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The Black Death as a case study
Posted by Stuart Staniford on February 1, 2006 - 12:08am
It is becoming clear to more and more energy analysts that the United States of America as we know it will not endure for long.I say, how does he know, and how can anyone know in what way a nation or a civilization will respond to a catastrophe?
Wikipedia has a good overview of the Black Death. First striking in 1348, the epidemics returned in 1360, 1369 and 1375. The overall population of Europe, which has been estimated to be around 75 million in 1340, declined to 50 million in 1450. England possesses the richest sources of medieval documentary evidence, making it relatively easier to estimate population loss there. Here are estimates for the percentage of the total population killed by plague in England:
| First epidemic (1348) | 25% |
| Second epidemic (1360) | 23% |
| Third epidemic (1369) | 13% |
| Fourth epidemic (1375) | 13% |
English population in 1347 was at least 3.7 million (some estimates are higher). By 1377 it had declined by around 40%.
Cities were harder hit than the countryside because of poor sanitation and crowding - ideal for spreading disease amongst large numbers of people. For instance, here is a famous source for Siena, Italy, Agnolo di Tura:
The mortality began in Siena in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing. . . . There was no one who wept for any dead, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. . . . This situation continued until September. . . . in the city and suburbs of Siena 80,000 persons died. At this time Siena and its suburbs had more than 30,000 men, and there remained in Siena less than 10,000 men.I think the staunchest proponent of a die-off scenario would agree that the Black Death was a true die-off.
The Black Death has long been seen as a major event in world history, as important as peak oil will be. So, what happened in Europe? Was there social anarchy? Did kingdoms and empires fall? Was the Catholic Church and the world-view it fostered overturned? Were there widespread revolts and dramatic revolutions? Did the world change over night? In brief: no.
In Spain, for instance, the economic pattern of agricultural and industrial work was not modified. While the plague caused considerable disturbance, there were no fundamental changes in the character of any political, social or economic institution. England did experience peasant revolts later in the 14th century, but these rebellions achieved nothing. In Italy, in cities hit by the plague, disorganization paralyzed political life for a short time, but the influence of the plague on political structures was quite minimal in the long run.
In general, post-plague price shocks, disruption of commerce and labor shortages often led to economic stagnation or decline, but not to fundamental change in the social order. Despite the fact that population was diminished both qualitatively and quantitatively, institutions remained intact. The overall lesson according to historian Philippe Wolff:
...we must not exaggerate the social consequences of the disaster. It does not seem to have overturned the social system.The psychological shock, however, was immense. Fear of the plague and the sight of disease and corpses aroused constant thought of death. Public morals declined, as another well-known source, Jean de Venette, describes:
For men were more avaricious and grasping than before, even though they had far greater possessions. They were more covetous and disturbed each other more frequently with suits, brawls, disputes, and pleas.... Charity began to cool, and iniquity with ignorance and sin to abound.Of course, the plague set in motion major long-term changes, much as peak oil will. Structural revolutions did occur, but they did so slowly. In Germany, for example, rural settlements and agricultural lands were abandoned. Prices for food declined and for manufactured goods rose, favoring urban over rural economies. Urban wealth became more concentrated, and people moved from the country into the cities. The landed nobility declined in relation to the urban world, and the state began to exercise real power.
This growth in the power of the state is seen clearly in England too, where,
...in order to preserve the status quo as far as possible, the upper orders of English society drew together into a more cohesive government to facilitate or coerce the members of the upper orders to stand to their obligations, at the same time they were coercing the lower orders more punitively to stand by theirs.One can imagine much of the same happening after peak oil. Existing governments, institutions and organizations will remain largely intact. There will be a certain amount of disorganization and even chaos at first, but in the face of the crisis, the government's coercive powers will increase in order to maintain established order and put down rebellion. Public morals in general will decline, as the magnitude of personal losses will lead to increased crime and lower social cohesion. The economy will, slowly at first, undergo a fundamental transformation, probably along the lines suggested by Kunstler: suburbs will be abandoned, large numbers of people will begin working in agriculture, passenger railroads will be rebuilt, life will become much more local. Perhaps significant numbers will die.
But that is a long way from Olduvai. As in the Black Death, there is no reason to believe that we will inevitably lose our basic institutions. Governments, corporations, universities, churches, and the whole panoply of civil society can endure - in fact, might even grow stronger. For me, this is a source of hope.
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Also, the Black Death kicked the heck out of Norway with its trading patterns due to the Hanseatic League.
For a best idea of what a contemporary crisis may look like I suggest reading Dmitry Orlov's excellent Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century. Personally I really enjoyed that reading as it reminded me of the days we also had to go by without a functioning economy around.
the entire essay is also available free on survivingpeakoil.com .
The problems that will come from the liquid fuels crisis, climate change, soil depletion, currency collapse, and resource wars are something else entirely. Too many people and not enough resources leads to warfare of the most desperate sort, that exacerbates the resource scarcity, destroys infrastructure, and creates a downward spiral. I believe the societies studied by Jared Diamond in Collapse are much better comparisons to the decline of the oil age.
I am interested in the psychological reactions to trauma on such as large scale. This was before the germ theory and ideas of what caused disease may have been related to punishment from God (all that smiting as written in the bible). Therefore I can imagine a whole lot of collective grief and guilt, both for being a survivor and for whatever was done to "deserve" this punishment. Didn't self-flagellation develop in the post-Black Death era?
If as a society we ever come to grip with the way we placed ourselves into this predicament I can imagine a similar kind of collective guilt. Perhaps akin to the post war German generation who asked their parents "What were you doing as Hitler gained power?"
I still get a bit angry when I see the collective denial, but I could forgive easier if there were greater recognition of the situation and everyone's complicity. I also know how powerful an addiction fossil fuels are and can't imagine any society not using them to excess. Anyone who grabs that power will conquer or subdue, which sadly may be an inevitable strategy among nation states. In spite of many good intentions, by now it seems clear that trust is hard to generate and maintain in a globalized, multicultural world. This is the grief liberals and the weakness neocons play upon.
I think the other point that should be made here is that the trauma, while it might be large scale, will be terribly incremental, likely starting with the poorest (those with the least voice) first. It will be the proverbial frog in boiling water story that we've all heard too many times...(which relates indirectly to your Germany-Hitler idea). It will damage the class mobility present in American society (that has already been on the decline in the past decade) and further hamper it elsewhere. The rich will continue to get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle get squeezed in one direction or the other. In some essence, it will be exactly as it has been going for the last ten years, but with an accelerant on the flames that consume the middle class.
There are no especially good historical comparisons. Possibly the most enlightening is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, in which deprivation of energy in the form of imported grain from North Africa was a major contributing factor. Oddly enough, the Roman civilization did not collapse because government collapsed: As late as 450 and 500 a.d. Roman legions regularly defeated the barbarians. However, one thing the Romans could not figure out how to do (despite notable efforts by some of the later emperors) was to convince Roman women to have enough babies to counteract the effects of the high death rates during (for example) the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius--during which the population of Roman citizens may have been cut in half or even more than by half. By way of contrast, the German women were highly fertile (unlike today, when Germany faces a severe aging and population decline problem--possibly the worst in the world) and the barbarians, whom Rome had fought successfully for half a millenium, finally won the demographic war in the west. (The Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, is another and equally interesting story.)
