Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production - Part 1 - Summary
Posted by Gail the Actuary on March 22, 2010 - 10:17am
Recently, a 55 page paper called Tipping Point: Near-Term Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production (PDF warning) was published as the joint effort of two organizations:
Feasta, a leading international think-tank exploring the interactions between human welfare, the structure and operation of human systems, and the ecosystem which supports both, and,
The Risk/Resilience Network, an initiative which was established in order to understand energy induced systemic risk, the scope for risk management, and general and emergency planning.
This paper talks about the likely systemic impacts of peak oil, including the possibility of collapse. With a long publication such as this, it is difficult to know how to present a reasonable subset of the material. In this post, we are publishing the Summary as Part 1. Our tentative plan is to publish three additional excerpts from the paper later. Those who wish to read the paper now can download it from the link above.
The lead author of this publication is David Korowicz. You may remember him for his talk at the Oil Drum/ASPO Conference at Alkatraz, Italy last summer called Things Fall Apart: Complexity, Supply Chains, Infrastructure & Collapse.
Tipping Point
Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production
An Outline Review
Summary
The credit crisis exemplifies society's difficulties in the timely management of risks outside our experience or immediate concerns, even when such risks are well signposted. We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production. Our civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast and near-term collapse.
As individuals, and as a social species we put up huge psychological defences to protect the status quo. We've heard this doom prophesied for decades, all is still well! What about technology? Rising energy prices will bring more oil! We need a Green New Deal! We still have time! We’re busy with a financial crisis! This is depressing! If this were important, everybody would be talking about it!
Yet the evidence for such a scenario is as close to cast iron as any upon which policy is built: Oil production must peak; there is a growing probability that it has or will soon peak; energy flows and a functioning economy are by necessity highly correlated; our basic local needs have become dependent upon a hyper-complex, integrated, tightly-coupled global fabric of exchange; our primary infrastructure is dependent upon the operation of this fabric and global economies of scale; credit is the integral part of the fabric of our monetary, economic and trade systems; a credit market must collapse in a contracting economy, and so on.
We are living within dynamic processes. It matters little what technologies are in the pipeline, the potential of wind power in some choice location, or that the European Commission has a target; if a severe economic and structural collapse occurs before their enactment, then they may never be enacted.
Our primary question is what happens if there is a net decrease in energy flow through our civilisation? For it is absolutely dependent upon increasing flows of concentrated energy to evolve and grow, and to form and maintain its complex structures. The rules governing energy and its transformation, the laws of thermodynamics, are the inviolate framework through which all things happen- the evolution of the universe, the direction of time, life on earth, human development, the evolution of civilisation, and economic processes. This point is not rhetorical, access to increasing flows of concentrated energy, which can be transformed into work and dispersed energy, is the foundation upon which our civilisation stands. Yet we are at a point where these flows are, with high probability, about to begin decreasing. We should intuit that an energy withdrawal should have major systemic implications, for without energy flows nothing happens.
The key to understanding the implications of peak oil is to see it not just directly through its effect on transport, petrochemicals, or food say, but its systemic effects. A globalising, integrated and co-dependant economy has evolved with particular dynamics and embedded structures that have made our basic welfare dependent upon delocalised 'local' economies. It has locked us into hyper-complex economic and social processes that are increasing our vulnerability, but which we are unable to alter without risking a collapse in those same welfare supporting structures. And without increasing energy flows, those embedded structures, which include our expectations, institutions and infrastructure that evolved and adapted in the expectation of further economic growth cannot be maintained.
In order to address these questions, the following paper considers the nature and evolution of this complex integrated globalised civilisation from which energy is being withdrawn. Some broad issues in thermodynamics, the energy-economy relationship, peak oil, and the limits of mitigation are reviewed. It is argued that assumptions about future oil production as held by some peak oil aware commentators are misleading. We draw on some concepts in systems dynamics and critical transitions to frame our discussion.
The economics of peak oil are explicated using three indicative models: linear decline; oscillating decline; and systemic collapse. While these models are not to be considered as mutually exclusive, a case is made that our civilisation is close to a critical transition, or collapse. A series of integrated collapse mechanisms are described and are argued to be necessary. The principle driving mechanisms are re-enforcing (positive) feedbacks:
• A decline in energy flows will reduce global economic production; reduced global production will undermine our ability to produce, trade, and use energy; which will further decrease economic production.
• Credit forms the basis of our monetary system, and is the unifying embedded structure of the global economy. In a growing economy debt and interest can be repaid, in a declining economy not even the principle can be paid back. In other words, reduced energy flows cannot maintain the economic production to service debt. Real debt outstanding in the world is not repayable, new credit will almost vanish.
• Our localized needs and welfare have become ever-more dependent upon hyper-integrated globalised supply-chains. One pillar of their system-wide functioning is monetary confidence and bank intermediation. Money in our economies is backed by debt and holds no intrinsic value; deflation and hyper-inflation risks will make monetary stability impossible to maintain. In addition, the banking system as a whole must become insolvent as their assets (loans) cannot be realised, they are also at risk from failing infrastructure.
• A failure of this pillar will collapse world trade. Our 'local' globalised economies will fracture for there is virtually nothing produced in developed countries that can be considered truly indigenous. The more complex the systems and inputs we rely upon, the more globalised they are, and the more we are at risk from a complete systemic collapse.
• Another pillar is the operation of critical infrastructure (IT-telecoms/ electricity generation/ financial system/ transport/ water & sewage) which has become increasingly co-dependent where a systemic failure in one may cause cascading failure in the others. This infrastructure depends upon continual re-supply; embodies short lifetime components; complex highly resource intensive and specialized supply-chains; and large economies of scale. They also depend upon the operation of the monetary and financial system. These dependencies are likely to induce rapid growth in the risk of systemic failure.
• The high dependence of food on fossil fuel inputs, the delocalisation of food sourcing, and lean just-in-time inventories could lead to quickly evolving food insecurity risks even in the most developed countries. At issue is not just food production, but the ability to link surpluses to deficits, collapsed purchasing power, and the ability to monetize transactions.
• Peak oil is likely to force peak energy in general. The ability to bring on new energy production and maintain existing energy infrastructure is likely to be severely compromised. We may see massive demand and supply collapses with limited ability to re-boot.
• The above mechanisms are non-linear, mutually re-enforcing, and not exclusive.
• We argue that one of the principle initial drivers of the collapse process will be growing visible action about peak oil. It is expected that investors will attempt to extract themselves from ‘virtual assets’ such as bond, equities, and cash and convert them into ‘real’ assets before the system collapses. But the nominal value of virtual assets vastly exceeds the real assets likely to be available. Confirmation of the peak oil idea (by official action), fear, and market decline will drive a positive feedback in financial markets.
• We outline the implications for climate change. A major collapse in greenhouse gas is expected, though may be impossible to quantitatively model. This may reduce the risks of severe climate change impacts. However the relative ability to cope with the impacts of climate change will be much lower [orig. says greater] as we will be much poorer with much reduced resilience.
This will evolve as a systemic crisis; as the integrated infrastructure of our civilisation breaks down. It will give rise to a multi-front predicament that will swamp governments’ ability to manage. It is likely to lead to widespread disorientation, anxiety, severe welfare risks, and possible social breakdown. The report argues that a managed ‘de-growth’ is impossible.
We are at the cusp of rapid and severely disruptive changes. From now on the risk of entering a collapse must be considered significant and rising. The challenge is not about how we introduce energy infrastructure to maintain the viability of the systems we depend upon, rather it is how we deal with the consequences of not having the energy and other resources to maintain those same systems. Appeals towards localism, transition initiatives, organic food and renewable energy production, however laudable and necessary, are totally out of scale to what is approaching.
There is no solution, though there are some paths that are better and wiser than others. This is a societal issue, there is no ‘other’ to blame, but the responsibility belongs to us all. What we require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer-term adaptation.
Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production - Part 1 - Summary
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216 comments
Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production - Part 1 - Summary
PDF version
216 comments
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I fully agree with the authors' assessment of the risks, probabilities, and impacts. I especially appreciate the understanding of different decline scenarios (i.e., linear decline, oscillating decline, and systemic collapse). Understanding the value of real assets against the virtual value of monetary instruments will also benefit those with the earliest insights, until too many begin to realize what is happening and "fear-driven and mutually re-enforcing" virtual asset sell-offs begin.
And the need to adapt is readily apparent and is being realized through efforts such as Transition Initiatives, of which there are already several hundred to-date. Interestingly, the authors do not believe this goes far enough, yet their only solution is "planning for food insecurity", so it seems we need to look elsewhere for recommended approaches.
While some might want to dismiss this as "Doomer", the scenarios described most certainly fall within the realm of possibility, so we must take them seriously. If not, we run the risk of ending up like the failed civilizations in the books of Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond. We can only ignore these risks at our own collective peril.
Since David Korowicz's Oil Drum article was published last August when most of us were on vacation, it might not be a bad idea to repost it (unless this one more fully develops his thoughts).
I believe there is a small errata in this article;
"However the relative ability to cope with the impacts of climate change will be much x-greater-x less as we will be much poorer with much reduced resilience."
What is striking is the social resistance to even looking at issues like peak oil through the lens of risk management. Instead there seems to be a notion that if we simply bumble along, things will work out. Personally I prefer to map out known risks as best I am able, to assess them and to assign courses of action for mitigating them or avoiding them. Since we're not doing any of those actions, I expect the worst possible outcome should the decline rate in oil production exceed the rate in decline in demand.
The financial system has a required increase in economic growth "baked in" to keep business as usually going. So all oil production has to do is simply level off--not even decline--and we end up with the financial mess we are in now. If production actually starts heading down, the financial situation is likely to be a lot worse.
So the idea we can reduce consumption, and everything be OK, doesn't really work, unless we can somehow maintain a fairly high level of economic growth at the same time--something that seems impossible.
HI Gail
In general terms I agree with the article, though I suspect we may prove a bit more resilient than the article alludes. Britain's war time spirit comes to mind. On oil production we have used around 4.5 barrels per capita per year since 1970. I think we can do much better than that. But the question is how much better, what other changes will there be such as hunger, riot, insurrection, wars; and especially how the capital markets will react. I suspect growth is over on a multi year global basis, but will continue to be patchy both geographically and temporally. Aside from most of us in the PO community there is virtually zero acceptance that there is any link between oil and the economy. We in the PO community are a tiny fringe group with virtually no influence. Lots of people view us as nutters.
Our leaders, especially the dimwits we have here in Australia, will be wedded to growth for quite a few years to come. This will be the case even as the economy bumps downwards quite independent of their clumsy attempts to perform levitation tricks. I personally cannot believe that the likes of Rudd, Brown and Obama don't "get it", but either they genuinely don't (they are incompetent), or they are deceiving us (they are dishonest). There is no middle ground between these two options. Or maybe we are wrong and they really are wise and resourceful people and we should be grateful for their leadership.
Amen
Although I begin to see a change.
Soon It will all be yesterdays news.
Gail:
Yes! You are exactly right. Shout it from the rooftops until you go hoarse.
We are in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and we are merely on a production plateau - producing the most oil that's ever before been produced!
When we start down the slope the volatility will make 2008 seem halcyon. Before this is all finished we will see rationing, enforced through draconian police states measures, as well as the ultimate dissolution of large structures like the U.S.
It's up to everyone to prepare in their own way. There are no right or wrong answers, and most preparations will turn out to be futile.
I am sure you saw my graph I published previously:
As the gap between the green line and the red or blue line grows, the situation is likely to get worse and worse.
It's funny, the pdf mentioned deflation going on and listed it's deleterious effects. Of course the government can eliminate deflation at will by printing money, but then it has to spend it. It could spend it on handouts/bailouts, but it would be better spent on productive enterprises.
Unfortunately, the government is really bad at productive enterprises. Centrally directed pork barrel economies suck and give too much power to government officials.
Since even honest private enterprise is going to have a very tough time getting a return for investment, honest efforts by the government don't have a snowball's chance.
What are corporatist states known for doing when they can't deliver economic growth by honest efforts? Scapegoats anyone? What problems can we cause for ourselves so as to have something/someone to blame for our problems and increase social cohesion, and keep our positions?
If bad guys don't appear elsewhere to provide this, *insert name of your country here* can certainly get into trouble on it's own.
It's funny, the pdf mentioned deflation going on and listed it's deleterious effects. Of course the government can eliminate deflation at will by printing money, but then it has to spend it. It could spend it on handouts/bailouts, but it would be better spent on productive enterprises.
Unfortunately, the government is really bad at productive enterprises. Centrally directed pork barrel economies suck and give too much power to government officials.
Since even honest private enterprise is going to have a very tough time getting a return for investment, honest efforts by the government don't have a snowball's chance.
What are corporatist states known for doing when they can't deliver economic growth by honest efforts? Scapegoats anyone? What problems can we cause for ourselves so as to have something/someone to blame for our problems and increase social cohesion, and keep our positions?
If bad guys don't appear elsewhere to provide this, *insert name of your country here* can certainly get into trouble on it's own.
When confronted with a summary like this, straight out of the 'Collapse' school of thought, the immediate reaction is to want to crawl into a hole and whimper.
It does seem that the energy crisis in the UK is finally getting some political attention and reaction
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/21/tory_energy_policy/
and also the report that the energy minister is to meet with Branson and co. about the possible impacts of peak oil.
The government has finally started acting rationally to the extent of supporting large scale off-shore wind generation, but in the event of systemic collapse described here it will do no good. Megawatts of power 10 miles out to sea is useless if the grid has gone down.
Community scale onshore wind power is less efficient and politically more difficult, but in the event of collapse, it will still be a source of power near to where it is needed.
I fear these reports of political activity are nothing more than electioneering, and once elected it will be BAU once more, until the collapse happens.
Everyone expecting the collapse of the electrical grid should be reminded that the railroads were in a similar situation when the US entered the First World War. Many railroads were bankrupt and many had obsolete equipment. At the time there was not much highway infrastructure and few trucks and there were tremendous jams of freight handling critical war supplies that overwhelmed the railroads. The government nationalized the RR's from 1917 to 1920 under the United States Railroad Administration and conducted sweeping reform. Despite the build out of the highway system and the tremendous growth of trucking, railroads are still fundamental to the US economy today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Railroad_Administration
I am not an advocate of government running infrastructures like electricity or RR's. Part of the problem at the time of WWI was that the railroads had been over regulated and were not allowed to earn adequate returns. That probably applies to the grid today.
I'm not sure the comparison to the railroads in early 20th century is a fair or reasonable comparison. The same can be said for the comparisons to the buildout of the american war machine for WWII (huge growth in aircraft production etc in a few short years).
The levels of complexity are not comparable, the availablility of affordable energy is not comparable.
Imagine trying to coordinate energy distribution in North America as the current crisis unfolds, with more and more states looki9ng to protect themselves. Imagine doing so in the same environment as the former Soviet States after their collapse (e.g. see Europe-Russia-Central Asia gas-line geopolitic).
The "grid" is interconectedness of various utility systems. Thay can function without being as connected but at a lower reserve capacity.
Electric consumption declines in a bad economy, which will happen post peak oil.
Major economic transitions occurr gradually. The railroads took almost 100 years to build out. Same with the highway system. We don't have that much time with peak oil, but at some point we will get our act together and go on a crash program, assuming that "we" are still a nation.
If you had told anyone in 1830 that the nation would be covered by railroads in 1900, or anyone in 1900 that every home and most farms would have electricity by 1940 and that there would be roads everywhere and 230 million cars in the US by 2000, they would not have been able to imagine it possible.
If we had the systems and the knowledge level that we had in 1830, we might have a chance of going back to a different system reasonably well. It is our lack of alternative systems and our lack of knowledge that are really hurting us.
We will wether we are a nation or not. Those other transitions took a lot of time, this one will too. They were gradual; this one will be too. Peak oil is not a light switch; it's an inflection point. We don't have to replace everything overnight. Steady change in how and what we do could make growing and reinforcing changes. As things that don't work fall apart, things that do work will see investment and credit, even if the over all economy is shrinking.
That is a macro level way of looking at it. Look at it from a micro level. The local economy is withering. Trucking is down. Car sales are down. The poor start riding bikes. Might credit to a bike shop be a good decision, even as the economy as a whole tanks? What would I do instead with my funds? Watch them depreciate in cash or bonds or stocks?
Those areas that continue to do well, or begin to do well, will likely be the same things we need to do to offset energy losses.
Peak credit, as Gail describes it, is, I think, grossly oversimplified. There will always be good bets, even if they are fewer.
