificially boosted the carrying capacity of earth for human occupancy (if you ignore the damage we've done to other species). We are in overshoot, the theme of his previous book. We are like the cartoon character, Wile Coyote, who would race off a cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner and would remain suspended in mid air until he realized his predicament; then it was too late and he would fall. When the fossil fuels are effectively used up, what will replace them? As things stand now, there simply is no realistic or viable alternative energy source that could scale up to the level needed by modern civilization in time to take over the job. Once again, it's the rate of change that gets us. In spite of continued pie-in-the-sky thinking by even engineers and scientist who should know better, no one has shown how real time solar energy in all of its many forms (thermal, photovoltaic, wind, even hydroelectric) will ever match the power in fossil fuels. These came from ancient photosynthesis over millions of years compressed and cooked into a convenient package over more millions of years. The scope of concentration is literally unimaginable (apparently) yet very serious people dream of capturing current solar influx and replacing fossil fuels with it. They may be serious but they are also dreamers or delusional. While in theory, the total daily influx of solar energy to the earth would provide many times over what we need to sustain our current civilization and provide development for the lesser developed nations, our systems of capture would have to cover gigantic areas of the planet. Our energy storage and distribution systems would have to be radically redesigned and rebuilt. And all of this comes just as we recognize the impacts of declining net energy from fossil fuels; those fuels being needed to subsidize the building of all that energy infrastructure. The root cause of humanity's impending impasse, however, is not his lack of will, or cleverness, or even sufficient energy resources. The root cause is his lack of wisdom. Catton points to this on page 190, speaking about his great-grandson: ...by the time surviving members of his generation have emerged from the coming bottleneck, when he may himself have somewhere a great-grandson he will wish to visit, somehow his contemporaries will have attained the wisdom Linneus implied was characteristic of our species when he named us Homo sapiens. (Emphasis mine) For several years now I have
been pursuing a quest to understand better why our species is not, on
average, wiser than it is, apparently. With all of the history we have
experienced, with all of the science we have learned, with all the cleverness
our kind has for solving local (in time and space) problems, you would
think that we would have developed greater wisdom than we have in fact.
Why haven’t we been able to learn from our mistakes and develop a
society that reflects individual and collective wisdom? What I came
to realize was that the brain capacity for wisdom (which I have boiled
down to: good judgment in complex social issues, strategic thinking,
highly developed systems thinking, and strong moral sentiment, coordinated
by the most recently evolved patch of prefrontal cortex) was a relatively
new emergent capacity coupled with symbolic thinking and language and
second order consciousness (conscious of being conscious) for early
Homo sapiens. But it was evolved, as Catton notes, to meet the needs
of the late Pleistocene existence of our small group-oriented species.
It is not, on average, up to the task of modern complex society. One
of my main conclusions is that our species is simply not sufficiently
wise (or I prefer the term ‘sapient’ to differentiate between a
native capacity and an actualized capability) to deal with the world
we have created. For a more in-depth treatment of this subject, readers
are directed to my working papers at: http://faculty.washington.edu/ It is this lack of inherent wisdom that will keep us, has kept us, from doing the right things to prevent the impending impasse. Catton's 'Prognosis for Humanity', page 206, is alarming. ...with great reluctance and regret, I am compelled to doubt that we can confidently hope to avoid a serious "crash" as the focal human experience of the 21st century—envisioned also as our species having to pass through an ecological "bottleneck". This is by far the most explicit statement of what we would call doom of any author in the popular book trade. There have been many writers, especially in the blogosphere, who have expressed similar conclusions. But I have yet to see a writer of some eminence such as Catton go all out and claim that the end is near. Unfortunately, I happen to agree with him. The question for me is: Will humanity come through this bottleneck with a gene pool competent to meet the challenges of a changed world AND have a stronger native capacity for sapience, for wisdom? Assuming some remnant of humanity does survive, that is no guarantee that our descendants will go on to evolve a better ability to make good, long-term judgments in that future world. Nor are we guaranteed that they will be able to reconstruct anything like modern technology-based society in order to re-achieve a species fitness allowing them to survive and thrive in the very long run. My only complaint with Catton's thesis is that he didn't go far enough in suggesting what those of us who see this coming might do now to save our genus from extinction or, in the case of my concern, to increase the likelihood that our descendants will inherit genetic components leading to higher sapience. He assumes that some humans may survive and the future environment may select for greater wisdom. I'm not so sure that will be the case. His parting words simply express thankfulness that he lived during the epitome of human achievements in science and understanding as well as freedoms to travel the world. My question is: Now what do we do? I have to applaud Catton for writing so honestly about what he has concluded. I have contemplated writing a book on the evolution of what I call eusapience, true sapience, as the future of the genus Homo – Homo eusapiens. Necessarily, the species sapiens must go extinct to allow the rise of a new, wiser, species of humans. And an evolutionary bottleneck would be the most likely mechanism for this to happen. But I have hesitated, realizing this is a message no one wants to hear! Every other author of books on end-of-the-world scenarios at least offers that if we would only come to our senses... the world won't end. William Catton does not do this. Sorry for the spoiler but you should know in advance. Thus this probably isn't a book easily digested by everyone, even though I think everyone who believes themselves to be a critical thinker should read it. The reviewer is an Associate
Professor of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington
Tacoma. He is currently on sabbatical leave studying biophysical economics
and energy-related issues at the State University of New York, Environmental
Sciences and Forestry in Syracuse NY. His blog is Question Everything
at: http://questioneverything. |
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Excellent review, and my vision also.
I struggle with the statement "He assumes that some humans may survive and the future environment may select for greater wisdom.", as it will not be the people currently cultivating this that will necessarily survive, or be selected for (if any of us obviously, as that is the point).
Thanks George
The only way to interpret this is if you accept the basic assumption of Marxism - that available resources are constrained in a fixed manner, and only in a fixed manner.
And that efficiency improvements don't exist. That new technologies don't exist. That we and all methods we currently use are final, perfect and sacred.
If you believe this to be true, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you will end up as a Marxist. For over 4000 years you will find these sort of arguments in just about every civilization, and every time much more damage was done by listening to them than by ignoring them. Nearly every time (yes - nearly) ignoring those limits brought salvation. New technology, new energy sources, new methods of working, or simply emigrating brought respite.
Savings never brought respite, even in the cases were the doomsayers were right, and the natural resources were finished.
If the book is true, 90% of humans (at least) have to die. Do tell, on this site, who's volunteering ?
On this site, all of us have been volunteered for death within the next 100 years. The question is, how many of our deaths will be accelerated by circumstances (and by how much), and how many of us will be replaced by new births?
Recognizing limits isn't treason, it's simple realism.
None of us will be alive in 100 years. I am not being replaced by spreading my genes with a future generation, neither is my brother or his wife. The only thing I will pass on is knowledge, and lots of things for a grand yardsale.
I can't see 6,700,000,000 people lasting more than another 10 years, crash is very close to us.
Charles.
Actually, according to my desktop population counter it's 6,844,100,000 and counting. If you're correct Charles, then Meadows and many others have got it wrong. That would be a "shark fin" peak, following the oil production peak, I guess.
It's just a feeling I get, it might also be my general angst when looking at how people are tending to react in general around this time of year. I have always made my own gifts for Christmas, so buying a lot of fluff was never big for me, but the business of business needs the sales around Christmas (Christ should be in the season, but money and I want's are what most people talk about.) The great depression II has not fully run it's course, this year sales figures HAVE to be good or else. Knowing that the general media is hiding the true nature of the economic mess we are in, hiding the facts about peak oil, generally wanting to have the cake and still get second helpings of dinner.
I have written stories where all these problems I have seen for over 30 years were solved by truly altruistic people. Sort of the Christian Ideal put into a fictional framework, pardon my pun, a Novel idea. What has been getting me down these last few months, is I know that very few people are as altruistic as my fictional characters are written.
Knowing that people are going to die in vast amounts is not a pleasing picture. I Know that a lot of the posters on the Oil Drum know all this, and have still been trying to explain it to others, and make as soft a bed for themselves and others to land on when we all fall off the cliff ahead. But if more people had been paying attention to events around us we would not be in this mess in the first place.
I can see a solution to the mess we are in, but it is impossible for me to do much more than I am doing, which is not enough to bring that solution to fruition, as part of that solution is tied into my Novel Ideal.
I wonder if Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells would of had days like this if they were alive today?
Charles.
I advised my graduate class to enjoy their holiday, go to the beach, etc. They probaby don't need this advise, but one can only do so much preaching about the impending problems. My feeling is a lot of the material wealth loss won't be missed as much as some expect, as it means so little anyway. Think about your last day on this planet. Will piles of gold or other material wealth be foremost on your mind? No, you'll likely reminence. Like Citizen Kane, you'll probably be thinking of those good times with Rosebud. So go spend some quality time with your Rosebud, whatever and wherever it is, you'll be glad you did.
Actually, Marx is the best we have when it comes to the analysis of capitalism, but takes a "Blank Slate" view towards human nature, which is obviously wrong.
Humans overshooting their ecosystem would not be an anomaly, but the norm within biological systems.
We can be more efficient at making rope to hang ourselves with.
Newer evidence indicates that after populating much of Europe and Asia there was a dieoff (likely climatic) and all modern humans can trace their genetic ancestry to a fairly small group of early humans who survived at the southern tip of Africa around 70'000 years ago.
What happened to the climate 70k years ago?
Supervolcano Toba in Indonesia exploded around 73,000 years ago. It killed almost all humans. Less than 10,000 humans survived in Africa.
I think it probably comes down to what your perceive as being "human".
Neanderthals and our ancestors were thriving in Asia and Europe 70,000 to 50,000 odd years ago.
Quite a good book which gets you thinking. http://themandus.org/
You're focusing on arbitrary human categories and labels, not physics. "Marxism" doesn't matter. Getting the fertilizer from point a to point b matters. Getting the power on matters.
Yes, innovation will occur, however to think that it will magically occur on schedule and in a manner guaranteed to solve our energy problems is very likely to be wishful thinking. Some problems are harder than others. We've been working on fusion power and artificial intelligence since the 60s. Yes, there's been innovation, but power is still coal generated, and HAL is not in evidence.
Does this bottleneck have to happen? No. Will it happen? Almost certainly. To avoid the bottleneck, we'd have to drastically reduce population with forced birth control and dramatically increase investment in alternative energy technology, energy storage technology, and energy efficiency. Worldwide, our standard of living would drop dramatically for at least a couple of generations. The changes would be seen as draconian and dictatorial. Yet, this would be the *least* painful solution.
And we would have to follow the Oil Depletion Protocol.
Ian807, Thanks for stating some of my same thoughts for me.
Seeing the *least* painful solution does not seem to be on the minds of those people that can actually start the solution-ball rolling. We humans tend to be to self-centered for our over all own good. Altruism almost seems to be a dying concept.
Now where do we vote for the King of the World to come save us?
(the irony in that statement, might slip past some)
Charles.
Poppycock!
I'm personally as deeply into the business of innovation and as much a believer in possibilities as you're every likely to find. But I'm also a systems engineer, and my engineering judgement is that the world social and economic system that we're living under is in dire shape. Full of perverse incentives and counterproductive feedback paths. Collapse may not be inevitable -- it certainly isn't on the basis of what is physically possible -- but I frankly don't see how it can be avoided.
I'm working on it, as are various others who post here. But I can't say that our chances are very good. We're seriously outgunned by those whose vested interests, influence, and ability to rationalize are leading them to block the necessary changes.
If that's too cryptic, a specific example of the type of inappropriate feedback path I'm concerned about was posted by someone else recently in another thread. It's the history of Westinghouse's attempt to set up factory production of cheap nuclear power plants on floating islands. It was derailed by the Arab oil embargo. Not because it depended on cheap oil, as some might have it, but because the recession caused by high oil prices cut demand for electricity. The utilities that had been the lead customers for the reactors found themselves with surplus capacity, and de-committed.
Under the system as it now operates, the worst possible time to try to implement an alternative energy system is in a deep recession caused by high energy prices. It's going to be really hard to innovate our way around that one!
The Westinghouse solution would still be possible if we could turn off the profit motive of BAU. A solution like that was one of the themes in the Novel I spoke of in another post. We see a way out of our tight fix, but to many people won't let it happen because they need to have a profit, they need growth or else they shoot your idea down.
It goes back to having someone show up on the scene and taking profit out of the mix, just doing things to fix the problems, keeping people feed, and healthy, but not living in McMansions.
For example. A new mandate, No house to be built in the USA would be bigger than say 1,000 square feet (we could go less, but 1,000 is a nice sized 4 person home) It would need to be as energy efficient as possible. Need to gather and store it's own water supply, and treat it's own waste water. Making this a type of Model Home, different floor plans, and add on spaces for extra people are options. All the new homes would be built with energy capture devices, solar, waste heat, whatever that can be designed for the region in which the house is built.
Every new structure built that housed people, would have to meet standards like those.
There are tonnes of things we can do, but no one is willing to do them on vast enough of a scale. There are people out there building people and energy friendly homes, just not enough of them.
As a trained architect, both in structure and landscape I see a lot in current thinking that can be used, and a lot that needs to be thrown out.
Charles.
*At least* 90% will die. And who survives is going to be very random. Having a "doomstead" will be a positive factor in survival of one and one's own, but there will probably several "rats", those who can live on almost anything, inured in childhood to hard living, physically small and toughened by genetics and a lifetime of physical labor, not smart enough to worry overmuch or constrain their procreation, to every forward-thinking, provident, doomsteader.
Things are about to become chaotic enough that it's going to be essentially a lottery. You know, those things we intellectual types look down on, along with the players of them. Now we're all about to become players, how ironic.
I need to add that I don't look down on the type I refer to as "rats" I admire them. I had to survive on the "rat" model for a good part of my life, and it makes me smile that the rich guy's pool boy probably has a better chance of making it through the genetic bottleneck than the rich guy.
Hey Fleam, are you still making guitar picks? *hoping my memory of that is correct*
If I were ever that Rich Guy, I'd know how to service my own pool.
I'm still surviving on less than 9,000 a year. I am not of #rat# size but have a lot of those skills. But I have not, nor will procreate.
Rats in a Maze comes to mind now, and I can't see even my small city being overly full of people after it all. Almost all the Homeless folks are dependent on handouts of some sort or another, and few people have Doomsteads because it's not on their radar. To many BAU folks here abouts.
Well cheers, nice to see a post by you.
Charles.
The only way to interpret this is if you accept the basic assumption of Marxism - that available resources are constrained in a fixed manner, and only in a fixed manner.
And that efficiency improvements don't exist. That new technologies don't exist. That we and all methods we currently use are final, perfect and sacred.
This is false. You are making the assumption that tech and efficiency **will** save us. How is that any more valid than the what you criticize?
We have seen consumption overtake efficiency time and again. What happened in the US after the '70's? 30%+ increase in efficiency, but consumption rose above levels of that time. Why? Population, at least in part.
I would expect that any die off would select for something like engineering cleverness--ability to get short run improvements, by putting things together in a way that works better. I don't think this has much to do with wisdom.
Wisdom seems to me to be a way of looking at things from a greater perspective, as to what works for the long run. It has been studied through the religions of the world and through philosophy. Now recently, economics has come up with its view of what is important and right. Even sociology has chimed in with some thoughts.
Clearly, a lot of what passes for wisdom today is anything but--Our mega financial institutions, and how they are run, making huge amount of $$ for a lucky few--Our reliance on limited resources. I don't see how this will be selected for.
I don't think we really know what long-term characteristics will be selected for. In the past, organized religions have been important in passing down wisdom, and I expect this will continue to be the case--but perhaps different religions than we know today.
Religion today is one of the factors enhancing and forcing our extinction. As a natural phenomena it has provided fitness in the past, often acting as an insurance policy when in smaller groups.
Today it is one of the major obstacles to our survival, as Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, etc have so eloquently and thoroughly proved.
The "Belief in the Belief in Religion" needs to be examined, and removed from the censorship that has prevented analysis.
Gail, I do believe it is part of the human experience, and a natural phenomena.
Let us hope that the survivors (if any), will have more wisdom as to how to approach this evolutionary predicament.
Gail,
I'm not saying this will be the case (selection for greater sapience). Rather I am saying that is my hope. None of us can decipher what will be selected for or against in reality. We don't even have a notion of what the future world will be like for survivors. We can speculate, certainly. We have some reasons to think the climate regime will be quite different from today's. We can consider some kind of conservation of some of our scientific culture's hard won knowledge as a platform for future cultures. But no one is privy to second-guessing the way evolution will play out.
Fittingly this topic arises on the anniversary of Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species!
George
Gail, natural selection does not select for just one characteristic. Though engineering cleverness would surely be one important characteristic, it would not likely be the most important.
Picture in your mind a time when things are bad, I mean really bad. Picture a time when everything collapses, a time when food and shelter must be grubbed from the earth or taken from someone else. Picture a time of great dying, a time when perhaps one in ten survives. In such a world what characteristics would a person need to possess to increase their chances of surviving?
In such a world engineering cleverness would certainly be an asset but that alone would not ensure your survival. Those who eventually do survive will probably have far more in common with Attila the Hun than Thomas Edison.
Easter Island
Ron P.
It seems Attila might have been better able to see and take advantage of natural talents on the level of a Thomas Edison and then harnessed those talents to his own benefit. So my guess is that if new civilizations are to arise from the ashes of our own then natural leaders such as Attila will create a space for future Edisons to thrive. Perhaps because of my Hungarian ancestry my bias is a tad more pro Hun than average. And to those who wish to challenge my point of view I have a few lances that need to be decorated with some fresh human heads and then carried by my horsemen through the local village...;-)
http://asianhistory.about.com/od/profilesofasianleaders/p/AttilaProf.htm
Hi Fred,
Well.... Gonna nitpick here a bit.
The "Huns" were probably a mixed racial group of waring migrants in the 5th Cent.
The "Magyars" came into European history 4 centuries later and were tags with the false name "Hungarians" in memory of Attila. He obviously had made an impression the few centuries earlier..
Cheers, Dom
Dom,
I'm packing for a camping trip so this will be a very short reply. If you want to discuss this topic drop me a line my email is on my profile.
Magyarország literally means country of the Magyar's in the Hungarian language.
As far as the tribes themselves the Magyars and the Huns were certainly not of the same origins.
BTW most Hungarians are reasonably familiar with their own history.
Ron, you didn't read far enough. The website you provided is debunking that theory.
"The faulty notions presented in these theories began with the racist assumptions of Thor Heyerdahl and have been perpetuated by writers, such as Jared Diamond, who do not have sufficient archaeological and historical understanding of the actual events which occurred on Easter Island. The real truth regarding the tremendous social devastation which occurred on Easter Island is that it was a direct consequence of the inhumane behavior of many of the first European visitors, particularly the slavers who raped and murdered the islanders, introduced small pox and other diseases, and brutally removed the natives to mainland South America. Readers interested in more detailed information regarding the inaccurate historical interpretations concerning the causes of Easter Island’s ecological devastation, its so-called civil war, and the genocide caused by European slavers will appreciate the following article written by Benny Peiser."
"...why does Diamond maintain that Easter Island's celebrated culture, famous for its sophisticated architecture and giant stone statues, committed its own environmental suicide? How did the once well-known accounts about the "fatal impact" (Moorehead, 1966) of European disease, slavery and genocide - "the catastrophe that wiped out Easter Island's civilisation" (Métraux, ibid.) - turn into a contemporary parable of self-inflicted ecocide? In short, why have the victims of cultural and physical extermination been turned into the perpetrators of their own demise?
This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond's environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny."
Nick,
Are you sure you are on solid ground in respect to Easter Island?
No, I haven't researched it. OTOH, I've seen discussions of this several times, and it does look reasonably likely to me that Diamond made a mistake.
The quotes above are from Ron's source.
I've read Diamond's Collapse, and heard some critical scientific presentations on various aspects of Diamond's scenario, which is based upon a synthesis of others' work on the island. To be fair here, Diamond was referring to a time before European contact. That of course does not negate or diminish the probable severe impact of later European contact upon the islanders.
One of the presentations I heard was by an anthropogist that was questioning the role of the Polynesian rat versus human impact upon the large date palms on the island. There is physical evidence that the rats were eating the date nuts, which would doom those palms. The rats were either an inadventent or possibly a deliberate introduction by the colonizing Polynesians. Probably the former, but hard to eliminate the latter as a possiblity. If so, they sure misjudged the impact of the rats.
To be fair here, Diamond was referring to a time before European contact.
As I understand it, that was Diamond's intent, but his critics suggest that he got it wrong - that he attributed some of the phenomena caused by European impacts incorrectly to the earlier behavior of the island's inhabitants.
I would be very cautious taking anything from the journal Energy and Environment, the source of the article in Ron's post. It has little-to-no credibility:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Energy_and_Environment
No, that doesn't look good.
Anyone have good sources for the Easter Island question?
I think it's important to recognize that, to varying degrees, human evolution operates via DNA, brain programming ("software," not "hardware," which, on both an individual and group level, appears to continue to evolve after birth, and doesn't have a strict, sexual mode of transmission), and group culture (consisting of both "software" and built-environment "hardware"). The last two have often been refered to as "memes," though the exact definition thereof seems variable and imprecise.
On your example of "engineering cleverness"--I think this is a good example of a trait that may be selected for across all three of these mechanisms. To the extent that we want to guide or facilitate emergence of a trait, either individually, locally, or globally, we should look to all of these mechanisms as potential levers.
