In today’s world, we have a huge amount of debt outstanding. Academic researchers Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous for their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and their earlier paper This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. Their point, of course, is that the same thing happens over and over again. We can learn from past crises to solve our current problems.
Part of their story is of course correct. Governments have gotten themselves into problems with debt, time after time. This is happening again now. In fact, the same two authors recently prepared a working paper for the International Monetary Fund called Financial and Sovereign Debt Crises: Some Lessons Learned and Some Lessons Forgotten, talking about ideas such as governments inflating their way out of debt problems and pushing problems off to insurance companies and pension funds, through regulations requiring investment in certain securities.
Many seem to believe that if we worked our way out of debt problems in the past, we can do the same thing again. The same assets may have new owners, but everything will work together in the long run. Businesses will continue operating, and people will continue to have jobs. We may have to adjust monetary policy, or perhaps regulation of financial institutions, but that is about all.
I think this is where the story goes wrong. The situation we have now is very different, and far worse, than what happened in the past. We live in a much more tightly networked economy. This time, our problems are tied to the need for cheap, high quality energy products. The comfort we get from everything eventually working out in the past is false comfort.
If we look closely at the past, we see that in some cases the outcomes are not benign. There are situations where much of the population in an area died off. This die-off did not occur directly because of debt defaults. Instead, the same issues that gave rise to debt defaults, primarily diminishing returns with respect to food and other types of production, also led to die off. We are not necessarily exempt from these same kinds of problems in the future.
Why the Current Interest in Debt Levels and Interest Rates
The reason I bring up these issues is because the problem of too much world debt is now coming to the forefront. The Bank for International Settlements, which is the central bank for central banks, issued a report a week ago in which they said world debt levels are too high, and that continuing the current low interest rate policy has too many bad effects. Something needs to be done to normalize monetary policy.
Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair, and Christine Lagarde, managing director or the International Monetary Fund, have also been making statements about the issue of how to fix our current economic problems (News Report; Video). There is the additional rather bizarre point that back in January, Lagarde used numerology to suggest that a major change in policy might be announced in 2014 (on July 20?), with the hope that the past “seven miserable years” can be followed by “seven strong years.” The IMF has talked in the past about using its special drawing rights (SDRs) as a sort of international currency. In this role, the SDRs could act as the world’s reserve currency, be used for issuing bonds, and be used for setting the prices of commodities such as gold and oil. Perhaps a variation on SDRs is what Lagarde has in mind.
So with this background, let’s get back to the main point of the post. How is this debt crisis, and the likely outcome, different from previous crises?
1. We live in a globalized economy. Any slip-up of a major economy would very much affect all of the other major economies.
Banks hold bonds of governments other than their own. If a major government fails to make good on its promises, it can affect other governments as well. Smaller countries, like Greece or Cyprus, can be bailed out or their problems worked around. But if the United States, or even Japan, should run into major difficulties, it would affect the world as a whole. See my post, Twelve Reasons Why Globalization is a Huge Problem.
2. Our problem now is not simply governmental debt; it is debt of many different types, affecting individuals and businesses of all kinds, as well as governments.
In the studies of historical debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, the focus is on governmental debt. Now there is much more debt, some through banks, some through bonds, and some through less traditional sources. There are also derivatives that are in some ways like debt. In particular, if there are sharp moves in interest rates, it is possible that some issuers of derivatives will find themselves in financial difficulty.
There are also promises that are in many ways like debt, but that technically aren’t guaranteed, because legislatures can change the promised benefits whenever they choose. Examples of these are our current Social Security program and Medicare benefits. Citizens depend on these programs, even if there is no promise that they will continue to exist in their current form. With all of these kinds of debt and quasi-debt, we have a much more complex situation than in the past.
3. Our economy is a self-organized system that has properties of its own, quite apart from the properties of the individual consumers, businesses, governments, and resources that make up the system. Circumstances now are such that the world economy could fail, even though this could not happen in the past.
I recently wrote about the nature of a networked economy, in my post Why Standard Economic Models Don’t Work–Our Economy is a Network. In that post, I represented our networked economy as being somewhat like this dome that can be built with wooden sticks.
Figure 1. Dome constructed using Leonardo Sticks
Years ago, when a civilization collapsed, the network of connections was not as dense as it is today. Most food was not dependent on long supply chains, and quite a bit of manufacturing was done locally. If one economy collapsed, even a fairly large one like the Weimar Republic of Germany, the rest of the world was not terribly dependent on it. Figuratively, the “hole” in the dome could mend, and over time, the economy could strengthen and go on as before. We cannot count on this situation today, however.
4. Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) available today are what enable tighter connections than in the past, and also add vulnerabilities.
Early economies relied mainly on the sun’s energy to grow food, gravity to help with irrigation, human energy and animal energy for transport and food growing, wind energy to power ships and wooden windmills, and water energy to operate water wheels. Wood was used for many purposes, including heating homes, cooking, and making charcoal to provide the heat needed to smelt metals and make glass.
In the past two hundred years we have added fossil fuels to our list of fuels. This has allowed us to make metals in quantity, as well as concrete and glass in quantity, enabling the development of much technology. The use of coal enabled the building of hydroelectric dams as well as electrical transmission lines, thus enabling widespread use of electricity. Fossil fuels enabled other modern fuels as well, including nuclear energy, and the manufacture of what we today call “renewable energy,” including today’s wind turbines and solar PV.
Of the fossil fuels, oil has been especially important. Oil is particularly good as a transport fuel, because it is easily transported and very energy dense. With the use of oil, transport by smaller vehicles such as cars, trucks and airplanes became possible, and transport by ship and by rail was improved. Such changes allowed international businesses to grow and international trade to flourish. Economies were able to grow much more rapidly than in the pre-fossil fuel era. Governments became richer and began offering education to all, paved roads, and benefits such as unemployment insurance, health care programs, and pensions for the elderly.