In the long run, demographics rule.
A - Europe - the black death.
B - Africa, today.
Now, to be honest 'stead of cheeky, I agree with you that demographics are very important, but I don't think the correlation is always quite as strong as you seem to believe.
Africa is an interesting example of failed societies, most of which were growing rapidly, until AIDs came along--one of Malthus's positive checks.
Prosperity and confidence tend to encourage population growth. For example, look at the explosion in population of the Vikings, beginning somewhere around the year 800, due in large part to a few crucial inventions: knitted woolen cloth that greatly diminished infant mortality, the curing of ham and bacon plus the salting of butter which gave the concentrated calories (along with strong ale) of energy to row those boats, and some incremental improvements in ship building. Possibly there were advances made in navigational knowledge, but it is mostly speculation as to exactly when this happened, nor do we know precisely how the Vikings determined lattitude, though we have some pretty good guesses.
Note that even major setbacks in the economy, such as the Great Depression, [which was far from societal collapse] can cause birth rates to plummet.
The best way to convince women not to have so many babies is to educate them. Then the problem becomes that the smartest and best educated women have the fewest kids--a serious problem in the long run.
Did you know that both Plato and Aristotle regarded population policy as one of the most important and difficult for government (i.e. city states) to deal with? Alas, because of PC (and I'm not talking about what is made by Dell and Gateway) some vital topics are taboo these days, especially in universities.
I disagree about Africa; it was both exploding with population and going to hell in a hand basket well before AIDs arrived, though yes, it's greatest gains where taking place in the late 60's when there was a substantial population increase - however, the population then continued to increase while things fell apart: lot's of nasty business with post colonization, machetes, Idi Amin and such. And now, post AIDs, well ... AIDs is big, but it's so big, it covers a multitude of lesser sins, and was - ahem - "aided" by them in it's formative years.
I think population growth by itself is not enough, though once again, this was hidden from view more often than not previously - all one has to do is consider China; a place formerly run so inefficiently that despite it's billions - it could barely feed itself, and it's influence beyond it's borders was surprisingly low when compared to it's numbers.
Now that they're restructuring and "borrowing" technology - while their population hasn't grown all that much in the past 10 years, their influence is far far greater.
This is somewhat of a corollary to your Viking example, with technology leading to an increase in influence - though without the population increase.
Thus I remain: demographics, and population growth, while important, and often surprisingly predictive, aren't everything.
Rwandan Hutu's
I did not say that population cannot increase in failing societies; Nigeria is a case of a rotten society sliding down toward total anarchy and chaos, but for a while Western aid and public health measures plus the traditionally high birth rate can overcome the forces of decline. Petrolism destroys societies--not that there ever was much hope for Nigeria once it got stuck deeply in the population trap.
People who say Malthus was wrong should go to Nigeria or other parts of Africa. Just be sure to buy plenty of life insurance before you go, get all your injections, take your anti-malarial pills, drink only bottled water, and be sure to hire bodyguards to reduce the chance of being kidnapped. Oh, I forgot: Bring plenty of cash to bribe the police, who are the worst criminals of all in Nigeria and many other parts of Africa.
Peak oil will produce a different paradigm. As we are all aware, the population of the planet is at this extreme level because of cheap energy. Population increases marched lockstep with the increased production of oil. Once we remove this fossil sunshine subsidy, the underpinnings of our Malthusian overshoot will be kicked out from under us and our machinery of production will become disfunctional with no serious way to recover the level of productivity necessary to support our bloated population level. There will be a die off. That is inevitable. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluded, optimistic, but deluded.
As to social collapse, we need to look no further than Katrina for a good example of what may happen when we pass the peak.
See, the problem is the people of the middle ages were all well versed in the workings of nature. They each knew to some extent how to make a living from nature. They could farm, weave, build, husband animals, and generally live within the solar budget they had used for generations. We, on the other hand are divorced from nature. If we cut off the cheap energy fueled life-support, we cannot simply go out into the field and scythe the grain, milk the cows, pick the fruit, weave our clothes, and take care of ourselves as the people of the middle ages had. We are like babes in the woods, bereft of skills, wide-eyed naifs who will, at first, wander around with our hands out, begging for our food. When it becomes clear that there will be no food, we may riot. To claim that, because people in mideaval Europe did not riot, we will not riot is specious at best. One need only look at recent riots from New Orleans to the Sudan to see that riots can and do happen.
Panglossian optimism is not helpful. False promises that everything will just be peachy keen so long as we just keep repeating the magic words is harmful to our outlook. There needs to be a sense of urgency because our history is one of consistently ignoring impending disaster until it is upon us. Please, please try to keep typical consumerist inertia in mind.
Large ammounts of infrastructure require much less resources to maintain then to build from scratch. The same is true for a lot of factories.
But will people adapt to poorer living conditions by moving much closer to work, probably living in smaller apartments, travel much less and use a fraction of todays yearly consumption of toys? A physical fight around that can bring ruin to manny countries.
The most worrysome scenario is political breakdowns and civil war due to fast changes in peoples luck, not the lack of oil itself.
As for hydropower... global war for water may break out well before the first peak oil war!
Nuclear? As this week proves, is not a viable option for everybody.
Solar, not working efficiently for above the 50th latitude. Did you know that 2/3 of Norway/Sweden/Finland is above the Arctic Circle? (fortunately not too many people, but don't tell them that). Only about 1/6 th of Alaska is (if that much).
Alternative energy and technological development?; State of the Union Address!
The lesson I take from New Orleans is: Don't rely on the government; don't trust the media. Expect that most people will be good and constructive, and a few bad people will totally paralyze official disaster relief efforts.
Chris
I stand with Jack, I'm not with either side of that coin. I think we're now on the Highway to Olduvai Gorge, but there are a few exits before we get there. Some of those exits (all?) will require population reduction.
Led there by Olduvai George? (sorry, couldn't resist :)
But don't be fooled by it. We're all on the road to Olduvai Gorge, without a particular leader. It mainly arises of growing population over deminuising resources, we don't need anyone to tell us to do it.
I've been considering the problem of the economic consequences of peak oil for some time now. With all due respect to Stuart's argument that there is a depletion threshold under which the economy can gracefully contract, our debt based money system (debt issued today under the assumption that growth tomorrow will be able to repay that debt) and our reliance on constant growth, seem to me to indicate that sustained economic contraction is likely to lead to economic collapse. I have recently finished an essay, The Organic Economy (PDF), that outlines my thoughts on a potential alternative that does not require perpetual growth (and the fossil fuels necessary to power that growth).
Now combine those two episodes and stir vigorously; add two cups of Middle Eastern war, pour in TID (Totally Insane Debt), and what has always happened in history is that governments go back to making money the old fashioned way. They print it. (Or they debase the coinage, which is equivalent to printing money.)
What will happen to the dollar? Same thing that has happened to the Mexican peso over the past fifty years. At one time the Mexican peso was worth exactly one U.S. dollar (because both were based on the same silver coin, more than two hundred years ago). I think that in the lifetimes of most of us, the Mexican peso will again be worth exactly as much as the U.S. Dollar.