Also, if anyone has read Julian Jaynes' "The Evolution of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," Jaynes offers a very controversial and interesting mechanism for human adaptation to environmental changes...
Could not find my copy of Julian Jaynes' "Origin of Conciousness" just now. Who failed to return it to me, or did I carelessly give away this unique work? A lot happened around 1250 BC. Someone "Homeric" wrote down some ballads some 400 "dark" years later. Voila!
It's a great companion of Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" and "Gone to Croatan", by the way. And further, didn't Tuchman claim there were pockets of peace and productivity all over Europe during the "calamitous l4th century", FWIW?
I'm a pessimist about natural selection for wisdom. When life is dangerous and short, all thinking becomes short term. What's the point of saving for the future and waiting longer to have babies if there's a good chance you won't be alive to enjoy it?
As anyone who's had one knows, babies take an astonishing amount of work. Pregnancy is also incredibly draining on a woman's body. This is why most women, if they have access to birth control and some small amount of control over their lives, severely limit the number of times they are pregnant. Women actually are this rational.
In this regard, the age at which a woman first becomes pregnant is just as important as the number of times. Birth control and sex education certainly help. Without them, young women would more likely fall for a slick-talking charmer who can flash around a bit of cash, and damn the consequences of getting pregnant. It's short term thinking all around, with obvious disastrous consequences as far as selecting for long term thinking.
But 70k years ago when we went through the last bottleneck humans began to wear clothing and create beads (for decoration?). This would seem to suggest more than just better physical qualities were selected at the time.
I agree.
Imagine the world of 100,000 years ago.
Humans were preyed upon by all kinds of fauna. We evolved to out-compete our rivals and use the environment to our advantage.
I think we are more likely to devolve if we are reduced to a very small number.
We won't need to "invent" mechanisms to conquer the environment, fauna and flora because the resources to do so, will be to all practical purposes exhausted.
IMO the world of tomorrow will see humans reduced to scavenging. What changes that inflicts on us is anyone's guess but I don't think it will be greater intelligence. My guess is we'll get a lot smaller and scavenge at night to beat the heat, that may mean bigger eyes and better hearing but who the hell knows. We have to be reduced to a very few breeding pairs by hardship to be able to come out the other side any different.
In any case if we do change, are we still human? If not, then we would have gone extinct.
The "survivors" in the coming years will not be intellectuals or people of great wealth and power. Such people may briefly hold out, but they will simply postpone the inevitable for a short spell. Those most likely to squeeze through the bottleneck are primitive hunter gathers and subsistence farmers and herders. Sadly, there are few aboriginal societies that have not be substantially altered by modern civilization. True subsistence cultures retain the knowledge base and the flexibility to adapt to severe environmental challenges.
Yes, Hightrekker, I think we have Buckley's chance on the other side of the bottleneck. The psychological shock of not having what it takes when life gets gritty and dirty will take out a lot of people. It is going to be especially shocking for people in the emerging economies who are riding what I call the 'second wave of delusional prosperity'. Unfortunately, a lot of people who have been survivors so far (Somalia, Central and Northern Asia, and parts of the Andes in South America) will succumb to civil war and the effects of climate change.
The only small hope I have is that the Neolithic Andaman Islanders will pull through. They have had the wisdom not to play with fire-literally.
I will read this book in the near future.
It seems to me that a really hard crash is definitely in the cards but after reading quite a lot of doomer literature I can't see that anybody has made a strong case for the actual extinction of the human species.
The Earth is a very large place and it is likely that while large portions of it currently populated with homo sap might very well become uninhabitable it is not likely that this would happen silmantaneously over the entire planet.
Thus there would be some pockets of humanity left here and there sufficient to preserve the species. Due to thier relatively small numbers, dispersion, and probable near subsistence level lifestyles or economies , these populations would not be able to further degrade the overall environment significantly.
( I am interested in hearing why those better informed than I am consider it likely that we will become extinct given our adaptability and dispersion over the entire globe. )
It follows that the overall biosphere or ecology would shortly begin to rebound, although it would probably be so far far removed from that existing today due to climate change and loss of diversity that it will be mostly unrecognizable to a layman.
Those of us with litlle kids need not give up hope for them.
I tend to agree with you, that there will be some pockets of humanity. I think the extinction thesis derives from a loss of knowledge about how to survive in our environment without a complex society to support us. It is certainly true that this knowledge is totally lost now, probably disappeared with the last of the Bushmen in Africa.
If small bands of people can maintain enough complexity for a long enough time to either a) re-learn the old ways or b) rebuild complexity on a more stable basis, then I believe we'll likely make it. I'm confident that we will, but just not many of us, and certainly not many in the USA--we began this country by exterminating those that had such knowledge in the largest genocide in modern history. Other parts of the world (even in the Americas) still have a traditional base, and while much of it is eroded, they can probably build off of it.
i haven't read the book, only the (overly self-referential) "review", but i tend to agree with you (as opposed to catton i think) when you say...
there are many people on earth who are currently living anything but the colossus lifestyle.
on a side note, i like that colossus coinage, but i think it suggests too much strength/control and not enough vulnerability.
True, but even the poorest of the poor countries subsist to some degree off the production of the colossus countries: things like food aid and cheap manufactured goods like steel blades and surplus clothing. Anyone a fan of The Onion?
"African Child Loves His 'World Champion Seahawks' T-Shirt"
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45304
funny stuff! and definitely, there is likely to be a whole heckuva lot of hardship when energy prices rise. i'm not arguing that, but then again... there is a whole heckuva lot of hardship now - even here in our "colossus country."
Places where food aid is needed to survive will not be places where people will be living until later after they have died off, and come back to fill in later.
Places were food is there if you know where to look, or even have a vague Idea of how to feed yourself if you can't go to the grocery store to get it will be okay.
Just because the kids wear T-shirts from China(US team names), before dressing in western wear they dressed in tribal colors and styles, and we will go back to that much faster than you'd think.
There are enclaves dedicated to surviving catastropy and emerging on the other side. The guy that pointed me to Campbell's Dieoff.org years ago used to take a "hiatus" every year to something he called "The Foundation". He was a chemist (his former company freezes animal sperm and embios and I assumed he was doing work for a private research foundation). I later joked that he was involved with something like Asimovs Foundation. He and his family have moved and their new address is a mail forwarding outfit in Texas. Kind of funny. It is well known that Mormons have survival doctrines and possibly facilities designed to provide long term survival for a group. Other "arks" are known to exist so maybe enough could make it.
is it "kind of funny" to you, ghung? i remember your comment from a few weeks ago:
considering your outlook and your own extensive preparations, i'd think you'd respect and admire energy expended this way. no?
Bert,
The "Kind of funny" part refers to the fact that this guy and his family up and moved suddenly and left a mail forwarder as their new address. If I was part of some "foundation" as in Asimovs books, I would keep its existance and location secret and at somepoint might get "the call" that means its time to go. It could just be that he's in the witness protection program or something. Who knows? Bio-chemist. Deciple of Campbell. "Foundation" reference. Mysteriously moves away breaking social bonds. No known location. Great story line, huh? (Ralph, if you read this, Email me. You know where.)
My preparations are nothing on the scale of what would be required to out-last what is described in these books. At times I wish I was more remote, but I know that at some point the "have-not hoard" may show up to take whatever preparations I have put in place. I just want to have a chance in the event of a slower decline. In the mean time, I can say I tried. My older sister thinks it's just a hobby.
The Mormon millennium-ark
You need an annual total of 300 lbs (136 kg) of grain products per person.
beans .... 100 lbs (45 kg) per person
fat or oil ....20 lbs (9 kg) per person
vegetables ?? ... 150 lbs (68 kg) per person per year
http://www.millennium-ark.net/News_Files/LTAH_Food_Store6b.html
Interesting in that we previously talked about growing all your own food/calories for a year.
here is one example of what you would need on a Plant Based Diet
That's under 2000 calories a day. Be tough for anyone doing labor unless they're small.
You can go down to 700 calories a day on a CRD and still do physical training although I dont think it would cut it with 8 hours labour a day. Getting the right amounts of vitamines and minerals on such a diet is difficult though and requires some calculation.
Dieoff.org was Jay Hanson's baby. He still has dicussion on his yahoo group. Post's a topic and they hash it out for a month. I am not the mailing list, but don't read much of it.
It used to be the site to go to get your doomer news.
Charles.
Your right. I knew it was Hanson. Been a while (and I'm still a little hung from my B'day)
Happy Birthday, I have one of the those coming up middle of next month. Another day older, Clink Clink and rack up the pool game to you.
Edit above, I am on* the list, just not posting.
I'll be 46, what was your damage?
Charles.
I don't see survival as needing an overly complex society. Sure Knowledge will be lost, not everything we use today will be a tool for those that come after us. But like a child picking up a rock to chew on, we will learn that not everything we stick in our mouths is edible.
Without some pathogen killing us all off, I think that there will be those that will rise out of the ashes we leave behind. We might have to learn how to use yeast to make fine wines all over again, or how to weave silk might be lost to the ages. But we should be able to grow back to a point where we'd be able to form new kinds of societies that pattern themselves after those that have gone on in the past, even though their might not be a record of them remembered by anyone in a 1,000 years.
We might not be able to go to the moon ever again, but I am sure we will not die out so easily as some people have painted our future.
Charles.
I keep a couple of yeast cultures for my mead making. They can die off and be left for months before reactivation by improving their environment (adding water lowering the alcohol concentration) and/or supplying more energy in the form of honey.
There will always be some yeast cells surviving in the lees (crud at the bottom of the carboy) even if the only thing they have left to feed on is other dead yeast cells.
Old,
Thanks for the comment. And maybe I can clarify a bit. Both Catton and I believe there will almost certainly be survivors of our species, most likely in small pockets of successfully localized communities. I don't think a crash MEANS that humans will go extinct. But this is the meaning of bottleneck.
The question is what would the future evolution of the offspring of survivors look like?
No one can make a case FOR extinction per se. All we can say is that by what we know about how evolution works, extinction is a distinct possibility. What I envision is that Homo will further evolve because of the really different conditions that we see obtaining after the bottleneck event. Any human survivors will have a whole new set of environmental challenges to face. And these will almost certainly select for different traits in future humans.
What many people don't appreciate is that humans have been evolving right along since the earliest recognizably (by anatomy) sapiens emerged. We have co-evolved with culture (consider the retention of lactase activity in adults in cultures that relied on bovines for sustenance). There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that many ethnic traits were in the process of differentiating us into multiple subspecies based on allopatric dispersion. There is even some evidence that we continue to evolve through mate selection in a sympatric fashion. We are still one species, technically. But we are probably not as close to our ancestors as was once believed.
All of this is by way of explaining that at some point in a future, very different world, our species will give rise to another, just as prior species of Homo gave way to us, Neanderthals being the last instance of two species of Homo co-occupying the same regions. Just as the Neanderthals were out competed by sapiens, so I suspect some newer incipient species of man will replace sapiens. It is in that sense that I would hope for the continuance of the genus and not worry about the species. I just also hope that the future environment will put our genus back on the track of evolving more advanced sapience.
The other option is that no variants on the basic sapiens line develop the wherewithal to survive in that future world. In that case the species and genus are doomed in the same way we observe endangered species today going extinct. If we actually do understand evolution, we have to be prepared to accept this as a possibility. Nothing in biology stays the same forever.
George
Yes-
We continue to evolve.
There are numerous but still relatively subtle differences between the various human races that have arisen as the result of living in different environments with different selective pressures.
All that is necessary for a geographically forced speciation is time and a changed environment plus in our special case one more thing-a loss of our ability to travel nearly at will world wide , which keeps our gene pool relatively homogenized.
Localized speciation is a concept which I am less familiar-this is a concept which I understand in principle but given the sexual nature of our species I cannot see it happening without a geographical seperation.Finches might choose thier mates based on subtle variations in song, behavior, or markings but men don't.My guess is that any sub group arising would be continually reabsorbed into the larger and more dominant group.
Of course a cultural division strong enough to prevent intermarriage could concieveably arise and persist for a long enough period for speciation to take place but this would apparently take a minimum of a hundred thousand years or more.
Don't forget women have a say in this matter as well! We don't have solid evidence for humans in the way we do for chiclid fishes in Lake Victoria (classic examples of sympatric speciation), but there actually is some evidence that even with mobility, some behavioral traits have selective advantage in female choices (e.g. men still compete for notice by women). So guessing based on intuition might not provide a good guide.
In biology no rule seems to have no exceptions.
1) Several may have arisen. There is actually a serious attempt to trace the genetic influence over brain development that leads to predominantly conservative vs. liberal interpretations of reality, and hence behavior. Who knows, maybe there is a subspecies of Homo sapiens repubicans and one of H. sapiens liberalis!
2) It might take a lot less time than the gradualist interpretation would have it. It all depends on the strength of the selection pressure. And in sexual selection, the pressure is high (birds of a feather, you know). I've read recently about evolutionary explanations for obesity, autism, and the above political persuasions. All claim significant genetic concentration within just a few generations! On top of that, there is also some evidence that our modern higher mobility is actually accelerating the effect rather than diffusing it. One study found that kids who go off to college, away from home, tend to marry (or its modern equivalent) someone more closely matched along several genetic/behavioral dimensions, than kids who attend colleges near home (and in a anecdotal note, marry their high school sweetheart). Another strong barrier for mixing isn't race, it's class. The list goes on.
One thing I've been learning about evolution is that it is much more complex than the simple Darwinian selection model. It is much more subtle than classical models of speciation. For example, we now realize that a substantial part of more recent human evolution isn't just in the coding genes (protein coding segments) but in the complex control network we used to call junk DNA, and epigenetic factors. As I said, guessing isn't a good strategy when thinking about this stuff. Speculation based on best understanding is all any of us can do, so long as we phrase it as such.
Fwiw,I intended "men" in the sense of mankind both male and female but it is obvious you are much better informed in this area than I am,although I have heard about some of the new data and theory you mention.
Thanks for the long replies, today I have learned quite a bit.I try to keep up but the faster I go the behinder I get-unfortunately I am only an amatuer and collect no salary or benefits for my efforts.
Maybe I can add a couple of new biology books to my winter reading list.
Long live TOD.
It's like breeding Betta splendens (siamese fighting fish) several factors come into play. The male builds the nest, but if the female does not like it or him, she can kill him, or just destroy the nest. As a breeder you have to start over with the pair, or find another female to mate with the male.
You also have to Speculate a lot on the genetics of the fish you breed, even when you have crossed and matched lines for several generations, odd things can still show up. Many of the traits you now see in the breeders pages of today did not exist 20 years ago. My first wife and I had one of the formost pages on Betta's online in the mid 90's, it's still out there, but has not been updated since 2001, and won't be anytime soon. Anyway, color traits were the hardest to figure out and I've learned a lot about genetics from the experience.
One of the issues I have with some of the more recent speculation you mention above is that whenever a study is put out there in the media, people tend to think all the information is true. What we don't know about our own genetic code fills more pages than what we do know about it. Pushing for faster Genome mapping, More individual's complete maps in the database. Genomics is one of the fields of study where faster and bigger computers will be needed to process the data streams. Until we understand what the Genome of as many different humans look like, we can't say for certain if much of the speculation we see in some of the studies is actually holding any water or not.
We seem to be at that juncture where we need a complex society, and high orders of energy use to understand the things we need to know to help ourselves survive, and also find ourselves destroying the very ability to sustain that complex society.
Does Homo sapien computerius win out over Homo sapien nukethemall? News at 11, see the fight live on your local cell phone.
Charles.
Not only lactose tolerance, but Sickle Cell protection against malaria, the SDF1-3'UTR-801G-A gene protection against AIDS, plus we are getting longer legs through sexual selection, etc.
George
H. sapiens has defined Evolution in such as way as to imply that there is always "upward" or "foward" progress on the tree. In other words, if H. sapiens "evolves" it will be to some higher level.
This isn't how natural selection works, necessarily. Natural selection chooses traits that are successful in helping a species to adapt to a particular set of environmental conditions. One animal can branch out into multiple subspecies laterally.
There's no "forwards" or "backwards" about it. Just adaptation.
When it comes to human adaptation, there used to be several species of human on the planet - H. sapiens out-competed those other species, so now we are the only branch living at the moment.
There's no reason to think that our evolution will be "forwards" in the way we imagine "more wisdom". It could go in any of several different lateral directions, especially if populations get split apart from each other by geographic constraints.
Most recent evidence shows we out-competed Neanderthals, and possibly H. erectus, by having the physical stamina (by means of upright posture and a certain musculo-skeletal frame) to pursue animals for long distances. I've heard it described as having a more energy-efficient physical construction than Neandethals, who, apparently, needed 5000 plus calories a day to support their shorter, more muscular physiology.
The large brain, which gives us some of our cultural attributes, is theorized to be a byproduct of our ability to trap more animals, and make use of the surplus energy to build more complex societies. Burning stuff enabled us to cook food, thus making it more easily digestible, and more nutrients available. Cooking together assisted in developing tribal culture.
Once we return to an environment which is rather lower on the energy scale, and we have a smaller energy surplus, the complex society will diminish. IMHO, it will be physical attributes which determine how we adapt to our changed circumstances.
Less energy will mean less food. People will adapt by getting smaller. Smaller people, smaller brains. Less complexity.
If propensity to survive disease is a factor, those of us who have lowered resistance to disease due to our historically recent reliance on modern sanitation and antibiotics, for example, may have a lower chance of survival than populations that are still co-evolving with the world's pathogens.
The question to ask is, who is wiser - H.sapiens, who has occupied the planet for only a short time, and is destroying it with our big brain, or H. neanderthalensis, that occupied the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.
Maybe it is large brains that will turn out to be the maladaptive strategy, long term.
I'm wondering what gave you the impression that I was claiming that evolution was progressive? If you have read some of my comments here or have read my blog series on sapience you would see that I have done my homework in the nature and mechanisms of evolution. Also note that teleonomy is not the same as teleology.
If I misread something, my apologies. I'm not familiar with your other work. Possibly it's something to do with the idea that we will come out "wiser" after the bottleneck. I don't see "smarter" and "wiser" as being necessarily the same. If that was attributable to Catton, rather than yourself, my error.
For those interested in the differences (but interrelationships) between intelligence and wisdom, I highly recommend:
Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1990). Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.
The interrelationships are not simple! But clearly there are different attributes and processes involved in both, and different functions performed. Makes for fascinating reading.
Another of Sternberg's work (edited) that will make you think twice the next time you are tempted to use the words intelligent or smart when you really mean wisdom:
Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.
I would add 'Can Be So SEEMINGLY Stupid.' If you read it, you'll get what I mean.
Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid
Looks interesting - I'll pick it up at the library.
Given that humans live just about everywhere that they can find food and water, from cold to hot climates. I don't see our future die-off as killing all of us. Unless what kills us is a global killer type of event, and these are more rare than popular culture would lead you to believe.
I've researched for stories how to kill off the whole human population. Unless the pathogens kill totally 100% there is always some that survive. If a pathogen were to use human reproduction against us, we might all die off from that route. But you would need to taint every living human or our food chain with some form of pathogen to kill us all off. I have written a story where I explained how that happened, but it is as far as I know still fictional.
So unless you can kill off the global food chain to the point that humans can't survive, I think we will have some of us still lurking around in a 1,000 years. Even though they might not know who made all those odd structures all over the world.
Charles.
The Earth is a very large place. If we can get through this without the extensive use of nuclear weapons, I think the odds on some of us surviving are fair to good.
Who will get through the bottleneck? is a very good question.
I live in Japan where the number of 18 year olds peaked in 1991! The birthrate hovers between 1.2 and 1.3 and the population is in a decline that accelerates. The economy went through a massive pumped up bubble before it crashed back in 1989. At the moment one-third of Japan`s factories are idle. It is certain that all of these phenomenon are related to FF energy availability and cost.
In short Japan is a great place to experience severe peak-oil withdrawal syndrome, if you`re into studying that (and I am!).
My observations on who will get through this crisis are related to my observations of what is happening here.
First of all, the crisis in the birthrate has mostly happening among the poorest and least educated. Because of costs of raising kids. I think lots of manual workers don`t have kids or get married. and this has been true for a while.
The elite educated people (bankers, govt workers) have kids, but only 1 or 2 or 3.
The uneducated can work with their hands and live simply and they are also in the countryside. I think they will be the ones who will be doing better as this crisis continues. Little by little the rich city people`s lifestyle (basically it dumps cement, effluent, garbage dumps, etc. on the countryside) will stop hampering the lifestyle of the poor in the countryside. They will have a chance. The rich will find it impossible to get enough to live on. Little by little practical, useful, even uneducated people will have more of a chance than the rich elite. It will be quite an amazing of a turnaround because for so long in this country the elite well dressed, well-spoken city person has been the model, the ideal and the dream.
If that is true, it is a unique trend among developend contries. Normally it's the other way around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
http://spinner.cofc.edu/chrestomathy/vol3/parker.pdf?referrer=webcluster&
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1787989/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W4M-4NH6N8N-1...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W4M-4BD5SB5-1...
What are your sources? Or is that only some sort of "personal-feelings"? Because normally the kognitive well-situated and best educated (it is not linked 1:1 i know) are the first with falling birthrates and their rates fall depest and stay there.
The carbon capture post (Euan Mearns, TOD:Europe today) combined with your review of Catton's latest invokes in my mind an image of a bunch of little Alladins desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle (or in our neck of the woods, "trying to get the cork back in the Pig's butt"). If we are indeed in overshoot as he states, how then to proceed?