Thus, fossil fuels enable a very different lifestyle, and very different governments and government programs than existed prior to fossil fuels. If something were to happen to all fossil fuels, or even just oil, most businesses would have to cease operation. Governments could not collect enough taxes to continue functioning. Very few farmers would be able to produce food and transport it to market, because oil is used to transport seeds to farmers, to operate machinery, to operate irrigation equipment, to transport soil amendments, and to create herbicides and pesticides.
This situation now is very different from the past, when most food was produced using human and animal labor, and transport was often by a cart pulled by an animal. Before fossil fuels, even if governments collapsed and most people died off, the remaining people could continue growing food, gathering water, and going about their own lives. If we were to lose oil, or oil plus electricity (because oil is required to maintain electric transmission and because businesses tend to close when they are missing either oil or electricity), we would have a much harder time. Most of our jobs would disappear. Banks wouldn’t be able to operate. Our water and sewer systems would stop working. We would find it necessary to “start over,” in a very different way.
5. Because of the big role of debt today, economic growth is essential to keeping the current economic system operating.
It is much easier to pay back debt with interest when an economy is growing than when it is shrinking, because when an economy is shrinking, people are losing their jobs. Even if only, say, 10% lose their jobs, this loss of jobs creates many loan defaults. Banks are likely to find themselves in a precarious position and are likely to cut back on lending to others, making the situation worse.
If the economy starts shrinking, businesses will also have difficulty. They have fixed costs, including rent, management salaries, and their own debt repayments. These costs tend to stay the same, even if total revenue shrinks because of an economic slowdown. Because of these problems, businesses are also likely to find it increasingly difficult to pay back their own debt in a recession. They are likely to find it necessary to lay off workers, making the recession worse.
If economic growth is very low, this lack of growth can to some extent be covered up with very low interest rates. But such very low interest rates tend to be a problem as well, because they encourage asset bubbles of many sorts, such as the current run-up in stock market prices. It is not always clear which bubbles are being run up by low interest rates, either. For example, it is quite possible that the recent run-up in US oil extraction (see Figure 4, below) is being enabled by ultra-low interest rates debt (since this is a cash-flow negative business) and by investors who a desperate for an investment that might yield a slightly higher yield than current low bond yields.
Actually, the current need for growth to prevent defaults is not all that different from the situation in the past 800 years. In Reinhardt and Rogoff’s academic paper mentioned above, the authors remark, “It is notable that the non-defaulters, by and large, are all hugely successful growth stories.” Reinhardt and Rogoff didn’t seem to understand why this occurred, however.
6. The underlying reason regarding why we are headed toward debt problems is different from in the past. We now are dependent both on oil products and electricity, two very concentrated carriers of energy, instead of the more diffuse energy types used in the past. Our problem is that these energy carriers are becoming high-cost to produce. It is these high costs (a reflection of diminishing returns) that lead to economic contraction.
This time, in order to continue economic growth, we need a growing supply of very high-quality energy products, namely oil products and non-intermittent electricity, to support the economy that we have built. These products need to be low-priced, if customers are to afford them. Thus, it should not be surprising that economic growth in the past seems to have been driven by a combination of (1) falling prices of electricity as we learned to more efficiently produce it, and (2) continued low prices for oil.
Figure 2. Electricity prices and electrical demand, USA 1900 – 1998 from Accounting for Growth, the Role of Physical Work by Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, February, 2004).
According to Ayres and Warr (Figure 2), power stations in 1900 converted only 4% of the potential energy in coal to electricity, but by 2000, the conversion efficiency was raised to 35%. This improvement in efficiency allowed the continuing decrease in electricity prices. With lower prices, more individuals and businesses were able to afford electricity, and more technology using electricity became feasible. Cheap electricity allowed goods to be produced at prices that workers could afford, and the system tended to grow.
For oil, the price of oil remained relatively flat in inflation-adjusted terms for a very long time, even as engineers developed ever-more-efficient devices to use that oil.
Figure 3. Historical oil prices in 2012 dollars, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013 data. (2013 included as well, from EIA data.)
We ran into our initial problems extracting oil cheaply in the early 1970s, after US oil production started to decline (Figure 4).
Figure 4. US crude oil production split between tight oil (from shale formations), Alaska, and all other, based on EIA data. Shale is from AEO 2014 Early Release Overview.
Back in the 1970s, we were able to work around the price spike by bringing oil production online in several additional places, including the Alaska, the North Sea, and Mexico. Unfortunately, those areas are now declining as well. Thus, we are increasingly forced to extract oil from areas that are high priced either (a) because of high extraction costs (such as the tight oil now being extracted in the United States) or (b) because of high indirect costs (such as the need for desalination plants and food subsidies in the Middle East). These can only be funded if oil prices are high, allowing governments to collect high levels of taxes.
There is considerable evidence that high oil prices are associated with recession. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was associated with a huge spike in oil prices. I have written about the way high oil prices contribute to recession in a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Energy called Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis. James Hamilton has shown that has shown that 10 out of 11 US recessions since World War II were associated with oil price spikes. Hamilton also showed that the effects of the oil price spike were sufficient to cause the recession of that began in late 2007.
Now the cost of oil production is high, and electricity prices have stopped falling. We read U. S. electricity prices may be going up for good, from the L. A. Times. It should be no surprise that economic growth is now a problem.
7. In historical periods, defaults were mostly associated with the transfer of ownership of various productive assets (such as land and factories) from one owner to another. Now, we are vulnerable to changes that could ultimately cut off oil and electricity, and thus bring the system down–not just transfer ownership.
The kinds of things that could bring the system down are diverse. They include:
- War in the Middle East that would vastly disrupt oil exports. We do not have alternative suppliers–the world would have to do without part of its supplies. We are vulnerable now, because oil exporters are getting “squeezed” by prices that have not risen substantially since 2011. This makes it harder for Middle Eastern countries to fund their budgets, making wars and civil disorder more likely.
- A spike in oil prices, perhaps caused by a war in the Middle East, that would vastly disrupt oil exports. Oil importing countries would head back into recession, with many layoffs. Governments are in worse shape for fighting this situation than they were in 2007-2008.