Everything is a lot more linked now. For example, if the Internet were not available, a lot of organizations (like The Oil Drum) and references would not be able to function. Most jobs are just tiny parts of a chain, and don't produce anything on their own.
If everyone could function pretty much on their own, decline would take a long time. This is the reason decline too a long time, back at the time of the Roman Empire, and other well-known declines.
The question is how long we can keep current systems together--for example, keep oil producers sending us oil, even though we don't have exports to pay for the oil--just promises to pay in the future.
I'm not one of the folks who see a conspiracy behind every bush, but it is an obvious truth that various well educated, well financed, and well connected groups of people find ways to work together and advance thier agendas as they see fit and are able to do so.
The climate and environmental coalition, the public health establishment/lobby,the educational, legal, and other professions are prime examples.
There is another prime example in the military industrial complex-so long as ours stands, we have something to export-offers that cannot be refused, as Mr. Brando put it in the Godfather.
Even if it becomes impopssible for us to maintain armies of occupation, we will still be able to project power anywhere there is industry ( a few well placed bombs that take out a cow or two won't matter) so long as we have a few bombers capable of flying almost anywhere and returning unscathed nearly every time- or if not bombers, some other exotic weapon system with world wide legs.
I believe that for the most part the people in the positions to make the decisions about such things-presidents and congress critters on the right committees-understand this scenario as I haved ever so briefly outlined it, and this is why we have ballistic missle submarines and new generations of fighters, etc,regardless of party line rhetoric-when the chips are down, the democrats/liberals have mostly talked "left"to milk as many votes as possible and then voted "right" in sufficient numbers to maintain our military power.
Unfortunately military power and expecially military supremacy are very hard to maintain, and history seems to indicate that excessive reliance on such power is a strong indicator that the possessor of it is on thin ice and quite possibly headed for the "dustbin of history".
My personal estimate as an avid reader of history (I am not a trained historian) is that we are well into the "excessive reliance" stage.
Otoh, history also seems to indicate that the decline of a long established major power is most often a drawn out and messy business.
Most of us here in this forum probably stand a pretty good chance of dieing of old age before UNCLE actually has to say uncle.
That is not the question in my mind. If the current system doesn't work, why would we want to keep it going? The question to me is not how to keep the system going, but how to continually adapt it to chaning circumstances.
We won't not have exports to pay for the oil; we might have less exports (and less credit), and thus less oil available. It is not all or nothing... again, too rigid.
What are the oil producers going to do with the oil? Leave it in the ground? Doubtful. Less demand drops prices, so to keep their income up and competitive, they might pump at full capacity and sell for less. This is an example of how a changing situation can cause societal changes which further changes the situation. The "system" isn't as rigid as a lot here believe, I think.
And I do believe the grid will be kept up over medical, agricultural, over everything else, because without it, the cost ot all other areas (including the military) is huge. I think it will always be a higher cost to let the grid fail than to maintain (much/some) of it, unless the power plants stop producing, but that isn't a grid issue, it's a fuel issue.
I also think you overestimate how much oil it takes to run basic services. The vast majority of oil is wasted by the public hauling dead weight around, often for asinine reasons like displays of status.
This should have beeen posted as a reply to the comment including a rhetorical question concerning investing in a bicycle shop.I do not mean to question the principle involved,which is sound, but the practicality of such small businesses in a collapse scenario.
If I remember correctly, it was in Atlas Shrugged that one of the simpler good guys plan for survival included his wife having a little shop where she could alter and repair clothes once the shtf.
It didn't take him long to figure out that there would be four such shops on every block once he faced up to reality.
There may be a few dollars to be made in bicycles when and if, but most of the ideas for actually earning money I see batted around along such lines are just wishful thinking-if tshtf, there will be ten times as many fully qualified and fully trained auto and truck mechanics with plenty of tools eager to earn thier dinner as there are openings for bike mechanics.
Furthermore one of the stellar advantages of bicycles is thier simplicity-people won't need mechanics to work on the kinds of bicycles they will be riding post crash.They will fix thier own, or they will trade a haircut or something for routine repairs- unless it's an exotic, just about any repair a bike will need is first grade level work as mechanical work goes.
I might be wrong about the book-it's been a lot of years since I last read Rand.
Ayan Rand wrote of a lot of ignoramuses demanding their unearned keep.
We have criminals demanding bailouts.
Yup.
Tick that box.
I think of the electrical grid as being like a computer in complexity. We keep upping the complexity, as we expect electricity to be transported farther, and we deal with more and more fluctuations in power from wind and solar PV. At the same time, utilities are under financial pressure, and responsibility for grid maintenance is very much divided.
I can see a lot of ways bad things could happen to the grid:
1. Needed parts for repairs are not available from overseas manufacturers, because of world financial problems.
2. Some major utilities go bankrupt, and states/municipalities are in too poor financial condition to bail them out.
3. Diesel for trains carrying coal or for barges is not available, for some reason.
4. World financial problems cause many electrical consumers to stop paying their bills. As a result, utilities are short of funds for buying fuel and making other needed payments.
My computer can go down pretty easily; it is not too hard to imagine the grid having similar problems.
Thanks for the post Gail. I agree with you about the grid and have appreciated your posts on the grid in the past.
I would add
5. The skilled workforce is aging and most likely being kept as small as is possible to maximize profits. A major pandemic could make the job of managing the grid impossible if it hits hard those who are skilled at that work.
6. EMP attack "In a matter of seconds, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack or a geomagnetic storm would set America back to the 14th century, Gale Nordling, president of a company that protects against such a catastrophe, tells Newsmax." http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/emp-electromagnetic-pulse/2009/09/2...
7. Solar storm "Not only was this coronal mass ejection an extremely fast mover, the magnetic fields contained within it were extremely intense and in direct opposition with Earth's magnetic fields. That meant the coronal mass ejection of September 1, 1859, overwhelmed Earth's own magnetic field, allowing charged particles to penetrate into Earth's upper atmosphere. The endgame to such a stellar event is one heck of a light show and more -- including potential disruptions of electrical grids and communications systems." http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/23oct_superstorm.htm
These may be unlikely but they are "black swan" type events - unlikely but not impossible and deadly if they occur. The protection would be in redundancy, just the sort of think we will not do in an age of declining high EROEI energy
Besides your points about what could happen to the grid I offer these comments
1. There is nothing there to cover for the grid if it goes down - cars and trucks still worked without rail, but they do not work without the grid because gas cannot be pumped. Nothing can power our computers, freezers and coolers etc.
2. Each grid covers a large area and when it goes down (as it did in the northeast some time back) it can go down over a huge area.
3. If you have multiple grid failures repair trucks have to come from farther away and have the problem of refueling. The longer you are down the bigger the problem - diesel powered backups don't last forever
4. If (or I would say when) the grid goes down over the whole continental USA I would guess that industrial civilization has a week or less before collapse, as local groceries have only a few days worth of food on hand. Once you cannot run your trucks because you cannot pump gas and cannot even refine anymore gasoline, people start starving even though there is still food to be had (just not transported to major population centers)
Richard Duncan's Olduvai Theory has been discussed here before. He makes a lot of the same points as Gail does about the grid's vulnerability. The grid is the most complex machine ever created by man.
Some of us have installed solar systems in anticipation of grid problems coming. Of course that isn't really a long-term solution either because spare parts for solar systems may also become unavailable.
Solar systems don't really help with getting electricity where you need it--like powering pumping stations for gasoline. They do provide power when the sun is out, and some (usually partial) backup power, as long as your backup batteries last.
I expect batteries will not be replaceable, once problems start appearing, so that solar systems will (in not too long) provide daytime only power.
"Solar systems don't really help with getting electricity where you need it."
Actually, Gail, that's exactly what PV is good for. When and how much is another question. We've been pumping our domestic water for years with solar because the spring is remote and we could put the PV power "exactly where we needed it". Pumping fuel during daylight would be better than not at all, or store it in an elevated tank, like our water. Then again, if you have fuel to pump, you have fuel for a generator.
Lead acid batteries are fairly simple to recycle/refurbish. I'm sure cottage industries will spring up to do this on a limited scale if needed.
Maybe I should say that the current system has multiple places where electricity will be needed, if say, you are going to be able to drive your car, and groceries are going to be delivered to your grocery store. The fact that you have a solar PV panel on your housetop does nothing for all of the other broken links, like providing electricity for pumping at the various gas stations, and providing power to the oil pipelines, providing electricity needed for refrigeration of food, or electricity for pumping and processing your municipal water.
Our world now consists of a complex system. Fixing your little piece doesn't do much for the total.
I have no illusions about PV on my rooftop fixing broken links in the system or the grid but I don't think there will be much of a need for pumping of gasoline either. There won't be any BAU, remember?
As for refrigeration, pumping water for irrigation etc... these are precisely the kinds of things that PV with tried and true lead acid battery technology is best suited for. BTW you can store dry lead acid batteries and battery acid in glass jars almost indefinitely. a few palletes of PV panels stored in a building or cave if you prefer will last a very long time as well.
I guess when your ship sinks in the middle of the ocean you're not going to worry about maintaining your little life boat either because it isn't going to save the ship, eh?
At some point even you will have to give up on BAU and, PV if you can get it, is a heck of lot better than sitting in the dark. It might even help chill your home brewed mead or power a little electric fan on a hot winter day. Yes I did say hot winter day...
So if you want to know what to invest your money in while it still has some value left PV would not be a bad investment at all. And, yes, I do sell it ;-)
How many dollars per watt these days?
Standard monocrystaline panels are available at around $2.20 a watt wholesale to integrators but by the time you add rails, inverters, battery back up, engineering, bureaucracy involved in permits and all the intermediary's fees a complete residential install can run around $6.80 a watt. In real numbers a 5KW system will run you about $36,000 if you don't count the tax rebates and incentives. Assuming you don't have to finance the system.
Or if you want to go the cheapest route, DIY non-grid-tie, and have plenty of roof space:
3 pallets of these: ($1.37/watt) = 4500 watts = $6165.00
http://www.affordable-solar.com/solar-panel-pallet-kaneka-60-watt-solar-...
NOTE: These are amorphus panels and require lots of space (aprox. 75 square meters) but they work great and are inexpensive. You can substitute crystaline panels for less space/more money.
2 of these charge controllers: $1368.00
http://www.affordable-solar.com/outback-FLEXmax-80-mppt-charge-controlle...
2 inverters: $4068.00
http://www.affordable-solar.com/vfx3648.outback.inverter.htm
16 batteries: $5536.00
http://www.affordable-solar.com/surrette.s-530.deep.cycle.solar.battery.htm
1 system monitor: $339.00
http://www.affordable-solar.com/outback.FLEXnet.DC.System.Monitor.htm
I'll add $7000 for balance-of-system stuff (mounts, wiring and conduit, combiner boxes, breakers, temp sensors, battery enclosure, etc.) This is a generous figure. You may need to hire a helper.
So if you are handy/electrically experienced, motivated, and choose to educate yourself about your system, you can have a robust off-grid system for under $25K, or about $5.50/watt US. You can usually get free shipping and package deals on a system this size. Permits, etc will vary. Many areas will not require a permit if your system isn't grid-tied as this is considered low voltage. A battery based/off-grid system takes an efficiency hit but, IME, this is managable.
I just wanted to put some real time/real world numbers out there for folks considering this sort of energy independence. And shop around as this is a very competitive market these days. The current "Homepower" has a great article on designing your own off-grid system.
Disclaimer: I have no association with the above vendor. I have used them in the past and found them to be excellent folks but there are other vendors out there that are equally competitive and reliable. Do your deals on the phone. They almost always come down on pricing or offer incentives when they realize you have money and are a serious buyer. Also, look for area/regional co-ops that share labor, experience and buying power.
Yes siree!
BTW, it is very important to really know what you are doing so following a plan such as one might find in Home Power magazine is a good place to start. While PV is generally low voltage it is easy to get over 600 Volts DC nominal out of an array connected in series which can create one heck of an arc. Education as Ghung says is really the key
I recently had an experience with a town (I shall not name) electrical inspector who would not issue a permit for a passive solar hot water system because it had a small PV panel and a 12 volt DC pump. There was no reason other than he either didn't know or pretended not to know that there was no electrical permit required for this system. Not only that but he charged an extra $100.00 every time we called him and asked that he look at the plans we had submitted. We chalked this up to a scam being run by an economically stressed township and plan not to do business there in the future. This kind of situation has fortunately been the rare exception to the rule.
Though I would be happy to go this township in the future and hold a pro bono seminar teaching people how to make really cheap solar collectors and install them themselves and give the town the big old middle finger salute! What goes around comes around.
Hi Ghung,
Do you have a link to that "Homepower" article? I don't see it on their site but perhaps it's behind a paywall. Thanks.
Don
Most current articles are members only. Sorry. Bookstores carry Homepower. This month's is well worth it, lots of good stuff including radiant floor slab design and getting into a renewable energy job.
Very true. I went into a McDonald's some time ago ... and they were completely unable to serve people because the computer serving system had gone down as a result of a short power outage in a storm. Staff were helpless, and all these customers stood in three long lines, not having an alternative (possibly, not having a brain).
I went round the corner to the mum'n'pop hamburger shop, and was served without any problem. It takes longer to make your order, but they can work through any drama. Complex systems are efficient when they run well, but they are so vulnerable to the slightest disruption.
It seems that remaining available resources would be directed to maintaining grid supplied power to critical applications such as railroad control, natural gas and petroleum products supply, large farming operations, etc. What I wouldn't bank on is maintenance of the further out portions of the grid providing power to remote residential customers. However, declining use of the grid would negatively alter its economics, which depend upon a high level of demand and the load sharing effect of widely distributed demand. "The Power Makers" by Maury Klein is an interesting read documenting (among other things) the build-out of the grid around 1890-1930. Before there was a grid there were a lot of small individual (coal powered) plants producing electricity for commercial and luxury private usage. The grid made electricity universal and simultaneously greatly reduced its cost for everyone. But there will always be those who can and will pay much more for it than the present going rate, because it has or generates that much additional value for them and they can afford it. We have had some huge ice storms in upstate New York and I saw a Niagara Mohawk (now National Grid) video of the restoration following the one in 1998. An amazingly intense, expensive operation with trucks and crews coming in from all over to replace hundreds of broken poles and miles and miles of downed wires, a lot of this going on while the storm was still in progress. I do wonder how far into the future this type of high speed, universal response will be possible, or at least affordable.
Landowners with power lines crossing thier property will probably eventually find that the trees are cut and hauled away to cover the expense -this woill require far less manpower , less eqippment, and a far lower level of skilled labor.taking care of the problem this way will prevent nearly all the downed lines problems.
Sometime later, the landowner may simply be reqiured to take down all trees neat the lines himself as ther price of keeping his land-the way business owners were at one time in some places requred to sweep the sidewalks in front of thier businesses.
At other times and places, the locals were required to work certain days on the kings roads.Maybe the govt will nationalize the electrical supply system, maybe not-either way, the lines going down in storms can be mostly managed with plain old sweat.
Replacing the capital equipment is the scary issue as I see it.
There was an interesting talk at the last ASPO-USA conference on grid security that focused mainly on the extremely-high voltage transformers at power plants and major substations. These are so large that they have to be shipped by rail, and in some cases by roundabout routes because they won't fit through tunnels or some underpasses. In many cases a special rail stub had to be built to the final site to deliver them. They are very expensive -- so much so that neither the manufacturers, the generators, or the utilities want to keep spares. IIRC, the delivery interval after one is ordered is weeks/months. They can be ruined by, for example, driving a large garbage truck into them at high speed. Again IIRC, many are located where such an attack is feasible.
I remember wondering at the time how hard it would be, if you had a few million dollars, to acquire a dozen or two shoulder-mounted anti-tank launchers and get them into the country...
I suppose that last sentence will have DHS knocking at my door.
They are mostly located at unmanned stations, with little chain link fences around them. This is a link to the ASPO-USA presentation you are thinking about.
You could fabricate an anti-tank weapon (an RPG-7, not a fancy guided system) yourself in-country. It would take some know-how, mostly for the propellants and explosive, but the rest is simple machining. The actual launcher is a glorified pipe.
I was at happy hour years ago with some power company buddies and they explained how with a few hundred dollars, a good car and about 4 days they could black-out the whole country for weeks. They were laughing about how vulnerable the grid is. This was pre 9-11.
What has the "system" done? Put up cameras! If someone crazy decides to do this, we're all toast. "Boom Boom, Out go the lights! But it seems Afganistan and Iraq are priorities.
I expect that by thr time they hit the second or third large transformer, there would be a cop or national gaurd troop sitting in the bushes with a rifle qnd a radio at all such transformers within a hundred miles, as well as some other critical points of infrastructure.