This is an excellent review of a very important book, thanks for posting it. It is really hard for me to envision how humanity is going to survive this calamity. We are so far into overshoot and so totally dependent on fossil energy. And we have evolved to fight and kill each other when faced with resource scarcity and population pressure, like our cousins the chimpanzee. Our large brains are maximized for reproductive success and survival coupled with modern weaponry capable of massive destruction ... its really too horrible to contemplate. I'm thinking Permian extinction.
Cattons book is going to be on my Christmas giving list.
SD,
As a super doomer, I see little chance that our species will gain sufficient wisdom to truly transition. In fact, as you state, we will fight and kill each other for resources. My only hope (and that's all it is) is that we will have Great Depression II leading to a re-thinking of how society should be structured and function.
Todd
Last week I purchased Greer's new book The Ecotechnic Future, which covers this ground - what society might evolve into post-peak. Haven't started into it as of yet, I understand it's, like the Long Descent, largely sourced from his blog. He envisions humanity making use of the copious amounts of left over material we have lying around, for one thing; one striking example from the first book was car alternators being driven by people driving stationary bicycles, an inefficient way to generate power for sure, but it would work, and we have a frickin' mountain of used alternators out there.
Also good for wind generators, and part of the basis for my build out plan. (See my blog.)
Cheers
I agree that division of labor has been overdone. It is hard to have much resiliency in a system that is as complex as ours. If we had a lot less specialization, with many people performing essentially similar basic tasks around the world, it would be a lot easier to "power down" to, say, 80% or 60% of where we are now. With so much specialization, there is much more chance that the complex system will cease to operate, and we will have no simple system to replace it.
This is a very good point and a conclusion i also made some time ago - but only a very few get the point (fewer then even get PO). I design Machine tools and am now working on a energy-efficiency project (design Machine Tools which need less energy) of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Germany for machine Tools and production in general as a scientist. The systems are getting more and more complex. They get better but also fragiler and more non-linear because the parameters you have to consider are growing to insane numbers. Fewer and fewer people can handle it and more and more are involved on on single system.
But the problem is there is no alternative because technology-evolution does increase the complexity of (technical) systems inevitable in most cases. And that's all which can save us in the long run, because some day this planet will head up (sun-process), with or without man-made effects.
Look at a computer or smart-phone which is dealing with quantumn-mechanic effects (tunneling becaus of nano-structures) allready and than look at the 14-year old girls dealing with them smoking and knowing nothing at all when you drive-by on buss-stops (i live in germany, so we have some) early in the morning.
The problem is that our technology and systems are getting more and more complex but the individual will not catch up and not get smarter (in fact i suggest the average person will soon start getting less smarter because of dysgenic tendencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenics). So one day we will not longer be capable of dealing with our technology or at least the technological evolution will stop or getting slower - than and only than we are finished. And PO can make this happen (can, not must) because if society breaks appart and the complex technical systems are no longer hold on-line, the end can occur relatively fast.
A solution? Getting smarter. That can only mean in the long run becoming kybernetic. It's the only solution for mankind. If it will not happen, whe are doomed for shure!
Yes, it does tend to in a competitive environment where the requirement is to produce the highest performance, most cost-effective tool possible.
That's the problem we have to somehow get around.
Hi dare100em,
And perhaps more and more fragile.
I suspect that much of the computer software that underlies the business systems we depend upon in our daily lives suffers from a combination of extreme complexity, minimal standards, and very poor quality control. Although retired for several years now, for many years I worked with fairly large scale computer software systems (mostly supply chain logistics) that keep our economy humming along. Perhaps things have improved (but I doubt it) regarding software standardization and quality control. I observed many systems that were extremely fragile and needed constant patching to keep running. I fear that it would not take much of a disruption to cascade failures through many of our “just in time” supply systems, financial systems, and other Information Technology (IT) systems. I suspect that our capacity to adapt these system to rapidly changing circumstances, if our skilled labor force is compromised in any way – is near nil.
What happens next time there is large CME (coronal mass ejection) will our computer systems be able to handle it? Or will it happen when the systems have already failed for other reasons, and it'll just be a bunch of pretty lights in the skies over what used to be Miami?
Have Homo sapien computerius gotten to smart to fail?
Charles.
Gail, I totally agree.
The 'free-marketer' will tell you that more specialisation is always good for society, but common sense tells us otherwise. Take my local supermarket for instance. The women on the checkouts (it is almost always women) are very nice and pleasant but with the best will in the world one could by no means describe them as well educated and certainly not in the upper quartile of intellect. Sorry, that may sound snobbish but it is the reality. They will be earning minimum wage plus a few pennies so that the company can say in their corporate literature that they always pay more than the minimum.
Now, over the last year or so about four check-outs have been removed and in their place have been installed self-service checkouts. They are touted as being helpful to the shopper in a hurry but in actual fact there is no time saved in using them. The idea is that one deposits the shopping basket on the left hand side and the computer weighs the contents, then the shopper is trusted to scan each item through, placing each article into a plastic bag on the right side where the shopping is weighed again, and if it tallies with the start weight then all is good. The shopper pays and leaves, having done the job of a humble check-out clerk.
I should state that I am no Luddite. Far from it, I am a computer programmer. But I have such a huge loathing for these machines that every time I see them in the store I start foaming at the mouth. They are doing (poorly) the job that a not-very-bright human could easily do. They are removing even less human-to-human contact which is the basis of society and most of all they are actually a net loss of jobs. Classical free-market nonsense economics will try and convince the sheeple that far from destroying the total number of jobs available to the community these machines will actually increase the number and value of jobs as the redundant check-out staff will now be able to retrain and get a hi-tech job designing, building and servicing the machines. What a complete load of old bollox!
These machines are designed by a handful of engineers and software consultants. The parts are manufactured on highly optimized production line - almost certainly in China etc - and even if the machines are actually assembled in the UK they will again require only a few people. Then they are installed and serviced by an area team comprising even fewer people.
But perhaps the biggest lie of all is that the not-very-bright check-out clerks will suddenly become computer programmers and system engineers! At the risk of once again sounding slightly elitist (it is not my intention) there are only a relatively small number of people in any given sample who actually have the intelligence to participate in the utopian hi-tech society envisaged by the free-market fraudsters. The bulk of human kind is either not well educated enough or even if exposed to the highest quality education available they still will not have the aptitude to succeed.
While I am a firm believer that all humans are created equal in the eyes of God, that does not mean that all are just as equally capable to perform any task within a society. Therefore if a society is to function there must be a large, protected pool of unspecialised jobs available and these should be protected at all costs. The consequences of over-specialisation are a) massive and structural unemployment which ultimately will lead to b) anarchy and revolution.
Hacland,
Your "large protected pool of unspecialized jobs " is in my opinion without doubt an absolutely essential component of any stable society.Failure to recognize this fact in the pursuit of short term profit has played an enormous role in the decline and crash of our ecomomy here in the states.
An employer with a thousand or ten thousand employees ships his work to China , substantially reducing his expenses but impairing his market by only an undetectable few thousands-his former employees of course- out of many tens of millions.
But when this process is repeated thousands of times, the burden of lost purchasing power becomes substantial , as does the burden of new social programs ranging from food stamps to rental subsidies to socialized medicine.We wind up with less and less of us doing the productive work that supports ever greater numbers of drones-people who essentially shuffle paper.
And of course only a free market idiot actually believes the market will provide new jobs in anything like the number or quality of the jobs lost.
Add in the burden of uncontrolled immigration and the newcomers competing for the unskilled or semiskilled jobs remaining and we have what may be aptly described as either a sinking ship or a powder keg that could go at any time over the next few years.
If the world move at a slower pace we might be able to redistribute the existing work and income in a fairer fashion but those who currently have are very good at holding and I don't expect the mail carriers -as an example-to volunteer to accept a four day week.
Hacland,
This is a very sensible post. I feel the same way and for the same reason I always insist on conducting my business with the postal clerk instead of the stamp dispensing machine.
Those nifty contraptions have been in stores in the US at least 10 years or more. My dad uses them, and I don't. We could both program them, and he has the skills to fix them if he had too.
The skills of the Clerk ladies might be in fixing simple meals, or gardening, or sewing, or weaving, or beer making, unless you ask them what their hobbies are you might not know what lies hiden underneath the person who scans your produce.
I grew up learning lots of different skills, handyman type things, thinking out of the box, making a box, digging a ditch, planting in that ditch, skills I don't see many people in the High tech world getting taught by their parents, or wanting to learn enough by going out there and reading a book to understand new concepts.
In 1,000 years we might not be able to build a rocketship for space travel. But I still feel that we would be able to build a building, carts, make bread, distill spirits and splint a broken arm. We might lose the ability to preform brain surgery, but still retain the knowledge of delivering a child.
Who knows what we will look like in 100,000 years, and besides using it in a book, we don't really need to know, wanting to know something and needing to know something are still two different issues.
Teach as many people as many basic skills as possible. Simple things, how to grow plants, how to weave, sew, make sourdough mother culture, use hand tools on wood, how to cook, how to preserve foods. Where to find water, how to purify it. How to look for edible plants, how to heal with plants and simple medical skills. If you make a project to teach at least one other person what you know and them to teach another, we would be further along surviving with most of our skins intact when things get rougher than they are now.
Learn biology, chemistry, know how to make gunpowder, how to smelt, how to forge, even on a basic level these skills will help you be more productive in the future, even if you never use them to make a living, having the knowledge is power, and a survival skill in itself.
Can I do most of the things I suggest learning, yes. My parents were great teachers, but they also instilled in me a thrist for knowing things and how they work. If you can have a good library with all this knowledge in it, maybe in several different languages depending on your location.
Yes I tend toward a hard fall when things get out of hand. The more people know about how to survive the better off they will be, even if they are the only one to make it to the otherside.
In the end we will have great stories to tell around the campfires of how long ago, people had to go into big drafty buildings and talk to metal boxes to get their food, and other such odd tales about people talking on little boxes that made odd sounds, and talked back to them. Oh the stories that will be told.
Charles.
And the problem is going to get worse. Technology for speaker-independent speech recognition systems is improving. Even order-taking and burger-flipping jobs at the local fast-food are on the endangered jobs list. The places that automate those functions will be able to sell cheaper food using fewer employees. They'll probably be successful, for a time, selling to the diminishing number of folks who still have jobs.
I am surprised that no fast food chain has decided to try just outsourcing the drive-thru order taking job. A long distance line to India probably isn't too expensive, and less workers would be needed because not all McDonalds are simultaneously taking orders at full capacity.
Hah! Half the time the connection is so bad they can't get my order right when they're within walking distance. Forget about outsourcing it to India. I might as well just drive up with a twenty and take whatever they're about to throw out.
That is being done in some markets. A franchise chain will have one call center for all it's stores in a given area. Your car drives up you get a voice, they take your order, it's sent via telephone data link to the store you are at, they fill the order, and you never know you didn't talk to anyone in the building besides thanking the person who handed you your fries, if you even did that much (sorry I was on my cell phone and just handed over the money, they won't care if I seem distant and rude).
I read about it over a few years ago, Goes to hunt online....http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22fast+food+call+centers%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Trendy new as of 2006.
What surprises me is that they have not figured out how to use RFID tags to just charge my bank or credit account as I walk out of the store with the products in hand. Just walk in, put in cart and walk out, never having to talk to anyone. Tales of the Future, stories you've read about, maybe even seen on a recent TV show are really just one step away.
Then again it's a page out of a story I wrote last year, where the guy in charge *FireAngel, points at someone, and they are tagged and added to the network all without ever knowing that they are being used as one big vast computer data gathering device. *FireAngel was just trying to save the planet from nasty aliens, he did have everyone's best interest at heart.... Ah the cutting edge science to scare people with is endless.
Charles.
Security and politics are the answer here.
Security for payment systems is complicated. Your RFID tag has to know it is talking to a valid RFID reader or else the privacy is out the window and fraud becomes too easy.
The answer is to use the Internet to verify the identity of the store systems before handing over any information. This could be easily done by the cell phone companies, but right now the politics and laws are not right for them to get into payment systems in the US. Compare Japan, for instance, where there are payment systems through the cell phone.
This illustrates how hard change is sometimes. Even when it makes absolute economical sense to do something, if it goes too much against status quo, it is often too hard to implement.
It would have to go through a cell phone. RFID is easily spoofed by an electronic device and too easily read by attackers using cheaply available readers. Cell phones have the possibility of implementing cryptographic methods and other security measures. For example, a cell phone with a GPS could check to see if it is actually in Wal-Mart before talking to a reader that claims to belong to Wal-Mart.
HACland I hate those things and refuse to use them. I don't care how much of a hurry I am in, I know they will ALWAYS take longer, even longer than standing in a long like with people ahead of me with carts full of food and screaming kids.
Pouring Coke into electronic things is a good way to reliably destroy them by the way, that stuff just does an amazing job on circuit boards.
In your summing up, I can only say, the anarchy and revolution are coming.
The Trader Joes near my home has exactly zero self-checkout lanes.
I just wrote a story along these same Catton-related lines. It's called "A Doomer's Christmas Carol" and it's posted at http://www.energybulletin.net/50773
Loved it, great work dan. thanks.
Good stuff, Dan.
Good Review.
I remember seeing the arresting cover of Overshoot, and being struck by its clarity. I might have disagreed with it (I did not), but I felt at least I was being asked to engage with it as a responsible adult which I appreciated greatly. The exhortations to be positive or not to 'go doomer' are at this stage denial and avoidance mechanisms.
One imagines the chief steward of the Titanic (hackneyed, I know!)announce as a screech is heard and the ship tilts "Ladies and Gentlemen, hypothetically a ship could sink, therefore could you all shift to one side of the deck and enjoy your drinks there", or Churchills stirring "We will fight them on the beaches, but there will also be plenty of opportunity for sandcastles, glaces, and the bronzing French sun".
If we cannot discuss the real risks we face, then we cannot begin to prepare. Our energy, communications and natural resources minister talks knowledgeably about peak oil, but sees it as driving a techno-fantasy of continued growth; others who are similarly knowledgeable about PO and the deflationary impacts are designing complementary currencies on the most complex integrated mobile phone+banking platforms imaginable. People see local opportunity (all positive), without engaging with what a systems failure might really mean, and so we are left with more wasted opportunities.
Today (in Ireland) some of the worlds best paid public servants, in the top 1% world-wide in terms of earnings, are on a national strike. They are cursing the top .1% for their greed and malfesance. We are collectively tearing strips out of eachother in a pointless exercise in blame shifting. The thing is, I think a real dose of doom, coupled with a bit of direction could lift people out of their self-obsession for a while, let them appreciate their blessings, and get growing etc. Meanwhile I'm waiting for the IMF(by June?), and hoping things don't get nasty.
Best to you all. D
What are you expecting the International Monetary Fund to do by June? Or is that the International Metalworkers Federation?
I pasted in a comment I made in another post slightly edited:
For the govt. to admit to the problem would open the door to the extent of the problem. They don't want to risk stampeding the sheep.
Pres. Obama rehearses his State of the Union Address:
"I have been your President for a year now. While the Nation has been focused on healthcare and the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, while you have been distracted by a relatively "mild" recesion, I and my team of energy analysts have been determining the extent of a looming problem that, to this point has only been voiced by a lunatic fringe known as "The Peak Energy Alarmist Front". It is our determination that this subculture of scientists, engineers, economists, geologists, educators, and others has in fact been completely accurate in their prediction that global oil production has peaked and that available supplies of energy will no longer be able to support the system of economic growth that our modern technological society has been dependent upon for over a century. Our economy, our currency, our military, our transportation and agricultural systems, the clothes you wear, the homes that you live in, indeed our entire way of life are utterly, completely reliant upon an ever increasing supply of carbon based energy, mostly in the form of petroleum based products. The time to act in an effective way to mitigate the consequences of peak carbon energy has passed. The age of oil is ending and we have not prepared. At this moment, as your President, I am declaring Martial Law. All prices are to be frozen, all bank and investment accounts frozen. Stock markets and commodity exchanges are closed to trading until further notice. There will be no hoarding or looting....................."
"Gee, Mr. President, maybe we should just try and keep the country's head above water until we go over the falls".
I'm sure this same culture of "people should be treated like mushrooms" applies to your various ministries in Britain, and applies to the whole concept of overshoot as well, in their minds.
I think it's unlikely that we'll prevent serious climate change. Who knows what kind of catastrophes we'll face because of that. OTOH, the following is so unrealistic that I can't let it pass without comment:
there simply is no realistic or viable alternative energy source that could scale up to the level needed by modern civilization in time to take over the job.
Wind power was 40% of new electrical generation in the US for the last 2 years. Solar power is scaling up and becoming affordable ( http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/11/has-photovoltatic-solar-reached-gr... ). We have enough natural gas and coal (unfortunately) to provide sufficient electricity for the next 40 years for a transition to wind and solar. Electric equipment can replace oil for almost all applications: http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html
Catton wrote his first book, and formed his views, at a time when wind and solar power clearly weren't ready. They clearly are now.
before lots of folks jump to shout you down, i'd just like to say, "hear here" to you, nick! while i'm not so confident that "they clearly are now," alternative energy r&d effort is increasing markedly. there will be clean energy available, but i suspect it will be more expensive than oil for some time.
if oil goes to $120, alternative energy quickly gets "affordable." the saudis say they are supporting the recovery, but in fact, they are ensuring an under-capitalization in alternatives to ff. this will not last, and then the future comes.
Thanks for the support.
I think we agree that when I say that wind, solar and electric vehicles are clearly ready, I mean from a TOD point of view. They'd struggle against the kind of $20 oil we've had with historical "BAU".
OTOH, as you note they clearly are competitive with $120 per barrel oil, and as far as I can tell they'll be competitive with $80 oil in just a couple of years (with just a little economy of scale).
Nick,
Thanks for the comment. But I must say, after two and a half months working with Charlie Hall at EROI central I have yet to see convincing evidence that alternatives will ever reasonably replace our current capacities based on fossil fuels. Also, the current claims you hear about natural gas and coal abundance are looking like a lot of hype. I've seen some results for well production for shale gas that suggests that the real recoverable numbers are much less than the gas drillers are claiming. The big problem is that all current capacity for producing alternative infrastructure equipment will rely on energy inputs from fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Of course if we had adequate time and were willing to substantially reduce our current usage of energy, directing all of our efforts toward building an alternative based infrastructure, we might achieve this over the next 100 years or so. What is the likelihood of that happening? Neither spoiled citizens nor politicians are going to move that agenda along, I suspect.
Also, recommend you not rely too much on percentages when the starting base is so small.
after two and a half months working with Charlie Hall at EROI central I have yet to see convincing evidence that alternatives will ever reasonably replace our current capacities based on fossil fuels.
I think Hall has generally concluded that wind's E-ROI is around 20, which is more than enough. It looks rather higher than that to me, but the difference is trivial.
Also, the current claims you hear about natural gas and coal abundance are looking like a lot of hype.
All we need is for them to maintain their current production numbers for 20 years - that's much less than the 100 year supplies for which we hear claims currently. Coal, unfortunately for climate change, is more than adequate. I've followed the debate about "peak coal", and I agree with "Heading Out" that coal supplies are greatly underestimated: http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html
current capacity for producing alternative infrastructure equipment will rely on energy inputs from fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
Wind and solar use very little oil. We have enough electricity.
recommend you not rely too much on percentages when the starting base is so small.
Wind is clearly large enough to scale to what we need. In the US, 8.5GW was installed last year. Scaling to 75GW per year (a manufacturing project of a scale rather smaller than currently idled car manufacturing and housing construction capacity), and maintaining that for 40 years - that's pretty easy.
Nick, there are also studies, f.i. from German geologists, which claim that coal reserves are greatly overestimated. The best quality coal in some countries, also the U.S., is gone, so increasing amounts are necessary to provide the same BTU.
Please, read my discussion: http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html
Sure, the very best coal is gone, but the 2nd-tier quality is more than good enough and abundant enough.
I wish it were otherwise, as IMHO Climate Change is a much bigger problem than peak oil or coal.
Nick, maybe later. The point is that there are different opinions. Same with oil: many geologists claim that Peak oil will not happen soon. Same with lithium. Same with Uranium. Only time will tell if the optimists or the pessimists are wrong. Or that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Climate Change is not the same as (A)GW.
I agree that coal is a bad alternative, but regarding the tremendous amounts of energy needed, a necessary evil.
Climate change and (A)GW is a big problem, but for the near future Peak oil is the issue that cause the most problems for humanity.
The point is that there are different opinions. Same with oil: many geologists claim that Peak oil will not happen soon. Same with lithium. Same with Uranium. Only time will tell if the optimists or the pessimists are wrong. Or that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
There are different opinions about whether the earth is round, or whether evolution is real. The fact that there is controversy about something doesn't really tell us anything about it's truth.
I encourage you to read the articles: it's really not that hard to tell what makes sense.
Climate Change is not the same as (A)GW.
Could you explain that?
I agree that coal is a bad alternative, but regarding the tremendous amounts of energy needed, a necessary evil.
Well, I agree that we'll use coal if necessary to keep the lights on. I disagree that we couldn't phase it out fairly quickly, at relatively small cost, if we desired to do so. See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-expensive-is-wind-power-needed...
Nick, no geologist or geographist or whatever scientist is going to write about whether the earth is round. If I read several articles from geologists about overestimated coal reserves than I'm not thinking: "that are flat earth economists". Besides, it's not about reserves, but about peak coal. Regarding oil: there is at least 5 trillion more barrels to win.
Climate change means: more droughts, more flooding, more hurricanes, ect, partly caused by deforestation, not necessarily caused by global warming.