- An increase in interest rates. While Quantitative Easing and Zero Interest rate policy may not look like they are doing much, an increase in interest rates would not work well at all. With higher interest rates, governments would owe more in interest payments, so would need to raise taxes (leading to recessionary effects). The monthly payments required for buying high-priced goods (from cars, to houses, to factories) would rise, cutting back on demand, also tending to lead to recession.
- A decrease in lending, or even a failure of debt to keep rising, would also be a problem. Janet Yellen’s recent IMF speech highlighted the possibility of using regulation to prevent excessive debt. Unfortunately, increasing debt is very much needed to keep oil prices high enough to enable extraction at today’s high cost levels. See my post The Connection Between Oil Prices, Debt Levels, and Interest Rates. If debt levels drop, we run the danger of oil prices dropping as dramatically as they did in late 2008, when lending froze up.
Figure 5. Oil price based on EIA data with oval pointing out the drop in oil prices, with a drop in credit outstanding.
8. The world is now filled with a large number of people in powerful positions who mistakenly think they know answers to questions, when they really do not. The problem is that researchers tend operate in subject-matter “silos.” They build models based on their narrow understanding of a problem. These models may temporarily work, but as we reach limits in a finite world, these models produce misleading results. The users of these models do not understand the problem and make decisions based on badly flawed models.
Economists do not understand energy issues. They seem to think that their models, which ignore energy issues, are fine. All they need to do is fine-tune regulation, or tweak interest rates, and everything will be fine. Unfortunately, these economic models no longer work, as I explained in a recent post, Why Standard Economic Models Don’t Work–Our Economy is a Network.
In fact, the issue is more basic than just bad models that economists are using. The whole “peer-reviewed paper” system, with its pressure to write more peer-reviewed papers, each resting on prior peer-reviewed papers, is flawed. Models are built and used endlessly, in part because that is the way things have been done in the past. Once an approach is used frequently, everyone assumes it is correct. Models can and do have short term-predictive power, but that fact does not mean that the approach works for the long term.
The problem we are running into is the fact the world is finite. Growth can’t continue indefinitely. The way that the physical world enforces the end to growth is not obvious, until we start hitting the limits. The limits are cost of production limits for oil and for our supply of stable grid electricity. (I have talked about selling prices, but selling prices are not really the limits, in themselves. It is the fact that with higher costs of production, either selling prices must go up, or profits and the ability to invest in new production must go down–that is the problem. Right now, the rising cost of production of oil is being hidden in prices that are too low for oil producers. So many assume we don’t have a problem. The issue of adequate government funding is also mixed into the price/cost of production issue.)
Models that are no longer correct fill every area of study, from actuarial models, to financial planning models, to economic models, to models forecasting future oil and gas production, to climate change models.
Some models are deceptively simple–the idea that the number of years of future production of oil (or gas or coal) can be estimated by [Amount of Resources / Current Annual Production] is a simple model. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t work, because we can never get enough investment capital to extract all of the fossil fuel that seems to be available–the price can never go high enough, and stay high enough. High prices simply bring on recession. See my post, IEA Investment Report – What is Right; What is Wrong.
In fact, it is pretty hard to find any model that continues to work, as we reach limits in a finite world. This is not intuitively obvious. If a model worked before, why wouldn’t it work now? Researchers and well-meaning leaders follow models that sort of worked in the past, but don’t really model the current situation. Thus, we have well-meaning leaders, doing their best to make things better, inadvertently making things worse. In a finite world, everything is “connected” to everything else, so things that look beneficial from one perspective can have a bad outcome viewed another way. For example, a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from closing coal plants risks major electrical outages is New England and seems likely to raise electricity prices. Such changes push the economy toward recession, and perhaps ultimately toward collapse.
Governments are one area squeezed by higher oil and electricity costs. As governments cut back, whether these cut backs are in education, unemployment benefits, military spending, or healthcare spending, there are indirect effects on the economy as a whole. The problem is that government spending creates jobs. As government spending is cut, it pushes the economy toward contraction–even if part of today’s spending is clearly wasteful. It creates a conundrum–fixing one problem makes another problem worse.
Conclusion
We live in perilous times. We have leaders who think they know the answers but, in fact, they do not. The debt problems we face now are not just overspending problems; they are signs that we are reaching limits of a finite world. World leaders do not seem to understand this connection. It is not even clear that they understand the connection of debt problems to the need for cheap-to-produce, high-quality energy products.
World leaders are nevertheless convinced that they know the answers, based on complex, but very flawed, models. Unfortunately, actions taken based on these models have a good chance of making the situation worse rather than better. For example, trying to tie a world economy closer together, when it is already heading toward collapse, seems like a recipe for disaster.
I find Christine Lagarde’s use of numerology in her January 14, 2014 speech at the National Press Club Luncheon disturbing. Is she trying to signal some “in crowd” to make different decisions, in advance of a big IMF announcement? Or is numerology being used for prediction? Such an approach to forecasting would seem to be even worse than using models based on silos of limited understanding.
Dear End of More
Murray Gell-Mann, the distinguished physicist, wrote The Jaguar and the Quark back in 1994. He talks about how the relatively small change in the genome from our cousins the great apes to humans led to a very large increase in the complexity of what humans can do versus what the apes can do. On page 70 we find his explanation of the term ‘potential complexity’:
‘When a modest change in a schema prermits a complex adapt system to create a great deal of new effective complexity over a certain period of time, the modified schema can be said to have a greatly increased value of potential complexity…’
I would argue that, in addition to the genetic inheritance as a source of ‘potential complexity’, the rewiring of synapses may also be a source of ‘potential complexity’. The potential complexity may manifest itself as more carrots produced with less labor by an expert gardener, or as more satisfaction produced with less physical transformation of materials by people who have learned to directly manipulate their mental states.
Don Stewart
sorry for typos: ‘When a modest change in a schema permits a complex adaptive system…’
NOAA: June and May were hottest on record worldwide
http://cir.ca/news/noaa-state-of-the-climate-report
Do you actually believe the “world leaders” really care about that? Obama just approved more oil and gas exploration off the Eastern US seacoast!