Zip = Zip
BTW, do not buy gold. People who are even rumored to own gold during times of turmoil see their loved ones tortured to death as the guys with guns try to get you to tell where you hid your gold. Happened frequently in the 1970s in Lebanon, happened also on a large scale during the disorders in the Soviet Union vividly described by Solzhenitsin as "the gold purge." The gold bugs never mention these nasty happenings.
Pennies will probably hold their value. Small denomination coins typically keep their value even during the worst hyperinflations, because it is not practical for the government to call them in and demonetize them, and if the price of zinc keeps going up, then our one-cent pieces will have a greater melt value than monetary value.
Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis
Look at the last (but not least) point gave by the author.
Firstly, as others have pointed out, the nature of the disaster on our resources is different.
Also however, as was hinted by in the article and by Jason Bradford in a comment above, one of the largest effects that the black death had on society was that it changed our relationship with God. In the next few hundred years after this event our culture went through an enormous change in how we see the world. The outlook of the masses changed from a `conventional' belief system to a `rational' outlook. Referred to as the rational enlightenment or the Renaissance. This was no small change. In many ways it was equivalent to the change from tribal culture to agriculture 10,000 years ago, which included a shift in outlook equally dramatic. The black death will not have been the only event that brought about this change, but it is arguable that it was a large component of it.
Peak oil is likely to change our outlook in yet another new direction.
bit I'd like to my tuppence worth anyway.
'Was there social anarchy? Did kingdoms and
empires fall? Was the Catholic Church and the
world-view it fostered overturned? Were there
widespread revolts and dramatic revolutions?
Did the world change over night? In brief: no.
In Spain, for instance, the economic pattern of
agricultural and industrial work was not
modified. While the plague caused considerable
disturbance, there were no fundamental changes
in the character of any political, social or
economic institution.'
Whilst that may have been true then, it is a
completely fallacious argument to suggest the
same would be true of a post-peak world now.
At the time of the plague, agricultural systems
were organic and were largely sustainable. Food
was grown and eaten locally, Nutrients were
recycled locally.
In the developed world, food is not grown locally
nor sustainably. It is only the input of huge
quantities of fossil fuel energy that allow the
current agricultural system to function at all,
and once those inputs (nitrogen based fertilizer,
phosphate -mined, processed and delivered on
the back of oil, potassium -mined and delivered
on he back of oil) decline, or disappear
altogether, that is the end of most of the food
supply.
Not only that, but number of people requiring
food from the same area of land is currently
around twenty times the medieval figure in the
case of England and the ratio would be similar
in most other locations.
We should also note that nutrients are removed
from the land and delivered into the oceans by
sewage systems. Assuming the sewage systems
continue to operate implies the nutirients
would continue to be lost. If sewage systems
fail, we would anticipate widespread disease
that results from indiscriminate unrination and
defacation by thousands or millions of people.
Whilst many commentators advocate permaculture as
a solution (the only solution) we must bear in
mind that it takes anything up to 7 years to
establish fruit trees and to recondition soil
that has been little more than a sponge to which
chemical are added.
Clearly it is a monumental task to alter all the
structures of society in preparation for Peak
Oil and I see precious little being done.
Indeed I see continued denial of reality on
behalf of most institutions, right at the
momnent when we should be making frantic
preparations.
were organic and were largely sustainable. Food
was grown and eaten locally, Nutrients were
recycled locally."
This is a very idealistic picture of things. There was a lot of wine drunk in England, for instance, and it was NOT produced locally. International trade insured the very quick spread of the plague throughout the Old World. Btw, local food production almost insures the occurance of over- and/or under-production.
The reduction in population in England was a huge boost to the country's economic progress: Wages increased, feudalism decayed faster than almost anywhere else, and farming became way more productive due to less population pressure. The plague was not the only reason, nor even the main reason why England ruled the waves and invented the Industrial Revolution--but surely it helped.
Sorry, I cannot resist it. There is a good reason for common people (poor) drank ale and the nobility (rich) drank wine at the Middle Ages.
No water treatment.
Ethanol kill germs. 18% ethanol is enough to kill all germs and wine can have 16% to 20 % ethanol. Ale and beer have 6% ethanol I think.
So, if you don't drunk ale or wine (if you are rich enough to buy wine) you had a high chance to die from some intestinal infection. It is easy to see why the egyptians and the sumerians drunk ale. You really want to drink the river Nile water? Or the rivers Tigre and Euphrates waters?
And the greek invented the symposia when they discovered that wine mixtured to water (1-1 proportion to 1-4 proportion) was enough to kill almost all germs that the water had.
Comparing then and now, we know that our social capital--the set of connections that makes us a working society--has been declining precipitously in most developed economies. We have fewer common beliefs, and less cohesion, less sense of community, and less trust in institutions than those medieval folk. I'd guess this would make us less cooperative, and more Darwinian, if push comes to shove.
We may not get to collapse from peak oil, but I bet people will be really cranky.
==AC
"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
~MLK http://tinyurl.com/6j9my
Which brings us to collaps. Societies within generations, not within years. It can only be considered a fast proces when seen on a historical scale. Our expectations, immensly influenced by modern media, tend to think of a collaps to happen overnight, not quite unlike the climate change in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", but the larger part of disappeared civilisations took several generations to collaps. Another quite important thing to consider is that those collapses had several causes working together rather than one.
That is why I think MicroHydro's remark on soil depletion is extremely important. And that is why I think some nations, cultures or parts of the world might exprerience dear consequences from peakoil while other may simply undergo significant change. I have stated it before: the best thing to do about peakoil is becoming active on political issues. Fix your nations other issues or they will explode in your face.
I like to point you all to this, for instance: Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis
In the case of WWII and the black death, the system was not flawed, we just had a major disruption that was "within limits".
Finance is not a peripheral issue.
First and foremost, the massive die-off reduced the amount of market labor available, resulting in a tremendous increase in the value of that labor, especially true in and around the cities of the age. This made workers (the surviving ones) more valuable, badly disrupting the feudal system arrangements that had existed for centuries, making possible the creation of a middle class (primarily in those same decimated cities), and ultimately made the Rennaissance possible, effectively ending the Dark Ages.
"Doing the math: Fewer people equals more wealth
Plague so drastically reduced Europe's population that a smaller labor pool changed the economy. Ironically, this improved many Europeans' lives -- creating disposable income, which spurred a demand for eastern luxuries and even eastern ideas. (The intellectual and cultural result of this reduction in population and eastward focus was called the Renaissance.)
With so many dead, fewer people were left to work the land. A few workers had the spunk to stand up to the nobles and landowners and point out that they weren't about to give more work for the same money -- not when the supply of workers had become smaller and thus more valuable. The most famous of these uprisings was led by Wat Tyler, an English rabble-rouser who got himself killed for his trouble in 1381.
Post-plague economics forced some large landholders to split their estates into smaller plots. Instead of remaining tenants who turned over the bulk of their crop to the landlord, some laborers actually began earning pay for their work.
Though there were fewer people overall, more people had land, income, and the potential to buy goods. This stimulated a rise in merchants, craftspeople, and skilled traders who could supply goods. Up until that time, you were either rich or poor, usually poor. Now there was a middle class."