Regarding the amount of windmills that will (not could) be built per year I am not so optimistic. They will choose the locations carefully, in the oceans one have to consider the trajectories of ships. Besides, on land the places with moderate to high windspeeds are chosen first.
If I read several articles from geologists about overestimated coal reserves
I've seen a number of articles about "peak coal", but none by geologists, and none in peer-reviewed journals. Could you provide a link?
it's not about reserves, but about peak coal
Coal is different from oil: coal doesn't flow, it's mined. With coal, it's about reserves.
Regarding oil: there is at least 5 trillion more barrels to win.
I'm not sure what you mean. You're not talking about conventional oil, right?
Climate change means: more droughts, more flooding, more hurricanes, ect, partly caused by deforestation, not necessarily caused by global warming.
I'm confused. I thought Climate Change was the generally accepted term for CO2-induced changes in climate and our environment?
They will choose the locations carefully, in the oceans one have to consider the trajectories of ships.
Not really. There's plenty of space for both.
on land the places with moderate to high windspeeds are chosen first.
That's true in a few places, especially Germany and a few other parts of Europe. It's not really a problem in most places (the US is a very good example).
Nick, I don't have a link right now, but it is easy to Google. There are also books about energy, which write about Peak coal.
For instance in a book written by Rembrandt Koppelaar. Can be that they don't use the terminology 'peak coal' in the most important literature: the peer-reviewed journals.
It is a different kind of flow. The amount of tons you can mine and transport per day has its limits. Let's say it is 'solid flow'. And the amount of tons have to increase if the quality of the coal gets less and takes more time when they have to mine deeper. So then only to stay even, it takes more tons and more time. The coal transportation from the mines to the plants has a time-factor. To increase this capacity is more easily said than done.
No, the 5 trillion is including non-conventional oil.
With the now happening CO2-induced changes, they normally talk about AGW. Climate Change can happen without change in global temperature.
Yes, there is plenty of space for both windmills and ships. But they have to take account with all the shippingroutes and change some, and that takes a lot of time. That is what I read.
And what about what I read that because of Climate Change (or GW) some places 'suffer' from (periods with) much less wind ?
Nick, I don't have a link right now, but it is easy to Google. There are also books about energy, which write about Peak coal.
I'm reasonably confident I've read the sources you're thinking about. I've read Rutledge's work (and discussed it with him) and the Energy Watch Group's work, as well as other sources such as industry reports and relevant USGS papers. What I was trying to say is that I think your memory is wrong, and there aren't any peer-reviewed, geologist authored studies that establish that "peak coal" is anywhere close on the horizon due to supply limits - if I'm wrong, I'd be delighted to find that out, but I won't be convinced unless you can dig them up. Again, please read http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html
The amount of tons you can mine and transport per day has its limits...To increase this capacity is more easily said than done.
Not really. It's an industrial operation: you open more pits, you add more trucks and conveyor belts, you add to rail capacity. Pretty straightforward.
Let's say it is 'solid flow'.
That doesn't really make sense. The point is, conventional crude oil is different from almost all other minerals: there is a pretty sharp demarcation between the easy good stuff and the non-conventional. The non-conventional is much harder and slower.
Climate Change can happen without change in global temperature.
I haven't seen the phrase used that way. Could you elaborate, or show sources where it's used in context?
they have to take account with all the shippingroutes and change some, and that takes a lot of time....because of Climate Change (or GW) some places 'suffer' from (periods with) much less wind
I think if you look back at the sources you'll find they don't really support that. I've seen such arguments at flaky anti-wind web-sites.
No, my memory works perfect. I've a book at home written in Dutch language, by Rembrandt Koppelaar, President of 'stichting Peak Oil Nederland'. He sometimes writes articles on TOD. He writes that Peak coal is on the horizon, somewhere between 2030 and 2050.
Just like copper mining, right ?
Ever increasing amounts to mine to get the same amount of copper. I don't know how long many mines have left before the middle-quality coal is finished and they have to mine the worst quality coal. I will read your mentioned site about coal.
Well, I know in Dutch language they make a clear difference between CC and AGW. Here on TOD they talk about AGW when it is about CO2 and methane emissions. Human activities other than emissions of greenhouse gasses could lead to, and are leading to, Climate Change (desertification leading to droughts f.i.)
I've a book at home written in Dutch language, by Rembrandt Koppelaar, President of 'stichting Peak Oil Nederland'. He sometimes writes articles on TOD.
I'm familiar with Rembrandt. I've generally liked his analyses of peak oil, but according to this http://www.energybulletin.net/node/10857 he's "Rembrandt Koppelaar, who studies Nutrition & Health at Wageningen University". That's not a geologist.
He writes that Peak coal is on the horizon, somewhere between 2030 and 2050.
That's a mighty wide range. I suspect that if you read what he wrote, you'll find he's using a logistical analysis, which doesn't apply to coal, which is suffering from peak demand, not peak supply.
Just like copper mining, right ?
No, nothing like copper. Copper has a genuine supply issue. Fortunately it has very good substitutes, like fiber optics and aluminum.
Climate Change (desertification leading to droughts f.i.)
That's interesting. Well, I have a feeling that's not the usual use in the rest of the world.
I'm not a geologist either. But reading about a subject some years can help. There are not so many people who are allowed to publish on TOD, must be for some reason, and the reason is known.
No, not peak demand. Wrote about the main countries that export coal, rising coal demand. I wrote: between 2030 and 2050, but actually the book mentions 2 different years (what is strange) and one of them is 2050. To be sure I have to look at the other year, but it is more early than 2050 (2030 or 2040). Of course for coal it is impossible to give a good estimation if the peak is still 20 or more years away.
Not in that way compared to copper.
Concentration in the earth of copper is falling. More to mine for the same amount of copper. Quality of coal is going from good to intermediate to bad. More to mine for the same amount of BTU's.
That is because most people don't know there is a difference, or don't make the difference in the the language, i.e. they use the word CC when they mean GW.
I'm not a geologist either. But reading about a subject some years can help.
Sure. I'm not one either. The point is, he's not an independent authority, he's an analyst who works with data provided by others. Coal is not his main focus, so it's likely that he's relying on analysis performed by others (like Rutledge and EWG).
There are not so many people who are allowed to publish on TOD, must be for some reason, and the reason is known.
Sure. I've liked his PO analysis.
No, not peak demand.
Are you sure? For instance, the UK has a very large amount of coal left - it's just not being produced, because Australian coal imports and North Sea gas have been slightly cheaper. Also because Thatcher wanted to shut down the miner's union. I could go on, but I've already said it in my article http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html . Have you had a chance to read it yet?
Quality of coal is going from good to intermediate to bad.
Actually, it's not really behaving that way. Again, read my article for more detail.
they use the word CC when they mean GW.
My understanding is that leading climatologists prefer the phrase CC, because rising CO2 won't necessarily or uniformly cause warming - instead, weather and climate will become more variable, with effects varying by regional .
That is the same as saying: "I work with more reliable data than him". This in case that you are convinced that peak coal is later, or even doesn't exist.
No, not read it yet.
Is there not anthracite with highest BTU and then 2 with less energy content ?
Maybe, but then obviously climatologists don't study the effects of deforestation and desertification on the climate.
That is the same as saying: "I work with more reliable data than him".
Well, on the one hand, you said earlier that you were thinking of studies by geologists, i.e., independent experts - people whose professional training and experience make them authorities. OTOH, I'm simply saying that I've looked into the question in more detail. If you read my article, that will become clearer.
in case that you are convinced that peak coal is later, or even doesn't exist.
Oh, I think it exists. In fact, I hope it's sooner than predicted. My point: peak coal is due to a peak in demand, not supply, and there's more than enough coal to provide whatever power is needed during a transition from oil to renewable electricity (say, if it takes longer than expected).
Is there not anthracite with highest BTU and then 2 with less energy content ?
Yes, anthracite is the best, and as far as I know, it's pretty depleted. The next grade is bituminous, and supplies of bituminous (e.g., Illinois Basin coal) are very, very large. Sub-bituminous is a lower grade(arguably there are even lower ones), and it's being used because of relatively very small differences in cost due to sulfur content and accessibility (strip vs tunnel mining). I detail this in the article.
climatologists don't study the effects of deforestation and desertification on the climate.
I believe that they do.
New PCI Study Concludes No Combination of Alternative Energy Systems Can Replace Fossil Fuels
I can't find the study itself. Do you see where to find it on their site?
The study was largely authored by Heinberg. The problem with Heinberg, Hanson, Kunstler, et al? They don't understand wind and solar, and haven't taken them seriously. They've just assumed that they aren't adequate. Look through their writings and you don't find an accurate, detailed analysis anywhere.
Heinberg's treatment of wind and solar in "Powerdown" is relatively undetailed. "The Party's Over" is a bit more thorough, with 4 and half pages devoted to wind, but there's still no detailed, quantitative analysis. It has some numbers, but they're oddly uneven, and ultimately it's overall conclusions don't follow. For instance, on page 152 he says: " Current storage batteries are expensive, they are almost useless in very cold weather, and they need to be replaced after a few years of use. Currently, there are no batteries available that can effectively move heavy farm machinery or propel passenger carrying aircraft across the oceans."
Well, with the exception of the last bit about aircraft, none of this is accurate (which he would have discovered, had he looked at the numbers). See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/07/volt-battery-costs-part-3.html as well as http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html .
Nick and George,
Any calculations trying to replace FF with Renewables and arriving at BAU is really a smoke screen. Nick might be correct, George might be correct. Frankly it doesn't matter a damn if the following two things continue to happen:
a) Population growth, both global total and country specific and
b) Relentless pursuit of GDP growth - aka consumption growth.
Even if EROEI and resources were not an issue, to convert from FF to Renewables and then not only maintain them but continue to add capacity to the grid as populations and GDP continues to grow at an exponential rate is simply not within the realms of the physical and mathematical world. This is the nub of the issue.
I am sure that you both get this, but I just hate to see debates about whether we can convert to renewables with out pointing this out. Can we convert? Yes. Should we convert? Absolutely! Should we then go back to raping the planet in greed-obsessed consumption? NO!!!
There is no point doing the converting from FF to renewables if we are unwilling - or just unable - to completely rebuild our monetary and economic systems to a steady state system which is in harmony with the Planet.
The question of the feasibility of a conversion is an awfully important question to nail down. All of the analyses of the human ecological footprint and the sustainability of our current society that I've seen put fossil fuel at 50-75% of the problem.
continues to grow at an exponential rate
Resource consumption and population growth both level out even under BUA. For instance, US per capita car sales leveled out 30 years ago, and US fertility rates are at replacement.
Reducing population and non-FF resource consumption are harder, but perfectly feasible. Look at Japan and Italy for population reductions, and the reduction of mercury and lead consumption.
Nick,
The real problem is in our monetary system. The system requires growth in consumption. The US consumer makes up 65-70% of the GDP total. While I am certain that there are efficiency savings to be made, these will only provide a hiatus at best, and then the total amount of energy required will need to increase again - at an exponential rate. There is no way around this fact! For an econony to grow continually and at an exponential rate the total amount of energy required will need to increase proportionally too and this will require new wind turbines, solar farms, nukes etc in perpetuity. This is not going to happen.
We have got to kick the growth habbit before reality kicks us into touch.
The system requires growth in consumption.
Not in resource consumption. Look at the US: per capita consumption of cars, appliances, houses, steel, etc. They've leveled off.
Healthcare, education, entertainment, art - these are the things that are growing. They don't require increases in energy.
Sorry Nick, on this you are just plain wrong.
Resource consumption in the US has most certainly NOT leveled off. What you might be referring to is the total amount of 'resources' in use. When a consumer is forced to continuously upgrade, swap, change, re-style their resource-laden objects then the growth in total amount ever produced is continually increasing. From what you suggest there would be no more imports to the US at all! This is clearly wrong. There is still plenty of resources being consumed and these all need energy.
As for Healthcare, education and entertainment etc these all require energy in toto to grow too.
And by the way, the population of the US has not levelled off either. Far from it.
The belief in the GDP growth monster is alive and well and this monster requires ever larger energy inputs somewhere on the chain, that energy might be used outside of the US but the incessant desire for growth always and by definition requires more and more energy.
HAckland, in any way, humanity could use much less FF in the transportation sector and still grow.
When a consumer is forced to continuously upgrade, swap, change, re-style their resource-laden objects then the growth in total amount ever produced is continually increasing.
Upgrading a car, appliance or ipod doesn't increase the amount of energy required to manufacture it. If the total sales volume doesn't increase, energy consumption is actually likely to fall, as manufacturers continue to make their processes more efficient.
There is still plenty of resources being consumed and these all need energy.
But that energy consumption isn't growing - in fact, as I noted above, it's likely to fall.
the population of the US has not levelled off either.
That's not what I said - I was talking about fertility rate ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_rate ).
Healthcare, education and entertainment etc these all require energy in toto to grow too.
No, they really don't. In fact, as lighting, PC's and servers consume less and less power, their energy consumption is likely to fall.
the incessant desire for growth always and by definition requires more and more energy.
That's a common myth on TOD. It's not true. An important and relevant researcher here is Robert Ayers . We see that he showed that GDP is related to applied energy (exergy), and only very loosely linked to energy, let alone to oil consumption. The research indicates that BTU's only explain 14% of GDP,and that the source of those BTU's can change (coal to oil to wind, for instance). Both energy efficiency and energy intensity can change. Further, oil is only one source of BTU's. Oddly enough, many energy commentators seem to misunderstand Ayre's research, and think that it supports the idea of a strong causal connection between oil consumption and GDP.
US (and world) GDP would grow much more quickly than it's energy consumption (even including electricity). The best example of this is California, which has kept per capita electricity consumption flat over the last 25 years, while growing it's GDP relatively quickly.
Ayres used "exergy services", which are not "very close to BTU parity". Exergy services are work performed. So, for instance, a Prius performs the same work as a similar vehicle with half the MPG, but uses half the BTU's. Strictly speaking, a Prius can perform the same work as a Hummer (transporting people), and use 20% of the BTU's. An EV also does the same work as a Hummer, and uses about 1/3 of the BTU's as the Prius, and 1/15 of the Hummer's...and so on.
Sorry Nick, but once again you are just plain wrong. We will have to agree to disagree.
By very definition growth requires more energy. This 'exergy' is a nice idea but a complete red herring. After efficiencies are done, in order for a society to increase the total real value of goods and services transactions (GDP) there is by definition the need to consume more energy. More hair cuts at the local barber? More electricity needed for the clippers. More screens at the cinema? More electricity for the projectors. More, more, more. This is simple physics. To provide more stuff, more transactions in the service economy needs more energy. Period.
I'm surprised you don't get this? An economy simple can't grow (ex efficiencies) without an increase in energy useage.
We will have to agree to disagree.
It's possible - we don't seem to be making much progress. I thought the Hummmer to Prius example was so good - it doesn't make sense to you?
By very definition growth requires more energy.
Whose definition? The US (and most other major countries) defines growth as increase in value: if a car increases in price by 3%, and it's design features make it 3% better, that's considered growth in GDP, not inflation. The car doesn't require any more energy to manufacture, the engineers and designers didn't use any more computer electricity to design it (in fact, almost certainly less).
More hair cuts at the local barber?
How can the number of hair cuts per capita increase?
To provide more stuff, more transactions in the service economy needs more energy.
But, we don't need more stuff. We aren't producing or consuming more stuff. Growth in the US and OECD is coming from increased value of intangible services, not more physical goods.
I hate to butt in here but, I groom dogs. If I don't groom more dogs next year than I did this year then my business isn't growing. Or I could charge more but I'm not really growing the business. In my mind growth requires something tangible, physical to occur. I think you guys are arguing symantics here.
Not at all.
1st, I think you're right: there's not a whole lot of room for growth in your business. The groomers I know tend try to grow their business by reducing the time with each dog, which seems to make them handle the dogs more roughly.
OTOH, you could try doing something higher quality: you can allow owners to accompany the dog; or be gentler with the dogs; or use special perfumes on the dogs; or win awards; develop unique cuts; or groom Oprah's dogs and give your clients a bit of celebrity; etc,etc. I don't know how well these work - but they may be worth a try.
The example with the cars is precisely how GDP and inflation are measured. The BLS and the Fed really don't consider GDP and inflation calculations to be semantics.
Nick,
Let me also pick you up on your example of California managing to grow it's Gdp while keeping electricity consumption static. This is a completely bogus example.
Let us first of all define GDP as the total dollar value amount of transactions within an economy (including net trade)
Sheila is Mr Smooth's agent, based in Holywood. Mr Smooth is an upcoming actor hoping for his first major breakthrough. One day Sheila's phone rings. A Bolywood director in Mumbai has heard good things about Mr Smooth and wants to hire him for the latest Indian romance. Sheila negotiates a fee of one million bucks for Mr Smooth. The fax comes through, she signs the contract and sends it back to India. She calls Mr Smooth and tells him he is booked on the next California Air flight to Mumbai. He flies to Mumbai and puts on a wonderful performance. Sheila takes her 15% ($150,000) and books it.
The State of California now shows another transaction to add to the Gdp but very little energy expenditure. In your books this means that it is evidence that GDP can grow without a commensurate increase in energy. But let's look at what has really happened. Mr Smooth was picked up from his apartment in a petrol burning chaufeur driven car and driven to LAX. Among other things, the security guard at check in had to use her 'wand' on another passenger which ever so slightly drained the batteries thus requiring an additional fraction of a second of recharge. While Mr Smooth is heading to duty free to buy a magazine, Morgan (Sheila's chauffeur) is heading to the airport Burger King for lunch. His wife left him some of last night's dinner to heat up in the microwave but he is hungry so he opts for a Whopper with cheese instead. The till at the fast food joint is programmed to autatically reorder patties when they get down to a certainly level remaining, and it just happens that while Morgan's burger is sizzling a meat packing plant 500 miles away has just recieved a new order for a thousand patties to be delivered to the airport.
Just as the 1,000 volts passed through Daisy the Cow at the start of the Pattie Production Line, Mr Smooth's plane was taking off. Because he is on board by the time it lands in Mumbai an additional quantity of fuel will have been used to propel his mass of carbon atoms through the sky. When Mr Smooth arrives in Mumbai he goes straight to his hotel where he has a hot shower, orders room service and turns on the tele to see what Indian adult movies are like.
Now this tale could go on for a long time, but it is late and I am running out of energy! I hope you can see my point though. Had Sheila's phone not have rung: Morgan's car would not have burned that tiny amount of petrol to get Mr Smooth to the airport, Morgan himself would have finished last night's leftovers, Daisy the Cow would not have been introduced to 1,000 volts, the airplane would have landed in Mumbai with slightly more fuel in it's tanks than it did, the hotel's water and electricity bill would have been slightly lower, the elevator from the basement kitchen to Mr Smooth's room would have done one less journey - thus being one less away from a full service requiring many technicians to converge on the hotel in diesel powered vans - and Mr Smooth would have never discovered the delights of the Kuma Satra as applied to corny Indian porn!
So you see, although California recorded an increase in GDP of $150,000 most of the energy costs were carried outside the state. Every seemingly routine addition to GDP growth carries a lot of hidden energy costs. There is absolutely no way to grow the real value of all transactions within an economy without incurring additional energy costs - ex efficiencies. Perhaps where you are going wrong is in not viewing the whole system. Somewhere there is always an energy cost.
Let me also pick you up on your example of California managing to grow it's Gdp while keeping electricity consumption static. This is a completely bogus example.
Yes, that's a common complaint about that example. Unfortunately, it's very hard to find data for cross-border "grey" consumption of that sort. The best we can do is note that world GDP grew about 20% over the last 5 years, while oil consumption was pretty much flat.
For the US, cross-border flows of this sort were pretty minor for the first 75 years of the 20th century. That period is covered by Ayres' research, which shows quite thoroughly that primary energy growth is not necessary for economic growth. Did you look at his research, which I referenced?
we dont even need to try to bring up vague and contentious arguments about cross border flows of grey energy or whatever.
Too many people confuse money for real prodcutivity or meaningful stuff of value. Part of the reason is that it's genuinely hard to quantify 'value' and we use money to measure it (especially in the small scale of daily life) all around us.
But me writing web pages for you, and you selling home equity loans to the guy down the street, and the guy down the street
buying movies for download from netflix, and the executives at disney buying dot-com stock all throws a hurricane of dollars
(or pounds, or francs, or euros, or quatloos) into GDP without
producing a damn thing of lasting value.
When most of our economic activity was clearly making and moving of physical objects, usually ones which were a lot closer to the 'necessary' end of the spectrum (clothes and food and shelter, versus DVD players), it's fairly easy to
get a grasp of economic activity and its relation to money transactions. These days, we have gotten way ahead of ourselves with the paper and electronic fantasies outpacing
real activity.
As a matter of fact what we can measure with most of what
has been called 'efficiency' in the past few decades is really
how much we have been lying to ourselves!
Individually and in groups we have all been trying to grab as
much of a piece of the pie as we can. When it is possible
to give hot air in exchange for something of more concrete
value, well, why the hell not?
Since hot air is easy to come by, we find that there is a cycle of inflation of hot air as we keep speeding up to stay abreast of everyone else's prodigious output of hot air.
If we fail to discern between hot air and concrete things of value, or even between concrete things of value and concrete things of total fluff (like that dvd player), we start confusing 'share-gathering gimmicks' for real economic activity. Indeed, there is some economic activity involved,
often quite a lot of it, but at some level you can tell that
it's parasitic and designed merely as a mechanism for herding some of the 'real' wealth in the direction of its owners.