But your point is well taken;I have bs'ed with my own buddies about such things, and we came up with a dozen or more ways to really put ts in tf without special training or hard to obtain munitions-any half dozen muiltcraft tradesmen with experience in heavy industrial maintainence who want to can shut down a major city for days , maybe for months, in an hour or two-although they would probably get caught unless they were very skillful at hiding thier tracks and not being seen.
I once found a military training manual at a second hand bookshop that detailed the method a half dozen infiltrated special forces troops could burn down an entire business disrtict, and maybe an entire city. In essence the method involves simply spreading homemade fire bombs all over town, by foot if necessary, at three am or so, and setting them off silmantaneously, more or less.No city anywhere has the ability to fight hundreds of fast spreading fires silmantaneously;and of course some of the bombs would be placed at locations particularly prone to large hot fires,each of which would normally be a "seven alarm" fire in and of itself.
Given the fact that the average American cop really is rather reluctant to shoot first and ask questions later, it is likely that in a confrontation with a tough young soldier trained to simply shoot and ask no questions at all, most of the bombs would be successfully placed and detonated.
The very fact that creating havoc so easily and on such a scale is possible is probably pretty good proof that we are not in very much danger at all from Alquaeda types. Otherwise we would have a lot of priblems that simply have not become evident.
This does not of course prove that there are no sleeper terrorists in your town just waiting for the right signal.
I had in mind 10-20 simultaneous strikes (within a few minutes should easily be good enough) and shutting down Washington, DC. Although some people might think the terrorists were helping us out, not hurting us, with that choice of target.
Yep, pretty much! Rocket science ain't all that its cracked up to be.
It's so simple its actually scary because just about anyone can master it.
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/N55ROCKETSYSTEM/N55ROCKETSYSTEM.html
You could fabricate one a lot simpler than that. A few hundred pounds of nitrate fertilizer, some diesel fuel, a few blasting caps, pack it into the sewer underneath a street with wires leading back to a nearby building, and you're in business. You could blow a main battle tank 20 feet into the air if you really wanted to.
The good old Molotov cocktail still works pretty well, too. Fill a wine bottle with gasoline, stick a rag in the top, light it, and toss it on the engine deck of a tank. Very annoying for the tank crew, and potentially fatal if they don't put the fire out, which is difficult if someone is waiting for them with an automatic rifle.
Back in my college days I used to freak out the military cadets and hardened war veterans by talking about this (they thought it was some kind of secret.) These days it's all available on the internet.
Of course, the stuff they're encountering in Iraq these days is far more sophisticated than that.
IIRC, the US has no capacity to make some of the largest anymore. And the lead-time is measured in years, not weeks.
What parts? Do you even know where these are manufactured? Why couldn't they be manufactured here? Aren't there likely work arounds for many problems? The grid is complex, yes, but given the nature of what it does (conduct electricity, step voltage up and down, etc...) the nature of any one failure is likely to be the result of a specific problem, not a complex one, right? Calling the grid "Themost comple machine ever made" really mystifies it in a way that isn't deserved.
Overall, this is so vague a statement, it sounds a little like you don't know what you are talking about. I would love to hear a specialist chime in here.
This seems more like a post-collapse occurence than a trigger for it. The grid will not be allowed to fail because of all the reasons mentioned here, unless we physically lacked the resources. Financials be damned... there is no tax that wouldn't pass unanimously to keep it up. The only way this will happen is if we don't have the resources/energy or manpower at all... which implies that the US military has already disbanded.
We were happy to socialize the financial system; surely we will socialize lights and water.
Hard to see how this could happen anytime soon in the US given that we pump 1/3 of all the oil we use domestically.
Then we will see socialized utilities and maybe planned rolling brownouts like in other poor countries.
Yes. And like your computer, it is not hard to imagine workarounds. A transformer goes out, replace it. The cost of not replacing the transformer will always be greater than replacing it until the grid is no longer tied to productivity at all.
You describe complex global system in a compartmentalized way. Yes, all aspects of society are interrelated, which means they can cascade together; but they are also integrated in a way that adds resiliency. Which is why you have to posit implausible scenarios like "The US suddenly has no diesel fuel at all" in order to rationalize a sudden systemic failure.
I suggest you look at Mcain6925's comment below, and the string of comments following it. Also look at this presentation from the last ASPO-USA conference.
Regarding the US producing one third of its own oil, just how co-ordinated do you think our government is, in trying to use that one third of the oil optimally. There are going to be a lot of "priority" uses--growing and transporting food, emergency medical, hospitals, and getting workers for priority industries to work. Do you think TPTB are going to be able to figure out things well enough, to get the workers to work to make the diesel, and to distribute the diesel to the railroad companies, and to keep the railroad cars and tracks in good repair? There get to be a lot of details, and some are likely to be overlooked.
It is Liebig's Law of the Minimum that makes a difference.
Gail, for preparation and details they have to study for example:
21st Century Public Health Preparedness Challenges from the Johns Hopkins Center for P. H. P.
Peak Oil is seen as 1 of 6 possible
disasters.
You're taking his comment out of context (or he made it out of context). He is talking about a terrorist attack on a LARGE installation. Large installations rarely fail as a whole (has this type of failure happened before in the history of the grid?), but rather some small part does, a link in the chain. Your argument was that if a link in a chain breaks, the chain is useless, and I basically said, no, you change the broken link. Now you're countering that with ways that the whole, or large parts, of the chain could be exploded at once?
Anyway, this is no new risk and has nothing to do with resource constraints. If you are trying to convince me that terrorists attacks happen, you win.
Yes, I really do. Did Germany fall apart when they were cut off of oil? No. It was a while before they even stopped waring.
The market will figure it out, industry will figure it out. All the government has to do, in an emergency situation, is ration fuel for different sectors.
If something critical is overlooked, it will, when necessary to keep the grid up, pretty quickly be noticed. You don't have to plan for all possible outcomes in advance... doing so is impossible.
I stand by my statement... we are not going to just let the grid go down as long as there is copper to conduct and fuel to burn.
"I stand by my statement... we are not going to just let the grid go down as long as there is copper to conduct and fuel to burn."
Are you in the power business? An engineer of any kind who has had to make flanges/pipes/bearings/driveshafts/etc line up and actually work? It's one thing to say "it can be done" when one has had to do it. It's one thing to 'stand by a statement' and another to have the quals to make the statement to begin with.
Andrew from Texas asked;
"What parts?"
Let's start with power generation. With thermal power conversion, one must apply high temperature heat to boilers as a starting point. Using coal as an example, that means acquiring and repairing the massive bulldozers and other earthmoving machinery and then the monster buckets that move the rubble out of the way via giant dump trucks, then lift and load the coal into the giant dump trucks. Then it involves all of the necessary coal cars, diesel locomotives, and all of the machinery required to load coal cars. While specific processes and methods vary, most of the same steps have to occur.
Then there is the entire rail network that has to be operational, which has a significant number of dependencies which would be a post all of its own.
Then one has to unload the coal once it arrives a coal plant.
Then there is the coal hopper and crusher process;
Then it has to be transferred over to a belt conveyor system that brings the coal into the plant.
That's just to get the coal to the stage of being ready to be placed on the conveyor leading to the boiler hopper (#14 below).
We'll cut to the chase here, since this post is getting to be too long already, and leave you with the rest of the power plant overview;
Needless to say, there are many dozens of steps to creating coal-fired power, without beginning to discuss what it would take to support the grid infrastructure to required to deliver the electricity to residential, commercial, and industrial customers.
Doesn't answer my question. I didn't ask, does it now take a lot of large machinery to run society? This is obviously a yes. Your pictures there amount to little more than a strawman fallacy. Flashing pictures of complex big machinery says nothing about our ability to manufacture them.
What I asked was for specification of what specific componments of the grid system HAVE to be imported. I doubt there are any.
There is the issue of time and expertise needed to develop capacity to make parts currently built overseas. But that isn't really much of a collapse risk. If a bulldozer goes down, many parts are probably made overseas, but the coal plant does not fail because one bulldozer goes down. The grid does not fail because one transformer goes out.
If there is any key part that could go out at once, and we don't have the capcity to manufacture it here, I would think it in our best interest to make the capacity, peak oil or not.
This hasn't been maintained as well as it should have been:
It's maxed out during peak periods and there hasn't been enough investment or redundancy built in. Major links and intraconnects are vulnerable. The brown lines are proposed. Go to link below for full size map with links (click on brown[link] proposed lines to turn them off, see where we are now):
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398
And, a nice series from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103281114
Andrew said:
"If a bulldozer goes down, many parts are probably made overseas, but the coal plant does not fail because one bulldozer goes down."
I showed you a long serial string of links in the chain to ensure a coal power plant can produce power. If any one of those links ceases to function, no power will be produced by the plant. Sure, if one bulldozer fails, the plant doesn't shut down. But look at all of the other subsystems or major components; non-availability of parts for any of them means rapid degradation or complete systemic failure.
Will,
Thanks! Nice images. It is amazing how complex our whole system has gotten to be. It takes an army of experts just to maintain what we have--and there is no way we are going to make spare parts with recycled materials that we happen to have on hand.
My business partner is a combat wounded ex Navy Seal and if he heard you say that he would roll his eyes and groan out loud. Because that is exactly the mentality that will get you killed. Your mission is to think outside the box and get the job done, if that means tossing all of BAU then that's what it means. He and I are often amazed that the experts can't or won't make something work when we just come and do it! It's all about survival in the field when the system is FUBAR.
In Brazil we have a saying:
Roughly translated, "if you don't have a dog hunt with your cat"
That's fine with simple hardware, but in a very large system of systems with many single points of failure, "McGyver" types of quick fixes are great on the screen, but are reliable or simple.
Yesterday I saw 'megastructures' on t.v.: this time is was about a truck building company (Peterbilt). The amount of parts that arrive in the factory every day is amazingly high. IIRC they assemble 100 trucks per day. Yeah, if one or more parts don't come in anymore, the whole production line goes down.
It is hard to know where to start with the story--the little pieces, building up to the total, or the summary, which doesn't really tell the whole story. You can download the whole report here.
It is too long a story to articulate in a single 2000 word post. The current tentative plan is to run some additional excerpts from the report, which will detail some of the issues more fully.
We need to look at well-thought out articles like this one, and each come to our own conclusions as to what the future is likely to be like, and what the best approaches to dealing with the situation are likely to be. Even if things look like they are not likely to work out well, I think we need to understand the issues involved, so we can make the best choices with what money is available for investment.
Yet this report is not saying anything significantly different from what the Hirsch report said. While the Hirsch report did not go into detail of how bad the world would look if we waited too long to begin mitigation, it did note that the scenario would be quite bad. And yet here we are, apparently after the peak and well beyond any of Hirsch's mitigation points, and we're still debating courses of action. Given Hirsch's observation that it would take a 20 year lead time to avoid serious impacts, the report above simply reinforces Hirsch's report, albeit it apparently in greater detail.
Given the above, why should anyone be surprised that we remain on course for a serious collapse?
David: In general I agree with this post and several of your other posts in here and Healthcare Insurance threads etc. Many of us are not debating courses of action, i.e. yakking 'shoulds' on TOD.
I do believe that it is imperative that each of us take responsibility for our own and our family’s survival as I don’t believe the government at any level can do anything to care for us if the grid goes down. JIT groceries, filling stations, hospitals etc. add to the complexity and diminish sustainability. There are some here on TOD that have invested much time and energy to sustainability; Todd in particular comes to mind.
Many here are engineers. As such, it is obvious that in this high desert around Reno, water is the main consideration. We have a well and can solar power about 1000 gallons per sunny day which will support several families. Each location around the country has a ‘number one’ priority in event the grid goes down. Once that is covered, then look at the next priority; in our case here that is food. Get a supply of food, learn to garden and help your neighborhood to grow food. Then look at priority three … etc. etc. Somewhere down the priority list are good solid garden tools, wood working tools, metal working tools, again ‘etc.’ to cover many options. And learn to use them. There are a world of books and manuals of how to solar, gardening, food storage by Sharon and so many others.
Many (even here) will say, “I don’t have time for all that doomer crap.” While I would say, “Look at the present realistically and tell me what better way to spend your time and money?” Add to that list marksmanship and survival skills because an armed gang will not go hungry but they are not stupid.
Last but not least, go outside an hour after sundown. The moon is about half now, to the west admire Orion, Arcturas, Aldebreron, and the dim Seven Sisters because in a few months they will be too near the sun to view but remember they will be back easily by Thanksgiving. Know where polaris is and wonder at the size of the whole thing. That is to keep your ego in perspective.
TSWHTF someday. It is probably a good idea to be somewhat ready.
Good luck fellow drummers; I have some more raised beds to put in yet this blustery day.
Lyn
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that a roving gang harvesting supplies from rural groups is a better survival model than most of the approaches described here.
Protecting a fixed point from an attacker with some intelligence is a difficult task even with serious preparation and large numbers. You and your gun wouldn't have a hope of achieving it - you have to sleep and can be picked off at a distance if necessary.
Nope, think the mexican's in "The Magnificent Seven" if you want a model for the post peak sustainability farmer.
Most likely to succeed in the model are the police and the army, calling it a tax and taking 90% of your surplus with a sense of entitlement and the weapons and training to back it up.
Maybe the best planning you can do is not learning farming skills, but devising an effective raiding strategy and toolset to circumvent the obvious defensive approaches at minimal risk?
No doubt about it, that's a plan. But grid down will change a lot of plans.
In our situation here in Reno I believe most people will go to California if the grid goes down. There sure is nothing east or north of here for a couple hundred miles and to stay here without preparations is not a very good deal either.
Maybe we can hire a magnificent seven to help us. :-)
BTW: Regular here is $3.00 average around town. Since we have 13.8% unemployment we may see a drop in population as people go back home to live with parents and in-laws. What's going on in your town/city?
I would watch out for people coming the other direction, from California, instead. Pay attention to which direction the transmission lines are running.
And, it's a lot easier to get approval for a new power plant in Nevada than California.
In my own town, here in the Canadian Rockies, the tourists are not throwing money around like they used to, particularly not the Brits, but the Americans are still driving through stop signs and making illegal turns in their big SUVs. There are 300 or so urban elk wandering around. The wolves are keeping a low profile and the cougars are staying away, although with cougars you never know. I haven't seen any grizzly bears yet, but it's time to get the bear spray out for my daily walks. The two little hydroelectric plants in town (50 MW and 100 MW) are still humming away, so I think we've got the electricity situation covered.
Don't raid the Shaman's food cache, you may get really sick, you may feel really good, you may have minotaurs chasing you around, or you may die. Probably the best overall survival strategy is to be useful. If you are worth more than your cache you stand a pretty good chance.
If tsreally and truly hits the fan, there will be raiders without a doubt;but there will also be counter raiders.
It seems likely tome that once the cops stop responding to calls out in the boonies that boonies types will not simply sit around waiting to be hunted-in the event , my personal preference would be to spend most of my time setting up ambushes with the help of my nieghbors and making sure few if any raiders make it into the nieghborhood.
Whatever a dead raider is carrying can be added to community stocks.I suppose it will be necessary to run constant scouting patrols and maintain a community perimeter for at least a year or so.After that, things might calm down considerably.
Of course the ability to maintain such a defense implies a competent local militia.
If this were important, everybody would be talking about it!
That's the line my sister used on me.
IMHO, collapse is the path of least resistance. There are many historic examples of both collapse and slow decline, but It is easier to collapse. Collapse is also, more likely, politically. So I lean toward collapse over decline.
FSU did not collapse because of PO (though I believe their oil production was in decline b4 they started to collapse), my understanding is that FSU oil production started to rise again because of seconary and tertiary recovery.
But, what makes the U.S. so special? Why would the U.S. be that much more resistant to collapse than them?
IMHO, collapse is the path of least resistance. There are many historic examples of both collapse and slow decline, but It is easier to collapse. Collapse is also, more likely, politically. So I lean toward collapse over decline.
Well put leduck. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but as soon as I read your comment I realized you were right.
I think Dmitry Orlovfelt the PO was a problem for the Soviet Union. It did rise again, but was that before or after collapse. I think too that before collapse the price had gone way low. That maybe is why they were able to do secondary and tertiary later - if the price was higher. Maybe someone more familiar with that time line can comment
Also of course the Afgan war was a drain. If you haven't read Dmitry's "Reinventing Collapse" I strongly recommend it. Lots of insights, lots of humor (he thinks humor is one of the characteristics that help people survive hard times) He details the way that some things that were negative in the SU turned out to be pluses in the FSU (such as kitchen gardens because soviet food was so uninteresting, and the fact that no one owned houses so they just stayed where they were - no one was evicted)
"There is no solution, though there are some paths that are better and wiser than others. This is a societal issue, there is no ‘other’ to blame, but the responsibility belongs to us all. What we require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer-term adaptation."