I see a nearly perfect parallell between todays globalization and Swedens industrialization that were among the last in europe. We had in the early 1800:s corruption, monopolies protected by the state and a stagnant economy. The people in power figuerd out that this simply did not work and started to reform and liberalise creating a free market economy inspired by Great Britain and the industrial revolution. The result were not much the first 20 years or so. But foreign continental and British pension funds invested in Sweden due to the cheap labor, cheap wood, good order and a craftsmanship tradition. Child labour were common but it was allwas combined with schooling, everybody had to learn to read, write and count. Our foreign owned and foreign partnership industries grew. At the same time immigration to USA increased enourmously giving our leadership an scare that we had to stop this by increasig our wealth or we would bleed dry by loss of young population. Swedish inventors and investors started new companies that often copied products and I think the legal system were tweaked in favor of them. But we have most allways had low tariffs due to or age old dependancy on sea going international trade.
Our industries grew exponentially, they started to buy competitors abroad and sell abroud since the home market is small. We had luck with not being razed by WW1 and WW2. SKF, Asea, Ericsson, Volvo, Scania, Facit, Electrolux, money and power! The top of the world! Unfortuantely we started to experiment with socialism during the 1900:s and we also got lazy when we were the second richest people in the world and Sweden stagnated.
Seems to be the same path taken by Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and now China and so on. The only new thing seems to be large parts of the USA stagnating and that is new for you and your enourmous cultural influence on the whole world makes it into a major issue, welcome to the club. I say large parts since you seem to have a much more dynamic culture and lots of the workplaces and people seem to be moving to your country.
I think we in manny areas in Sweden will continue to stagnate untill the economical fortunes are equalized between countries with roughly equal skills and working legal systems. We have to do the best of the traditions and infrastructure we have today, fortunately most of it has been wisely built and will be usefull in the future. The international 95% US peak oil debate indicates that areas of USA have much larger problems with for the future inapropriate investments.
The Roman roads were built primarily for military purposes, just as Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway system in the U.S., primarily to be able to move troops and equipment quickly to any part of the country. (In World War I he was in a trans continental truck convoy across the United States, and the horrible experience left a deep mark on him.)
The importance of transportation for maintaining a complex economy and social order cannot be emphasized too much. We can do without jet planes, cell phones and the Internet; none of those is very important compared to road, rail, and sea transportation. And do not forget waterways: a key underpinning of Roman prosperity was the elimination of piracy in the Mediterranean (the terrorism of those days), and if memory serves it took the Romans about 250 years to do that job. Then when Roman finances went bad they could not afford to maintain enough of a fleet to keep down the pirates--which meant that Rome lost its crucial source of cheap energy, i.e. grain from North Africa. No money equals no navy equals no food.
Without the Internet, information would have to travel by physical conveyance--many orders of magnitude slower and more expensive. And information lets us be far more efficient and effective in a wide range of important tasks, like knowing where to ship food, when and where to send repair people and doctors, what the weather is like upstream, where the bandits are gathering, how to make soap...
It's easy to overlook the Internet because we have never had it before. But it could make a substantial difference in the livability of a post-peak world.
Today's Internet uses a lot of resources because we are using it to send media (entertainment) at too-cheap-to-meter rates. If energy suddenly got ten times as expensive, we could decrease Internet traffic by 90% and hardly notice the difference. Email bandwidth will never again be scarce.
Chris
Internet infrastructure is also a cheaper way to build a telephone network and we had such before oil use increased enourmously.
And once you have an Internet, it's really easy to send any kind of data over it. Movies would probably be too expensive to send; songs might still be worthwhile (they'd cost somewhat more than a few minutes of phone conversation); plain text would probably still be too cheap to meter!
Chris
(And it was indeed Wat Tyler I was thinking of when I mentioned failed rebellions in England. As you yourself point out, he was killed for his effort and there was no revolution in English politics.)
My point is that while the general reaction to the plagues of the Middle Ages was great sorrow and grief the reaction to peak oil will be extreme anger which tends to produce extreme and dangerous actions.
Don't flame me, I'm not making a value judgment here, just an observation!
From what I've read at TOD, IMO the best short-term solution to this in the US will be to build dozens of new nuclear facilities as quickly as possible, while switching the vehicle fleet over to battery-powered and hybrid autos running on a mix of electricity, gasoline and biofuels.
Uranium is also suffering a peak that will be accelerated if we start encouraging such folly.
Coal-fired plants create acid rain which ruin our lakes and kill our fish. Solar and wind have their place but are dilute and inconstant.
Like it or not, our society is going to need to maintain its ability to transport people and goods around the infrastructure we have created. We may not go as fast, nor travel as often, but we will still need to get around, and we will need a reliable source of power to do so.
We will not and can not return to horse and buggies. We are not all going to become Hobbits and live in The Shire. Nuclear is the only proven real alternative to fossil fuels on a realistic scale in the coming century. To ignore its usefulness is folly.
Diesel trains in the US transport 8 x as many ton miles per barrel of oil as do 18 wheelers. Electrify them (with regenerative braking, where power is generated while braking) with motors that are roughly 3x as efficient as diesels) and existing hydro could take care of transportation (with competing demands from other areas). A score or so of new nukes could take care of electrified intercity and urban rail, especially if volumes decline.
I strongly suspect that your "4,000 nuke" replaces BTU for BTU nuke electricity for oil. Not required !
Honesty may happen, but there's no guarantees.
That could very easily including the loss of civilization and the way of life as we knew it.
The Black Death destroyed mostly the Labor and pratically not affected the Capital. A consequence is that the wages get higher.
The Peak Oil will destroy mostly the Capital. And a lot of Capital will be used to build new energy infra-structures (nuclear, coal, biofuels, solar, wind). The consequence is that the wages will be lower.
I don't think our current consumer pattern will survive, because the Labor will be more cheap than the capital and the wages will be lower. Not the end of the civilization, but our civilization will need change. I think that surelly the suburban "american way of life" have low chances to survive. However, the "european way of life" that use the public transport can survive.
Be warned, we are going to see the "French Fries" era...not the "Freedom Fries" era. The model will be Sweeden, not USA.
Bicycling and public transportation commuting during weekdays and at weekends driving to the wood heated cottage(?) in a (old) Volvo?
That would be what well off working families did in the 50:s and 60:s but then they had a new car. Now it would overall be easier to have that kind of lifestyle since we have better infrastructure and more urbanisation. I guess a new car, a cottage or a (sail/motor)boat will be a pick one of three choise for most middle class people.
Earlier today I read a young mans vision of a good lifestyle in Stockholm. Driving to work on a motorcycle when the weather is good and take the subway when its winter or bad weather. No new roads and little oil needed for that.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Peak Oil will change the Labor/Capital ratio. Less Capital, same Labor, the Capital will be more expensive and/or the Labor will be more cheap. Cheaper labor CAN destroy globalization, we just need that the US labor have the same wages that the chinese.
Can you live with less than one dollar per day? When the US wages get to less than one dollar per day globalization will be caput. And when you ask to me for cigars ("Hombre! Que tenia mi ultimo cigarillo?") I will answer: "Desculpe, não. Primeiro, não fumo. Segundo, minha língua é português e não entendo espanhol..."