Those on wall street who manage to pull in tens of billions with nothing but hot air indeed have the highest efficiency
in this game. Those who own factories cranking out DVD players and disney movies have rather high efficiency in that they
can for X amount of input of 'real' stuff, squeeze or cajole Y
amount of 'real' stuff out of 'consumers' as profit.
but we have completely lost the distinction between these ultimately parasitic activities and those which are more real or primary.
When it gets down to it, though, work done is still directly related to energy dissipated moving stuff around or modifying it (which is of course again moving, but on a smaller scale :)
minus 'waste' losses. If you start to see GDP numbers pulling away from energy use numbers in a serious way (like we do
since the second half of the 20th century), then the real
message is that the measuring stick is broken and the GDP numbers are not accurately describing activity.
And this is why the folks who focus on net energy available
to society, either in absolute terms or in per-capita terms,
have had a clear and obvious picture of a civilization already past its peak and well into decline for quite a while now.
And some of this is fuel for a different rant, about how when
only economists with charts of numbers are legitimately allowed to measure value in the world, we get some very twisted and misleading ideas about productivity and efficiency.
Nicely said. James Michael Greer (The Archdruid) has just put up a good blogpost on this very subject.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/lies-and-statistics.html
Nah.
When farming was the main thing, I imagine they dismissed craftsmen as useless tinkerers.
Craftsmen probably dismissed engineers as over-educated producers of unnecessarily high-tech stuff.
There were probably engineers who dismissed physicists as useless dreamers.
It's easy to say that manufacturing is the main thing, and dismiss education, medicine, arts, and entertainment as just fluff.
OTOH, for many people they're the most important part of life. And when you're father's life is saved by medicine, you'll be grateful.
I mean..seriously?
I would chime in on both of your sides.
1. GDP is crap for actual wealth measurement. Example: A hypercane sweeps across the USA - basically a tornado that's 5oo miles wide. BZZZZZZZZZZT!!!! Like a buzz saw a broad swath cuts across the USA. What happens? Recession over. Suddenly the USA is rebuilding. GDP goes up. Trillions spent on rebuilding. But what is really going on? The survivors are living in tent cities and transit camps in a military dictatorship. Life is miserable...employed, but miserable. But GDP rocks.
2. If a society's energy demand is below the depletion curve, it can grow. Take Jevon's paradox and turn it upside down. If energy stocks are decreasing, the only societies that will experience growth are those that conserve energy below the depletion curve for base load operations - the difference becomes the amount the society can "grow". Eventually, granularities come into play - but by then society should be developing energy systems that are not (as) sensitive to the depletion curve.
cheers.
Hi HAclan,
According to this chart you are correct - it takes a zero number to stabilize population growth. The US is near one percent - which is quite significant over time.
http://chartsbin.com/view/xr6
the other link in the chart offers a good explanation of "growth"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
Also, one can just look at this to see world pop growth is still pretty robust:
http://www.worldometers.info/
it takes a zero number to stabilize population growth.
Of course. But replacement fertility levels will get you there eventually. Search wikipedia for "demographic transition".
Many here don't understand the actual fertility-trends for real. World-fertility has fallen from around 5.0 in 1950 to around 2.5 now. In 2050 the world fertility will fall under the replacement-level (actual around 2.1). Popoulation growth will go on (without a big die-off of course) till about 2070 because demograpic-inertia and increased life expandancy in many parts of the world. After that an inevitable decline will set in. The max. world-population (without a big die-off) will peak around 2070 by about 10 billion.
@ Nick / HAcland
Their is absolute no doubt that energy-use and GDP are linked to some degree but not at R²=1 for shure. I actually do work as a scientist for a big project for a new generation of Machine Tools. The goal is to be more energy-efficient (it's a german project of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft), which means to produce more with the same (or even better) quality with less energy-input. The goal is to reduce the energy-use to produve a defined workpiece by 30%. And there are a couple of things that work, the exergy is a key-point to it. Of cource this can't go on forever but we are fare from beeing perfect in our energy-use. We are producing anergy in large amounts everywhere. An internal-combustion engine has an efficiency-ratio of around 30-40%, a electric-engine up till 95% and more. Another thing is that renewables are for shure capable to meet our demand in the long run. If we get it fast enough done is another question and i'm not so shure for that, because of various reasons. One of theme is allready an non-natural selection mode in "western-societies" which works against people with high cognitive skills.
I generally agree with your thoughts.
A quibble: Their is absolute no doubt that energy-use and GDP are linked to some degree
Historical oil consumption was in a cheap-oil, non-CO2 aware environment. Energy efficiency and FF consumption were relatively unimportant. That means that historical correlations no longer hold.
This is correct of course and you can see it easily if you look at the energy use vs. GDP graphs. Till around 1970 it was linked very close, after 1970 not that close anymore and after 1990 absolute not (at least her in germany).
One could suggest GDP is inflated - which it is to some degree - but that doesen't tell you all, because for expample her in germany we never have seen large-scale de-industrialisation like in the US or UK.
Good thought. Germany should be a good test case of the argument that OECD countries are showing a higher ratio of GDP to energy because of out-sourcing, given that's it generally understood that Germany hasn't out-sourced it's manufacturing.
Have you seen a good chart of energy use vs. GDP for Germany? I imagine a chart of oil vs GDP would be even more dramatic, given Germany's fast declining oil consumption.
@ Nick
http://www.umweltschulen.de/images/image905.jpg
red line - primary energy use (1990=100)
yellow line - GDP (1990=100)
blue line - energy productivity compared to start (1990=100)
That's great - thanks.
This PCI study is in line with my thinking. We simply cannot sustain a US economy at its present level with renewable resources. When you start thinking in terms of an economy with a per capita GDP of about 1/4 the present level, then it starts to look more feasible. Not inevitable, but not yet out of the realm of possibility. Instead of thinking about "replacing" 100% of our non-renewables with renewables, we need to be thinking about two "S" curves: a fairly steep decline of per capita GDP, leveling off at around 25% of present levels, and a less steep build up of renewables, leveling off at about 25 Quads (the present US energy supply/use is around 100 Quads). It is still just possible that we could actually do that. We probably also have enough land and water to feed something close to our present population, if meat becomes a rarely-affordable luxury, and is entirely grass-fed, and if we grow gardens instead of lawns.
For the US, at least, I see absolutely zero possibility or hope for a future any better than that. Something much, much worse is a real possibility, of course. I just don't see that as an absolute inevitability - yet.
As for the rest of the world, different countries would have different strategies, and there are unfortunately some places around the world where there is no answer that avoids a significant die off of their population. Life's unfair, I'm afraid.
Have you read the PCI study?
See my replies above and below about the PCI study - it's not a thorough study of the real candidates: wind, solar and electric transportation.
I know it is a mistake to 'discuss' certain things with true believers, but here goes ...
I don't know if the 'bottleneck thesis' is correct or not, although I certainly appreciate George Mobus for bringing it to my attention. Nobody can foretell the future(s) and besides, in the long run, we are all dead. Nevertheless, it is beyond any disagreement that major changes are forthcoming. The best attitude is to anticipate them and prepare ourselves - at all different social levels - so the changes and benefits are voluntary. Done with planning and disciple, the effects of 'less' ... which is what the changes imminent sum up to - will be much more manageable than they would be otherwise.
The difficulty comes with the 'substitution' part, which doesn't really happen. The result has always been 'additional' which integrates users more and more deeply into the consumption paradigm when the need is to go in the opposite direction.
Yet ... this going opposite, against the grain of consumption is taking place right now, an outcome of the (mis)behavior of the economy. I am certain that most people you know as well as most participants here are 'cutting back' and reducing credit exposure. This is a natural reaction to both uncertain outcomes in credit - where your loan balances grow unserviceably large by virtue of deflation - and in uncertainties in employment. Yet ... this reasonableness works against the fundamental expansive bias baked into the economy itself. It is implicit in your remarks, as well.
When you - and your neighbors - do not buy the economy shrinks, just as it has been doing. In a shrinking system the substitution part doesn't work. This is because the good being substituted for has had its investment paid for in the past and sees a profitable future. It's liability is it is less 'economically' efficient - that is, it doesn't provide as a great a return as would a 'new' good of the same type. Nevertheless, being paid for gives it an almost unbeatable economic advantage over the good that is unbuilt, burdened with debt or requires financing.
There are many examples of this, including power stations, apartment complexes, stores and oil field developments that are rendered unaffordable with the changes in the economic climate. The wind and solar concepts are 'pushing the rock' uphill' as they need increased funding both in the watts- generated as well as backup and distribution. As many have noted, this funding is becoming harder to get as the establishment ignores investment while it enables finance participants to 'cash out' and exit the system.
While the 'Great Escape' is taking place, the power supply 'goods' at different levels of investment return and productivity are being stranded by the current high price of petroleum. The legacy systems' capital cost advantage is wasting. Current capacity- related maintenance/upgrade costs are added to the proposed wind/solar capacity- costs, the total must be funded in a very tumultuous lending environment. New supplies are constrained by funding while legacy systems are run 'into the ground' until they break down.
At a different level, it is hard to see what can be gained even by switching kw for kw on paper and somehow keeping the same consumption infrastructure intact. I don't understand what is appealing about it. The elites appreciate(d) its power to generate funds for themselves. Who else? A watt for watt transfer would mean a massive increase in power infrastructure in addition to all that which now exists. Should the proposed 'system' work then more and more power generation/distribution would be added. More devices to consume the new power would be dreamed up with even more infrastructure built to support those. The entire world girdled with solar plants and turbines, wire, cables, supporting power stations, substations, etc ... for what, exactly? None of this would mean the end of conventional, fossil fuel power as the doubling of watts would serve to insure that fossil fuel 'shortages' would be inconvenience rather than crisis.
Catton's point - and George Mobus's as well as articulated on his website - is not ... when do humans finally get around to saying, 'Enough!? Their thesis is that is probably too late! I'm not sure I agree ... the question becomes, the point of satiety is when, exactly? Why do you think the 'fix' of one aspect of overload fixes any of the other aspects of it? Does the entire planet have to become an industrial site? What for?
Does the entire planet have to become a toxic waste dump? Ugly is waste, too! I love my beautiful planet which is my home that is disappearing faster than an old dude like me can die. My existential anguish will perish with me, but what about your children? Your children's children?
Is there anything to you other than money and more and more junk?
The difficulty comes with the 'substitution' part, which doesn't really happen. The result has always been 'additional'
Sure it does. Google kerosene and electric lighting.
More later...
Kerosene and electric lighting were some of the additions that have made possible: an explosion of industrialisation and world population. When oil (and gas) goes down I cannot imagine that something shows up that can give the good substitutions that we had in the past. Certainly not wind and solar; yes, they are abundant, however are not concentrated forms of energy, and cannot be tranported as easy as liquid fuels.
Kerosene and electric lighting
I wasn't clear. My point: the main use of oil in the late 19th century was in the form of kerosene for interior lighting. Electric lighting made that use obsolete. Electricity replaced oil completely and with higher quality.
Certainly not wind and solar; yes, they are abundant, however are not concentrated forms of energy, and cannot be tranported as easy as liquid fuels.
What's more concentrated than electricity? Sure, liquid fuels are convenient, but electric rail can replace long-haul trucking very nicely; short-range fleet electric trucks work quite nicely; and PHEVs are even more convenient than ICE's (they're dual-fuel: great for shortages). See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html
Nick, certainly you realise that now most of the electricity is generated by FF. That is my point. With wind- and solarenergy the problem is that many times you have to transport the generated electricity over a long distance, f.i. from the sea to land, and not only to the coastal areas. In Europe they are talking about plans for CSP generated electricy in Africa for Europe !! How many possibilities for disruption would that create ?
So, yes, electricity is concentrated, but you have to look also at the distance that the electricity must be transported.
Yes, electric rail, electric trucks and PHEV are part of the solutions. Together with the necessity to generate more electricity, much more.
most of the electricity is generated by FF
True. Coal, especially, is bad. Sadly, we have a lot of it. Google "Illinois Basin", or read http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html
How many possibilities for disruption would that create ?
Not more than we have for oil.
you have to look also at the distance that the electricity must be transported.
Again, oil has the same problem.
Long-distance transmission of wind power would be needed in some cases, and wouldn't be that expensive.
How many possibilities for disruption would that create ?
That is not true in times when there is plenty of oil (gas, coal). The oil (gas, coal) is exported to a country and there it is used locally to generate electricity. With CSP from Africa to Europe, a lot can happen, not in the last place because there are a lot of instable countries there.
you have to look also at the distance that the electricity must be transported.
There are no electricity generating plants on the oceans, or in the deserts in Africa.
In Europe there are planning to install a lot of windmills on sea, so it is more than 'in some cases'.
That is not true in times when there is plenty of oil (gas, coal).
Think beyond electrical generation: think of a war in the Persian Gulf, which knocked out oil exports. The Straits of Hormuz are necessary for about 20M bbls/day. Our reliance on oil makes our energy supply very fragile. I'm not saying I'm excited about Europe relying on African electricity exports, but it's hard to see how it could be worse than the current situation.
In Europe there are planning to install a lot of windmills on sea, so it is more than 'in some cases'.
Yes, but transmission from off-shore wind farms isn't really a very long distance.
Yes Nick, I know that. I even wrote it in the local newspaper. But there is more chance that this happens if oil-supplies are going down: the oil-wars.
I read your article about coal. I don't know if f.i. that German geologists take the less economical coal into consideration (should be), but during an economic depression caused by an energy crisis , rising energy costs are not favorable for recovery, even if only slightly rising. I admire your optimism and 'religion-like' believe that things will work out well. Especially with windenergy, (PH)EV's and lithium-availability (although batteries made from other metals maybe could do the trick). Coal possibly is a lesser problem (if any) because when the economy is going to tank the use of electricity will go down also. And as you wrote before, when people don't have money to buy a (PH)EV, they also cannot buy a ICE car.
But there is more chance that this happens if oil-supplies are going down: the oil-wars.
I agree. My point? That even the longest-distance kind of renewable setup, like CSP solar from Africa, is at least as reliable as our current oil arrangements.
during an economic depression caused by an energy crisis , rising energy costs are not favorable for recovery, even if only slightly rising.
First-the cost increment is small,
2nd-the money stays in the country, so it doesn't contribute to the balance of payments problem that is at the root of our current recession, and
3-if necessary, the sulfur scrubbing that causes the cost differential could be dispensed with.
The conclusion: the lights will stay on.
I admire your optimism and 'religion-like' believe that things will work out well.
No, it's just based on the evidence. When the evidence is bad, I call it that way. That's why I say that CC is a bigger problem than PO.
Especially with windenergy, (PH)EV's
They're all proven technology. They're here now - heck, PHEVs and EVs have been around for 100 years - think diesel submarines, which are enormous, incredibly reliable PHEVs.
and lithium-availability
See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/02/could-we-run-out-of-lithium-for-ev...
Ok, Nick. CSP is reliable. Until now what happens is: postponing the important steps necessary for the big energy transition. Another problems is that countries like Algeria don't like to see CSP coming, because their gas value will diminish then.
I disagree with this. If all the evidence points in the same direction, it is obvious. But this is not the case. There are different opinions, and you have chosen for the most optimistic one. Regarding coal reserves, one can read also that some say that because of PO the economically recoverable reserves are getting less, because the costs of extraction will rise considerably with rising diesel prices.
For the next 20 years PO is much more dangerous. If the world accepts its consequences it could work out well. But knowing historic events....
Your lithium site I read allready some months ago. Also with this there are different opinions about how much how many years could be extracted.
Yes, EV's have been around for 100 years. However most people don't want to see how the numbers have changed since 100 years ago. Even if they know the numbers, they don't realise the meaning of it.
Until now what happens is: postponing the important steps necessary for the big energy transition. Another problems is that countries like Algeria don't like to see CSP coming, because their gas value will diminish then.
I agree - things aren't moving as fast as they should, due to resistance to change. That's a problem mainly for CC, because it means we use more coal.
f all the evidence points in the same direction, it is obvious. But this is not the case. There are different opinions
First, controversy isn't the same as uncertainty. We see this around evolution and Climate Change. 2nd, it is possible for an educated observer to sift through the opinions, find the evidence, listen to the debate, and identify what makes sense. It just takes time.
and you have chosen for the most optimistic one.
No. I look at CC, and I see a major problem. I look at PO, and I see a real challenge, certainly, but nothing that can't be solved and that isn't likely to be solved, eventually. I see no evidence for a "bottleneck" which causes the death of the majority of humankind, caused by energy supply problems.
I don't look at opinions - I look at pretty concrete evidence. If you disagree, look at the specific evidence I provide and tell me where you disagree, and we'll work through it.
Regarding coal reserves, one can read also that some say that because of PO the economically recoverable reserves are getting less, because the costs of extraction will rise considerably with rising diesel prices.
This is a common argument.A $100/bbl increase in the cost of oil would increase the cost of transporting a ton of coal by $100/bbl x 1bbl/42 gal x 2 gal/ton* = $4.8/ton. That's a 2.5% increase in the cost of electricity, which means that railroads will be easily be able to out-bid other potential users, like trucks.
Coal transportation by rail can also be converted in a relatively straightforward manner to use electricity instead of diesel, meaning that reduced oil supplies are highly unlikely to have a significant direct impact on the ability of the US to transport coal.
For the next 20 years PO is much more dangerous.
Yes, PO will certainly cause international stress. I don't think any more major hot wars are likely, but there certainly are risks. Trade wars are somewhat more likely.
Your lithium site I read allready some months ago. Also with this there are different opinions about how much how many years could be extracted.
I think I've looked at the serious ones. What do you have in mind?
However most people don't want to see how the numbers have changed since 100 years ago. Even if they know the numbers, they don't realise the meaning of it.
Do you mean that EV's haven't grown as much as we'd like? On the one hand, I'd agree: between dirt cheap oil and resistance to change, EVs aren't where we'd like to see them. OTOH, I'd note that there are well above a million Priuses on the road, and dozens of EVs and PHEVs coming out soon, including really serious ones like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf.
*Rail transportation is about 440 ton-miles/gallon on average, and coal is at minimum 500 tm/gallon (Coal trains are probably even more fuel efficient, because the ratio of load to tare weight is greater than most other rail freight (particularly intermodal). 600 tm/g might be a good guess). Low-sulfur coal in the US travels roughly 1,000 miles before being used. Dividing these tells us that transporting US coal requires roughly 2 gal/ton.
No, this energy issue is incomparable with the 'evolution' controversy. It is far from easy for an educated reader to sift.
Because you can write an article with a list with educated people in the energy sector in which about half of them say oil (and gas) cannot be replaced by renewables and the other half say it is possible (presuming an important part of current civilisation has to continue). For me, in the PO issue, different opinions make sense, one more than the other. With knowing different sensible opinions I feel that is it going to be much more difficult than you 'think'.
Regarding coal, it is not only the tranportation. Why the R/P ratio for coal was 216 in 2000, and 140 in 2008 ?
Regarding the numbers, I mean all the numbers. The world population, the ever increasing dependency on oil, the tremendously increased infrastructure that uses oil, the exploded industrialisation.
If the U.S. gets yearly 3% less oil, that is 50.000 barrels of oil per hour less. Year after year. Calculate how many nuclear reactors of 1000MW have to be built each year, or how many windmills, etc. Another solution is f.i. carpooling, which you call 'trivial'. I rather would say it is an emergency measure, if it has to be increased from 10% to 50% or more.
this energy issue is incomparable with the 'evolution' controversy. It is far from easy for an educated reader to sift.
On the one hand, evolution provides a good example of an issue where there's enormous controversy (even among non-biologist scientists), and yet the underlying science, I think you'll agree, is quite clear.
OTOH....you're right. I tend to forget that I have a lot of experience and training in this field. I still think that an educated layman can figure this out for him or herself...but it's not easy, it's true.
With knowing different sensible opinions I feel that is it going to be much more difficult than you 'think'.
I understand. For my point of view...I'm not going on opinions. FWIW, many of those opinions are from people in the FF industry who know oil & gas, say, but don't really know the details of wind, solar and EV tech. They just don't. Catton and George are among them, sad to say, as well as Youngquist, Hanson, Kunstler, etc, etc.
Why the R/P ratio for coal was 216 in 2000, and 140 in 2008 ?
Basically, because reserves have been reclassified as resources, due to lack of demand for coal. It's a recognition that those resources are unlikely to be mined - but...they're still there.
Calculate how many nuclear reactors of 1000MW have to be built each year, or how many windmills, etc.
Nuclear reactors are difficult - they have a long lead time. OTOH, windmills are easy. If the US loses 3% of it's oil let's say it electrifies about 6% of it's personal vehicle miles traveled. That's 6% of 3 trillion, or 180 billion miles. At 4 miles per KWH, that's 45 B KHWs, or 45 TWH's. That would need 45TWH/8760 hours per year, or 5GW average production. At 33% capacity factor, that's 15GW nameplate. @$2/watt, that's $30B per year. That's not really very much. The US installed 8.5GW in 2008, and ramping up to 15GW isn't a big deal - the US will need rather more than that, and that too won't be a big deal.
carpooling, which you call 'trivial'. I rather would say it is an emergency measure, if it has to be increased from 10% to 50% or more.
Of course, from a BAU point of view. But, from a Catton point of view, it's trivial.
it is beyond any disagreement that major changes are forthcoming. The best attitude is to anticipate them and prepare ourselves
I agree. I think we should eliminate oil consumption ASAP.
In a shrinking system the substitution part doesn't work.