There is no solution to entropy and evolution has programed us to maximize flow rate into more complexity - we will continue doing that until it comes to eating your neighbors. There will be no planning only triage!
It seems like population is a big part of the problem.
If collapse is an issue, it is hard to come up with an approach that has adequate resources for the world's 6.8 billion people.
In the future, the world is likely to be a much poorer place. It is hard to see how there will be much funds for education or pensions or birth control. It seems like birth rates may rise, rather than fall.
Birth rates tend to decline during economic contraction. This seems paradoxical at first, since we have had the demographic transition hypothesis drilled into us.
At some point the children become assets rather than expenses. Fertility would be much higher if birth control was not as available.
I am sure birth rates decline, where the people are well educated and it is a moderate or even large contraction.
I wonder though, if it will happen over the long term, if we go through a major transition. It seems like society in many ways starts going backwards--people will be less educated, there won't be funds for pensions, birth control and even voluntary sterilization will be less available.
Poor/no prenatal and neonatal care, poor nutrition, societies used to hospitals/doctors rather than midwifery, etc. will cause increases in miscarriages and infant mortality. In worse case senarios, infanticide, self sterilization, suicide, all will curb the overall reproductive rate in some societies. There was a link posted on TOD some time back, a hypothetical woman in post PO Britain who got pregnant. She decided she WAS NOT going to have the baby. The story only hinted at how the pregnancy was terminated.
I am sure birth rates decline, where the people are well educated and it is a moderate or even large contraction.
We don't think of Hunter-gatherers are well educated, but in fact they were all very well educated to living in the natural world. They didn't have an overpopulation problem, especially where resources were scarce. While sometimes this was due to infanticide, it appears that educated Americans by and large have no real problem with infanticide as long as it is collateral damage in countries we are fighting in - ie blowing up women, pregnant women, and children with drones. Otherwise if we were so opposed to killing kids we would be out of Iraq and Afganistan. "The report also found that 46 per cent of the victims of US air strikes whose gender could be determined were female and 39 per cent were children." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/5161326/Number...
At any rate I would suggest that the problem with overpopulation is more than lack of education. The problem IMO is excess energy supplies - same as with most creatures from bacteria in a petri dish on up. Education basically convinces people that they will be able to keep 1 or 2 children alive until adulthood by reason of better chances to earn a good income. It is the belief that one will be able to pass on one's genes through those few children, rather than the education IMO that keeps family size down. Education is not the cause but the correlation (except in terms of educating on how to correctly use birth control.)
I am a little confused, you switch from talking about hunter-gatherers to educated Americans in mid sentence. But while it is true that hunter-gatherers (probably) didn't have an overpopulation problem, we cannot be sure. However it is not likely that they did but not because they resorted to infanticide. They had the same population control system that wild species have, a very high mortality rate. Most children died before becoming adults, many mothers died in childbirth and primitive societies were constantly at war.
All this kept their population groth rate extremely low. But no doubt they would have liked to had it much higher, that is why I doubt your infanticide hypothesis.
Note: The hardback version of Constant Battles had the title followed by:"The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage". However when it came out in paperback they changed the title to "Constant Battles: Why we Fight".
Ron P.
Ron, sorry for the change in mid thought. I know there are many reasons that babies died early in H-G societies and infanticide is only one part of the picture. However as soon as I mention infanticide I can hear people (perhaps not so much here) getting upset, and that sent me off on another track. I could have mentioned eldercide as well. One book details the tearful abandonment of elders unable to keep up by the !kung
I haven't read LeBlanc's book but I just went to Amazon reviews. Not everyone thinks he is right -
http://www.amazon.com/Constant-Battles-Peaceful-Noble-Savage/product-rev...
I suspect that the truth is somewhere between constant battles and peaceful existence. I suspect also that the difficulties or lack thereof affect the way hunter-gatherer's live. Those in the most difficult environments, where outside forces do the culling to have less battles, but probably more infanticide for babies with problems, and more eldercide.
I don't! Rousseauian Romantics cling to the myth of the noble savage like a Baptist clings to his religion. LeBlanc was originally such a Rousseauian himself. However his research simply forced him to concede that his hypothesis was simply wrong. Facts simply trumped ideology.
I have no doubt that those who cling to the myth of the noble savage will find LeBlanc's work abhorrent. That is to be expected. However those who have done their field work know the truth. One such person is Steven Pinker. His book "The Blank Slate" confirms LeBlanc's conclusions. From "The Blank Slate". The following was a bar graph in the book. I could not reproduce it here so I translated it into simple language. Looking at the bars on the chart I had to guess at the percentags but I think they are pretty close.
You might be interested in this great video with Steven Pinker explaining "The Blank Slate".
Steven Pinker talking about his book The Blank Slate.
Ron P.
I don't think it was just the noble warriors.
When I read the Old Testament of the Bible and read about the constant warfare described, it seems to me that the most likely explanation was that population was growing too rapidly for resources. Everyone had to go to war with their neighbors on a regular basis, in the hope of winning some additional land. Even if they didn't win additional land, the war would result in the death of quite a number of the warriors, helping to bring population back into balance.
It seems like that pattern has continued to this day, with some brief respite when oil supply was rising, and the threat of nuclear bombs kept attacks somewhat lower.
One should rejoice that the stories in the Hebrew Bible (OT) are fictions. Who could be proud of their ancestors' abhorrent behavior toward the Canaanites and the Amalekites and the Amorites etc?
It turns out the "Israelites" were never invaders of the land of the "Canaanites" but were instead an indigenous split-off group of Yahwist highlanders who created the myths of the OT to distinguish themselves from the rabble in the lowlands.
I highly recommend the work of archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Siblerman, who have unraveled the truth: there is no evidence that anything in the Hebrew Bible before the period of the divided monarchy is historical.
I'd be willing to bet the constant fighting was historical, though.
It would be hard to make up stories about so many wars, unless that is the way people lived.
I would recommend the tapes and books of Amy-Jill Levine. She makes no claims that the Old Testament is historically accurate. One of the things she does is compare creation stories of different groups, including the ones in the Old Testament, and sees how they differ--what they emphasize.
Ron I have read the Blank Slate. Pinker compares how many of these tribes died of warfare to how many died in warfare in the 20th century. I am quite sure he doesn't compare to how many died because of imperialism - the undeclared wars of our CIA for instance. Does he include the figures of all the wars we in the US started. Does he include all the people who died in Bolivia, Guatemala, etc because of imperial interference. How about all those who die an early death extracting resources, do they count. Just a different way of dying, but still IMO violence against others. Oh did he count the people killed at the Battle of Blair Mountain where the US used bombs against striking miners, many of whom just returned from WWI. I think not.
You are aware I presume of the controversy concerning Yanomamo
http://zeroanthropology.net/2007/10/12/the-yanomami-controversy/
I have no doubt that I have no doubt that those who hate th myth of the noble savage will find LeBlanc's work excellent.
I don't believe in the noble savage who never messes up the ecology. Nor do I believe the myth of the enlightened educated Western World being less violent than hunter-gatherers. Just depends what you count.
A basic existence proof says recent history has been less lethal -- population growth indicates it must have been thus.
A few dozen killed here or there is massacres or a tribal village quietly expunged in the dead of night do nothing for numbers.
Of course the other horsemen have been idled by modern technology as well. Starvation and disease have not claimed there share either.
But that can be rectified.
A basic existence proof says recent history has been less lethal -- population growth indicates it must have been thus.
True but that says nothing of how it is less lethal. Bunnies are kept in check. Sometimes by predators, sometimes germs, sometimes lack of food, sometimes momma eats them if conditions aren't good (save resources for future litters) and sometimes momma just reabsorbs fetuses for the same reason.
Likewise humans may not be born for a variety of reasons, and may die for a variety of reasons. The fact that we have more humans today may just mean that our violence to each other has not yet caught up with our ability to thwart death with medicine and expanding food supplies. That recent history could end with a nuclear war messing up everyone's statistics to date. Modern industrial civilization has only had a few hundred years, give it say 50 years and the numbers might look very different.
Don't know about that. Looks like starvation at least is doing its fair share to me. I guess I could look up the toll for what we in the western world consider easily curable diseases but I bet its probably higher than starvation. Imagine what the world population would look like if it wasn't the case. Would you be willing to wager that both the death rate for starvation and disease are going to increase significantly in the not too distant future?
http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html
I figure all the horse and picking up speed. Pestilence and disease have a long way to go before they're back to true recurrent pandemic levels of smallpox and so forth.
I do agree completely that famine is a growing issue, but as long as the population of Africa is expected to double in the foreseeable future it obvious that neither starvation nor disease is all that rampant overall. AIDS alone is making a dent in sub-Saharan Africa, though.
"I haven't read LeBlanc's book but I just went to Amazon reviews. Not everyone thinks he is right -"
I've come across more than my fair share of cornucupians who totally dismiss LeBlanc (and John Keegan who wrote on the same subject) and blame governmental control and brainwashing for all violence and that humanity would be living in peaceful bliss otherwise.
By that stage, it could be expected that health care is 'simplified' to deal with the lack of resources needed to sustain the complexity. Another way of saying it is, one time curable or chronic diseases that could be managed aren't any longer, but this may increase mortality at both ends of the scale.
This is a pretty doomerish piece though, and systems have a habit of behaving in very unpredictable ways under stress.
Worldwide birthrates have been falling for several decades. This is why the UN estimate of maximum population has been dropping. I suspect that birthrates will fall even more if the economy continues its downward spiral.
Jason is exactly right. It's kind of like confusing obesity as a disease of poverty, when actually obesity is a disease of massive abundance - it just so happens that this caloric abundance is concentrated in the poor / less educated people in the developed world. For most of world history, life was one long (or often short) struggle to feed yourself and your family; the common folk were thin, and it was the kings who were heavy.
The high birthrates of the baby boom - not to mention most of these kids surviving - as well as the high rates in the developing world - are due to a fossil fuel energy abundance.
Diminishing birthrates worldwide are already happening as our planet gets overcrowded and poor. Eventually, they might rise, but that's all but meaningless, kind of like saying eventually the collapse will end, there will be 1 billion people on earth, we will have renewable sources of energy, and everybody would be fed.
Sure, but it takes armageddon to get there! Kind of like saying to a German in 1939: you guys are about to embark on a war which will ruin your country and leave you occupied by 4 foreign powers; you will be split in two, and your eastern half will be brutally suppressed under a communist regime - but, don't worry! In the decades after this you will gain back your manufacturing capacity and reunite in 1990!
I guess the village elders will be sitting around the campfire telling the young ones stories while the able bodied do the chores necessary for survival and all of that will happen without the need for any money. Perhaps the actuaries will be doing inventory control of seeds or something like that ;-)
Yes, but I saw nothing of the greatest consequence when the world's oil exporters finally accept that oil supplies are declining... hording! Small exporters like Ecuador, will be the first to completely shut down exports. Large exporters like Russia will greatly trim exports in order to avoid running short themselves. Every country, even Saudi Arabia, while still exporting oil at exorbitant prices, will greatly reduce exports in order to save it for themselves.
This will turn a slow decline into a cliff. Oil exports, instead of dropping a normal 3 percent or so per year, will drop 10 to 20 percent per year. This will mean the world will not make an orderly economic descent but the world economy will suddenly crash. Globalization will collapse within a few months. Beyond that it becomes impossible to predict.
This is my opinion anyway. However if some folks thinks hording will not happen, I would love to hear your argument.
Ron P.
You make a good point.
It's interesting that emotional responses are likley to completely overwhelm underlying physical forces.
I think this applies to both peak oil and the economy. The U.S. and many other states are bankrupt. The only question is when will the majority figure it out and react.
The problem with a horading scenario is that it assumes a rational response by a gov't that cares about its people on the one hand, and that alternative means of exchange are available (ie: credit and international fiat currency exchange.) To hoard your oil, you have to have something else to exchange. A Kleptocracy can't manufacture Mercedes cars for internal use, and without oil revenues in international currencies, would not be able to purchase them or be able to get credit for such purchases.
As for Saudi Arabia, it is not self-sufficient in food production.
They will have to export oil(or oil products) to get currency (or to barter) to cover foreign inputs to their food supply.
I believe that, as always, lying and corruption will win the day, and the poor in most exporting countries will be the first to bear the brunt of oil shortages. (In fact, they suffer quite a bit already, as outlined in Peter Maass' book Crude World.) Save oil for generations of the poor yet unborn? I can't see any Dictator or President-for-life taking that route. (I'm not sure I can see it happening in Canada.)
Of course they will. I made that point in my post above. As oil gets scarce the price will go up. They can cut exports by as much as 25 percent or more and still get as much money for their oil as they are getting right now. Russia can do the same thing. And with smaller countries that depend on exports much less because they have little to export, will likely cut exports out completely.
That much oil cut in only a year or two will have catastrophic consequences on the world economy.
Ron P.
Hi Ron.
I've done some more thinking on this. I think the place where we diverge is that I can't see anyone doing something like this and announcing it, or doing it in an obvious way, like a 25% supply reduction in one year and a 33% price increase (as you posit above.) After all, better to sell your oil in a stable world with a working exchange system, not one devastated by one of the two flations. Especially if everyone thinks you caused it. If one or two small exporters, or even the KSA took such a step, it could be done covertly, and we'd never know (well, Memmel would know, but no one would listen.) Assuming they are already into depletion, a gradual reduction, beyond that required by the actual state of their fields, would allow them to husband their reserves longer.
I think a few countries trying a subtle hoarding strategy is far more likely than an announced shutting of taps on producing fields, and that the effects would not be easily distinguishable in the short term from natural field depletion, or the effects of the Export-Land model.
So...Is it hoarding, or natural field depletion?
Only your dictator knows for sure.
Lloyd
I wonder whether financial issues will become more important than the hoarding instinct. For example, lack of trust among countries because of widespread debt default could cut back on trade of all sorts. This may cut back on oil exports (similar to what you expect, but for a different reason), but will also cutback on availability of replacement parts needed to keep oil drilling and the whole system (including electric power and road repairs) going.
So what may happen is a former exporter may start out withholding exports, but because of feedback loops and normal decline rates, after a while discover that in a few years that it is not really capable of exporting very much, even if it wanted too. The infrastructure will be in too bad shape.
Nonsense. What happens with a decline in energy flows is that people and companies halt marginal activities and switch to more energy efficient processes. So what you will see are people cutting back on leisure trips, carpooling, switching jobs to ones closer to where they live or moving closer to where they work. Businesses will switch from Just-in-Time processes to keeping significant amounts of inventory (moving a few big lots more efficient than moving a large number of small lots). Marginal companies will go out of business (lots of marginal retailers in particular). There will be some relocalization. Prices will go up; the poor in particular will suffer a lot.
But there won't be this collapse.
Interesting. So marginal activities will halt (tourism industry collapses, increasing unemployment) and disposable income is reduced through higher energy bills (more goods and service going unpurchased, more jobs lost).
"Moving closer to where they work." So exurbs and outer suburbs will become ghost towns. If they become virtually worthless, how will people be able to sell them to raise the capital to buy new homes? And will there be significant new construction to house these people? And with steadily increasing unemployment, where will all these 'jobs' be?
So inventories will increase in your scenario, raising the prices of goods at the same time unemployment goes up. Fewer people will be able to buy, and the vicious cycle of increasing unemployment continues its downward spiral.
We could have done this all through last decade. Unfortunately, the overall trend was exactly the opposite, but now we are broke.
"switching jobs to ones closer to where they live or moving closer to where they work."
Jobs? What jobs. Selling what, to whom? Being paid with what? Credit?
Carpooling? On roads maintained by whom? Being paid for with what, from whom? With fuel from where?
I see that you don't understand that our society is a house of cards. All things are interconnected, inter-reliant. Dominoes. If you aren't firmly entrenched in the production of basic necessities like food, fuel (firewood), clothing, basic healthcare, you likely will be in the soup line. That will be your job.
I can see a lot of people moving to cities to try and find work, in fact its already happening here. They might not nessessarily find any in the future though. City property prices will skyrocket while those in the suburbs or countryside nose dive. This migration of people will only hasten the overloading of the local systems as muncipalities and governments try to support the burgeoning urban populations.
Well, I think pasttense's observations are fine are far as they go. The issue, however, is how long can those adjustments be made before some critical mass is reached in the interconnected economy;...and then what?