In central Missouri gas prices are dropping like rock. The American Empire seems to be having its way in the Ukraine and the middle east. Talk of eminent collapse seems to be misplaced. The stalk market is sky rocketing and the an over valued market can be kept propped up seemingly endlessly with printed money. There would seem to be no end in sight.
Is that you, Paul Krugman?
Dear Jan Steinman
You questioned the ‘sustainability’ of Jean-Martin Fortier’s methods. This excerpt describing their approach to carrots may illustrate my points that:
*Money is important to them
*They use appropriate technology, some of which is industrial in origin
*He gives detailed instructions in the book
*They are probably multiples more productive than many home gardeners
*The Fortiers customers are paying for physical work which requires energy, but also for knowledge
*Their biointensive methods are not much like forest gardening or permaculture like efforts to do perennial gardening
*A major collapse would significantly disrupt what they do. The Fortiers themselves would probably be OK, but their production would drop and they could not sell as much food.
*With approximately 30 vegetables growing in a 10 year rotation, they can perhaps be forgiven for purchasing high quality compost.
,
Don Stewart
‘Since carrots are both popular and cold-hardy, they are an excellent vegetable to force in the spring Our first seeding is planted in the hoop house using the Six-Row Seeder at a density of 12 rows per bed We then use pelleted seeds to produce early baby carrots that sell like hotcakes at our first market. Our second early seeding is done directly in the garden but under the cover of a caterpillar tunnel and a row cover. At that point, we aim to grow bigger sized carrots and space the seeding to 5 rows on the bed From what we’ve observed, carrots need about 1.5 square inches to grow to a size of 6 to 7 inches, which is what we aim for.
We time our final carrot seeding so that the crop can be harvested from the field right until our very last shares in October. When the nights begin to get frosty, we cover our last carrot beds with row covers, sometime two. Carrots store well in the ground as long as the temperatures doesn’t sink below 20F/-7C. The cold nights actually make the carrots taste much sweeter, much to the delight off our CSA customers.
Carrots like loose, well-aerated soil that’s been worked quite deeply with a broad fork. This crop is not a heavy feeder, and fertilizing with compost once every two years seems to be enough to meet its needs Carrots don’t appreciate high-nitrogen fertilizer or excessive fresh manure, demonstrating this aversion by forming hairy roots. However, we do apply supplementary fertilizers in our first seedings when the soil is still too cold to provide sufficient nitrogen for good leaf growth.
The biggest challenges with carrots are seeding and weeding. Since carrots take a long time to germinate (usually 8 to 15 days), it is important that the soil surface be kept very moist so that it does not harden or dry out by the time the fragile plants emerge. We accomplish this by installing micro-sprinklers to water as needed. We also lay floating row covers over the soil to help the plants come up faster. The best weed-control strategy we have come across is pre-emergence flame weeding (see Chapter 9) This technique saves us untold hours of weeding on our knees. A flame weeder, even iuf used only for carrots, is definitely a worthwhile investment.
Carrots also have some insect challenges. Two pests, the carrot rust fly and the carrot weevil, are responsible for the brownish scarring seen on affected carrots. The rust fly causes the most problems for us, but we manage to fend it off by covering the crop with anti-insect netting in mid-August, during the fly’s egg-laying period. Weevil damage has been minimal on our farm; our solution is simply to pick the affected carrots out and sell them to our customers as juicing carrots. During seasons that are unusually wet, a number of diseases sometimes affect the leaves, but this usually happens when the carrots are mature. Our solution is simply to cut off the upper half of the tops.’
Broccoli, in contrast, is identified as a ‘heavy feeder’ which gets ‘a lot of nitrogen and potash…this is one crop where a supplementary dosage of organic fertilizer, in conjunction with compost, is essential’ He describes the anti-insect netting which protects against Swede midges, cabbage maggot, flea beetle, and cabbageworm. Detailed instructions on how to recognize when the plant is about to bolt. In all, a page and a quarter of detailed instructions for broccoli.
“With approximately 30 vegetables growing in a 10 year rotation, they can perhaps be forgiven for purchasing high quality compost.”
I didn’t mean to imply that they required “forgiveness.” I just pointed out the fact that their goal is not so much sustainability as other factors.
Folks, just store enough of food to hold you over for a number of years.
All this talk about “feeding” people….It AIN’T going to happen!
Don’t forget the toilet tissue too. In Soviet Russia that was good as gold.
“Don’t forget the toilet tissue too.”
Pshaw. Just use old rags. Then throw them in the washing machine… oh, wait… what’s wrong with this picture…
Thanks Jan, we need a sense of humor here given our hopeless situation
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/in-a-subprime-bubble-for-used-cars-unfit-borrowers-pay-sky-high-rates/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Deja vu all over again
How America’s Sporting Events Have Turned into Mass Religious Events to Bless Wars and Militarism
The religious reverie—repeated in sports arenas—is used to justify our bloated war budget and endless wars.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-americas-sporting-events-have-turned-mass-churches-give-blessings-imperial?akid=12035.292944.yE0GpV&rd=1&src=newsletter1012038&t=15
Reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s comment: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Likewise it is difficult to get Americans (and other countries such as Canada, Australia, UK etc..) to understand the true nature of America (and NATO) because we all benefit grandly from our pillaging of the globe.
Most are oblivious — there are a few who do understand — who are not hypocrites — and simply believe if we don’t do it to ‘them’ then they will do it to us…
But of course the sheeple must be maintained in a state of feeble-mindedness … because most people — if they truly understood the price that is paid around the world for our prosperity (particularly the good Christians among us) would need to go on Xanax to deal with the guilt — or would oppose these policies.
Of course that is where the MSM comes in very handy — 24/7 spewing the message that America is good — the global policeman – the beacon of democracy… that soothes the masses — creates a fever of patriotism.
And meanwhile the Deep State is sitting up there in the castle and laughing at the ‘little people’
The American Indians been saying that pretty much since us Europeans landed here on their shores.
when any state creates a military complex that is bigger than the immediate requirement of defending its own territory, then that military can only justify and sustain its existence by thrusting outwards to absorb other territories—and by definition, absorb their resources–
When a number of states do this, then violent conflict is inevitable, because each state needs those resources to maintain its top heavy military infrastructure, and to justify the ensuing impoverishment that ordinary citizens have to endure to support their armies.