Well, this is a more difficult argument, as it doesn't rely on objective things like energy physics, technology or geology - it amounts to saying that as a society we've panicked, and won't be able to get our wits together to do what's needed.
If we take a look at the current wind and solar markets, we'll see that wind is doing ok, and solar is still growing strongly. Hybrid sales are doing just fine.
it is hard to see what can be gained even by switching kw for kw on paper and somehow keeping the same consumption infrastructure intact. I don't understand what is appealing about it.
I think most people appreciate the value of keeping the lights on.
None of this would mean the end of conventional, fossil fuel power as the doubling of watts would serve to insure that fossil fuel 'shortages' would be inconvenience rather than crisis.
True. At least for a while we'll have to make a decision to stop using coal and other FF's, rather than having it forced on us. I hope we do so soon.
Does the entire planet have to become a toxic waste dump?
Yes, greater aesthetic value would be good. This is, of course, something we won't be able to afford if we fall into poverty. Look at the USSR's collapse - it was very, very bad for the environment and wild animals. Look at how poor Africans destroy their environment - poverty is bad for everything.
Here's the report --
Searching for a Miracle
http://www.postcarbon.org/report/44377-searching-for-a-miracle
Thanks - I took a look.
Oddly enough, they actually make it clear that wind power is perfectly viable. They agree that the resource is more than large enough, and that it's cost and E-ROI are perfectly good.
Their only objection is that it suffers from intermittency and that there are difficulties in electrifying transportation.
Intermittency is, in the larger scheme of things, no big deal: http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/02/is-wind-intermittency-fatal-proble...
Electrifying transportation is pretty straightforward:
http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html
Other commenters will no doubt chime in on the probabilities of building out wind, solar and electrified transport even with a 100% committed crash program, which we won't get because of political gridlock, but I'd like to put out two widely divergent possibilities that, I think, would depend on our choice of financial arrangements. I don't mean to endorse or predict the likelyhood of either scenario.
If we insist that BAU must go on, the whole system collapses from failure to increase net energy inputs into a financial system that must grow. It doesn't take much decline; just flat or single digit decline rates is enough to make this happen.
If, on the other hand, we manage to wipe out a significant fraction of debt and go to more of a command economy where electricity and transport fuels are prioritized for basic necessities like food and water, we may manage to follow the decline curves down peacefully.
failure to increase net energy inputs
That's the fundamental assumption on which we disagree. Peak Oil doesn't mean Peak Energy, and PE doesn't mean peak Work Done (see Ayres).
For me, the answer lies in our inability to perceive our own end. I see this inability every day, and as I age, wrestle with it in my personal life. We, simply, cannot accept all possibilities. Americans cannot accept that one possibility is our economy may collapse with catastrophic consequences. Few people can accept all humans disappearing.
In a sense, our very awareness of existence is our worst enemy. We cannot accept disappearing into nothingness. If we could, we would make very different life decisions.
We are an occupant of a small planet in a small solar system that is only one of billions of stars in one galaxy in a universe with billions of galaxies. In our self centeredness we actually believe we are indispensible to all of this. We aren't!! Who cares if the human animal disappears?? I agree with George Carlin. The planet will not disappear. It will still be here and go on in one fashion or another. The present state of the planet is not important either. It will all simply go on without us.
haven't you read any science fiction, zeke? that's why we have colonize other planets! (hee hee.)
We are an occupant of a small planet in a small solar system that is only one of billions of stars in one galaxy in a universe with billions of galaxies. In our self centeredness we actually believe we are indispensible to all of this. We aren't!! Who cares if the human animal disappears?? I agree with George Carlin. The planet will not disappear. It will still be here and go on in one fashion or another. The present state of the planet is not important either. It will all simply go on without us.
RIGHT!! Even if we manage to wipe out 90% of all life forms on the planet as well as ourselves the Earth will eventually recover. It may take 10 million years but it will recover. It's happened before.
But in around 100 to 200 million years earth is finished either way (sun will burn their hydrogen faster and earth will head up more and more and lose all water to space becoming a second Venus). At present only our speciec has a slight chance to spread "intelligence" or better "big opposite entropy structures" (not life because we must leave our archaic biologic orgins one day if we will survive) in the universe some day. The chance is very low, but at least not zero.
Why is there a lack of wisdom in our "culture"? Could it be that we've been programmed to be fearful, Kool-Aid drinking consumers?
Great book, great review.
Regarding wisdom, survival and evolution:
It seems fairly apparent to me that natural selection favors those elements of an organism that provide short-term success over long-term success. In the review, it seems that Mr. Mobus equates wisdom with long-term planning (success). This is not what natural selection does. I'd like to hope that this is possible, but it is unrealistic.
The life of an organism is too short for natural selection to reward long-term success (long-term being defined as multiple generations of the organism).
I wonder if it depends on the speed of the change? For a relatively slow change, short-term planning wins. For a very fast change that required wisdom and foresight to see coming, long-term planning should win out as all the short-termers get drowned by the tsunami before they can either adapt or breed.
This would be like a petri dish of yeast deciding that it was best (long-term) to refrain from reproducing, so as to maximize the amount of food available in the future.
Further, success, in many ways, means reproductive success - passing on one's (presumably more valuable) genes. This is short-term success not long-term success - make lots of copies of your genes as quickly as you can, or make a small number of copies of your genes and protect those copies for as long as you can.
Long-term success means sacrificing short-term success, and this is not what natural selection does. It would be like the dinosaurs deciding that the abundance of plant material (and large plant-eating dinosaurs) would not be available forever, and natural selection making them smaller, in response. This didn't happen. The big ones died, and only when the world was fairly empty (comparatively) did the mammals get a chance. We are now in the Mammalian Age. Why will mammals choose long-term success over short-term success, when many other dominant species did not?
I would argue the opposite: that the faster the change, the more favorable short-term success becomes.
I know it's been said before but i keep being surprised at how much of the talk about "doom and gloom" and future scenarios is focused on losing energy supplies as if that is equivalent to the end of the world.
I realise that heating is a major factor for survival, but so much of our energy use is basically worthless - "discretionary spending"
Is there anywhere an article/report looking at the essentials to survival on a global basis that anyone knows about? obviously hospitals etc are a priority, what other essential services/processes are we dependent on with our current system?
For me food is and will be the priority, all the discussions about this deposit or that percentage of oil discoveries seems a bit like arguing while the house burns down! What will we eat after the supermarkets 3 day supplies run out?
There is enough food to feed the current population -even 10 Billion, it's just been distributed in the wrong way. I know that a large proportion of the posters on this site are more technical based but even engineers need to eat!
Hi Mark,
Of course you wrote some great stuff ;^)
If you take a look at my working papers (linked in the article) you will see one on the evolution of sapience. In that I describe what appears to be the development of wisdom from the perspective of selective advantage (for the group). We were actually on a track to evolve greater long-term thinking than I think most people would appreciate. What may have sidetracked us was our invention of agriculture which puts emphasis on shorter-term thinking (seasonal, and repeating patterns). It also emphasizes quite different reasoning skills than solving social problems.
Today all of our major problems seem to stem from short-term thinking used to tackle inherently long-term challenges. In my musings this is what, in the future, will select for individuals and groups that do a better job at it. Of, course this is conjecture. As I pointed out up-thread, no one can predict evolution.
Rather than try to explain a complex subject here, however, I recommend taking a look at the working papers to get the holistic story.
I will do so. I've bookmarked your blog for further reading.
My point in all of this isn't to say that long-term planning isn't a possible outcome of natural selection, just that long-term planning is severely hampered by the advantages of short-term success. I see no evidence of a species that has been able to put long-term planning ahead of short-term success. Yet, somehow, humans think they're different and can do it.
I'll review your further work.
Another Campbell, Joseph, speculated that writing in fact, may have contributed to a loss of wisdom. When ideas became locked up in writen form, ideas, ideals, religion, mythology all became out of sync with human evolution. Prior to writing, our world view was more mythological, passed on by the shaman, storytellers, bards, etc. Ideas, observations, world and cultural views, even habits and the business of everyday life, adapted from generation to generation as things changed over time, to better serve the generation and society in which they existed. For most of the history of our species thats how things worked. Perhaps our species hasn't caught up with the fact that we write everything down. Could Gutenberg have ushered out true wisdom? Was the age of reason the beginning of the end?
That's the kind of fascinating idea that keeps me reading TOD.
That seems to fit with the fact that 19th century US christian fundamentalism was based around a literal reading of the bible.
Back at the time of Nicaea when Constantine was codifying the Bible and writing it all down, there were groups of people who objected violently to the loss of the verbal tradition. They distrusted those who were imprisoning the faith in print. These groups broke away from the sanctioned Church in order to continue their verbal tradition. We know these groups today as...
.
.
.
.
.
The Oral Sects.
Baaaaaaaad.
You had me going there.....
Even as a Christian I find that funny.
Another bright spot in a gloomy doomy world, humor.
Charles.
He's an incorrigible punster, don't incorrige him.
Some of the stricter ones don't allow instrumental music at their meetings. Sects without Violins.
oh. oh. oh.
Really bad.
Thanks Nick. And how much energy is wasted by humans who embrace ideas simply because they were well written and timely? Mein Kampf, anyone? Ideas that have yet to stand the test of time or scholarship. How many of us embrace non-organic mythologies? Nostradomus? l. Ron Hubbard? Even your Fundamentalist Christians have a bible that was cooked over the campfires of a hundred generations prior to being realized in today's printed form. Is this the true source of the power of the "Word of God"? Perhaps wisdom must evolve just as we do or it becomes static and dies. Equating knowledge with wisdom is one of the great fallacies of our time (IMHumbleO).
Jeez, I gotta go feed the dogs! C-ya
One problem with not writing things down is that you can lose all the knowledge and wisdom if the population all dies off. Later peoples do have to understand your form of writing, and some knowledge and wisdom could be lost in translation, but none of it survives without something being left behind. We can piece together culture and how a society looked like in a general sense from artifacts we dig out of the ashes, but finding artifacts with writing on them is always a plus.
Pity might be that Homo sapian computerius will only leave behind shiny plastic baubles that look good on strings, but seem to have nothing written on them. (Dvds CDs, cell phones, other plastic things).
Charles.
I'd actually go one step further than Joseph Campbell and say that it is the ingrained beliefs of our species, our societies, our countries, etc. that has led to a loss of wisdom. For writing was just a way of remembering these beliefs. In a certain sense, even facts are beliefs. We point to facts as granular bits of Truth.
Because those beliefs got written down, the belief structure was made more permanent and less changeable from generation to generation. In a way, writing has limited human evolution, but writing was just the tool. It was the idea of making our beliefs permanent that did the damage.
It was the hubris of thinking that our ideas deserved to be made permanent, the desire to be immortal, or perhaps just the need to pass something of value on to our decendants. Yet another paradox of being human. If I write this down it may become dogma. If I don't it may be lost forever.
If our leaders had only heeded the message of "Overshoot!"
The implications of resource exhaustion, overpopulation and
climate change cannot be completely lost on elite planners.
There is no doubt a variety of contingency planning to "manage"
collapse. This could take various forms, but I have great doubts that it will entail preservation of liberties, and a humane allocation of necessities to prevent a dieoff.
Rather, as during the cold war when planners debated (and actually proposed by the joint chiefs to JFK) a nuclear first strike, killing 170 million soviet citizens, compared to a mere 30 million
americans, a managed dieoff is within the conceivable realm of national security state planning.
We, humans, have a history of fighting over scarce resources.
But now we have the very sophisticated tools of molecular biology
to fashion a "selective agent" to cull our numbers.
As frightened as I am of overshoot, I am equally (if not more) frightened by the reaction of our military planners to collapse. And, as an ironic and twisted rationale, they may think it to be compassionate and merciful for the victims.
Well, I know that for most here on the TOD, Catton's writings are infallible Holy Writ, and are not to be questioned. Nevertheless, at the risk of being labeled a heretic, questioning I am about to do.
The assumption is that the answer to a popular question here - "Are humans smarter than yeast?" - is "No". The assumption is that we are just like caribou on an island without preditors: we will grow our population until we overshoot the carrying capacity, and then our population will crash, maybe even all the way to extinction - AND NOBODY WILL DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. We will all just passively let this happen, just like dumb animals, living our lives as if nothing has changed all the way up to the end.
This is the received wisdom.
A heretical question: If this is the way that Homo sapiens invariably operates, then how does one explain the recent actions to arrest the depletion of the ozone layer? Given the above assumptions about humanity and how we operate, this is exactly the type of thing that should never, ever happen. And yet, an inconvenient fact: it did.
Need I mention that scientific evidence now suggests that our species has faced a "bottleneck" in the past, and managed to get through it. The evidence suggests that our ancestors actually made some efforts to adapt to the situation, and that it was their adaptations that made the difference.
There are other examples I could cite. Those who adapted to the spread of the Black Death by relocating away from the crowded, unhygenic cities into the countryside, were often the ones who survived, and from whom some of us are descended. It was those who didn't adapt who died off.
Don't misunderstand: I don't for a minute think that we can just continue on our merry way onward and upwards. Those who are familiar with my previous posts know that I believe that we are operating far above sustainable levels, and that we must inevitably decline until we have gotten ourselves down to a level that is sustainable.
Nevertheless, it is cited as a self-evident truth that humankind - in whole or in part - is incapable of doing anything at all to adapt itself to a rapidly changing environment. I am just questioning whether that assumption is quite as self-evident, or quite as true, as some here claim it to be.
What might be an alternative hypothesis? Maybe something like this:
"The human species - individually, but more importantly collectively - is apparently not really "smart" enough to always forsee and prevent problems, even those of our own making. However, once we are clearly in the midst of a serious challenge to our survival, we do try to do things to adapt to the situation and enhance our chances of survival. We do not just keep on operating on the basis of unthinking instinct, unchanging to the end."
I would simply ask: Which hypothesis would seem to have more support from the actual history of the human species - the "humans are yeast" hypothesis, or the "humans lack forsight to avoid problems, but do try to adapt their way out of them" hypothesis?
We are all fond here of citing the examples of collapsed, and mostly extinct societies that Diamond describes in his Collapse. Those are the societies that did not adapt. On the other hand, there are societies existing today that have been around a long time. They are the descendants of people who DID adapt to the challenges when they came.
All of us living today - ALL of us - are descended from human ancestors who successfully adapted to a challenging, difficult, and problematic environment. There is no one alive today carrying within them the genes of non-adaptors - of people who, like yeast or dumb caribou, just went along their way unchanging as a changing environment killed them off.
I don't consider that to be the received wisdom at all. I've never heard anyone claim that humans will not do anything. In fact, I've heard a lot of people say that humans will do a lot, but the things they do will not change the carrying capacity of the Earth, the damage that has already been done, or the belief that humans have that they are in control of the natural world.
And, there are probably countless people alive today "carrying within them the genes of non-adaptors". Just because a society or civilization or empire crashed in the past, it does not mean that their all of their genes disappeared with them.
In regards to your examples, you are focusing on short-term adaptation to catastrophic events. This is what all life does via evolution. The issue with "are humans smarter than yeast" is - can we put our long-term success ahead of our short-term success - as a species. Not as individuals.
I like contrarian analysis, but, methinks you doth protest too much in this comment.
WNC,
FWIW: I suspect I might have paid closer attention to your POV if you hadn't started out framing this as you being a heretic and "many" here being believers WRT Catton's work. Painting with a broad brush and setting up a straw man argument is a bit off putting - to me anyway.
If you read more carefully, the assumption is that some humans will survive a bottleneck event, as you yourself pointed out happened before. The title of the book is "Bottleneck" for that reason as well. So what is it that you think you are saying that is really that different. I would suggest you save the heresy frame for another subject! FWIW.
My comments were not directed particularly against you. Over the past several years, Catton and his work on carrying capacity and overshoot have been quoted around here extensively and continuously. I would venture to say that Catton and his work are Exhibit A cited in support of the doomer die-off scenarios. Since this is a thread about Catton and his work, this seemed the time and the place to raise some contrarian questions.
I think that Catton is right on the money when it comes to how poplations of species interact with their environment. I just question the application of those findings to the human population without any qualification.
And yes, I understand that the thesis of this post implies that a few probably will survive. But extinction was stated as a serious - even a 50/50 - possibility.
Non-human comparisons obviously don't work.
Human population is going through a demographic transition - this happens rarely in non-human species, where contraceptives don't exist.
I think that Catton is right on the money when it comes to how poplations of species interact with their environment. I just question the application of those findings to the human population without any qualification.
This seems to be of the "but humans are different" variety of belief (similar to the "this time is different" variety).
What makes humans so different from other organisms that the application of findings that apply to all other animals shouldn't be applied to humans without qualification?
Humans have certainly done more to impact life on this planet in a shorter period of time than any other lifeform that we know about. Yet, after only a few thousand years of civilization, we find ourselves on the edge of collapse. Dinosaurs (et al) dominated the planet for many millions of years, and it was only because of events beyond their control (asteroid, vulcanism, etc.) that they are not still dominating the planet.
See my comment just above.
we find ourselves on the edge of collapse.
That assumes the premise in question.
I am confused by your comment.
Your comment above states "Non-human comparisons obviously don't work." To start with, isn't that assuming the premise in question? But, more to the point, what part of "we find ourselves on the edge of collapse" do you disagree with and why?
Your comment goes on: "Human population is going through a demographic transition - this happens rarely in non-human species, where contraceptives don't exist."
I do not understand how this applies to collapse or extinction of the human species.
The comparison between humans and other species to which I am referring involves population growth.
Many non-human species will grow until they run out of food. Population overshoots the food available, death rates suddenly rise and malnutrition forces fertility lower.
This is obviously not happening with humans. Human population is decelerating and appears very likely to stop. It already has stopped in a number of countries, like Japan, Italy, Germany and Russia. It's conceivable that we still face a collapse in human population due to having already overshot carrying capacity, but it won't be due to infinite growth, which has already ended.
--------------
Now, I understood you to be arguing that a prospective collapse for human society was proof of the validity of a comparison between human and non-human growth dynamics.
My point: it's not proven that human society is going to collapse, so that can't be used as support for the argument for the similarity between humans and non-humans.
How has the human population not grown until it ran out of the energy required (food) to keep their population at its current level (or growing)?
As for "infinite growth", animals do not experience "infinite growth" and then collapse. They experience growth larger than carrying capacity of their environment and then collapse. Carrying capacity in a finite world of finite resources is, by definition,.....finite. Meaning "not infinite".
You've still not shown why it is obviously different with humans. I say that if you accept the idea that animals can overshoot the energy inputs available to them and then crash, then you must accept the idea that humans can (and might be) overshooting the energy inputs available to them and then crash. If we're at Peak Oil, then we have overshot our energy inputs. QED. Human population overshoot becomes a near certainty. The only question left is: to what degree have we overshot? Perhaps, by only a few hundred million. Perhaps, by several billion.
Are you just saying that 9-10 billion humans on this planet is within the carrying capacity of the planet? If so, then we have little left to talk about, for 9-10 billion humans is not within the carrying capacity, IMO. Not even close. If that is your belief, then the rest of this discussion becomes pointless.
How has the human population not grown until it ran out of the energy required (food) to keep their population at its current level (or growing)?
We're talking about cause and effect. In non-human species, growth continues until they run out of food. IOW, limits to food cause growth to stop. In the case of humans, growth is not stopping because of limits to food, it's stopping because people are using contraception. That's very different.
If we're at Peak Oil, then we have overshot our energy inputs. QED.
No. First, oil isn't the same as food (I know, we hear about how industrial farming is converting oil into food...but that's just a metaphor). 2nd, Peak Oil isn't peak energy, not even close. See where we started: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954/563337
Are you just saying that 9-10 billion humans on this planet is within the carrying capacity of the planet?
We don't really know that yet. Certainly, we aren't anywhere near direct physical limits imposed by energy or food.
Now, Climate Change is a form of energy-related pollution. On the one hand, we could easily eliminate our CO2 emission if we chose. OTOH, we're not likely to do so, so I think it's not implausible to argue that it's possible that energy will do us in (via CC), but it's certainly not proven that we won't get through CC with death rates that are within historical levels (say, the current levels in Russia, where men are dying 20 years prematurely due to drinking).
I wouldn't mind seeing more discussion of CC on TOD - I suspect it's far more important than PO. OTOH, it's arguably off-topic for TOD...
@ Nick
Your points are absolutely right - i could not have said it better (in part because of my bad english) - please keep posting. Some doomster here really are overshooting for shure!
I'm in no sense near a BAU or something else, but often reality lies in beetween. But one thing i totally disagree is the wide-spread malthusian hypothesis that the carrying capacity of the world is only 1 or 2 billion or even less. That's not true! It's a question of several pramaters but technological it is for shure far more than even 10 billion. That does not mean 10 billion by a 20th century american lifestyle are sustainable. But there are concepts for sustanaible cities with high densities and the use of renewables and so on which absolutely work. I personelly think the bigger threat is if we can hold our technological level as high as it is in the medium-term furture because of several reasons, first of all dysgenic tendencies, which i disgussed on another post with Adrynian(http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5899#comments_top / end of the post).
I fear that we have little to talk about.
However, "to hit the ball back over the net" I'll remove the larger concept of energy inputs (oil), even though much of our ability to grow enough food is due to oil.
The carrying capacity of the planet is not just about energy inputs, certainly. It is not just about food. It is also about the number, type and ratio of other animals and plants living on this planet.
Some fish populations are crashing, and may not recover. Leading scientists estimate that there will be nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if fishing policies do not radically change. Leading scientists say that the destruction of natural habitats and climate change is currently causing species to die out at 100 to 1000 times the natural rate. That is a staggering number.