We are, in fact, witnessing the playing out of exactly what pasttense describes. Weaklings in the discretionary economy have failed and are gone; Bennigan's restaurants for example along with a big chunk of the auto industry. This has resulted in a huge uptick in unemployment. People are cutting back on spending for all sorts of things they have decided that they don't really have to have; Starbucks has closed a lot of less profitable stores as have other chain businesses.
So, this is the picture. We have a game which amounts to a cross between musical chairs and survival of the fittest. Businesses with strong balance sheets, low debt loads and large market share are still fine; MacDonald's, for instance and many of the Tech companies. The next energy shock will "off" another chunk of the global economy; the crop of next most vulnerable businesses to high energy costs.
How long does this cycle continue before some point of no return is reached? Add in increasing costs of supporting government obligations; unfunded pensions and the long laundry list of government services paid for by a shrinking taxpayer base and I think we're there.
Like eating?
Don't get me started.
Selling their underwater, foreclosed home and after being laid off from their job? (though living in your car in the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven where you now work 19 hours a week does meet the letter, if not the spirit, of this item.)
Just-in-time delivery usually works on massive scales, where the OEM has control, and volumes are enough to be dealing in truckloads, or in the case of small, valuable items, caseloads. There are no efficiencies for the OEM here, just higher interest and storage costs (which in some cases they have transferred to the downstream supplier when they instituted JIT.)
Yes.
But of course.
So we agree that the poor will suffer and some companies will go out of business...that will happen in either case.
I do have ideas about how to prevent a collapse, starting with a one child per family policy, all new construction being required to be heated with passive solar, taxing second residences out of existence, controlling the acceleration of vehicles to the equivalent of 0-60 in 14 seconds and limiting top speed to 70 miles per hour, expanding public transit, rationing pleasure travel....things that would actually cause a difference in a meaningful time frame.
Not a lot of takers.
I think doomers are misunderstood. They are really romantics, who have looked at the possibilities, considered them, seen things that would at the very least, mitigate a collapse, and seen that even watered-down, mamby-pamby compromises are impossible to institute. I don't think of myself as a doomer (more of a hard declinist) but every day I get closer to the tipping point.
We see a future that's possible and prudent...and everyone else says "Smile! Have some Soma! It's not as bad as you think! Wanna see my Porsche?"
Which is why a crash seems more and more likely.
I think doomers are misunderstood. They are really romantics, who have looked at the possibilities, considered them, seen things that would at the very least, mitigate a collapse, and seen that even watered-down, mamby-pamby compromises are impossible to institute. I don't think of myself as a doomer (more of a hard declinist) but every day I get closer to the tipping point.
Canuk, I have been called a doomer many times. I never thought I might be a romantic. WOW! I'm something positive.
Sometimes in this life we have to choose between two evils. I have a living will so my family will know which I choose and not have to try choose for me or themselves if I should be terminally ill and unable to convey my wishes. I don't like one bit what the world is facing. I don't like my conclusions that collapse will come much sooner than most predict. But I don't consider that doomist. I consider it realism made positive only by the belief that the sooner the collapse the less people in the end who will have to suffer. 70 million new souls a year. Each year we avoid collapse we add that many to the planet, that many to suffer and die earlier than expected when it comes. That many to continue to consume the resources and the waste sinks so that what is left is less than what it would be with an early collapse.
Go ahead Canuk, embrace the doom - its tough but you get used to it....
Read 'Thinking in Systems' by Donella Meadows. There is a very good chance of a fast collapse, a much better percentage chance than a managed decline.
We've seen countries go through war and/or embargoe without collapse. In many cases these artificial constraints were larger than peak oil (at least in the early years of PO). I think nearly everyone on TOD just has this vision that human society/economies are extremely fragile. But we've seen that societies can be much more resilient than that. The fly in the ointment so to speak that I worry about is the misattribution of the cause of the decline. In the war/embargo scenario anger is deflected away from the society towards the foreign powers. Then the political system usually cooperates in creating some sort of semi-coherent collective response. In the case of PO, we will likely have many actors pushing their own narrow minded agendas by finding groups to blame. So we will get a list of false "bad guys"; tree-huggers, speculators, liberals, gays (pissing off god). And probable denial of the true nature of the problem. That is why I worry. If we could get the politics/public understanding of the problem right, I think that an adaptive response could be made.
I like to envision it like a series of steps as we begin to move away from an industrial society:
It seems to me that people are really arguing over how big the big step in the middle is going to be. Personally, I have no doubt that we will have a big step because we have set up an unstable system that will — somehow — move to a more stable equilibrium point, with or without our consent:
Maybe the next idealogical war for the US (after communism, drugs and terror) will be to save the planet. It would be a good excuse to attack China.
Small service firms also. Over the last 20 years, two-income households have created an entire service industry where individuals have specialized and, in effect, trade services back and forth. Consider a hypothetical 100 families: several people employed at day-care centers take care of everyone's kids; several employed at fast-food restaurants cook a sizable portion of everyone's food; a few at dry cleaners do a chunk of everyone's laundry; one or two mow everyone's grass. Most of these don't pay a living wage. The whole thing is propped up by the income from those who work outside this kind of service economy. When those lose their income, or see a drastic reduction, as is happening now, this low-end service economy also gets hit very hard.
pasttense:
What you are describing is exactly collapse.
Need I remind you, the last time anything like we are experiencing now happened, the world decided that it needed to go to war, sacrifice 70 million souls, and create the atomic bomb - just to get out of it! And we had oh so much oil left to be found then, and a much smaller world population.
Now imagine if the trump card of war is played, but it doesn't bring us out of the depression. Instead, we have permanent war and permanent depression.
Oh, wait, we are already there!
`nah, we just had Bush Jr.
Although that could be a 100 year curse......
That's about it in a nutshell. Like Nancy Kerrigan said after being hit with a stick weilded by one of Tonya Harding's henchmen, "Why Me?!!!", because I don't want to do this net energy descent into collapse. How about a slow descent instead? Sure, our family can make adjustments to living with less along a slow drop down.
linear decline; oscillating decline; and systemic collapse
Ah yes, The Fan or The Slide by any other name is still ... messy.
I guess I just don't use big enough words, I've been preaching for years to borrow less, need less, be less dependent and less specialized and quit waiting on "them".
"They" only care about votes and profit margins, if you don't represent one or both you don't exist.
I suppose I am starting to sound like a broken record, playing the same bit over and over again. But...
The problem is that we have already passed the peak of net energy available to the economy. EROI (or EROEI for the seriously retentive) has been in decline in petroleum and coal ever since we started extracting them. There is reason to believe this isn't linear, but even if it were the result is similar. The energy cost for extracting the next increment of raw energy is going higher leaving less net energy available to run the rest of the economy.
Now, I have been modeling the dynamics of resource extraction (similar to the work of the Meadows, et al), esp. oil to see how peak behavior obtains from physical realities (not just fitting curves to data). One of the key findings of this approach is that net energy (gross - cost) peaks well before gross energy flows. In other words, if we are really at peak oil (measured in barrels rather than joules!) then we must have already passed the peak of net. I submit the things we are seeing in the global economy reflect this fact.
For a summary of the findings see: Economic Dynamics and the Real Danger
Question Everything
George
I suppose one could argue that coal and natural gas production could theoretically increase for a little while after oil peaked, and as a result, peak net energy (including natural gas and coal) might be a bit later--but that doesn't account for the issue that most of our equipment is single-fuel. More electricity from coal/ gas/ wind doesn't really make up for lack of transportation fuel.
If we are really past peak net energy, one might suspect that we are past the "tipping point" referred to in this paper,
I meant peak net from oil, primarily. You are right, that doesn't necessarily mean the peak of total net energy. However, I think of oil as the "kingpin" energy since it is needed to produce the infrastructure and operations for the others (NG may be an exception since pumps powered by gas turbines can provide the motive force to move it through the pipelines). Coal extraction depends heavily on diesel fuel. So as net from oil declines the costs of extracting coal would surely be affected in a negative way. I'm not sure about the extent that NG is dependent on energy from oil. I suspect it will turn out to be significant (like delivering the rigs to the next site). Conversion of our transportation system to NG, while feasible, seems daunting to me.
So, still, if we are past peak gross oil extraction rates, then I think we can argue we are probably past the peak of net energy available to the rest of the economy. Also, I mentioned the difference between actual joules of energy produced vs. barrel count for a reason. More and more oil is of the costlier to process variety. So that leads to lower net as well.
All in all, it doesn't bode well. I personally think we are past the tipping point. The economy is moribund - dead but unaware of it!
George
"The economy is moribund - dead but unaware of it!"
I spoke to a bankruptcy/debt relief attourney I know this morning. His apointments are booked for months, as are all of his associates and competitors. He agrees, credit and jobs are worse than he's ever seen. He says that creditors/collectors are working overtime, that they see major defaults ahead making collecting anything of worth difficult.
Our newspapers are full of stories about planned layoffs for teachers, professors, city bus drivers, and practically everyone else on city and state payrolls. I can't imagine other states are a lot better off.
I expect these changes will be hitting in the next few months--certainly by next school year--and will push the economy down farther.
Yes, things are starting to look bad.
Remember that this is happening so that interest on municipal debt can be paid. Just like some people are out of work, so that some other people can still drive to work.
Which means that, in theory, it still makes sense to invest in government debt. The banks know this, which is why they are borrowing at 0% and putting it in treasuries - free money! And even if a sovereign debt deflation happens, you will not lose your principal.
There is no technical limit to government debt as long as the interest can be serviced, and nobody knows when it can't be. I suspect the debt game will last for awhile.
Don't forget we still have the AltA and option ARMS resets to hit.
http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/02112009_Alt_A_Resets.asp
And oil stays stubbornly at $80-$82 - much above that and things may get really dicey
Very interesting thoughts george...thanks. But to follow up on Gail's point: we may have alternates (coal & NG) to replace oil for some period of time and perhaps we could expand those electrical generating plants to utilize these resources (but not a cheap process by any means). And there will be the associated cost of expanding/improving the e grid. But the choke point may be the switch in vehicles. Over time and with good gov't leadership perhaps the economy could afford such a huge expense. But at the moment I see no indication of such potential. In fact, as someone pointed out elsewhere: what has been the gov't biggest move of late with respect to future transport needs: spend 10s of billions of road way improvements and expansions. So we may end up with an excellent road system that will last a very long time because usage might drop sognificantly because the economy may not be able to pay for the transition.
Bottom line: spending trillions to expand coal/NG fired e generation and expanding the distribution grid won't solve the transport problem if there isn't enough money in the system to replace all those ICE's. And I doubt you'll see any significant expansion of e vehicles if there is a serious question about future e capacity.
That is an interesting perspective, Prof. Mobus. I will try to remember to look at your blog in more detail tonight, or later this week.
Likely? That's kinda a wimpy sentence. If peak oil doesn't force peak energy then the whole disaster scenario doesn't unfold.
The whole scenario above is possible in a "perfect storm", but it ignores the vast and powerful feedback systems that counter the fall. It's an academic morality tale. "We have sinned and must pay". There is likely to be disruption with winners and losers. But the vast and negative scenario above ignores human behavior.
I will say you doomer guys have really thought through objections to the argument. But the problems that you've done it rhetorically, not objectively.
But the vast and negative scenario above ignores human behavior.
Hardly. Read Diamond and Tainter, but particularly Diamond. He notes that those societies that pursue greater complexity to solve problems - and most do - fail. That's human behavior.
Cheers
Not exactly. Societies fairly constantly look for greater complexity to solve problems. But at some point the cost of the complexity exceeds the payback. For example Rome started by bringing in lumber from nearby forests. When those were gone, it brought in lumber from nearby regions. When that was gone, it imported lumber from the closest provinces along the Mediterranean. Finally when that was inadequate, it tried importing lumber from the northern areas where the Germanic tribes lived. The cost of that final level of imports exceeded the value of the imports, which helped to drive Rome into collapse. Now that did not occur in isolation, of course. Other resources were meeting similar fates and Rome's supply lines got longer and longer. But the key point is that eventually the low hanging fruit are picked, and then the cost ratchets up to the next level of fruit. At some point the costs exceed value, which assists in triggering collapse.
Like I said...
Cheers
I once read a historian who believed the "collapse" of Rome would hardly be noticeable in a citizens lifetime.
In many society "collapse" I might argue that it wasn't so much resource depletion as a faulty belief system.
But for other societes, for example the Classic Maya, collapse did take place within a lifetime.
I think once the Goths showed up and sacked the city, the collapse became fairly evident. It was only 40 years from the time when the Goths crossed the frontiers into the Roman Empire (fleeing from the Huns) until the time they sacked the city of Rome in 410 AD. I mean when you're a barbarian pursued by even more barbaric barbarians, you have to move fast.
After that, just everybody with a broadaxe to grind felt free to invade Rome. The Vandals vandalized Rome in 455. The end of the Western Roman Empire is usually dated to 476, when the Goths deposed the last emperor.
Of course, you could date the beginning of the end to 330, when Constantine moved the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople. But still, the population of Rome declined from about 500-750,000 people in 400 AD to 75-100,000 people in 500 AD. That would have been pretty apparent to the residents.
It's not as steep as the current decline rate of Detroit, but still fairly fast. This last is a not-so-subtle reference for those who might be suffering myopia about what "Peak Oil" is going to do to the automobile industry (Barbarians->Rome, Peak Oil->Detroit).
No, no, no.
The Goths and Vandals were not 'barbarians'. They were Christian(Arian) auxiliaries to the Roman army.
The politics was insanely complicated at the time.
The Master of Horse and Foot for the Western Empire was Stilicho, who had a Roman mother and Vandal father.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilicho
The Goths were lead by Alaric who served as a Roman officer of auxilaries and tribal head of the Visigoths originally in the Eastern Empire. Alaric was denied promotion and let loose his angry Gothic auxilaries to cause the anarchy throughout Greece. Eventually he was chased into the West and Stilicho forced him to hide in Illyricum.
At that time a huge invasion of 'real' Germanic barabrians under Radagaisus invaded nothern Italy but they were annihilated at the battle of Pollentia. The Emperor and court were angry with Stilicho for trying to marry his son into the Imperial family and Stilicho was lured to Ravenna and murdered leaving the West without a military commander.
This caused all non-roman auxilaries to rally to Alaric who now petitioned to be named Master of Horse and Foot but the court and Emperor rejected him. Ravenna, where the Emperor and his court was, was invulnerable so Alaric marched on Rome. The Emperor safe in Ravenna told the Senate to resist Alaric at all costs.
At first Alaric accepted a ranson to raise the siege but the Emperor refused him again so he starved and sacked the city.
Roman armies of course had sacked Rome dozens of times but the city had not fallen to 'barbarians' since the Gauls took it in 387 BC.
But the reality is that the Christianized Gothic auxiliaries were fixtures of Roman civilization.
Alaric's successor in fact married the Emperor's sister and moved the Visigoths to Toulouse in France. These same Visigoth allies helped the Roman Army under Aetius defeat Attila the Hun(a 'real' barbarian) at Chalons in 451 AD. Attila next lay siege to Rome in 452 where he was 'defeated' by an embassy of Pope Leo who warned him off and Attila died some months afterwards in 453 AD.
During the sack of Rome the pagans blamed the catastrophe on the Christians who had began persecuting pagans and Christian heretics like Arians(unitarians) under the previous Emperor Theodosius. The conservative pagans thought the Christians(trinitarians) were undermining morality and mocking traditional roman gods. The pagans tried to employ magicians and soothsayers to drive off Alaric but it was an imperial death sentence to practice paganism so they didn't get anywhere.
Saint Augustine wrote his book City of God to explain how it was God's Plan that Rome should be destroyed and replaced by the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vandal sacking in 455AD was more serious because the Vandals carried off much of the city population as slaves to their capital, Carthage and Vandal control of the Mediterranean stopped the food trade with North Africa and Egypt.
I would say that 455 AD was the begining of the End, which occured in 476 AD with the return of the imperial diadem(crown) and sceptre to the Byzantine emperor, Zeno and what was left of the Roman army under Odoacer pledging to serve Zeno as duke of Italy.
Nobody wanted to be emperor anymore.
Odoacer's army was defeated by Theodoric the Ostrogoth in 488 AD and Italy fell under the barbarians.
It would be nice if we could avoid all historical perspective and reduce history to 'thermodynamics' and 'depletion' but isn't that a little simplistic?
I think the Romans considered anyone who was not Roman or Greek to be "barbarian". Goths, Vanadals, Huns - they were all the same to the Romans. The Goths, Vandals, and Huns may have disagreed on this point but they were not writing the history books.