João Carlos
Sorry my bad english, my native language is portuguese. And I don't understand spanish....
By the way, your English is no problem whatsoever. No worries there.
Does it always require energy consumption to create wealth? Is this like the second law of thermodynamics analogy, where all things would be equal unless the equality is upset by some power input causing an energy imbalance that creats a potential difference and consequently an exploitable quanity that can be feed in a controlled manner back to the region of lesser quantity? Did I get it yet?
At some point employers will start preferring manual labor (human energy) instead of machine labor - that is we may witness deindustrialization. It may sound that the workers will be better off with that but in fact they'll be much worse. The necessary work force will be re-recruited from what we now call "middle class" that will disappear. Welcome to the beginning of the 20th century.
Yes, some maintenance required occasionally, property taxes to be paid, but I produce a valued economic good much greater than the value of any labor for maintenance. (BTW, I have used some of my laboir in designing large hydro plants to buy shares in groups of smaller hydropower plants).
Likewise if I own a fiber optic network. Minimal labor, material & energy inputs compared to the economic value produced.
Some forms of Capital can be thought of as the tools that amplify productivity. A man with a shovel can move much more dirt than he can with his hands. The man that owns 100 shovels can rent them out at a profit.
Plague comes along later and causes most of the population reduction when it spreads among hungry people.
What happened then (the last bad weather situation in the sixth century) is that every agricultural mainland culture went down. Pastoral cultures survived because pasture is tougher than crops. If the clover dies the vetch lives, if the timothy dies the bermuda lives, etc. There's always something for the horses and cows and sheep, and if there isn't you can always raid the farmers.
So the Eastern Roman Empire survived because they had the islands in the Med that were able to feed Constantinople when the Bulgars and Persians were besieging the walls after overrunning the mainland.
An example in our time might be Australia and New Zealand, if they built synfuel plants and we didn't.
- An end to the Crusades
(an end to the Cold War)
- Bad harvests at the beginning of the century,
(first oil crisis in 1970s)
- An increase in despotism (Phillip II. of France outlawed the Knights Templars, with hopes to fill his treasury) and an increase in centralized power
(no comparison? Breton Woods?)
- world wide plague
(no comparison yet?)
- a long-term struggle as 100-years war begins/Turks move into Arabian world
("war on terror" i.e. Muslim world against the West?)
- strengthening of polical/social order as England e.g. tie surfs to land.
(comparison?)
- delayed internal political instability as peasants revolt in England (30 years after Plague) and War of the Roses (split royal house)
Every comparison has its problems. But I doubt that the US, for instance, will fall apart, just like there was no thinking of an internal revolt during the Great Depression. Instead, there was an increase of dependence on a central authority. Revolts, internal strife, "a new order" etc.. would probably beginn happening one generation later. Internation relationships, on the other hand will more than likely be (once again!) very turbulant.
(no comparison? Breton Woods?)
How about the rise of corporations and corporatism.
Neo-con fascism. New imperialism.
- strengthening of polical/social order as England e.g. tie surfs to land.
(comparison?)
The war on the middle class. Outsourcing. The return of indentured servitude (illegal immigrant workers).
I hope I dont bore you with more or less patriotic Swedish history snippets but we had the same kind of problems during the same time. It was back them our socialist party became powerfull and also distanced itself from the communists. I think this partly was a reaction on the civil war in Finland beween the communists and the right wing. They saw what real communists could do and also figured out that large scale nationalization were not the way forward. Our communists were also remote controlled from moscow.
Fachism crept in deeper. Sweden has a consensus culture and it was obviously a good idea to sort and cull the population to get a better people-stock quality. Money were invested in research and new theories brough forward, some of them adopted by the nazis in Germany. A large scale sterilizaton program were initiated of gypsies, mentally ill, young single mothers who had nervous breakdowns and other people who obviously could not take care of themselves in a civilized manner. It was active well into the 50:s and realy did not stop totaly untill the pill was invented.
More obvious fachistical tendencies stopped halfway during the second world war when the battle of Stalingrad indicated who was winning. I think the majority liked Great Britain, USA and so on more then the Nazi Germans. Almost everybody was scared about and disliked Sovjet, Russia is our arch enemy and they had attacked Finland. We had for a very long time liked anything German and imported a lot of German culture and technological know how and manny did not notice that a lot of their culture tourned sour with the rise of the nazis. I suspect that the Nazis were more fond of Sweden then the other way around, they had a crazy idea that we were more Aryan then them and some though we would win a fight with them. That was impossible since our army was downsized and neglected after WW1 as it was and still is after the end of the cold war. (Makes me a little nervous. ) Our naive love of German culture were replaced by an even more enthusiastic love of US culture, obligatory german lessons in school were replaced by obligatory english lessons. Please dont turn sour on us, if you do something stupid we might copy it. :-(
Natonalization ideas resurfacad again within the national labour union LO and the socialist party in the 70:s but nothing much came out of it. The idea then were that private profits would be taxed to labor union controlled funds that would buy shares until the means of production were controlled by the workers. Back then you automatically became a member of the socialist party if you joined the union and you joined the union if you worked otherwise very subtle bad things happend to you exept if you had mental skills enough too require non subtle preassure. There were of course no physical violence involved. This outragious idea envigiorated the political debate in Sweden. The oposition became more active and the socialist party responded by scrapping all implementation of theoretical socialism exept reforms that buy the optimum groups of voters or give friends nice office jobs. Since those times a slow separation of the labour unions and the socialist party started. Now the opposition officially likes the labour unions as long as they efficiently act as a support for workers, preferably all workers members or not. I actually like this policy since they do a lot of good, they only have some more bad habits to get rid of.
This consensus culture makes us efficient in doing to the right thing or very wrong things and sometimes we do them for a long time since no one objects. I think it is a good trait in times of hardship that has obvious technical solutions. If we are stressed enough I think we after much agonizing will decide to Do Something and then everybody does the same thing with very good efficiency and a rational explenation for any parts with questionable moral. Our technology implementation and production per capita is amazing and I dont know how we have survived our toying with socialistic ideas with so little harm.
Please tell me more about those inresting times in US politics. It might be important for the near future.
What struck me is that I notice a similar tendency of small countries like ours (I'm from Bulgaria) to hook up to a bigger country or culture that we use for a model. But I guess that's normal to some extent.
I agree with Dave's heartfelt and elegant post of a few days ago. No matter how bleak things may seem, I want to work for a constructive solution rather than simply wait to die.
A dieoff in and of itself is not really a problem. At least for those who survive. What we're really worried about are the effects that lead to a dieoff, not the results of one.
And this does not count as a collapse, as defined by Tainter, etc. There was no loss of complexity. (Indeed, there was an increase in complexity, driven by the shortage of manual laborers.) While some experts estimate the drop in European population was as high as 50%, that's not the 80-90% Tainter found was associated with collapse.
What I do find interesting is the question of what caused the Black Death. We still don't know for sure what disease it was. Bubonic plague has long been the #1 suspect, but there's no real proof. One study claimed to find Yersinia pestis DNA in the remains of plague victims, but no one has been able to repeat the results. (If it was Y. pestis, surely it we could tell? If DNA analysis could finger typhoid as the epidemic that ended the golden age of Athens 1,500 years ago, then surely we could do the same for plague victims who died a thousand years later.)