The loss of fish and biodiversity means a loss of food for humans. Additionally, we have absolutely no idea what the impact will be from the loss of biodiversity. Add in difficulties with freshwater access, and the food situation is somewhat dire.
even though much of our ability to grow enough food is due to oil.
At the moment. It's worth noting that it's not hard to electrify tractors and ship food by train. Fertilizer needs can be greatly reduced, and ammonia fertilizer doesn't require oil.
The loss of fish and biodiversity means a loss of food for humans.
Additionally, we have absolutely no idea what the impact will be from the loss of biodiversity.
I agree. The current wave of extinctions creates large, unknown risks.
Add in difficulties with freshwater access, and the food situation is somewhat dire.
Most food in the US doesn't require freshwater access. OTOH, much farming in the rest of the world does. On the 3rd hand, the world as a whole has an enormous surplus of capacity to produce basic non-meat food commodities. Starvation due to water loss will be regional (due to localization!), and due to social disorganization, not basic food availability in the world as a whole.
Most food in the US doesn't require freshwater access.
I find this to be patently false.
California is in the midst of a multi-year drought that is affecting numerous types of agriculture.
According to CSIRO:
Perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you were referring to irrigation. Only about 1/3 of US crops use irrigation.
California is in the midst of a multi-year drought that is affecting numerous types of agriculture.
California is....weird. They grow rice in a former desert. It makes no sense.
* To produce one kilogram of oven dry wheat grain, it takes 715 – 750 litres of water
* For 1 kg maize, 540 – 630 litres
* For 1 kg soybeans, 1650 – 2200 litres
* For 1 kg paddy rice, 1550 litres
* For 1 kg beef, 50,000 – 100,000 litres
* For 1 kg clean wool, 170,000 litres
Note the difference between grain and beef water consumption. The US could double the number it feeds, and cut it's agricultural water consumption dramatically by eliminating beef production (for instance, only a small fraction of corn is eaten directly by humans - most goes for meat production, and of course a substantial fraction goes to ethanol).
We've honed this discussion to the topic of the potential for the population of the human species to collapse, due to certain factors (which you seemed to disagree with earlier).
A big factor in this equation is access to freshwater for growing food. Not just in the U.S., since 95% of the world's population doesn't live in the U.S. Freshwater is needed where the people live for growing food and for drinking. Food takes a lot of freshwater to grow and people need enough to drink every day - it can come in many forms: rain, irrigation, groundwater, aquifers, etc.
The lack of access to freshwater for an abundance of the human population seems to point towards a higher potential for the human population to collapse, when combined with other factors such as FF use, climate change, politics and human nature.
Will it collapse by thousands, millions, billions? I don't know and neither does anyone else. However, there are enough dangerous trends to think it is highly likely to be more than thousands.
95% of the world's population doesn't live in the U.S.
No, but the US produces a much larger % of the world's food.
Freshwater is needed where the people live for growing food and for drinking.
Drinking needs are much, much smaller than for growing food and other uses. If that was the only thing we needed water for, we really wouldn't have a problem.
The lack of access to freshwater for an abundance of the human population seems to point towards a higher potential for the human population to collapse
No question, it's another stress on the system. Probably the biggest problem from Climate Change.
there are enough dangerous trends to think it is highly likely to be more than thousands.
Sure. OTOH, a single hurricane or earthquake can kill 100's of thousands. Something on the order of 100M die every year, from one thing or another. Death rates are,IMO, very likely to rise due to CC, but there's an enormous difference between a significant rise in death rates (as seen, for instance, in Russia recently, where male life expectancy has fallen by 20 years due mostly to drinking!) and collapse. If death rates were to rise by, say, 50M per year, from a BAU point of view that would be an enormous human tragedy, but it wouldn't even stop net population growth.
Hi Nick,
I’m from the “can-do” generation that tends to view “problems as opportunities”. And yet, as a graduate from the School of Hard Knocks, I have a pragmatic streak that warms me that about being overly optimistic – some problems really do not have good solutions or happy endings. Regarding this whole issue of collapse - I follow TOD because I’m still undecided as to the most likely course of events over the next 10 years or so. Note, I only said “most likely” as predicting the exact future is a fool’s errand. I’m quite convinced, however, that the next 10 or 20 years will be unlike anything that has happened before – but that does not say much. I’m convinced that BAU cannot continue but I’m really not sure where these changes will (most likely) occur on a scale of “graceful descent” to “utter catastrophe”.
I follow your comments as you seem to be a knowledgeable and competent debater – but, I’m really not sure of how you envision the “most likely” course of events. I am currently reading “Threshold”:
http://www.amazon.com/Threshold-Western-Culture-Thom-Hartmann/dp/0670020...
where he discusses the confluence of factors that could lead to some very nasty consequences for humanity. You seem to be much more optimistic:
I’m not sure that you are advocating human population growth, but you don’t seem to think it is a major problem either and you cite declining or predicted declines in human population. And yet, you seem to recognize the growth rate is so strong that removing 50M a year would not stop growth.
I am very curious to know your basic vision of how this is most likely to play out in 10 years or so? Aside from asteroids, pandemics, nukes, or other catastrophic events, how do you see PO, GW, environmental factors, and the debt issue - combined with the amount of population growth that is pretty much locked in at this point – how do you see this impacting, for example, folks in the US? Do you see an adaptive process that may be somewhat painful but doable – perhaps like going into WWII and coming out the other side with growing middle class and generally optimistic common folks? Or, do you see a very painful process with widespread death and suffering – perhaps analogous to what the Irish endured in the mid 1800s or the Jewish people endured in the early 1900s? Or, do you see something totally different?
Please note that this is not a “gotcha” type of question – I simply wonder what you see coming because you seem to have thought about it quite a lot and seem to be more optimistic than most.
What a really good question - the hardest I've gotten in a while.
Let me think about it...
It is indeed a good question. One problem with imagining ourselves into a viable future is how many things have to go right. As a teacher, I constantly point out to students who are getting doomerish on me that for almost any particular problem there are, if not perfect solutions, at least coping strategies, often tried and true ones:
IF we all (or almost all) became vegetarians/vegans (or something close to it) and we distributed food equitably, there would be much more food to go around even with our current population while giving the oceans a chance to revive fish stocks.
IF we radically reduced consumption of pretty much everything down to 1/8 or so of current US levels, we could still live reasonably comfortable lives and could be living on something close to what the earth could sustainably support
IF we educated women nearly everywhere, gave ready access to contraceptives, gave effective encouragement for couples to postpone childbirth to after they were thirty or so and keep to one child, we could quite rapidly reduce population in a humane way.
IF we electirfied public transport, effectively encouraged walking and biking to nearly all daily destinations, gave up almost totally on long-distance transportation, we could get by on a tiny fraction of the oil we now consume.
IF we resettled the countryside with small, mostly self-sufficient organic farmsteads, we could create a far more resilient population overall.
IF we gave up the compulsions for constant growth, for golf courses in desert, for conspicuous consumption, for space travel...we would have a much better chance at sustainability.
IF we immediately stopped all further coal mining, and rapidly fazed out oil and natural gas extraction, and worked extremely hard to reduce other sources of GHGs, while doing widespread planting of native grasses and other plants that naturally sequester carbon long-term in their roots, perhaps with a wide spread use of terra preta thrown in for good measure, perhaps we could get ahead of the GW feedbacks that are starting to kick in and slow down the acidification of the oceans.
IF Indians stopped pumping any more water out of their rapidly depleting aquifers...sorry, never mind, there is no even remotely happy ending to the story there that I can see.
IF...
Any of these individually would be almost impossible to do on a large and consistent enough level to have the needed effect. The problem is that we have to do essentially all of these and more, and do them all essentially perfectly and essentially now (though forty years ago would have been far better).
So while I can agree with Nick that there are a large number of strategies available, the likelihood that we will do even one completely enough and on a large enough scale to make a difference seems diminishingly small. And the likelihood that we will do more than one, much less all, right away, is simply beyond anything I can believe.
On top of this, Nick seems to want to preserve economic growth, for some reason.
I think we will take some half-measures that are partly effective, but more often we will take measures that make things worse (cap and trade, for example). Human inequities and species loss will continue to escalate. Some of those still in the shrinking 'haves' side will continue to be starry eyed and optimistic about possibilities for the future.
That's a thoughtful comment.
I disagree that these things are necessary in the way described to prevent "collapse". I'd agree that very dramatic measures would be necessary to prevent Climate Change.
I see CC as the worst problem, and I'd agree that some regions will be very badly hit by it (Florida? what Florida, Grandpa?). Still, it will be a slow-motion disaster, and we'll get through it with civilization pretty much intact. We may lose a few countries, like the Maldives, and Bangladesh - that's going to create one heck of a refugee problem. Still, I don't think anyone will let them drown...
Comments on items:
#1: yes, distribution is the problem. In fact, more people in the world are overweight than are malnourished.
#2: I don't see any physical resource limits to growth anywhere close. Energy is the big one, and we have plenty of that. PO is a problem, but mostly for oil importers like the US who are sending much of their wealth to exporters. Like food, the main problem is inequitable distribution, not a lack of BTUs.
#3: that would be good. We'll get to ZPG and then a decline, although not as fast as would be good.
#4: PHEVs like the Chevy Volt and EVs like the Nissan Leaf will work quite well. I don't really think road transport is difficult in principle - the real hurdle was institutional/social: getting the car industry to commit to something that will make many people's careers and investments obsolete. Now, it's just building out/ramping up to get economies of scale. If it's done slowly it won't cost significantly more than ICE vehicles. If we need to make existing vehicles obsolete more quickly than normal turnover..well, that's a real expense, though not overwhelming.
I'll try to add more later...
#1: yes, distribution is the problem. In fact, more people in the world are overweight than are malnourished.-source for this?
Food is a real problem. OTOH, obesity is a health problem for more people across the world than starvation - the world as a whole could reduce it's calories by 20% and be better off.
923 million people across the world are hungry.
http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html
WHO’s latest projections indicate that globally in 2005:
approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight;
at least 400 million adults were obese. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/index.html
http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/Malnutrition-And-Obesity-Goes-Hand-In-Hand-4960-1/
A shift to overconsumption of food was causing new forms of illness:
"While nutritional status has improved worldwide over the past fifty years, new nutrition-related problems have also emerged A global nutrition transition has and is occurring on a continuum. While problems of under-consumption and // poor nutritional status continue to exist, increasingly problems of diet/chronic diseases are emerging as significant public health issues globally.
Part of the issue here is that quantity is going up (so far) but quality is going down. Diabetes is becoming pandemic as we get more and more of our calories from sources like high fructose corn syrup.
On the other hand, with biofuels added to other connections between fuel and food, price instability in oil has lead to spikes in prices in food, leading to mass food riots around the globe last year (again, mostly a problem of distribution). Meanwhile, in the last few years we passed the one billion number for people with severe food shortages.
Flooding Mexico with out cheap, subsidized grain lead to the displacement of millions of farmers, many of whom came north looking for work.
The whole food system has become at once far more productive and far more vulnerable, destabilizing, and toxic to land, water, air and consumers. And of course it is very ff dependent.
I think I agree with your 1st 3 paragraphs.
far more vulnerable, destabilizing, and toxic to land, water, air and consumers.
Well, it certainly has a lot of problems. Has it gotten worse? That's not clear to me.
And of course it is very ff dependent.
In the short run. On the one hand, agriculture uses only a small % of our FFs, so it will be able to outbid other uses, especially personal transportation. OTOH, in the long run tractors can be electrified, fertilizer consumption greatly reduced*, and fertilizers derived from non-FF sources.
Is that a perfect future? Of course not - if food prices are more volatile and sometimes much higher, some people will go hungry, due to low incomes. But, will the numbers in OECD countries be high? No. Will the numbers around the world even begin to approach something that could be described as a "bottleneck"? Definitely not.
* McKibben, in his book Deep Economy, says that low-input farming requires twice as much labor per acre, and that it produces twice as much food per acre, which equals no more labor per unit of food.
"'far more vulnerable, destabilizing, and toxic to land, water, air and consumers.'
Well, it certainly has a lot of problems. Has it gotten worse? That's not clear to me."
See the movies King Corn, Big River and Food, inc., the last just out on DVD.
Thanks for your reference to McKibben and his book Deep Economy, both of which I know well, having taught the later, and had drinks with, had as a house guest, and been a chauffeur to the former. He keeps a positive but reasonably positive front in public, but privately he admits that he doesn't see much chance of a bright future.
Best wishes with whatever light guides you forward in these darkest of times.
dohboi
See the movies King Corn, Big River and Food, inc., the last just out on DVD.
I've been wanting to, but a little afraid it would be depressing, and more not wanting to take the time to watch movies - have you seen this info in written form?.
McKibben ...keeps a positive but reasonably positive front in public, but privately he admits that he doesn't see much chance of a bright future.
Well, I imagine he sees the future the way I do: solutions exist for CC, but there's no major sign of them being implemented the way they need to be. He's trying to educate people about that. I, in my modest way, am trying to as well, with more of a focus on energy (which I know better).
I think it's helpful to know what's a really disastrous problem and what isn't - in this case, CC and PO respectively - the solutions are almost the same, but the time frame is much shorter for CC.
Best wishes with whatever light guides you forward in these darkest of times.
Thanks. To you too!
You seem to be equating climate change with sea level rise only. CC means major disruptions in long-term weather patterns, patterns farmers rely on to know when and what to plant, builders rely on to know how strong and where to build bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure...
Many places are now seeing:
100, 500, even 1000-year flooding and other extreme weather events are happening every other year or so in many places
Drought is becoming so long lasting that it is being given up as a term for what is going on, since it implies a temporary period, in favor of "permanent drying out" or "desertification."
Diseases are spreading into territories where they were once unknown or long-eradicated--malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus...
Planting zones has migrated north by about one already, and further moves will push many species out of the soils where they can flourish--the soils in northern Canada are very thin and infertile compared to those of the mid-West/great plains where most of US grain is grown.
CC is already taking millions of lives per year according to the CDC, and very few of those are the direct result of sea level rise.
But, yes, mostly it will be the political and economic disruptions that will be recognized first as the proximate causes (and MSM rarely if ever looks beyond proximate causes, if they even look that far) of the death and mayhem likely to unfold in the next few years, even when CC and PO are contributing factors or ultimate causes.
There's an old cartoon (G. Wilson, I think) that Nick always reminds me of--in a dungeon a prisoner is being whipped by a torturer, but they both have smily faces pasted over their heads. We all need a little sunshine, sometimes, I guess : )
Hey now, be fair: I called CC a disaster. Here's what I said:
"I see CC as the worst problem, and I'd agree that some regions will be very badly hit by it (Florida? what Florida, Grandpa?). Still, it will be a slow-motion disaster, and we'll get through it with civilization pretty much intact. We may lose a few countries, like the Maldives, and Bangladesh - that's going to create one heck of a refugee problem. Still, I don't think anyone will let them drown..."
Droughts and desertification will be an enormous problem. Large populations will have to move. Actually, I suspect the largest problem we'll face will be ocean acidification - that's a real disaster just by itself.
But...to cause a majority of the population to starve would require the world's food production capacity to fall by 90%. I haven't seen evidence for that.
Planting zones has migrated north by about one already
I haven't seen any indications of that in the US. Could you point me to more info on that?
Yes, I realized a bit after I sent it off that I had left out ocean acidification. How many people in the world depend on the oceans for a vital portion of their food? I don't have the stats with me right now, but it's a good large sum.
A map of the shift in planting zones shift was posted here a couple days ago, I think. I'll see if I can go back and find the link (but others are invited to do so).
I think it won't be just food scarcity, but also water scarcity, spreading diseases, and increased conflict from these and other pressures (PO being not the least of these) that will bring down populations. Unfortunately it will often be the poorest who have generally contributed the least to these global imbalances that will go first.
L
But please don't let me cloud your sun-shiny disposition. Lord knows we need it around here. It can seem like there is no way that major systems that have lasted for years could not possibly change, but then the Berlin Wall fell, apartheid in SA ended, investment banking collapsed...
Change is certain. Drastic change. The question is will it be change that fosters a viable world for future generations, or one that destroys it.
How many people in the world depend on the oceans for a vital portion of their food?
An interesting question.
planting zones shift was posted here a couple days ago, I think.
I searched a bit on TOD without success.
I'll see if I can go back and find the link
Thanks.
I think it won't be just food scarcity, but also water scarcity
Direct intake of water is a tiny fraction of human use of freshwater supplies. If, for instance, we stop beef production and reduce rice paddies, we could cut ag consumption dramatically.
spreading diseases,
That's a wildcard. Hard to know how to evaluate it. Worth noting that malnutrition and bad sanitation are crucial - they were key to the Black Plague of the 1400's and the 1918 Spanish Flu.
Unfortunately it will often be the poorest who have generally contributed the least to these global imbalances that will go first.
I have a very bad feeling about Africa.
But please don't let me cloud your sun-shiny disposition. Lord knows we need it around here.
I agree (I hope you're not being ironic), we really do need some balance - some pointing out of solutions and the positive trends that get less attention.
It can seem like there is no way that major systems that have lasted for years could not possibly change, but then the Berlin Wall fell, apartheid in SA ended, investment banking collapsed...
I'm very aware of that. Another major systemic change: FF industries, that can be replaced by renewables and electric systems. People on TOD seem to have a hard time visualizing that - it's like a gaggle of oil industry veterans and automotive engineers, grumbling about how nothing can replace their oil.
Change is certain. Drastic change
No question.
The question is will it be change that fosters a viable world for future generations, or one that destroys it.
It's clearly going to be both. FF's will gradually get replaced, but not fast enough to prevent a variety of CC disasters....which most of us will get through eventually, with a viable civilization.
A short reply is that I think in the next 5 years we'll see reduced economic growth (perhaps by 1-2% % point)in OECD countries, greater volatility, and sharper regional variations. I expect oil to stay between $75 and $100/bbl.
I expect oil production to clearly fall from it's plateau in about 4 years. At that point things depend on how sensible public policy has been - IOW, have politicians reacted to economic stagnation with sensible policies that reduce oil consumption and support US manufacturing, or do they engage in regressive policies like trade wars and protection of legacy industries. IMO, it's slightly more likely that policies will be sensible, and if that's the case the economic stagnation should gradually lift - IOW, there will be negative feedbacks. Otherwise, the feedback will be positive, and it will deepen.
I'll try to add more later.
The difference between humans and other species is that humans have developed culture, which itself can evolve, and can be transmitted non-genetically from human to human. Our culture can get us into big trouble, but our ability to learn and to problem solve and to use the tools of our culture to adapt our culture can also get us out of big trouble in a way unique among species on planet Earth. This is all stuff that yeast and caribou can't do.
Yeast and caribou don't wage war on each other, either. Or, believe that they "own" the Earth and all its resources and lifeforms. Or, believe in flying spaghetti monsters that live up in the sky. Or, inflict pain and suffering for the mere pleasure of it. Of course, I could go on and on.
Being different does not mean being better.
Over time, has human culture contributed more to the diversity of the world or less?
Yeast and caribou don't wage war on each other, either. Or, believe that they "own" the Earth and all its resources and lifeforms....Or, inflict pain and suffering for the mere pleasure of it.
Of course, they do. Non-humans prey on each other all of the time. Lions, for instance, will kill cheetahs just to eliminate the competition, and male lions will eat the cubs of other male lions for the same reason. Predators like large cats routinely capture prey and have their young play at killing it, for the practice. The worst of human behavior is routine in nature.
To be a steward of the earth, to not wipe out all other species when it's convenient....these things will require humans to act much better than the average non-human species. That's part of why it's so difficult.
WNC,
I believe you are more nearly correct in your analysis of our adaptability and will to survive than the doomer contingent.
Furthermore as an amatuer student of history I think the doomers have not read or studied enough military history-many countries when faced with being over run by enemies have put up extraordinary fights that lasted for years while the locals suffered almost unbelievable hardships.
Once an undeniable and in our face IMMEDIATE CRISIS arrives we will probably find ourselves living under a govt that has transformed itself into a defacto war time govt in most countries.
At that point the TECHNICAL ability to actually do something will be utilized-we can and will actually DO SOMETHING.
Under defacto martial law ( or whatever the proper legal terms might be ) we can and will turn off all the advertising lights,institute draconian fuel rationing,shut down non essential energy intensive industries,institute a moratorium on new building except as necessary to the solution of the crisis, close down hundreds of boondoogle govt programs and offices, and draft a few million men to work on the problems.
We can brew our beerr locally and drink it out of reusable glass bottles , do without bottled water altogether , and do without soft drinks,potato chips, flat screen tv's, Mustangs, airtravel and a thousand other non essential goods and services.
Factories that manufacture insulation ,triple glazed windows, and solar water heating equipment can be made to run around the clock.
People who hold essantial jobs can be moved into the house nearest the job that is occupied by a retiree or non essential worker.
Businesses with more than a handful of employees can be made to organize thier work to accomodate car pools and bus and street car schedules.
Those thrown out of work will get a subsistence level or maybe somewhat higher living allowance and the offer of a job that in the words or the immortal Godfather of the movies which they "can't refuse."
Said job may involve hoeing corn and beans or laying street car track or providing child care so others can do the heavy work.Insulation will be installed, windows replaced, houses that cost too much to renovate to a high efficiency standard will be condemned.
Auto mechanics will find thenselves on crews converting over the road trucks to run on natural gas.Excavating contractors who have been laying sewer pipe will be laying gas pipelines instead.