When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD, it was the first time it had been sacked since the Gauls sacked it 800 years earlier.
The Romans responded to the earlier sacking by building the Servian Wall around the city and restructuring their military to be much more effective. The military system that resulted was the basis of all Roman armies for the next few centuries, and made possible the huge expansion of the Roman Empire.
The later sacking in 410 AD marked the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire. Although the raping and pillaging wasn't all that brutal by the standards of the times, Rome was economically ruined, and tens of thousands of Romans fled the city and never returned.
I was responding to the comment that "the collapse of Rome would hardly be noticeable in a citizens lifetime". Actually, I think it would have been very noticeable.
You could say that the Roman Empire ended in 212 AD when Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all freedmen in the Empire.
Or even that the Empire was never even Roman as all Italians became citizens after the Social War in 88BC under the Lex Julia.
It was a gradual process of bring non-romans into the system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship
The Romans had little respect for the Greeks, either.
But the emperors' liked their German and Hunnic mercenaries. The Emperor Gratian was murdered by praetorians jealous of Gratian's admiration for his Scythian hunters in 383 AD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratian
As far as Rome having been diminished, this occurred long before 410 AD.
Diocletian who first divided the Empire moved the imperial seat to Milan in 285AD and the imperial seat was relocated to Ravenna in 402 AD by Honorius.
Of course Constantine had moved the Eastern imperial seat from Nicomedia to Constantinople(Nova Roma)in 330 AD.
Rome was already a shadow of its former self in 410 AD before Alaric's siege.
I believe a lot of doomers confuse cause and effect.
All societies fail. But robust societies fail like the Roman Empire.
Tell me a situation that was accurately forecast by academics.
"We murder to dissect". The models are pretty. But they are a completely artificial constructs.
I'm reminded of the Soviets who tried to optimize their economy using linear programming.
There are a number of us who have talking about likely problems with the financial system and expected recession when the impacts of peak oil hit for a long time. This is a link to a post of mine from April 2007 talking about those issues.
"it ignores the vast and powerful feedback systems that counter the fall."
What "vast and powerful feedback systems"? Bank bailouts? Creating money out of thin air? Job loss and demand destruction? Banks seizing (worthless) assets due to credit defaults? People using mass transit because their car got repoed? Rising food prices due to ethanol production, more expensive fertilizer and fuel? Unemployment compensation "injecting" more cash into the system? Increased medicaid/medicare claims boosting the healthcare system? Unemployed folks having more time to invent the "next big thing"? More "efficient" production of goods in developing countries? Businesses increasing their bottom line by hiring people part-time at reduced wages and benefits? Pawn shops and debt collectors doing record business? Oh! Maybe it's the stimulus package and TARP, funding all of those "shovel-ready" jobs. Record Federal and State debt?
OK, I'll stop so that you can enlighten me about feedback systems.
People are smart and like to eat.
The repairing the grid, or making PV panels with limited oil are technical problems. And these aren't even particularly big technical problems. Generalists here are really arrogant to dismiss the tens of thousands of experts in each technical area that is proclaimed to be doomed.
Educated democracies are remarkably good at change when motivated.
Without money and without trade are even bigger problems. I am not sure they are technical problems.
The Great Depression did not cause economic contraction all the way to nothing indicating something stopped the decline. The stair-step descent model is playing out before our eyes. The economy was hit by a shock in 2008, demand dropped, some debt defaulted, some businesses were eliminated, the job loss histogram followed a Gaussian distribution and the economy stabilized at a new lower level by 2010 awaiting the next shock. I suspect this pattern will repeat until we drop below society's minimum operating level for crude oil causing collapse or we switch to other energy sources.
Death is a powerful feedback that eliminates the resource consumption of the individual. However, Obamacare counters it shifting the burden back to society dragging everyone down.
Actually, the most negative scenarios come about when you study actual human behavior. The reason societies collapse is because humans evolved to seek advantage. They do not cooperate for the common good. That's why all these suggestions for one-child families, etc. just get ignored.
Here is a quote from THERMO/GENE COLLISION: On Human Nature, Energy, and Collapse
Jay Hanson gets derided as a hopeless doomer but his research has been backed up by the likes of Garrett Hardin and Jared Diamond and books like Constant Battles: Why We Fight. If we want to avoid the worst we had better take human nature into consideration.
Local fundamentalist churches such as the ones atttended by many of the local people in my area will survive, and exert a powerful positive influence on the behavior of those who are members.
They will also do quite a bit to help people who aren't members, if they are still able to do so-even as they do today.
These churches will be one of two loci around which the Scots Irish mountian people gather when a gathering becomes essential.
I suggest that any athiest who seeks refuge in such an area post crash learn a few Bible verses, and approach a known church going truly pious man such as my Daddy first.He may be, probably will be, sent on his way, but his water bottle will be filled and he will get something to eat and something edible for his sack.
If he approaches a spiritually ressurected Scots Irish clansman, he will most likely be murdered on the spot for whatever he has on his person. There are about as many of them as there are pious men such as Daddy.
Quite a few of my relatives fall into the second group. The prosperous ones will maybe help a little but if they see the situation as us or them, they will not hesitate to choose us.
The ones who aren't prosperous believe that they have been playing in a game where the deck was permanently stacked a long time ago by the people with money. This is the way aman who has worked hard to make five hiundred dollars in a week feels when he is charged five hundred dollars by a lawyer to do something that takes an hour-regardless of the seven years to get the LAW liscense.
It will basically be open season on lawyers, the weay lawyers have been holding open season on them-if they need a load of wood, they can probably get it by trading thier wedding band for it.
If they threaten someone with a legal action, the letter will be used for toilet paper,,if it actually gets delivered, and any actual attempt at enforcement met with force-they will see things as an end game in a collapse situation.
The fundamental rules will again trump all other rules-and the most fundamental rule of all, on the group level, is the us and them rule.
Not necessarily. Energy from oil-products is not the same as energy from other resources. You cannot keep things moving around like now with more electricity. And the part of the transportation sector that can run on electricity, needs a few decades to scale up. If there is sufficient money available.
It is possible to go back to the coal fired ships, but with the same restrictions.
"Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production"
higher oil prices so plan accordingly?
Maybe, maybe not.
Customers have to bid up the price of oil products. If they don't have sufficient income (for example, laid off from work), they cannot. They also have to buy products that use oil in their production, like new houses and new cars. If they are too poor, they can't, and prices don't go up as expected.
If prices really could keep rising, maybe we would actually have higher production.
I have a hunch that gas prices will not be permitted to go too high by the government. Too many services depend on cheap gas. The result is more likely to be subsidised fuel or rationing.
Of course at some point the exporters will stop taking the paper in return for oil, at which point the temptation just to take the oil and not pay the exporter anything becomes very appealing.
I am really dissatisfied by Barack Obama. I voted for change hoping that he would at least do something about peak oil. And what happens? Just like how the Easter Islanders began building statues at a faster rate when they reached peak wood, we spent $1.4 trillion to build more asphalt roads and bridges even when there aren't going to be as many cars on the road. For that much money we could have bought every licensed driver in the country a bike worth $1,000 seven times over! We really need to wake up. $940 billion on health care? That could buy every single person in both India and China a bike worth $368. Get people off their ass and consuming less and you solve health care, global warming and peak oil all at once. The party's over, and it's morning in america again the day after the party this time for real.
http://aperfectstormcometh.blogspot.com/2008/03/build-out-grid-vs-househ...
Cheers
Teabaggers are nearly rioting and ready to stop the US Capitol over health care, something people use only a few times in their lives.
Imagine conservative reaction if Obama threatened to cut off gas to their pickup trucks or tripled the price of electricity to get people to stop using coal.
Idiotic conservatives have panicked (as usual).
They can't change/adapt so they keep announcing that the world is going to end every month.
It's getting boring.
My impression is that the teabaggers are useful idiots, a freakish sideshow.
Of course, if the far right ever gets into power...well, if you can't beat them, join them!
What did Obama ever say that would indicate he has any understanding of PO or any desire to do anything about it?
The study's generally pretty good, but like most fast-collapse predictions, it doesn't ask "what then?" It makes a very good case for severe discontinuities in the not too distant future, as existing systems dependent on permanent growth run headlong into a contracting energy supply. Still, there are plenty of things that national and local governments can do in response to a crisis of that sort, either to prevent a collapse from going all the way down into chaos, or to force a partial recovery in the wake of disintegration.
Let's take the US as an example. Its economic system is brutally vulnerable to the impacts the study predicts, and as those hit, there's likely to be a pretty fair amount of dysfunction and systems failure. Still, faced with the resulting crisis, the US government can nationalize banks and other institutions, ration gasoline, electricity, and food, shut off some areas entirely from the grid in order to keep vital systems functioning with what electricity was available, impose martial law -- you name it. (The US government has done most of these things already in its history, after all.) The result would be an impoverished, militarized, bureaucratized society, no question, but it would not be freefall.
In the course of the 20th century, many parts of the world have passed through drastic crises of various kinds, some of them at least as severe as what we're likely to see. The results have involved a great deal of death and human suffering, granted, and a great many systems failures. What too rarely gets noticed in peak oil circles is that, after the rubble stopped bouncing, the survivors have picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and reorganized some semblance of their previous society. It seems to me that some attention to human responses to the catastrophes of the past might usefully be factored into analyses like this one.
Three questions, John:
How far will we fall?
How long will the "dark age" be?
Will we learn enough this time to tell more useful stories in the future?
Ghung, pretty much all other examples of the collapse of civilizations have involved a stairstep process of crisis and collapse followed by stabilization and partial recovery. I think the study makes a good case that one of those crisis-and-collapse periods is breathing down our necks. That doesn't mean we fall all the way to dark age conditions this time; it means half a century or so of very harsh conditions followed by some comparable period of relative stability, followed by another round of crisis. My working guess is that we're probably one to two centuries out from full dark age conditions.
How far will we fall this time? Heck of a good question. The first round of crisis and collapse (1914-1954) took out the entire system of European global empires, involved history's two worst wars and a bunch of minor ones, and if it hadn't coincided with most of the rising half of the Hubbert curve, it would have left things pretty thoroughly flattened for a long time to come. One way of getting a sense of the approaching round is to imagine what the period from 1914 to 1954 would have been like if the world had never discovered petroleum, and had to make do with rapidly depleting coal supplies instead.
Will we learn some useful stories? Depends on your definition of useful. A lot of people in the wake of the Roman collapse thought that the stories told by Christianity were the most useful lessons they could find. (Read Christian mythology as a symbolic commentary on the decline and fall of a failed civilization, and it makes some interesting sense.) Certainly the cultures that emerge in the wake of ours will have stories to tell -- but our current definitions of "useful" are unlikely to survive the society that gives them their context.
The thing that bothers me about current society is how little of it can be reproduced with local materials. None of us could build a computer with local materials. The best we might come up with would be perhaps a wheelbarrow and shovel, perhaps using recycled parts from cars or trucks. But we would lose all of the newer technology.
It seems to me that society would have to pick up at a much lower level than where it left off. Local materials would provide a few things, but in many places they would not provide adequate food for the population.
Gail -
I really don't understand your assertion that 'None of us could build a computer with local materials."
There is absolutely nothing locale-specific about highly refined silicon. Sure, it is difficult to produce and requires a great deal of technical know-how, but it certainly does not require exotic materials imported from some far-off exotic country. Yes, if everything all of a sudden goes to shite, we won't be producing much of anything, but that has absolutely nothing to do with local or non-local availability.
Your post to which I am responding appears to mix together quite a few unrelated thoughts, of which I am at a loss to fully understand. You go from saying we can't build a computer from local materials, to saying that all we will have is a shovel and wheel barrow, and then go on to say that we will have to recycle parts from old cars and trucks, and finally go on to talk about lack of food.
Gail, have you been watching Mad Max over and over again too many times? No matter how much I read of what you have to say, I am still at a loss to understand what your underlying belief is regarding our future and what you think we should do to mitigate our problems.
Joule, have you ever seen the machine that laser etches the silicon into computer chips. If you could build one of those machines from local materials I will kiss... no, I will not go there. Anyway the construction of silicon chips is a lot more complicated than just gathering sand.
Also there are many other things in a computer other than silicon chips. There is the plastic insulation, the gold connections, the copper wiring and I could go on and on.
No, no, no, you could definitely not build a computer with local materials. Well, unless you consider the word "local" to mean a whole country. And I might add, the engineering technology that goes into building the complex computer chips would have to be local as well. Right now you will find that only in the very few locations around the world where silicon chips are etched.
Perhaps if you watched a few Mad Max movies you might get a better handle on reality. ;-)
Ron P.
I would agree with you about today's state-of-the-art. One of the reasons so few locations do state-of-the-art work is because those fab lines are incredibly expensive ($3B and up). If you choose your technology carefully (eg, simple 32-bit RISC designs sans GHz clocks, multiple cores, deep pipelines, branch prediction, massive cache, etc, etc) and drop back to mid-1980s fab technology, you need a lot less exotic stuff. California could almost certainly build such devices, at least if you allow them to import a few car loads of copper from Arizona every year (or salvage it from plumbing, I suppose). Probably also in Colorado, Texas and New York.
I accomplished an awful lot of sophisticated work on machines clocked at 20 MHz and no more complicated than that. Of course, my kids think the stories I tell from those days are historically equivalent to the Dark Ages... :^)
My husband put together a Heath Kit computer in the late 1970s. It makes for some interesting stories.
I designed and built a computer from scratch in the late 1960s as a project in a computer science course. One of my friends designed and built a car. Other than teaching basic concepts, what these projects demonstrated that it is far cheaper and easier to buy complicated devices off the shelf from a major manufacturer than to make them yourself.
Adam Smith analyzed the basic principles of this back in 1776 in his book, The Wealth of Nations which explained the basic principles of capitalism back when capitalism was a new idea. It should be required reading for everyone, but obviously isn't.
You cheated though. You bought the parts that go into the computer. I meant make them as well.
Ron
I think the DC-3 is one of the great airplanes. I once owned a copy of the computer that was used to design and build that plane. It wasn't made from silicon; it was made from bamboo.
Don't get me wrong;I know that billions will die prematurely in the coming years. I just hope that there will be small viable communities that will preserve much of the knowledge and lessons of this civilization.
Darwinian,
This forum would be a sorely depleted resource without your contributions!
As far as people dropping back to the technology of a by gone day is concerned, what is theoritically possible and possible as a practical matter are as far seperated as the East and the West.
If you dear reader find yourself so fottunate to live post crash with an old time blacksmith, please be aware that he will price his work like a neuro surgeon prices his today-and that the output of his hands will be very small indeed, in comparision to mass produced merchandise.
I myself possess a very considerable amount of skill in working metal-I know whereof I speak.most of my skills will be nearly worthless post crash,as I will not be able to acquire the necessary inputs.When I can , it will be only with great difficulty-making enough charcoal by hand to fire a forge by hand is a major undertaking in and of itself and would require a couple of full time woodcutters and charcoal makers more than likely, depending on the local wood resource.
A computer has many parts, most of which are not made with silicone. There is a metal or plastic case, and keyboard, a screen, wires, USB ports, and a whole host of other things (including silicon chips), all made to tight specifications. I am saying that none of us, whether living in California or Georgia or Germany could put together all of the equipment and energy supplies needed to produce any product that is as complex as a computer, with as many tight specification, with only local materials.
Just making steel from local materials would be a major undertaking, that couldn't be done too many places.
Most people I know can't make a decent meal from the plants and animals growing right around their house, much less for any length of time over a couple of weeks in the summer! Nor cook it on a non-fossil fuel appliance, nor store food for the winter.
Assuming that people will try to assemble computers made locally after a really deep crash is ludicrous. I suspect that mining the dump for discarded pieces to make trade goods such as jewelry and small metal objects is more like it.
Unless one lives now in one of the existing lifeboat communities that produce most of their own electricity, computers will simply be doorstops or sources of valuable metal. Or perhaps people will sit and stare at the screens, waiting for the gods to speak...
Whatever happened toe Pitt_the_Elder? He was usually the guy who would pop in and say Silicon and not Silicone. I guess I have to take his place.
Silicone is the stuff you caulk your bathtub with.
I have magical editing powers. I fixed it. If a letter combination goes through spell check, I don't always notice if there is something wrong.
I have to take exception to this, at least as a general statement.
Steel and iron have been widely traded for centuries; if it's that scarce, a horse-drawn wagon with a few hundred pounds is worth hauling a considerable distance. There are presumably going to be millions of otherwise worthless cars sitting around. Steel doesn't seem like it would be a problem. New steel, perhaps, but not steel in general.