As a clear example of this It has been estimated that the real price of gasoline is at least $15 gallon, when the cost of the military system needed to sustain its flow is factored in.
The $11 ‘difference’ doesn’t just disappear, everybody pays it. Problem is, paying that $11 means that everything else suffers. Thus you have overall poverty and decay which could be remedied to a great extent if that $11 wasn’t being siphoned off to support military industry and consequent wars made necessary by the constant stockpiling of wartoys.
Won’t happen of course. when a million jobs depend on ‘defence’ spending, who is going to throw them out of work?
The simplest way to “measure” geopolitical risk is to look at the price of energy. Energy is everything for a macro economist as it’s a tax on the economy when high, and a discount when low. High energy consumption levels makes it a critical part of any projection but despite this, energy assumptions are often exogenous (given!).
Think about this: Everything you did this morning involved energy consumption: Waking up to your smart phone (charging overnight), putting on the coffee, pouring the cold milk from the fridge, taking a shower, driving the car to work and walking into your air-conditioned office. Likewise, the rest of your day will be one big consumption of energy. The world’s energy resources are primarily extracted from “volatile” or underdeveloped regions, creating a real risk of disruption of supply. Herein lies a clear and quantifiable risk.
No, the signal from the energy market about the demand of energy and the risk of getting enough of it is clear: Prepare for less growth, less certainty and more geopolitical risk. The market, however, maintains a steady hand: Israel will be contained inside a couple of weeks, Russia vs. Ukraine will find a solution. The non-acceptance of tail-risk (Black Swans) is clear for everyone to see. The market is “perfect” in its information, zero interest rates will save us and we have all been fooled into believing that the real world no longer matters.
Unemployment, social inequality, wars, innocents being killed, and TV images of people fighting to live another day are not relevant………except for the fact that for world growth to keep increasing we need to continue to see growth in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
We need to accept that the world is now truly global – we smiled while globalisation reduced prices and made our companies more profit, now the escalation of wars reflect a world where growth is low, energy is expensive and increasingly hard to get and that we have gone full circle with macro and interventionist policies.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-21/saxobank-be-warned-delayed-market-reaction-escalation-global-turmoil
The demon manifests itself in many ways…
Dear Gail and All
These notes are about collapse and food. They are a result of reading two books simultaneously, while also contemplating the potential for a return to the Stone Age over a short period of time.
The book with the highest technology is The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek, written in 2008. Wilczek recounts the story of 20th and 21st century Physics, and what we have learned about the ultimate nature of Nature. For example, we learned to photograph the inside of the nucleus of an atom by using virtual photons that we cannot see. ‘An ultra stroboscope to look at features that last for a trillionth of a trillionth of the blink of an eye requires extremely virtual photons.’ And ‘a nano microscope fit for studying structures a billion times beyond the ken of ordinary optical microscopes requires extreme gamma rays’. This world is quite unlike what our common sense tells us, because our common sense is based on what we can see and touch and smell and taste. We cannot do any of those things with virtual photons or extreme gamma rays.
While we now have industrial products which use the results of the physics which results from these experiments, they use technology which is perhaps a poster child of what we could not sustain in a biology based, solar powered world.
The second book is The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming by Jean-Martin Fortier. This book gives us a very detailed look into a one and a half acre market garden which grows enough vegetables to feed 200 families. (I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on the ‘200’ number, since there are infinite variables in terms of ‘how many veggies per family?’ and ‘only in season?’ and comparisons with gardens farther south than Quebec.) Suffice to say that the Fortiers grow an awful lot of veggies. They do it with one full time employee and one part time employee. They basically take 3 months off during the winter, but work pretty hard during market season. They are not breaking their backs, and they make enough money to be content.
I wish I could describe to you the details of the technology and information which the Fortiers use, so that you could form a good opinion about how it relates to the high tech world of the Physics researchers and also our Stone Age ancestors. However, I think there is no way to do that, other than to direct you to the book.
As an example, if you go into a bookstore, and look on page 37 you will see a description of the irrigation system. I’d have to quote a page or more to describe it fully to you. Suffice to say that it involves pumping water with electricity from a pond and distributing the water with both overhead sprinklers and drip tapes, both of which are products of the industrial economy. There is also a lot of knowledge embedded in the design of the system, such that an irrigation consultant helped design it.
Consider this statement on page181: ‘Let’s start with the potato, a vegetable with all the characteristics of an appealing crop. Potatoes are popular and indeed profitable in terms of surface area. However, the tubers are much easier to harvest with a potato harvester than by hand. For a market gardener, it is almost impossible to be as productive as a mechanized grower, and the price of potatoes would not reflect the amount of effort involved’.
The Fortiers are, of course, compelled to be competitive in a world where mechanized potatoes harvested in very large fields very far away are nevertheless sold cheaply in supermarkets. So they make the decisions that they do. A homeowner with plenty of garden space and plenty of time who likes to dig potatoes might arrive at a different decision. Should a crisis interfere with the delivery of potatoes to the supermarket, then all the decisions would have to be rethought.
Cindy Connor has written:
Grow a Sustainable Diet
Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth
‘While many gardening guides will tell you everything you need to know about individual crops, none tackles the more involved task of helping you maximize the percentage of your diet you grow yourself.’
Back to me. So there are lots of moving parts involved in making wise decisions. Does one assume that things will go on about like they are now, only with the steady erosion of industrial agriculture for a wide variety of reasons? Will the mostly hand tools that the Fortiers use continue to be available? Will the walk behind tractor that they use still be available? Will the electric grid continue to operate? Will they be able to distribute the food they produce? Will the forced localization as collapse happens eliminate the food distribution issue as their neighbors clamor for food, as opposed to trucking food around looking for a market?