Patents will be suspended and wind farms will be built with minimal review or delay at the spots that get the most kwh per the investment in transmission lines and turbines.
Feedlots can be closed and grass fed beef rationed.Pet food can be taxed at luxury rates.Chickens can lice in every back yard and community based agriculutre can fast become a reality.
Shipping apples from coast to coast can be prohibited as apples are easily grown on both coasts.
A thousand other things as well as these can be done.
None of this will be nearly as hard as being bombed or starved or held in slavery or even as hard as the everyday lives of the worst off two billion people alive today.
Now as to whether it can happen this way-I refer skeptics to Germany in the thirties, Great Britian during WWII,the Afghans today,the soldiers and people in the American south during the latter stages of the American civil war.
Of course it might not happen this way-we might just lay down and die or cry ourselves to death.
You are not thinking clearly. There is nothing in history which compares to now, except the fact that we fight over resources.
The world has changed FOREVER.
"We" are nearly seven billion strong, the earth and the oceans have been plundered for resources to feed, clothe and shelter us, not just now but we've been doing it for thousands of years, its just now we have reached the limits. We've decimated every living animal on earth except those we choose to breed. We polluted the land, oceans, rivers and atmosphere.
As I have said numerous times, we engineered our way into this mess. Cornucopians much like you think we can engineer our way out of it.
There will be war. Just because you think there is an alternative won't change that fact. We are humans, it's what we do.
By the way, what sort of "hardships" will most of Africa further endure? What about the people living the shanty towns of the Sub-Continent, China, South East Asia and South America? I guess they are expendable in the brave new world.
Bandit ,
I suppose you are new here-I don't remember seeing any comments from you and if you were a regular you would know that I am a very long way from a cornucopian.
I fully recognize that the game MIGHT be over but the fat lady hasn't sung yet and it ain't over till it's over.
But I probably should have qualified my comment by saying it is geared to a peaceful scenario-I thought it was clear from the context of the discussion -- whether it is POSSIBLE for us to survive as a technological society.
I maintain that it is possible-and even probable that the US and western Europe and a few more places will pull thru chastened and thoroughly humbled of course.But we are likely to still have running water, electricity, tv and the internet,refrigerators, and an adequate diet.Probably very few cars, very little throwaway junk of the Walmart sort.
As a matter of fact I am on record here several times as saying a hot resource war or wars is very likely-but even that is not certain.We might not be involved and we might be able to prevent other countries from going the nuclear route by letting them know in no uncertain terms that if they fire one off at ANYBODY we will fire ten at them.
If we were to simply achieve the level of energy efficiency the Germand currently enjoy we could tell the world to kiss off-and if we did that nobody could do a thing about it.The Chinese could use our treasury bonds for kindling or cigarette paper.
Of course there is that warming thing down the road a ways -but that is in my humble opinion something that will either take care of itself or it will take care of most of us-at a later date.The energy crisis is the more immediate problem.
But I might be wrong and I have been doing a lot of things on the old family farm to get ready for the worst, including for instance stashing several years worth of fertilizers, pesticides, diesel fuel,etc. We are ready to go back to subsistence farming by hand if absolutely necesssary and know how it's done-I grew up in the fields working with my grand parents who lived the first third of thier lives without electricity and never bought more than a small part of thier food in grocery stores even when they were in thier seventies.
There is nothing in history which compares to now,
Sure there is. European "peak wood" was much worse than PO. Some attribute the mass deaths from the Black Death to peak-wood-induced malnutrition.
A lot of attention on some of our immediate issues, specifically fossil fuels and their importance to BAU, but closer to the heart of political, economic, ecologic issues and realistic social outcomes will be the availability of fresh water resources -- that may be at least as significant a "tipping point" element as the price of crude oil. In any case, the evidence makes it inescapable that BAU is unsustainable in even the short term -- most of us are already dealing with a concrete change in expectations about consumption and lifestyle. And we're relatively isolated. But, as Jim Morrison (et al.) said, "No one gets out of here alive."
I'm a great fan of George Mobus' Question Everything blog. It opened up my mind a bit more in the past year and a half. I'm glad to see this review being published here. Thanks, TOD.
Write it for goodness sakes! I think this idea every story has to end in a positive way is an unfortunate result of our illusionary homo collosus drive to satisfy every need right now. If the progression or outcome is negative, then so be it. Cornucopians will just have to grow up or whither away in the coming bottleneck anyway, so why not give them a primer course with a book about what will most likely happen. Wow, we're headed for a bottleneck financially, enviromentally, and population wise, but we're worried about people's feelings. Now I know its going to happen.
I think the Mayans were correct. Maybe 12/21/2012 isn't the exact date, but what they believed was time periods move with human consciousness changes. Well, we are right near that point where the bottleneck starts to pincer in and we are real close to that date, when consciousness will be forced to change. Doesn't mean things will end in a cataclysm, but it does probably mean the party is near over. The party of FF usage, the overshoot party, the over population party, the greed party, the ignore the environment party.
May the future consciousness change bring with it Homo eusapiens. Maybe sustainability and undamaging to the environment will be their mantra.
I don't agree that homo sapiens must go extinct for a new homo to emerge. We know that as many as six different "homos" occupied the planet at one time. Were they all seperate species? We aren't sure, but we know some were. In a senario where small populations were geographically separated for long enough its a sure thing they will evolve differently. Maybe Homo eusapiens will be the eventual, dreaded and worshiped Master Race.
Great book review and great comments. We are all however missing the two elephants in the living room and their names are war and protectionism. First will come protectionism as countries jostle each other to hold onto what they need to survive. Next will come wars when the heads of state have to feed their starving populations or protect their collapsing economies. War will spread like a cancer across the world. This time the nuclear option will be required to win.
The first major war will likely be between North Korea and South Korea as North Korea is a country already to close to the edge when times get tough and they have the 4th largest military in the world. (South Korea has the 6th largest military. Rankings based on the total number of people in the military services)
If we look at the history of why wars started in the last 100 years, it is obvious that in a world of diminishing resources the breakdown of societies is less of a risk than becoming involved in a war. War is a constant in our world, there is no reason to believe that will change.
My doomer thought for the day:-(
Why would North Korea go to war because it was "close to the edge"? Mr Kim has never worried about his people dropping dead in large numbers before. He would probably consider it nothing more than demographic weight loss.
I use North Korea as an example because they are a country with a huge military and they are already at a point of just barely getting by. Kim faces a real possibility of famine beyond anything seen before in North Korea. He will have to either beg for foreign aid and in return he will have to give up his nukes, or tell his loyal and uninformed subjects it is all South Korea's fault and invade them. If he does not, no amount of propaganda will keep his family in power when hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses litter the streets and countryside.
The big four world powers, the U.S., China, India, and Russia will then face their first crisis. Do they work together to contain North Korea or does North Korea begin to split them apart. That is one scary scenario. It takes just a single idiot ruling a country to start a chain reaction that can't be stopped. Kim is the biggest idiot I can think of at the moment;-)
Exactly PriorityX
Which is why I do not see the advantage of focusing the majority of our discussion on future scenarios for society.
It will be what it will be.
The bottleneck will define what that future will be and unless we can prevent all out war there may not even be a future.
While many of the commentors to this post are certain there will be a massive die-off, only a few note that once the direction becomes clear, we will do something.
Peak oil and climate change will affect different areas in different ways and to different degrees. It will not happen everywhere at the same time. It is likely to be a process that takes years, perhaps decades. This is a cold comfort: I do not believe we can avoid a massive die-off. However, there are different kinds of die-off, and different kinds of wake-up calls. I think that there will be less-than-global tipping-point failures.
Suppose (this is just an example) there is a critical drought in Asia, resulting in millions of deaths, de-industrialization, and failed states across the continent. Such a scenario might provide the impetus towards change in areas not affected; it would certainly require de-globalization whether it was desired or not.
This is only one scenario. It is hard, however, to come up with credible scenarios that affect all places in equally negative ways at the same time. There will likely be more than one kick at the can. Luck will play a part; it is possible that a society will survive with indoor plumbing. The timing of the tipping-point events is the wild card. For the species as a whole, sooner, obviously, is better than later.
If North America were isolated after a tipping-point event, it might be possible, by rationing everything from gas to health care (allowing the old and infirm to die, thereby reducing average life expectancy), and having sterilization lotteries for fertile women and sterilization after the first child for the winners(reducing fertility to 15 or 20% of replacement, say), to reach a sustainable level in as little as 30 years without a local (continental) die-off, and with some technology and society intact(all depending on the time of the events, the state of the climate, the population level, the energy available, etc.) Seeing the effects on other areas may allow the kind of draconian measures that would be required.
If an early tipping-point event happens in North America leading to a collapse here, I don't think there's anywhere else with the political cohesion, stability, water and energy resources, areas close enough to the poles to allow mitigation of AGW, and of low enough(yet high enough)population density to even have a chance of reaching sustainability with some technology intact and without a die-off.
This is a Strangelovian equation. However, I don't think our societies have the political will to change without seeing megadeaths somewhere else. Once people have seen the unthinkable, it won't be unthinkable anymore. Then we might see change.
Canuck,
Well said, Sir!
The Europeans managed to carry on , fight wars , and hold together as societies even as the Plague killed a third of them.
Peak Oil is nothing compared to the Plague.
Heck, the US could reduce it's oil consumption by 35% in 3 months just by carpooling, enforced by compulsory WWII style rationing.
Carpooling - the horror!
Nah, not hard at all. Carpooling! It's the answer! Just change the average North American's inbred sense of entitlement, educate him as to why he should change, convince him that this is the best way to deal with peak oil, and make him not feel like a sucker if the majority of his peers don't do it. And Mike Vandenbergh, director of Vanderbilt University's Climate Change Research Network (http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/11/
10/10greenwire-your-neighbors-saving-energy-why-arent-
you-4546.html)agrees with me and has a heap of technical reasons as to why carpooling is not easy, and is, in fact, really, really hard: "Carpooling, it turns out, is frustrating. Vandenbergh was part of a research team that examined 17 environment-saving behaviors, finding carpooling the second most effective in potential energy savings but dead last in potential consumer uptake."
Uh, I don't know how to break this to you, but that's not "carpooling, enforced by compulsory WWII style rationing". It's gas rationing. If you've got some magic way to get this accepted by the American public, you should share it with us.
My opinion remains the same: Widespread carpooling is a sign of the apocalypse. It means people are really suffering and are out of options. Because that is the only way you're going to get Americans to share cars.
I agree - carpooling is very inconvenient, and it won't be accepted unless there's an emergency of some sort.
OTOH, that's what you were talking about, right? Some dramatic event that convinces people there's an emergency, like Pearl Harbor, or 9/11?
My point: "the apocalypse", or the Plague, suggest something terrifying and fundamentally hard to fix: a disaster, that kills many people and can't be solved even after we get people's attention.
Carpooling is very, very annoying. It's inconvenient. But it's millions of miles from mass mortality. How can we describe something as "the apocalypse" when it can be fixed by something as trivial as carpooling (combined with other slightly longer-term options, like ramping up PHEV production)?
My original point:
Nick's reply
I think I made my point very clear: that people would have to be suffering and out of options.
Invoking the apocalypse was a figure of speech. An exaggeration that was both funny and thoughtful. Droll. The use of sarcasm in my original response is another clue that my use of language is carefully calculated. It's my style. To try to call me on this is, essentially, an ad hominem attack, which I believe is frowned on here. Further, it shows that you are bankrupt of new ideas to bring to the argument.
More troubling is the careful use of language on your part to try and minimize the points I made: I went to some trouble to find support for my views that car pooling is inherently so difficult that people won't do it. You even agree:
and yet, by the end of your comment you write this:
You cannot agree with me and believe that carpooling is trivial. You also cannot bolster a defence of your original comment with facts both not in evidence in the original comment and irrelevant to said comment(that would be the little bit about combining carpooling with more EV's.)
I will also add my voice to bicycle Dave and dohboi: where are you coming from, and why do you post this way? I, and I suspect most of the posters here, have given a lot of thought to our positions. We have read up on the various mitigation strategies and alternative solutions, and have decided that they are unlikely to happen fast enough to help. Yet you choose to badger us like you were a fifth grader with no knowledge of politics, business, or human nature: "c'mon guys, I just know they'll do it. It's easy! I'm sure they'll listen to us!"
So.
Don't attack my use of language.
Don't be two-faced in your replies.
Don't add facts not in evidence to your defenses.
And please, think about what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
Sigh. All I can do is try to reassure you: I wasn't attacking you personally. OTOH, you're clearly attacking my motives.
What am I trying to accomplish? I'm trying to ground this discussion in reality. On the one hand, a lot of people read TOD, trying to understand our world. I think we have a responsibility to not tell them it's coming to an end, when it's not. People seem to make life decisions based on the information here. I don't want someone spending their life doing dangerous, backbreaking subsistence farming unless they really, really love subsistence farming.
I admit I didn't see an attempt at humor. Based on your response above, I have a hard time seeing any humor...
people would have to be suffering and out of options.
uhmmmm...the point is, carpooling is an effective option. People will have to be pushed fairly hard to do it, but it won't require mass mortality to get there (as the term "bottleneck" suggests), and it will work.
Carpool to where? All the jobs that the economy forced them to carpool for?
No, I'm not suggesting that people will carpool because they've lost their job, I'm suggesting they'll carpool in response to $7 gasoline.
About 10% of US commuters carpool already, so it's not unheard of for Americans to carpool.
OTOH, maybe we'll never see $7 gasoline. We may just gradually move to PHEVs and EVs. If we moved faster it would be better for everyone (oil exporting countries especially), but we may never face that clear emergency that pushes people to move quickly.
What are you talking about......$7 a gallon relative, $7 a gallon relative to everything now, $7 in five years time, tomorrow, next week?
Fuel rising $7 a gallon is and will not be an issue. The problems arise when fuel is not to be had at any price. When it is inconsistent in price and supply.
A gradual rise to $7 a gallon is not a problem, if wages and salaries rise to compensate.
A sudden rise to seven dollars a gallon would be disastrous to any economy.
EV's, PV's, SUV's, HIV's, carpooling or what the hell ever else you continue to bleat will not get people to work at non existent jobs in which a haphazard fuel supply has disrupted or destroyed.
And don't start with the unreality you pander about "we will", "we can" because I don't buy any of it. Look back at what "we did" and what "we have not done" to give you an idea of what is actually taking place now and extrapolate from that.
What are you talking about......$7 a gallon relative, $7 a gallon relative to everything now, $7 in five years time, tomorrow, next week?
I'm talking about $7/gallon fuel, in absolute terms. Inflation adjusted, I suppose. Whenever it happens, carpooling will grow. Just about anyone who needs it will be able to use it. If they can get along without it, they probably will.
The problems arise when fuel is not to be had at any price.
I think that's unlikely. The shortages in 1979 were due to price controls and rationing - mistakes that the US is unlikely to repeat.
A sudden rise to seven dollars a gallon would be disastrous to any economy.
Yes, for oil importers like the US. It implies about $250 oil. It could happen in 2 ways: a sudden cutoff of supplies, like by war, or a change in public policy towards carbon taxes (unlikely, I know). A sudden cutoff of supplies would likely be met by emergency measures like mandatory carpooling.
Look back at what "we did" and what "we have not done" to give you an idea of what is actually taking place now and extrapolate from that.
Wind, solar, PHEVs and EVs are being built. It's happening. Not as fast as we'd like, but it really is happening right now.
One nice thing about a PHEV like the Chevy Volt - it's dual fuel. It can run on either electricity or gasoline. No gas available? Just run on electricity: stay within the 40 mile electric range to save your fuel till supplies are available again. Blackout? Run on gas until you can charge.
Let me add a bit more:
Invoking the apocalypse was a figure of speech. An exaggeration that was both funny and thoughtful.
The thing is...the Original Post was about a population bottleneck, a situation where most of the population dies. That's a true apocalypse, so I took you literally.
You cannot agree with me and believe that carpooling is trivial.
Sure I can - it depends on your point of view. From a BAU POV carpooling is a big deal. From a TOD "bottleneck" POV, it's trivial.
We have read up on the various mitigation strategies and alternative solutions, and have decided that they are unlikely to happen fast enough to help.
Yes, and I believe you're mistaken. Please reconsider - examine the evidence I provide.
Yet you choose to badger us like you were a fifth grader with no knowledge...
Much of the accepted wisdom on TOD is out of date. These things are real. GM, for instance, is building it's future around the Chevy Volt, a vehicle which uses 10% as much fuel as the average car on the road.
Don't attack my use of language.
I REALLY didn't - I just took you seriously.
Don't add facts not in evidence to your defenses.
Why not? This isn't a high school debate. We're not trying to win points in front of judges. We're trying to communicate information. If additional information helps, then it only makes sense to add it.
Thank you! I hadn't thought much yet about what will happen socially when TS really does HTF, except for thinking about the easy stuff like military dictatorships and war. You're absolutely right - once the problems have manifested and our hyperbolic discount functions are no longer holding the realization at bay, the game changes completely. People down through the ages have done remarkable things (both bad AND good) in times of intense privation. Now that the edge of the cliff is coming into view, it's possible to start thinking about issues like this.
Somebody posted a quote in another thread to the effect that as far as energy goes we have only two modes-complacency and panic.
That's a quote from Schlesinger, Carter's secretary of energy.
PO really isn't that hard to fix - we just have to decide to do it. As I noted elsewhere, the US could reduce it's fuel consumption by 35% in 3 months with carpooling.
Carpooling is very inconvenient, but it won't kill anyone.
Hi Nick,
This is the bothersome part - the American political scene is so polarized over religious and ideological nonsense that it may take a really big event to force cooperative decision making.
This view (we are almost all doomed) is a product of the differences between city and rural culture.
A thermodynamic explanation of politics
BTW I applaud all you folks who abjure children. It gives my 4 kids a leg up. (Two budding engineers and a Russian linguist so far).
Take a look at this article:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-relocalization-worked...
this is what happened when the roman empire fell.
No one is arguing about whether the fall of the roman empire was bad for it's citizens.
Why it fell, and whether that has relevance to today, is another question. After all, lots of empires have fallen through the ages. The vast majority were killed, rather than committing (eco)suicide. It seems pretty clear that it didn't fall, it was pushed.
Now, one might argue that an unusual internal weakness made it vulnerable. If so, then why did the Western empire fall, and not the Eastern?
I feel very confident that the reason why the empire fell, is because in the west they were living on the silver being mined out of Spain, and when that ran out, they were unable to fund their centralized government. In the east, they lived on the gold being mined in what is now the Balkans, and when that depleted, the east fell.
If you look at resource production graphs, they clearly follow a hubbert curve pattern of depletion correlating with the rise and fall of both halves of the empire.
I think that this is extremely relevant to the resource depletion issues we are facing today and it is clear that our "empire" is doomed to a similar pattern of decline.
If you want to look at a civilizations an ecological entity, they all survive as long as they have the energy to defend there borders. Resources become energy. When resources are below what is required for survival, borders cannot be defended and the civilization ceases to exist. The ultimate cause of death will be either internal or external but the result is the same.
Fascinating - I have heard very little about this. A good example of the plethora of theories about the Roman Empire.
In the east, they lived on the gold being mined in what is now the Balkans, and when that depleted, the east fell.
The East lasted for another 1,000 years. Did they really live on gold for that long?
If you look at resource production graphs
Could you publish them, or point me to a source on them?
If you want to look at a civilizations an ecological entity, they all survive as long as they have the energy to defend there borders.
But gold and silver aren't resources or energy, they're just forms of money. You're describing a bank robber, living off someone else's money until it runs out.
BTW I applaud all you folks who abjure children. It gives my 4 kids a leg up.
That sounds a little aggressive. Sounds a little like a burglar thanking people for not locking their doors.
Simon-
A better preparation would be Agriculture, Prostitution, or Thievery.
These will be better skills as things unwind.
Of course, a multi lingual prostitute will have an edge!
I don't think that it would be a big step foreward for mankind if especially the people here in TOD abjure offsprings... I think it would be rather bad because of several reasons.
This is a book I will buy. Like many others, I am sure, I bite my tongue and keep silent when I am in a group where the discussion turns to future prospects. Based on the realities of our situation, the only honest response would be, what prospects? There are no credible prospects for the continuation of business as usual (BAU). We are on the crumbling edge of an empire in decline. Modern economics, the underpinning of civilization, require continuous expansion to function. That is no longer feasible. We will not simply regress to a subsistence level agricultural society, because we long ago lost the critical skills required for such a lifestyle. The coming social and political chaos will likely leave the existing infrastructure in ruin. I sincerely hope I am being much too pessimistic, but there is little to realistically expect otherwise.
it's not too late to learn!
My thanks to all commentators for a lively and interesting discussion. Sorry if I couldn't respond to all. I have been traveling and will be for a while yet. If you have any specific concerns and want to contact me, my e-mail is easily obtained from here or my academic web site.
I hope everyone (who celebrates it!) has a reasonably happy Thanksgiving day with family and friends. These relationships are what, to me, are the only real values we need to fight to preserve. Bleak as it may seem, I personally still hold out hope that our humanness, and the better parts of it, will somehow endure.
George
I find it interesting how many people conflate the collapse of industrial civilisation with the end of the human species. I think there may be some kind of psychological explanation, as history teaches us that civilisation collapse happens quite often, but has never effected the ability of humans to live on most parts of the planet. Large parts of the Earth are inhabited by subsistence farmers. Famine will be unavoidable, but it is not something which they have not faced hundreds of times before.