None of the case, the keyboard, USB ports, and a 640x480 monochrome screen, use precision beyond what was available in the late 1950s (eg, the 1961 IBM Selectric typewriter and any television set of the time). Most of the non-electronic parts could have been fabricated in the 1850s if they knew what they were supposed to build. Perhaps not mass-produced in the 1800s, although we know enormously more material science and fabrication technique now, which makes a big difference. USB port tolerances can be incredibly sloppy; I feel comfortable saying that any number of craftsmen in 1750 could have fabricated the cables and connectors, using insulators made from local materials in place of plastic. If I spec'ed it using appropriate materials, I can show examples sufficient to demonstrate that I could fairly easily have gotten jewelers in London, Amsterdam, or Venice to build a functional USB cable in 1650. Until you dig into it, it is surprising how long ago precise fabrication was possible; without electronics, there was little or no need for it.
The hard part is the technology that goes into lithography good enough to put tens or hundreds of thousands of transistors on a chip (70,000 for the Motorola 68000, 190,000 for the 68020 true 32-bit processor), or flying heads on hard disks. Even if I can only get on the order of 10,000 transistors on a chip, there are bit-slice approaches that make multiple-chip processors straightforward.
I'd be willing to make this bet: assuming no complete societal collapse, in an area with adequate electricity (Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado have enough coal to provide local electricity for centuries), a bit of trade for some minerals that might not be available locally, and I'll give you computers as good as the 68000. Might have a Selectric-like printed interface using local hemp-based paper instead of a CRT, but it will compute.
I don't think that it will be necessary to go to such extremes. In a fast crash, a re-birth of industry should happen within the lifetimes of existing expertise. In a slow crash, some part of the computer industry will survive, only more localized.
Much of engineering is optimization -- with access to worldwide resources say I can build for a $100 sale price a high-tech purpose-built widget that fits in a cigarette box, and it'll take me 3 months. Chances are good I can build the same functionality out of more generic parts with some adapting for $1000 that fits in a bread box, and it might take a bit longer or maybe not. Or I can take whatever processors and parts are available and figure out how to cobble something together that is close. It might take me a year and cost $5K each, but it's do-able.
If the magic widget is needed to repair a precision hone for wind turbine repair, the cost is no object, and it will support a cottage industry along the lines of the silk road. Electronic parts could be the spice of world trade.
Gail, you're right that building computers in the sort of relocalized, impoverished, low energy economy we'll have in the not too distant future won't be an option, but computers are a luxury at best. They're far, far down the list of things that an industrial society would have to preserve in order to survive in a future of diminishing energy supplies.
What are the things at the top of the list? Agriculture capable of produce bulk grains and legumes in large quantities. Railroads to get these from farms to population centers. A functioning long distance communications network -- a radio net using Morse code would be quite sufficient. Some level of manufacturing capacity, and yes, this could be done along the lines of Adam Smith's needle factory, where every single job was done by human beings with hand tools. In other words, something not too far from the technology we had in 1900. (The radio nets substitute for the telegraph network we had back then.)
Can those things be established and maintained with locally available resources? You bet. They won't support the kind of economy we have now, but they can certainly support an economy like the one we had before the beginning of the age of oil. Will the transition to that kind of economy be rough? No question of that -- think starving children, collapsing public health, massive unemployment, political breakdowns, and collective violence of every imaginable kind from crime to war between great powers. Not a pretty picture, but then the end of a civilization never is.
JMG,
It would be hard to support a world population of 6.8 billion in such a world, so this would be one issue.
The other question I have is how feasible it would be to start putting in place replacements for what we have now, using much simpler technology. Part of the issue is just getting all of the necessary resources together in adequate quantity. The other issue is the time it takes to replicate and scale up a new (old) solution. For example, even if someone in West Virginia figures out a way of fixing a train engine to work with coal, the solution would not immediately be available elsewhere throughout the world, especially if information networks were much less complete than today. Even in today's world, I think the quoted level of time from an invention in the oil industry to widespread use is 16 years. (That is from Facing Hard Truths about Energy.)
Gail, a world population of 6.8 billion isn't supportable for long anyway. The scenario I'm proposing assumes widespread malnutrition and failing public health as important parts of the crisis picture, and yes, that means that a great many people will die sooner than they otherwise would.
As for technology, remember that we're talking about crisis management on the part of governments that can, if they decide they need to, impose their preferred solutions at gunpoint. Nor is there any need to downscale tech immediately. The US, for example, is still one of the world's largest petroleum producers, and will continue to produce a fair amount of petroleum for decades to come; as much of that output as would be needed to keep diesel-electric trains running can be assigned to trains by government fiat.
In the same way, available natural gas can be directed preferentially to electrical generation for essential systems -- even if that means cutting millions of households off the natural gas distribution system, and taking millions more off the grid so the power they'd use can be available to more urgent needs. Glance back at the emergency steps taken by European countries in the Second World War for a good reminder of just how drastically an industrial nation can prune its domestic energy and resource use, and still survive. That perspective is one the peak oil scene could use.
Two things. First, those "collapses" occurred within a wider context of 99% of the rest of the planet not collapsing. I don't think full systemic collapse is analogous to the collapse of a cell within a larger body that is still functional.
Second, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38VioxnBaI
Cheers
Ccpo, many of those collapses occurred in settings where there was essentially no contact with parts of the world that weren't collapsing. When Teotihuacan or Chou dynasty China went down, it didn't matter that there were other civilizations somewhere else; those other civilizations might as well have been on Neptune for all the relevance they had to the decision makers or ordinary people in the civilizations that were collapsing. Ours is a comparable case, in that industrial civilization dominates the entire world that we know.
As for the Youtube thing, er, my computer isn't new enough to play it. If you'd like to tell me about it, I can certainly try to respond.
I didn't listen to much of it, but it starts out with someone carrying a sign comparing Obama to Hitler, supposedly from the Teabagger Republicans.
Hmm. Yes, and we had exactly the same sort of vilification of the other side's figurehead from the Dems when Dubya was still in office. Not that that's not troubling; the last time this country had as much unchecked partisan hatred as it has today was in the run-up to 1860.
Feels like im living a double life now. I know that everything will start going downhill in the near future, but i still have to play the game and follow the rest of the sheep.
After learning about what PO really meant this song suddenly became very relevant again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzte79tARA
Ozzy Osbourne
The Almighty Dollar
It's in the lives that we lead
Setup for money and greed
A little isn't enough we have to use it all up
Success, excess, the truth is inconvenient
Oh hang your head
Pillaged and left us for dead
You kept us blind and mislead
How could you think nothing's wrong
You won't be smiling for long
When it's all gone, gone
We can never go back
Burn into the air and atmosphere
Watching the rain come down
Turn your head away ignore the fear
Watching the ice crash down
Our father's justice gets closer
How could you screw us all over
Rape, steal and murder
God bless the almighty dollar
The almighty dollar
Poison the air that we breathe
Chained to industrial need
Destroy the souls that you steal, the radiation is real
Debate, too late, you've built our funeral pyre
You kill my faith
Mother earth, desecrate
Deceive the whole human race
I know you think nothing's wrong
We won't be breathing for long
When it's all gone, gone
We can never go back
Burn into the air and atmosphere
Watching the rain come down
Turn your head away ignore the fear
Watching the ice crash down
Our father's justice gets closer
How could you fuck us all over
Rape, steal and murder
God bless the almighty dollar
Death, doom and disaster
The point of no return
No earthly life ever after
Is it too late to learn?
Burn into the air and atmosphere
Watching the rain come down
Turn your head away ignore the fear
Watching the ice crash down
Our father's justice gets closer
How could you fuck us all over
Rape, steal and murder
God bless the almighty dollar
The almighty dollar
In the context of "TSHTF, collapse, energy decline", whatever is the preferred euphemism, "food security" is the ever popular favorite remedy. Certainly for good reasons. As someone on TOD pointed out some time back, "society is always 3 meals away from anarchy".
Here is my 5 cents. Your food is only as secure as your neighbor's and your community's food supply. Having learned to think in a collapsed society, Germany, post WWII, with extreme shortages of everything, I can offer this bit of memory. During 1945-48 we had at least 3 break-ins through the basement backdoor. The loot? Mostly home-canned food. This door was extremely hard to get to for strangers. Picture a row house in the middle of the block. The culprits would have had to jump at least 7-8 5-foot fences, coming from the end of the street. Which would be enough testimony to their desperation. This leaves neighbors as the most likely suspects.
What kept Germany from descending into an Iraq-like scene was 100% gun control. Only the GIs had guns, and they were extremely well fed - and envied. They also were appreciated as suppliers of highly prized black-market goodies.
If "collapse", food security etc is on your mind, make sure your neighbors are as prepared as you are. Start or join a Transition Town/Neighborhood ASAP. See TransitionUS.org.
That same gun control also allowed for around 6 million Jews to get taken to concentration camps. Iraq has serious ethnic and religious issues, Germany did not (post WWII at least because the Nazis killed everyone else).
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/03/22/nigeria.violence.arrests/
Firearms aren't necessary for a bad situation to become completely crazy. Besides, today the world is awash in guns and they really cannot be controlled. How many rifles do you think are floating around in the Balkans?
How many times do I have to debunk the conservative meme, that Nazis favored gun control, actually the reverse?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany
Whatever, armed men don't end up in death camps, nor do they starve.
No, they end up blown to bits.
You have to realize that totalitarian regimes do not suppress dissent with truncheons and tear gas. They use tanks, machine guns, and mortars.
In a democracy, your best defense is to vote in elections and choose the best candidate. Shooting at the ones you don't like just ends up in the tank, machine gun, and mortar response, after they decide that that truncheons and tear gas aren't working for them.
And you have to realize that just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they're wrong. It might mean that you are wrong. There's always that possibility.
There is no difference between dieing of starvation or getting blown to bits. Either way you are dead. If you are going to starve then you are going to die. So resorting to force is an option, in the worst scenario you end up dead, the same as if you'd starve.
Actually, the gun control I mentioned was not "that same gun control" you are invoking. Post May 8, 1945, 100% gun control in Germany was imposed (thank goodness) by the Allies. My use of the term was merely descriptive of a situation, it was not meant to advocate anything. You are absolutely right, there is nothing that can be done about the number of weapons on the loose in the US or anywhere else. I understand that makes some people feel safer.
My comparison with Iraq wasn't meant to imply a similarity in underlying causes for the respective brands of chaos. You don't need ethnic or religious diversity to cause aggressive and desperate behavior. Hunger, malnutrition, and even more so, grown-ups watching their kids go hungry will lead otherwise more or less "normal" middle class folks to very desperate behavior in a hurry. This is simply predictable human/animal behavior and is not unique to the admittedly unspeakable, grotesque, ideological causes of the "collapse" of Germany. I was merely using a situation that involved widespread deprivation to illustrate how some people will respond to being deprived of basic sustenance for life, regardless of whether the cause is a maniacal political situation, or the end of abundant and cheap energy.
After all, it could be argued that centuries of Western political/economic systems from colonialism to globalization were/are no less destructive, if not always overtly, then at least in their impact on the lives in other parts of the world. I happen to be painfully familiar with that pattern. In the 1960s, I played a minor role in moving a mountain of iron ore from West Africa to a steel mill in Baltimore under the guise of "economic development" and "trade". In reality, it was more to subsidize American cars and washing machines with 5 cents/hour labor and next to nothing for the commodity to a conveniently corrupt government. A generation later, that "exchange" helped trigger one of the ugliest wars in Africa, killing 300,000 people. Because all the people killed were black, Westerners conveniently call it a "civil war". Which is asinine to put it mildly.
1. There is nothing civil about any war.
2. The weapons had been supplied earlier by one American President's zeal to keep the Soviets out, hardly a local, African issue.
3. The mountain would not have moved, had it not been for Western ideas about "the market" and "consumer demand".
In a more bizarre twist of irony, a good chunk of that mountain ended up in the steel structure of the Twin Towers in NYC, crushing 3000 people to death on 9/11. It turns out, the main reason for those 3000 people to be in those towers was the business of moving mountains of stuff someplace else, mostly to subsidize more consumer goods for Western shoppers. You go figure how it all works.
Unfortunately, most Americans have no clue that their lifestyle actually kills people elsewhere. Yet some of them cheer, when one vice president declares that their lifestyle is "not negotiable" and another president says, he "won't apologize" for it.
As far as I can tell, it's not easy to tread lightly on the earth without nasty side effects. Maybe the coming shortages will teach us to be more mindful. I am concerned, it may do the opposite. If so, the side effects may end up right on our doorsteps.
I recently read a quote, forgot who said it: "The hallmark of a civilized society is the ability to care for others". Maybe that's what we are trying to learn. Do I dare hope that we will?
Overall, our behaviors must reward us with energy and nutrition. The EROEI for stealing can be very high and it shouldn’t be a surprise that this behavior is widespread amongst humans. The Ego will always construct an excuse that satisfies the Superego before committing an act to satisfy the Id, or will say something like, “forgive me God.”
Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Id, Ego and Superego
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego,_and_super-ego
Many people will forgo the struggle between the Ego and Superego if an authority makes the decision for them. Some people have no Superego or morality at all and simply calculate how to obtain their needs and then go about it without any moral restraint. This French study was an interesting example of succumbing to authority.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124838091
In a struggle between being socially proper and satisfying the Id, sometimes all it takes is a vicious leader to overwhelm the personal sense of right and wrong. When basic needs are not being met, the Id has the loudest voice.
First a word about the poor, they are armed and dangerous. Many have no morals or ethics. They will steal your food rape your daughters and wives. They will punk out your sons and rape them also. Then they will kill you. I was a correctional officer at a prison for a few years. Those people are particularly dangerous. What will happen when the power goes off, the inmates overpower the guards or are just released by the state because they can no longer maintain the prisons. Those people will kill you and put your head on a stake outside your house for a joke. I am very handy will with weapons. I was in the army, was a police officer, and a correctional officer besides working at the telephone company. I have no illusions on who will dominate a life without energy. I’m old and I hope death will remove me and my wife from the equation prior to a total collapse. I pity you young folks. You’re in for hell on earth. You make me want to become religious and hope Jesus will come save me, but I think the POOR will be on my doorsteps first. Good luck keeping them out of your raised beds.
hotrod
They don't have morals?? Of course not! THEY HAVE SURVIVAL INSTINCTS!! Did you forget that we are still animals? Would you kill so that your family would survive? How do you think that you came to exist.. some of your ancestors were killers!
Are they the poor, or the excluded? You seem to hate the poor, while yet you were paid handsomely as a creation of the state, which stole from the productive to propogate itself. I am the poor, once self-employed... NEVER AGAIN! The taxes and tribute placed on my back so people like you could survive... Lots have to go.
I have to say it again and again, but I am sure America is ruled by bullies, beasts, liars and psycho-paths. If it was a survival situation and I knew you had food, and I none, I would not hesitate to kill you.
Don't worry Timmy I'll be gone with the first heat wave that hits and my air conditioning fails to works. There will be millions in the south that will die with that first heat wave, but don't show up on my door steps before then. I'm old and have very little to loose and I'm an expert with handguns and rifles. I keep a twelve gauge next to my chair at night and dog will bite.
hotrod
Your comment regarding death due to lack of air conditioning (due to lack of electricity) hit the nail on the head! Somewhere in here, we have all forgotten that life begets life and that it is appointed for all to die. Death is a natural part of the human experience, however, in the course of human events, never has such a large population attempted to evade and put off that natural event. Christians are the worst offenders. WHAT ARE YOU SO SCARED OF? I'm not advocating suicide! Just natural events! I must admit, I live a very unusual lifestyle and have never procreated (by choice) so I see things differently.... but clinging to life with a gun in your hand? I am too simple to understand, I must admit.
I'm just tired of being polite, it has to be said... the old and unproductive must do their duty and die. No longer can they suck on the tit of state taxes of the productive. Please, do your final duty and die. Collect money for sitting in a chair with your gun and dog? When SS (Socialist Security) was first "invented" people were only suppoused to live a few years after... not many. Indeed, it is a generational war, and watch out because I am heavily armed and pissed off at being ripped off by you assholes and told to pay for it. You'll find that dog dead and that shotgun shoved up your ass! POLITE MODE OFF!
As someone else said somewhere else:
"Now we're getting somewhere."
Hotrod, I hope you only have such an attitude because you are old and your head is not functioning too well anymore-otherwise you sound like the best argument I've heard in a long time against allowing people to own guns-this from a conservative leaning liberterian person with an arsenal and excellent skills.Anybody with your mindset shouldn't be allowed to be even a meter maid, but you probably would have made a good nazi.