Continuing. Suppose one has some money and can buy land. Should one aim for self-sufficiency, as Cindy Connor might recommend? Or should one aim for a market niche as the Fortiers clearly aim? If one tries to do everything, will the information intensive methods used by the Fortiers become impossible for ordinary humans, such that acreage will have to increase while production per acre declines? (I would guess that the ordinary backyard gardener may be a quarter as productive as the Fortiers.) Will the disappearance of the prosthetic devices used by the Fortiers (such as plastic tarps to kill weeds, or irrigation lines) disappear with the New Stone Age?
Assuming that one can visualize a future of farming/ gardening as the world morphs into something different (or collapses suddenly), there are a myriad of detailed decisions to be made. And all the decisions are time sensitive…does one have to make money now (as the Fortiers are making money now) or does one have plenty of money and so the goal is maximum self-sufficiency in the event of collapse? Let’s suppose that one decides that a fairly extensive garden somewhat modeled after the Fortier example is appropriate. Then one has to decide on a long list of specific questions. For example, Jean-Martin Fortier explains why he doesn’t like the ‘heavy mulch’ systems pioneered by Ruth Stout in the US and Emilia Hazelip in France (too many slugs). Instead, he prefers the ‘canopy’ approach (the plants touch each other, creating shade which discourages weeds) along with clever ways to use plastic and flames to prevent weeds. Deb Tolman in Texas uses raised keyhole beds on suburban lots which also rely on the canopy approach, along with the raised bed which moves the garden a few feet into the air, helping with the weed problem. While there are lots of options, the gardener or market farmer has to actually make decisions and do either one method or a combination of methods.
I will hesitantly venture a few conclusions:
*Any gardening experience is a lot better than absolute ignorance
*It is impossible to accurately predict the future. Get started and count on having to modify your procedures as you go.
*Pay particular attention to soil health, as Fortier describes.
*Use as much gravity fed water and passive solar as you can design into the system. Passive solar also means shelter from direct sunlight, when that is appropriate (bamboo will probably earn its keep).
*Be clear on whether you are aiming for a market garden (production of high value fruits and veggies to be traded in the community), a self-sufficient farmstead, or a calorie crop farm. Be prepared to have these morph as the situation develops.
Don Stewart
Whenever I hear of people growing incredible amounts of food on small amounts of land, I rarely see the word “inputs” mentioned.
Fortier mentions feeding 200 people from 1.5 acres. Do those 200 people save their urine and faeces and put it back on the land? If not, what are they doing for inputs?
It is impossible to feed 200 people on 1.5 acres over an extended period of time without inputs. You’ll simply wear the land out. If you aren’t closing the nutrient cycle by putting your own outputs onto the land as inputs, you’re importing fertility via off-site manures or chemicals.
Don says there is no way to explain what Fortier is doing without reading the book, but perhaps he can summarize what their inputs are, and where they are getting them.
rather like an article I read a while back (no longer have the link) which extolled the ‘sustainability’ of producing food on city plots—the photo showed the plot being cultivated by a horse drawn plough!
Jan
He buys commercial compost. He does have two compost heaps on his own property, but professes not to be a compost expert. He also uses inputs such as blood meal, especially when he needs nitrogen for crops when the soil is still very cold. He obeys ‘organic’ rules on allowable amendments.
I wouldn’t describe him as ‘low input’ as a ‘self-sufficient homesteader’ might strive to be. Instead, he is intensively entangled with a local economy of farm suppliers.
As I indicated, I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the ‘200 people’ thing. He has a relatively short season in Quebec, and the book doesn’t tell us whether the 200 is during the season, or whether the amount of food is enough to supply 200 people intensively putting by food for the winter, or whether all 200 are getting their Seven A Day.
But he is producing lots of food. John Jeavons produces lots of food also, but Jeavons counts the land that is required to grow his compost. Fortier just gives the facts: I farm an acre and a half and buy commercial compost and produce a lot of food in terms of dollars. As I hope I made clear, he is motivated by money…not by calories or self-sufficiency.
The decision not to buy a tractor was motivated partly by saving money, partly by concerns about soil health, partly about cramming as much production as possible into his small space. The turn around space required by a tractor is much greater than for a walk-behind tractor, which was a factor in his decision.
If you read the book, you can see that he is operating a very knowledge intensive garden. He admits he hasn’t mastered composting, which he sees as a skilled occupation, and therefore does what he does and buys what he needs. In some sense, he is like a doctor or architect…you are paying for his knowledge about growing lots of veggies in a very small space.
Don Stewart
Thanks, Don. Although the best from a sustainability point-of-view would be to create all your own inputs, I think getting compost from a neighbouring farm is a heck of a lot better than getting chemicals from St. Louis, Missouri (Monsanto) or Midland, Michigan (Dow).
Thanks also for noting that Fortier’s focus is not sustainability, but rather income. I get powerfully ticked when someone claims sustainability via imported inputs!
i agree… i could grow a great garden, but was importing lots of amendments… which is why we grow 6000 sq ft of clover now, which we cut and compost for our soil fertility. this is one kind of permaculture.
3 llamas, 2 horses, 2 mules, and chickens seem to supply my garden input needs.
Of course, composting other materials also.
You need animals.
“You need animals.”
and your animals eat what imported food sources?? sorry – no free lunch.
as high as 90% of an animals food input goes to regulating body temperature. with only 1.5 acres, we cannot afford that kind of waste /inefficiency. we are trying to grow as much food as we can with as little imported resources. that means no animals and a vegetarian diet.
the remarkable thing about our permaculture /composting system, is we are actually growing our soil fertility… the only added inputs are water and the time /effort required to make compost.
Animal-power daydreamers (one reads their stuff everywhere) ignore that reality about a strong draft animal needing 2 acres of land for its exclusive use.
A strong horse of ox might supply half a day’s power in return for a half day of rest.