Anyway, Yersinia pestis is endemic to Europe, so why would the plague suddenly be such a problem? Many scientists suspect other diseases, or even a bunch of different diseases.
Some point to Malthusian causes. The Great Famine of 1315 was only a few decades earlier, where even some of the wealthy and powerful starved. This may have weakened the population for the epidemics to come. Also, there were sanitation issues, because a shortage of firewood put heating water for washing out of the reach of ordinary people. (Peak firewood?)
I was astonished to hear someone explain on a TV talk show some time back, that a female starts her menses with all the egg cells she will ever have. They are not continuously produced. The point IIRC was that older women are more likely to bare children with defects because the eggs have had more exposure to mutagens.
Famine would, I think, increase the mutagenic stress. Also, the economic consequences often leads to delayed marriage.
1800 four million
1848 eight million
1900 four million
1950 four million
2000 four million
Of the eight million Irish in 1848 very roughly two million died of disease and famine and two million emigrated.
Late marriage and many spinsters and bachelors have maintained Irish population with, I believe, no decline in intellingence nor increase in defective births whatsoever.
Ideally, women would begin reproduction at age 18 and quit at age 30. We do not live in an ideal world.
The best is the enemy of the good.
This is a big question, on its own it probably won't, life will get harder, global economy will collapse, oil is resnsible for not only our transport and energy, but by products from oil are used in 500,000 products from plastics to pharmaceuticals. we are all worried about how we will get from A to B and how our homes will heated etc.
with regards to transport, we will adapt to other forms, and if necessary the horse and cart may come back in many parts of the world. Its the global economey which will take a big hit, and yes this will have a dramatic change on our lives, and in some countries there will be a collapse of society, due to economic collapse.
If we now add climate change to the scenario, then there is a possability this will add extra strain to any growing problems. Last year we saw in New Orleans, breakdowns in law and order, though these were quickly dealt with. The major problem with Katrina was the displacemnet of people having to leave New Orleans, as climate change gets far worse we may see more displacements of people. This will bring with it greater problems and issues, which will lead to possible disorder and discontent. During the final years of the Roman Empire, large groups of people moving from one area to another had a great effect of the Roman society. tough this was one of many problems that lead to the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was no one issue that caused the collapse, but a series of differing issues that compacted on top of one another which led to the collapse.
If we go back to the issue of Peak Oil, the problem is just not the depletion of oil, all fossil fuels are depleting, this will effect society a great deal, but may not lead to a collapse of global civillisation. Society will change, how is the big question, we have to assume it may not be in a good way. We have globally become far to dependant on fossil fuels, its made us lazy. Most people especially in the western world don't grow our own food, we simply go down to the local supermarket/hypermarket and buy it straight of the shelf. Our food comes from all over the world, we can get food that is normally not in season locally, because its grown and shipped in from abroad. I grow my own vegatables in the UK and at some times of the year, mainly in winter I'm restricted by what I can grow and harvest due to the weather conditions, my food is limityed at this time of year, yet I can go down to the supermarket and purchase what ever I need to make up this short fall.
What I'm saying is that in a post peak society this may not be possible, also there is not enough land in some countries to support the current levels of population, what happens when there is no transport to ship food in from abroad, and this is just the tip of the ice berg.
In the end we can not foretell the future, society may or may not collapse. I'm siding on the may not, but what ever happens its not going to be easy, life will get hard, job losses similar to the 30's depression will occur and there is likley to be more armed conflict in the world.
Thus, to me the most logical thing to do is to insure against risks that are insurable, figure out how to whomp up a life raft in case the Titanic goes down, and in the mean time have as much fun as possible.
BTW, I bought a survival kit in 1957, because I thought thermonuclear war was likely. The kit worked: Look at all the people who did not buy survival kits in the fifties and are dead now. In other words, if you have fire insurance, you probably won't need it. In terms of energy, we need all the insurance we can buy; specifically we need to let prices of energy double and redouble again to force conservation; we need to pursue multiple options, from nuclear (yes, including fast breeder reacters), ethanol, windmills, clean coal (which is not an oxymoron, regardless of what parrots shrill), and because I'm a gambler and a crazy wild-eyed optimist, how about this one:
Let's put half a trillion dollars during the next few years and dragoon the 2,000 smartest physicists in the world to work on fusion power. Finance the project with tariffs of about $100 per barrel of imported oil. There is nothing in physics to suggest that fusion power cannot work. If it can be made to work, then we can get on to more important issues, such as reducing world population in a humane way--and learning how to live agreeably and wisely and well.
(last few words stolen from John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930)
Those of us who live in Canada might want to keep that in mind when we contemplate whether to arm our border guards.
For people wanting to know more about the 14th century parallels, I strongly recommend two courses from the Teaching Company:
The Renaissance, the Reformation and the Rise of Nations by Andrew Fix, and Medieval Europe, Crisis and Renewal by Teofilo Ruiz.
http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/coursedescriptions/863.asp?pc=Search. I don't have any connnection with them, I just love their courses.
My thought is that during the black plauge, a lot of people actually thought that god was behind it, and that god would either kill them, or save them, and as such, they followed those rules and expectations.
Today we live in a world of science and understanding, where cause & effect are seen and comprehended.
If we know that our society is failing because of our greedy leaders and corporate whores who are interested in quarterly profit margins above the long term viability of the whole society... couldn't it be thought that there would be some radical shift to a new way of living based on a long term comprehension of the damage we do with our short sited actions?
Faith can lead to blindness, and just letting things happen, which reduces the will to revolt.
Knoweldge empowers the person to act againsts those who are harming them.
Just a thought.
Your broader suggestion that we live in a world of scientific understanding is one that gives me a lot of hope. Unlike every other civilization that faced potential collapse, we know that the gods are not to blame and we have a pretty good idea of how we might go about saving ourselves. Our problem, of course, is that this knowledge is still not widely enough diffused, and hence there is no political will to start changing our collective ways. That is why I think TOD is an important outlet as we strive to convince others of the need to change.
Right or wrong, I definitely expect a significant religious response to peak oil. In this light there are many directions things could go - from faith being used to pull people together to solve the problems to scapegoating of those who don't follow the beliefs.
Either way, I don't expect that pure logic and understanding will lead the masses.
A feudal society is Diamond's "chiefdom", more than a simple tribe but a far, far cry from a nation-state. Europe was not one homogenous society either. It was a sea of chiefdoms (feudal lords). Some of those chiefdoms did collapse and vanish, absorbed by their neighbors or conquered. Modern society is far more monolithic. I don't need permission from the feudal lord 15 miles down the road to venture into his territory.
Modern industrial society has an incredible complexity compared to medieval Europe. Couple that with the mistake of viewing medieval Europe as a single society, and the conclusion that the plague was irrelevant appears inescapable but I question whether it is correct. If you go back and actually review the individual feudal structures before and after the plague, I suspect that you would find collapse, annexation, conquest, and absorption happening across Europe and at an accelerated pace than before the plagues. Further, I wonder how many of the early European nation-states experienced loss of political control within or at their periphery?