Forgive me, but I have been poor myself, have poor relatives, and know many salt of the earth poor people.
You are undoubtedly unable to understand that"but for the grace of God, there goes-YOU!!!" (paraphrased)
As far as Jews and Nazis go, if the Jews had been armed they could have died a dignified death.There was never any realistic hope of more than a few of them getting out alive.Now if some perceptive young Jew had taken it upon himself to assassinate Hitler early on,.....probably no Holocaust, maybe even no WWII.
My second wife was Jewish; she lost the entire European branch of her family to the Nazis, and so having a personal interest in this history, besides being a history fan anyway, I have spent a good bit of time learning something about the Nazis, who they were, and how they came to power.
The quote above in regards to gun rights in Nazi Germany could not be more misleading if it had been written by Goebbels himself.Anybody who would read it literally obviously knows NOTHING about Nazi Germany.
A simple fast example should suffice to illustrate-Hitler and Goebbels organized the biggest May Day celebration in history in 33 or maybe it was 34, May Day (the European equivalent of our Labor day) being made an official German holiday for the first time.Hitler, Goebbels, and dozens of other high ranking Nazi offocials made flowery speeches all over the country, pledging the golden future of German labor, meaning orgsanized labor of course, under the swastika.
That was May 1.
I leave it up to the readership to guess what happened on May 2.
Perhaps some fine gentleman who is so sure conservatives are all congenital idiots and says so nearly every week will be kind enough to post the answer to this little riddle.
I would take me more typing time to go thru the gun story than I am willing to devote to it tonight.
Seeing as the fine gentleman has not risen to the challenge,I will take a minute and tell everybody what happened the NEXT DAY.
All union organizations were simply crushed out of existence- in a matter of hours.Thier offices were occupied and permanently siezed,re cords destroyed except such records as the highly corurpt police wanted kept, they were forbidden to ever hold another meeting , thier bank accounts confiscated. Some of the more capable leaders disappeared and others were forced into hiding, and a Nazi front organization run by a Nazi for the Nazis was installed as the head of a new labor movement-a movement that was entirely the puppet of the nazi establishment.
This it should be pointed out was in the early days of nazi power.
The gun control laws were later implemented in the same vien as the labor laws;regardless of what the law SAID, what it meant in practice was SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER.By that time, Hitler was functionally a god and in complete control of nearly every organization and establishment in the country, including the police, not to mention his private armies.
The gun legislation mentioned meant about as much as SOVIET ELECTION OR A MEXICAN ELECTION IN THAT ERA.The Nazis had plenty of guns -every body elses guns were collected if there seemed to be the slightest possibility the owner might harbor any fooilsh anti nazi sentiments.By that date nearly all the police were Nazis, and virtually ALL the top administrators were like wise Hitler's HAND PICKED MEN.
Ther usual term for such legislation is window dressing-it looks good to the idiots who know just enough to click a link or read a party press release as if it were real news or history.
Of course the link may have included a lot of explanatory commentary, but if so it was comveniently forgottten.
One of my high-school buddies was a prison guard until he retired a few years ago. He never carried a gun - he said, "If you have a gun, they will get it away from you for sure, but if you don't have a gun, you can always outwit them."
Case in point - there was an escape, he was wandering around in the dark looking for the escapee, and he ran right into him (literally). So he said, "Put out your hands!" The prisoner put out his hands without thinking, he slapped the cuffs on him, and that was that. As he explained, "We train them to respond instantly to commands. I knew we had trained him, so I gave him the command because I knew he would react without thinking." It's a lot like training your dog, if your dog is a Pit Bull.
After that they gave them night vision goggles because they didn't want them accidentally bumping into escaped prisoners in the dark.
On another occasion, he was at a police convention. Everybody was wearing civilian clothes. A police officer he knew quietly said to him, "One of these policemen has been accused of stealing drugs from drug dealers, and selling them. Which one do you think it is?" So he looked around the room full of policemen and said, "Him!" and of course he was right. As he said, "I don't know what it is about them, but if you are around criminals all day, you can spot them no matter where they are and what they are wearing. A crook is a crook even if they are wearing a three-piece suit."
Anyhow, I guess the moral of this story is that the key to controlling crime is that you should always be able to spot criminals, and you should always be able to outwit them. If you can't, then it is a lot more difficult.
Your friend is correct, a correctional officer never carries a firearm inside the prison.
The officers on the towers have shotguns, handguns, and rifles. Even if there is a riot, no weapons are allowed inside the fence, except nightsticks, because the inmates would take the weapons. Inmates are passive while officers are in place and have oversight ordinarily. They are afraid of getting written up and having their time extended. Correctional officers are trained to shot and kill any prisoner that hits the fence and tries to escape. I was there to protect the public and the inmates from each other. There are some very stupid people in prisons but also some very intelligent people there also. The prison where I worked housed a full bird colonel, a highway patrolman, and a man with a PHD from a major university. They were all in for murder. Many are very cleaver. Every holiday they would make booze. We would find it and toss it. They would make more. They would have relatives and corrupt officers bring drugs into the prison. I was never afraid of the inmates while they were in prison but if certain ones showed up at my front door I would be afraid. If they all escaped tomorrow there would be real problems.
hotrod
The savage was never Noble, He did what he had to do to survive, which is why we are still here. Many of the things He did seem distasteful to more civilized, less violence prone individuals, but we currently have the luxury of extra cheap energy to propogate our ideas. When that energy is gone it will be survival of the most violent and self-serving. There will be no other way. Sharing with neighbors will only identify yourself as having provisions, and others will kill you to obtain those.
The Psycho-paths and liars who are in positions as leaders of America already have their underground hideouts stocked and supplied. Cut off the electricity... all falls. How simple. No Water, Sewer, Gas, no Store. How are you going to survive? YOU WON'T. Sorry, when you and all your nature loving neighbors go into the woods to "survive" there simply won't be enough. I believe the Georgia Guidestones said it all and that the Elites who financed them meant business. It is there for you to read. Humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of the land and must go! This means me and you, and no, I don't like it either, but it is a simple fact I must accept. Accept your fate! You are only arguing for time!
In considering food production, and leaving aside any emotion and morals, realistically if the world magically switched to GM crops of all varieties what would be the resultant yield increase as an order of magnitude. Are we talking a doubling? A tripling? or something much smaller. I do appreciate that not all GM crops will be equal but is there a rule of thumb order of magnitude increase one can use?
Thanks
"Magically switched" I love your terminology, because that it what it is. Wishful thinking... Magical... I used to tell my girlfriend that I wished I had a magical wand to erase all hurts! To grow crops, it requires a certain amount of nutrients in the soil which are absorbed and utilized by these crops as energy sources. Humans then harvest them and our bodies use them in ways I know about, but don't understand. Not that its hard, I simply haven't studied it. Simply put, you can't make something from nothing. Although Banksters do this all the time... so no, perhaps your magical thinking isn't that far off, and humans shall populate to infinity and DAMN IT! Who needs the farmers anyways... I get my food from the grocery store! MAGIC Indeed!
I'm one of those who are no longer afraid of the prospect of peak oil or collapse. Every system collapses, either partially or completely. Peak oil is not the problem, peak oil is the solution. So what's the problem then? Capitalist industrial civilization is the problem. When we hit our resource limits, as we are now, it swiftly and decisively shrinks the capitalist industrial system. The result? VMT goes down dramatically; people start taking the bus, biking and walking in record numbers. People stop buying useless junk and repair and reuse what they already have. In short, they stop over-consuming the earth's resources and dumping useless garbage back into it. This doesn't mean that collapse is not going to hurt: it will be painful and terrifying and no doubt people will suffer. But it's absolutely necessary if human civilizations are going to get in line with the earth's limited ecosystems. And besides, its going to happen anyway, like it or not. The best thing we can do is prepare for this inevitability so that we can attenuate the human suffering.
One of the most eye-opening experiences I had was when I worked on a dairy farm and saw what it was like to keep the human population fed. Until you have been there... you don't know. All our other technology and pursuits rely upon a small minority to produce food, which our bodies require. And now, more than ever, with almost 8 Billion alive, more than ever before, the challenge is enermous. Of all writing and commenting... I would like to know how many are Farmers. I bet the number is less than 10. NO FOOD = NO PEOPLE. Hobby farmers don't cut it... food production is real, large and required. All we ever hear about in the news is about the economy and money... HOW ABOUT FOOD! NO FOOD NO CIVILIZATION!! Let humanity pass from the Earth... I believe it was a curse! All we had to do was control our breeding, but that subject has been made taboo and never to be brought up. I never bred, from informed choice! You Breeders, you brought it upon us, now watch your children and all humanity die! (ex-Christian, I hate the religious breeding Christians who are destroying our Planet)
Zero Point Of Systemic Collapse
By Chris Hedges
19 March, 2010
"If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America’s strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher."
http://www.countercurrents.org/hedges190310.htm
Wow, this thread sure did descend into some dark scenarios. Keep your shirts on people, it hasn't collapsed yet! Go out and find some fun in life while its still possible. Take in a movie, or take your mate to a great dinner out. See life as being a series of chapters, and try not to take the last one, collapse, so seriously. With some imagination it could be a very interesting chapter, and certainly a historical one.
yea . . fun .so . . anyone wanna go in on a bundle, i hear tito's holdin. a kiss from morphia will put the proper perspective on all this collapse biz. born to die,individuals and civilizations and planets and universes alike, its only natural.pretty soon, dream is over.
In WWII, 54 million people died above the background death rate. The current conventional scientific thinking, using the Wackernagel eco-footprint model is that humanity uses 1 and 1/2 worlds in the form of sources and sinks. Thats an overshoot of 1/3 or just over 2 billion people.
If we take the above background yearly death rate for WWII as 10 million people per year and then devide that into our 2 billion extra souls that the Earth wont be able to support due to future energy constraints then we will have the equivilent death rate of a world war going on for 200 years!
Of course this death rate, like most natural systems processes, will not happen as a linear trend line.
And then we need to take into account that Wackernagel's model is the most optomistic scenario. James Lovelock and Jay Hanson put us much further into overshoot.
Perk Earl,
I think you make a good point. We need to be taking advantage of the time when things aren't too bad, and appreciating what we have now. We can do a few things to prepare, but driving ourselves crazy with preparations that may not really be the right ones and may not "save" us, isn't necessarily the best course.
Thanks Gail.
Perk, no argument there. I'd point out also that collapse isn't the last chapter of much of anything; it's something that happens fairly often in history, and it's simply our bad luck to be living on the cusp of one. More broadly, what we can expect over the decades to come is simply a reversion to the way that most people, for most of history, have lived; it's only from the perspective of the age of abundance now ending around us that the future Feasta sketches out is anything out of the ordinary.
JMG - Thank you again for keeping thing in (historical) perspective.
This article is at odds with others that get posted here (like the wonder of EVs) but is absolutely on the ball when the summary says:
I wish more people would get real and see our converging problems as a predicament, that has to be adapted to, rather than a set of individual problems, which each have a solution.
Gail-
Electric grids were built for local purposes only, with exchanges of power only used for reliability. This situation continued until the deregulation period of the 1990's. Going back to a local grid should be easy. The problem is matching generation to load on the local grid.
A lot of uses we accept as necessary will probably be kicked off the grid when things get tight.
PS Howard Odum considered information technology so important that he suggested using all available (i.e. surviving) hydro-electric power for such purposes.
The only problem then is getting enough fuel to the local areas to provide the electricity. And I think there are some areas that really didn't build enough electric generating capacity of their own--decided to use other folks' capacity instead.
So I am not sure this entirely solves the problem.
I think what makes it so hard to see why there'd be a fast collapse is that it's hard to understand how much our way of life depends on fossil energy. You have to have a wide ranging understanding of many disparate fields such as soil science, the food supply chain (especially the cold chain and granary storage), infrastructure, global trade, and how cheap energy allows us to pursue the last of the fish, forests, and deep aquifer fresh water and so much more...
Computer chip fabrication is the pinnacle of the industrial revolution’s achievement. They are the most complex and difficult objects to make on the planet. They require extreme purity of air, water, chemicals, and materials of up to .9999999%, are made in several thousand steps, all of which must be done correctly, with no contamination, in exactly the right order.
No wonder a new mega-size wafer fabrication plant costs about $10 billion US dollars.
And computer chips don’t last very long. Consumer reports recommends not even trying to repair a personal computer after four years. If your computer breaks down between two to four years, it’s a tossup as to whether to repair or buy a new one..
For more details about chip fabrication, read “The fragility of microprocessors” at
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/19131
Microprocessors are made with precise machines often manufactured in only one country.
This makes microprocessors vulnerable to single points of failure. An earthquake in 1999 in Taiwan shook stock markets worldwide, because there was not a single electronic product in the world that didn’t have a Taiwanese component. Any chip fabrication machine or component made in only one country is vulnerable to closure from a financial crash, fire, war, extreme weather and so on.
It’s hard to eliminate single-points of failure because the cheapest supplier wins the race to the bottom in providing equipment and services.
Motherboards are equally complex to make as you can see at “How Motherboards Are Made: A Gigabyte Factory Tour”. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1722&page=1
Outsourced products are delivered just-in-time to the factory. According to Barry C. Lynn, “Our corporations have built a global production system that is so complex, geared so tightly, and leveraged so finely, that a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere, much in the way that a small perturbation in the electricity grid in Ohio tripped the great North American blackout of August 2003”.
Fabrication plants are particularly vulnerable to electrical outages – a four-hour long outage might require a plant to spend the next four days recalibrating their equipment. As energy resources continue to decline, outages are likely to become more and more common.
Just-in-time delivery means that a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere. Ships, which carry eighty percent of the world’s cargo, are increasingly vulnerable to piracy and terrorism.
Virtually every library in the world is trying to get rid of printed material by converting it to digital information. Yet paper is likely to be our only source of information when energy and material resources become so short that microprocessor fabrication is no longer possible.
At the end of “Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge” http://www.energyskeptic.com/PeakOil_and_Preservation_of_Knowledge.htm
I conclude we need to find better materials than paper and clay tablets to preserve knowledge. Maybe it’s as simple as converting Coca-cola factories from making soda cans to printing aluminum texts.
We should be funding materials scientists to come up with a cheap material that could easily be printed or indented on and that would last longer than paper or microfiche.
Good points all , and well made.
On the bright side, we don't really need more than a small portion of the contents of a typical library to be preserved-in a post crash situation, most of the books will have value only as kindling or a source of salvaged paper.
It really won't matter if we lose all the back issues of popular magazines and all the books full of worthless statistics, etc.
The history books and the technical books will suffice;but I hope the best of the novels, plays, and so forth are also preserved.
This part is a little short-sighted. Preparations are already being made for universal banking, which is a precusrsor to the elimination of cash from the economy. Once there is no longer any cash, withdrawl of financial assets from the network of financial intermediation we call banking will not be possible.
Once this is the case, a declining economy will lead to losses of bank assets which will be passed onto savers of financial assets - savers. A negative nominal interest rate will emerge that corresponds to the decline of the economy, whether for peak oil or demographic reasons.
Before you rush to shout 'hyperinfation, repudiation' consider that in the above scenario the money supply is shrinking, thus offsetting the effect of the negative interest rate to a greater or lesser extent. So a -3% nominal rate could represent a +1.5% real interest rate for example. The reality is the original paragraph above considers the future in terms of the old money+credit economy of 1700-1985, not the reality of the pure information/credit economy we now have. In the latter case there is no cause for concern over what are in reality 'imagined' constraints such as unrepayable debt or a 0% bound on nominal interest rates.
And I forgot to point out that demographic decline of the west and east works against peak oil. It may not prevent it but will soften its impact and hopefully provide time to adjust.
It was less than 200 years ago when the native populations on North America (before being wiped out by the civilizing white devils) lived in harmony with nature and without electricity. Jeez... they didn't even have toilet paper or diapers. To a British subject, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were terrorists. We are a terrorist civilization, our military is found world-wide and kills various people of different ethnic varieties every day. Business as usual.
Do you think that the white men who populate and rule North America are not lying psycho-paths? Look at any treaty we forced upon the Native Americans and how it is "honored" today, or in the past. WHITE MAN SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE! Perhaps, as a part of this blood thirsty society, I should accept my role, so I can economically advance by killing and oppressing as many of my fellow citizens as I can... NOW WE ARE GETTING SOMEWHERE. Take all your high sounding bullshit lying "economic theories" and shove them up your ass.. In the end... will your computer and car nourish your body?
"Take all your high sounding bullshit lying "economic theories" and shove them up your ass"
Weren't you banned the other day?!?
I was unimpressed by that report. I found it to be long on emotion but short on data.