I get the impression that horses are sometimes seen as four legged tractors–feed hay in one end and get unlimited ploughing power out
Dear Shastatodd
The difference between what I understand that you are doing and what the Fortiers are doing is that they are sending a lot of fertility off their acre and a half in the form of stuff they sell to the public. That fertility comes back to them in the form of the purchased compost. The commercial composter gathers waste from the community, composts it, and sells the compost. So there is still a completed loop, but the Fortiers are using a cycle which requires fossil fuels (the distribution of the food, the collection of the waste, the turning of the compost, the distribution of the compost) and a financial system (selling food for money, the commercial composter paying for their inputs with money, the Fortier’s using some of the money they collect from customers to pay the composter).
In a Stone Age scenario, the system that the Fortiers are using probably would not survive. Our society would probably begin to look more like, for example, Geoff Lawton’s place in Australia, where most all of the recycling occurs right on the property. It begins to look more like a plantation which aims for a large degree of self-sufficiency plus a cash crop. The DuPont estate in Delaware and the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville, NC both tried to express the ‘self-sufficiency’ ideal, although both were enabled by the wealth created by the industrial economy. Both estates were throwbacks to an earlier time, at least in their dreams.
There are interesting trade-offs. As I tried to illustrate with the Jean-Martin Fortier description of what he does with carrots and how his procedures are more sophisticated than the average home gardener, just simply devolving to home gardens would probably result in a very significant reduction in total output. We need specialization and specialized tools in order to keep production up. The plantations were one solution to the problem of specialization. Many people worked on the Vanderbilt estate, performing a specialized task such as running a dairy and selling milk from wagons in the town of Asheville. There were also foresters, and lots of other specialists. Of course, keeping it all running was the inherited money from the railroads. These kinds of estates have not been economically competitive for decades. But they might return, depending on the severity of the collapse. The worst situation, I think, would be absolutely isolated homesteads trying to do everything for themselves.
Don Stewart
“we are trying to grow as much food as we can with as little imported resources. that means no animals [in] our permaculture… system”
As defined by Mollison/Holmgren, Permaculture includes the use of animals.
I know a lot of vegans who claim otherwise, but a key aspect of biomimicry includes the use of animals in multiple roles — of which, meat may play a very minor part. Milk, eggs, fibre, etc. are all things that animals are more efficient at than we are — or were you going to grow flax and cotton for your clothing needs?
The biggest thing is the time and energy taken to compost something. If you are spending your energy gathering plant material, and your time and space composting it, why not employ a worker who will do it for you? Goat droppings are garden-ready, versus waiting months for the same source material to turn into humus.
I know I’m touching the hot rail for some people. I myself eat vegetarian, and yet I sell my baby bucklings to people whom I know will eat them. The goats are just too darned useful in so many other ways to get all religious about other people eating the boys.
By the way, we use animals with very little “purchased inputs.” The chickens are on pasture, and get limited grain. The only goats on grain get a handful while they are being milked. We could substitute either of these inputs as needed, but elect to use them while we can.
indeed jan… but then nothing is sustainable. the solar electric powered (chinese made) electric lawn mower, which cuts and bags the clover for delivery to the 9 compost bins is surely not sustainable… that being said, this IS a kind of permaculture – a system which circularly feeds itself. the hurdle of not importing soil amendments for our 4500 sq ft of intensive gardens seems to be resolved… IF we have the water resources for the ~2000 gallons/day of irrigation here in drought stricken california.
speaking of which, i just spent $5400.00 on a new well… the old one was only 30′ deep and getting thin on static level above the pump. i figured while my money still has value and there are fossil fueled well drillers available to hire, it was time to invest in better water security. we got 50 gpm at 124′! i am super happy!!!
Wikileaks a Democracy Now! exclusive, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange joins us from Ecuador’s Embassy in London. It is the first time a U.S. news program has gone inside Assange’s place of refuge, where he has entered his third year in political asylum while he faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States.
In the United States, a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as classified State Department cables. In Sweden, Assange is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=104715
In the first quarter of 2014, the seven largest independent oil companies (IOCs) announced $17-billion in cutbacks to their annual capital expenditures. The end of the second quarter is nigh, and publicly disclosed management discussions are unlikely to bring any change to the numbers or the dialogue. In fact, further retrenchment from investing in the international oil scene is likely. Investors, lenders and corporate decision makers want to be able to invest in stable growth, and sleep at night knowing their investment isn’t going to be lost to war, expropriation or other nastiness.
All this runs counter to past market mechanics. Higher oil prices have historically led to rising capital expenditures sprinkled all around the world. The Iraqi situation is going to catalyze lower global capital expenditures on oil projects, with concentrated, greater investment focused on more stable growth regions like the United States and Canada. So, what happens in Iraq stays in North America.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/as-global-disorder-spreads-the-oil-investment-tap-drys-up/article19301669/
Would not take much to send it all spiralling downward
“The situation we have now is very different …” While all the resource-related reasoning and the idea, that the more interconnected a system, the more prone to total failure caused by a single point of failure, are correct, I think there is a reason why it came tom that and it is in my opinion too often not discussed or overlooked: it is because to my knowledge for the first time in human history (as far as societies are concerned that are above the pure local tribal level) not one national currency is based on an “underlying”. It used to be gold. But after the US under Nixon went off the half-hearted gold standard in 1971 only Switzerland remained until 1992. Otherwise, for better or for worse, the true depreciation of currencies would have long shown itself and thus put a much earlier stop on things.
DG,
Very good point. Collapse arrives once credit cannot be produced faster than economic output.
IMO you would have the similar result (bear in mind the Iron Curtain paradigm and possible final solution with nuclear war) on smaller scale, but on the other hand 40 years earlier. Not sure scenario worth to be regretted. Just my two cents.
You may be right. Currencies and future promises have been getting farther and farther away from the resources underlying those promises. If there were a tie to gold, it wouldn’t be a direct tie, but it would provide somewhat of a tie to reality. As things are now, there are few real resources backing up the paper wealth.
coin and paper used to be a token representing wealth.
unfortunately we now see coin and paper as wealth itself
that is the baseline of our fiscal problem…ie. if a nation wants to become more prosperous it just prints more money
Kissinger created the petrol dollar, so as Gail points out there can be underlying resources to back the currency. But that in itself won’t last for the Dollar when Saudi Arabia trades oil for other currency. There is where we might go to war, not Russia or China.