Finally, continuation of agrarian, feudal society was dependent on human and animal energy, both renewable and limited. Continuation of industrial society depends on energy being available. If that energy is no longer available, then society must change (or collapse). And in fact, any social change from higher complexity to lower complexity is collapse of that particular social structure.
No one has yet to mentioned that the sole reason that we have sustained this prosperous way of life so far is directly due to 2 things:
- Cheap and abundant oil
- The Pharmaceutical Industry, which is dependent on cheap and abundant oil.
With out medicine, this civilization as we know it can kiss its ass goodbye, something so basic as a sore throat will kill us quite easily with out such medicines as antibiotics.No Food and No Medicine makes for a catastrophic concoction for die off, and to me that is a damn good scenario for social chaos and societal break down.
We have many skilled doctors and surgeons who can perform miracles, but there is a large portion of what passes for medicine that is nothing more than quackery. And the purveyors of pills are the heart of it. Combined with what passes for food, and you get the obese, unhealthy population we have now. Good diet and exercise would result in a healthier population than we have now. It's the food I'm worried about.
Which begs the question - how will these services be effected by the peak: the problem with answering this is, the uncertainty about the magnitude of the peak is so large, guessing about it's symptoms at this point is deliciously moot.
sigh
Measles is going down at Africa and it isn't because they are geting bettter sanitation. It is because they are geting vacinated. And was sanitation that made the US population more vulnerable to polio at the 50's: better sanitation made the children had less contact with viruses and bacteria, okay, less children death from disenteria, but the children were not immune to the polio virus. So, a polio's epidemy started at the 50's. Thanks heaven that Salk created a vacine...because sanitation don't make us less vulnerable to polio, au contrarie.
There is a Hindu goddess that protect the people from smallpox. I guess that the goddess lose the job after the 80's, because vacination ENDED smallpox. The last guy to have it had at Africa, a place that have NO SANITATION. Anyone that say that was sanitation that terminate smallpox is saying pseudo-science mungo-jumbo tottal ignoramus stupidefactus...
And the most important cause for women's death before the penicilin was childbirth. Why? Infection post-childbirth.
And guess what killed more soldiers at the WWI? Infection. Can you guess why the US DoD produced penicilin at the WWII?
Sanitation is important, but the modern medicine is mostly the responsable for the fact we live more than 80 years now. Vacination and antibiotics are fundamental for public health.
By the way, you think it is possible to make cardio-vascular surgery without antibiotics? Or any intrusive surgery? Kidney surgery to get out stones?
By the way, when you will stop to say these stupid pseudo-scientific bullshit? It is not only the IDCreationism, you are ever showing that you are complete ignorant about Science. Go study, go read something diferent than the Bible, go learn something! To be stupid is not a good thing as you american think. I cannot understand why you elect a stupid president, to be stupid is not beautifull...
João Carlos
Sorry the bad english, my native language is portuguese.
Different diarreha(spelling?) sicnesses are made insignificant with good sanitation and water quality. These both makes people weak and kills them in themselvs and in combination with other diseases. Dying from an untreated heart attack is better then dying earlier due to bad water quality.
We need both hygien and medicine but either or is better then nothing. But if I had to choose between good water and hygiene or access to a modern hospital I would choose the water.
Yes, that is true. Good sanitation and water quality lowered children's mortality. Vacination too. Measles's virus isn't transmited by water, but by air. Smallpox's virus was transmited by air too. And can you guess how flu virus is transmited?
And the germs evolve. Evolution is a fact and if you work against bacteria and virus evolution is an evident fact of life. Bacteria will be evolve to be resistent to antibiotics, natural selection is working hard to make all infectious bacteria resistant to antibiotics (well, only the bacteria resistant to antibiotics survive...). That is the reason why we need control the antibiotics use, we are selecting bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. For start we need ban the use of antibiotics at cattle and chicken. Big agrobusiness don't want the ban...so everytime you eat a Macburger you are eating antibiotics.
However, we aren't dieing from infections. Before the antibiotics any skin cut was problable to get infected and infections were mortal. Some guys died from infection that they get at skin cuts from shaving the face (a famous example is Lord Carnarvon that died from generalised infection and pneumonia that started from an acidental cut at a mosquito bite shaving the face... and please, Lord Carnarvon not died from the "Mummy's Curse").
Good sanitation and water quality don't will impede that the bacteria that exist at the air infect any cut you have. Or infect your throat. Or that you get pneumonia. I get pneumonia last year, I am alive because I used antibiotics. I fear the day that the bacteria will be resistent to all antibiotics...
It is a medical fact that the women deaths caused by post-childibirth's infection get lower after the antibiotics, any populational statistics show the women's post-childbirth deaths going down after 1950, including the places where there is no good sanitation.
And how the bacteria and virus evolve they can use the good sanitation against us. Polio virus is a good example. Polio virus normally causes diarrhea, only 5% of the cases the polio virus enters the blood circulation and start to damage the nervous cells. However, with better sanitation the children had less diarrhea. The good thing is that the children's mortality get down. The bad thing is that we had a large children's population that never had contact with the polio virus and that had NO IMMUNITY. The history of the native americans can say a lot about what happens when you have a population that have no immunity to a virus. For example, the spanish (100 spaniards?) destroyed the Astec Empire (1 million warriors?)not only because they had horses and steel, but too because they had germs (smallpox). Anything that destroy half Astec's army need be called "lethal weapon"...
Well, as the sanitation made the children's population have no immunity to polio virus and how the polio virus too is transmited by contact and air, you can see why a polio epidemy happened at the 50's.
Vacination is a fantastic tool to combat diseases. Mostly because vacination use the human immune system to combat that diseases, vacination is not a normal medicine (it not combat the germ, it make your body fight the germ). Immunizination (vacination) make the human body immune system be preparated to destroy virus and bacteria that invade our body. That is the reason why vacination TERMINATED a nasty virus as the smallpox virux. That is the reason why vacination will terminate the measles virus. When every person at the world (6 billion people) get vacinated against measles everyone will be immune and the virus will have no place to go.
The problem is create a vacine against flu that works against ALL flu viruses. Or at least to have a bird flu vacine before the pandemia starts (and before the virus evolve to be resistent to Tamiflu).
The aspect of bird flu I find most intriguing is its similarity to asthma, which is also an immune system over-reaction to common causative agents (pollen, dust, cold viruses etc). It makes me wonder if asthma medication, or a more powerful type drug targetting the same biochemical cascade, might be more effective at treating bird flu than traditional flu medication. If anyone here has any connections to the pharmeceutical industry, perhaps they could suggest the potential be investigated. In the absence of better information (which I am looking for but have not yet found), I would probably treat my own family for bird flu with asthma medication if the need arose. I have plenty of it around as my son is asthmatic, but I'd be happier doing so if someone had done a medical study on it first.
Our streams and rivers now have nasty bugs even in remote locations. If protazoa are in cyst stage, they can survive ten minutes of boiling water, and amebic dysentery is one of the nastiest ways to go--and is still common in parts of North America.
To dig an adequate well on my property and put in a hand pump costs about $1,000. Water purifying filters such as those used by campers are much cheaper, but my theory is that if I have my own good water, then probably I'll never need it because the city water will keep running. If worse comes to worse, I may be able to use good water as an export good for drinking, becuause most people will not have access to decent water. To the extent that a dieoff occurs, my guess is that bad water will be the proximate cause of at least one-third of deaths--and probably more.
Compared to the problem of getting good water, it is relatively easy to get food, at least in rural areas where one can trap animals and fish, have gardens, trade skilled services for those with food surpluses, and put out a salt lick so as to be able to kill Bambi at short range.
Turn off the clean water supply to any city, oh, let's say Lisbon - vs it's drug supply - and we'll very quickly see who's being pseudo scientific.
Two Words:
"New Orleans"
Turn off the clean water supply to any city, oh, let's say Lisbon - vs it's drug supply - and we'll very quickly see who's being pseudo scientific.
Two Words:
"New Orleans"
The funny thing about this thread is that it started to discuss the Black Death. There is something interesting about the Black Death: Florence had the Black Death, Turim not. Both cities hadn't clean water supply or sanitation, however Turin had cats...
If it is possible to boil water no one really need die from diarrhea if there is no clean water supply. The problem is that the people simply not know that they NEED boil the water. Evidently you need some way to get the water (a river? a well?) and some way to boil it.
However, New Orleans is a nice case: the people don't died from diarrhea. The people died mostly from drowning. I don't think that the people died because they drowed at their diarrhea, they drowned at the water that invaded the city.
After the catastrophe some people died from dehydration. That happened mostly to the old. The FEMA simply forgot to send water to the people drink. Oh, they forgot to send food too. And they forgot to send help. See you, a hercuva "good job", the typical good job that you get from Bush II.
New Orleans don't had a diarrhea epidemy or something worse, as a cholera epidemy, mostly because the people simply get out the city.
The fact is that the New Orleans people don't died because they lose clean water supply. They died because the Mississipi River drowned them. It is ever possible to boil the Mississipi River's Water to kill all germs and get no diarrhea. But humans cannot breath water and that was the problem when New Orleans drowned...
Careful with that Irony Juan.
Regardless, I still maintain that if you cut off a safe water supply to any city - you'll be in far worse trouble than if you cut off the drug supply: and far faster.
(not having any available energy to boil said water in the first place being totally irrelevant to "TheOilDrum.com" notwithstanding ... )
I did not say that all drugs are ineffective, nor did I say that all vaccinations do not work. What I said is that vaccinations (in general) are not responsible for reducing the incidences of the diseases they are targeted. Polio and smallpox are two exceptions, but in the US our children are subjected to over twenty different vaccinations before they are two, and many in the first days of life. Surprisingly, most kids are not vulnerable to Hep B on day 2. Now we give vaccinations for chicken pox that is not even dangerous for kids, does not provide adequate immunity, and leaves them vulnerable as adults when it is dangerous.
If you have ever looked at the rates of mortality (for those that were even fatal) on a timeline, you would see that 80-90% of the reduction occurred before the vaccination was introduced, and therefore they cannot be responsible for the reduction. I'll see if I can find the link to the graphs. This would not be a problem if the vaccinations were harmless, but they are not. Until recently, many of them were laced with high does of mercury, even though it was well known that this preservative was a dangerous neurotoxin. Further, the stress on immature immune systems of multiple vaccinations can be very damaging. The epidemic rise of autistic spectrum disorders corresponds directly to the introduction of vaccinations, and grew with their greater rates. And if you have not lived through the hell of having a child damaged this way, than count yourself lucky - I have. Vaccinations are yet another well-intentioned program that was subverted by money and profit, and has ended up doing more harm than good, at least in the US. That is not to say they could not be helpful if done in a rational manner, especially in places with poor hygiene.
As for antibiotics, of course they are necessary. If you go to the doctor with a cold, they'll prescribe some for you - and they will do precisely nothing because they don't work on viruses. Your body will heal itself, and the drug company and doctor will profit. All is good.
As for the rest of your moronic tirade, I'm an atheist, an engineer, I read and study constantly, and I'll be one of the ones they come for after our fascist revolution is complete here. I don't think your English is all that bad; it's your manners that suck.
It's the same damned overconfident attitude again, this idea that we know so much, we'll just go ahead an do this to every kid in the country. And in reality the knowledge was faulty, the product was flawed, someone needed to make more money, pride got in the way of caution, etc. - the typical human failings. To take such risks on such a scale, the threat had better be extreme.
My point was that without medicine to treat people with an illness, the infrastructure can be rendered useless.
And yes you can die from a sore throat, if it is bacterial in nature.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/4675431.stm
My dad is Doctor, he prescribed me antibiotics when I had a strep, (type of bacteria), infection of the throat. Had I not been treated, I would have died from a bacterial infection.
Another example would be a friend of mine, who fell over one night grazing his wrist on the footpath, thought nothing of it, when to bed, woke up and had Septicemia climbing up his arm. Without antibiotics, he would have died too.
Without medicine we are very vulnerable.
The biggest problem is that antibiotics are prescribed too often, not choosen carefully enough using the wrong kinds for an infection and often used for too short a time, people stop taking their pills when they feel ok. Antibiotics are also used in cattle feed in some countries and some peiople use antibiotics for virus infections like a common cold using it as placebo. This leads to more and more strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Antibiotics needs to be rationed, the use much more controlled and also rotated in regions letting a few kinds be unused for a few years while bacteria resistant to them randomly dies out. This is being practised in Sweden together with a ban on antibiotics use in cattle feed and so on and it slows down the problem significantly but it is not solved. It would work much better if all of the world did this and not only a few millions doing a lot of traveling.
This restrictive practise also saves a completely insignificant ammount of energy in unneded antibiotics. ;-) A morally tough thing with it is that it probably makes hospitals worse at curing people in the short run but much better at it after a few years. Ten dead patients this year or a hundred in few years or an uncontrolled situation after some more years if no new research bails us out? Tough moral decision.
The other big problem is that there is way to litte research into new kinds of antibiotics.
Out of 1000 sick patients 100 will be very sick with a multiple resistant bacteria.
If you treat all 1000 with the best antibiotic you have 999 lives.
But the bacterias get more resistant so next year 998 lives, 990, 950, 900 and the antibiotic is useless.
If you wait untill 100 of the 1000 gets very sick and then start the treatment with your best antibiotic 997 lives and the effect degrades more slowly.
This probaly would give a maltreatment process for the three dying each years since they would have had a good chance to live if they had been treated earlier with the best available antibiotics.
This kind of problem have given variations in strictness of this kind of policy, probably enough to do research on but I have only read popularised versions of the dilemma.
There are so many big things going so very wrong right now, most of them interrelated. It's so very hard for me to imagine that there is any way for us to escape being hit by at least a couple of them. How sad as a parent to believe that the future will be very hard for my children. I try to find something to be optimistic about, but the odds don't seem to favor it.
- environmental damage
- climate change
- hostile action
- breakdown of an essential friendly trade
- Leadership/social decision making failure.
Two examples seem especially relevant to the difference from black death. One is the genuine collapse of Easter Island (95% loss of life, remainder reduced to subsistence) when they felled all the trees, destroying fishing, commerce, and the protection against erosion. The other is Norse Greenland, whose European cattle based way of life was non-negotiable even as the climate change made it impossible to support. In both of these a vital economic element was lost and not replaced.