I’ve made some investigation on this problem we have with the currency, because it’s deeply connected to energy. It’s a matter of fact that globally, the world GDP (per year) is directly proportionnal to the amount of primary energy consumed during the year, and this has been constant, at least for decades.
GDP($) = k * TOE(kWh), k constant ; I could have used units other than $ and kWh, it’s just to say that, globally, money IS energy and nothing else.
Based on that statement of fact, many people (me too, first) have imagined that a currency backed by energy would be better than our actual fiduciary currencies backed by confidence in our governments (fiat money).
There was even a -unique- conference in 2012 in Split, Croatia, with high-level people talking about “Energy Currency: Energy as the fundamental measure of price, cost and value” ; here’s the link to the page where you can download their presentations, some of which are really interesting:
http://teslaconference.com/materials.html
(I can provide further links about same theme, if some of you are interested)
As far as I know, none of those initiatives have resulted into anything tangible, maybe because the banksters have killed promising ones in the egg, but overall -do I think- because the problem was tackled from the wrong side. IMHO, the money is a consequence, or a tool, so fixing the money will not fix the problem. I think that we must forget about the money to really start to understand how the system works.
Our current monetary system is still a variant of ancient barter systems. In the beginning it was a product swapped for another, then an intermediate product was introduced for reasons of convenience, as it allowed the second phase of the barter to be made with distance both in space and/or in time. This intermediate product for storage of the value has been lots of different things in the past ; it only had to be resistant over time and light enough for easy transportation, and have a value per unit (of weight, or…) that was recognized and accepted all over the area among which commerce was going on. No need for any government in this basic system.
Then this storage material has progressively become “only gold”, and then certificates representing a certain amount of gold, issued by central banks that were supposed to keep corresponding amount of physical gold in their coffers.
The more the economy increased, the more amount of money in circulation, thus the more gold had to be poured into central banks’ coffers. At one moment there wasn’t simply enough gold in the world (and some wanted to use it for other purposes as well, such as jewelry, industry, …), and the “gold-standard” thus had to be abandoned.
What followed is a monetary system based only on confidence, in a world where we cannot really rely on each other…
My -preliminary- conclusion is that trying to backup the currency with something, even with the blood of our economy (i.e. energy) would still be stucking to this barter system that doesn’t work (because of lots of negative side effects, etc..). Since the energy actually IS the blood of the system, it has a very special status that shouldn’t need any temporary storage system or other parasitic method to represent what really happens in the exchanges. I think we should take things the other way round and forget about the money, to really understand.
IMHO, a good starting point would be to consider that the price of a product is the total amount of energy embedded in it. There’s a lot of confusion around the concept of Value ; in my view the only realistic definition of the value would be “raw matter + all energy inputs” ; let aside the raw matter (consider it as “for free” in first approach, I don’t think it can be given any intrinsic value anyway, only a regulatory framework), then remains the total amount of energy inputs, ie embedded energy, which is a physical dimension that can be measured (in Joule, kWh, toe, …). This has huge implications, such as making impossible any negociation or speculation. I haven’t gone much farther yet.
NB: I’m not trying to “fix” anything, I think our system is doomed and us with it, anyhow. It is just wild brainstorming and conceptual thinking.
“the concept of Value”
For this the same applies as to the concept of money, it is highly subjective and any attempt to tie it to the real world is doomed to fail (in the end).
Value is imo always relative, i.e. something is more valuable than something else. I do not think that it can be tied to “raw matter + all energy inputs”. I think you are correct when you write that “I don’t think it can be given any intrinsic value anyway”. And without intrinsic value the concept of absolute value must necessarily die also.
Since value is relative and subjective, speculation and negotiation are very much possible. Even necessary, for without speculation it would be impossible to offload production risk, which would in turn lead to lower production.
Rien,
I agree that there’s no absolute Value, that it’s highly relative and subjective. My proposal is to explore the consequences if you evaluate a product from its embedded energy. Call it Value or something else, conceptually it’s totally different of what Value means today ; today it’s subjective result of a power-struggle, very different of embedded energy, which is a physical measure.
Don’t forget that globally, the addition of all embedded energies is surprisingly equal to the world-GDP (proportional, which means the same because the rate has been constant for very long time).
You say that speculation and negociation are likely necessary ; maybe, but then I’d like to understand why, and find out how it works.. At a macro-macro-level it’s like if we didn’t need money (GDP=TOE), so what exactly would make it necessary or useful at lower levels? that’s what I’m trying to figure out with my poor competences. I don’t judge in advance about the effects neither make any conjecture about consequences, I’m just investigating. And, then again, certain that nothing of it will ever be implemented. Just for the fun.
Stefeun, it surprised me that you wrote that the GDP to Energy Consumption for the world is rather constant. Could you maybe give me the source for this?
I use the world bank PPP number, that has changed from 5.4 in 1990 to 7.3 in 2011. This is in line with what I would expect since the printing of money means that the “measured” GDP would rise faster than energy output.
(PS: wdi.worldbank.org/table/3.8)
Rien,
refs for GDP=TOE*k
– Jean-Marc Jancovici: see 4th chart of this post on his site Manicore:
http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/energy.html
– Tim Garrett: 1st chart of this document:
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Physics_of_the_economy.html
I remember I had found a couple of other sources telling the same (among which a Charles Hall’s one, IIRC) but I’m not able to find any of them right now.
I didn’t know about the worldbank document, thanks for the link. It shows an improvement of the $/kg of oil-equivalent, which I’d rather attribute to increased efficiency of our technologies ; maybe money-printing is involved as well. However, the gap is very big (+35% over a 21 years period, waow!) ; as I see they’re promoting the idea that “everything is getting better and everyone will soon get rich”, I suspect them to somewhat arrange their figures to support this view.
Thanks for the links Stefeun,
Interestingly the first link takes the energy consumption from the BP survey and the GDP from the World Bank. So it seems likely that the world bank and the bp survey are tracking different energy uses.
The second link does not track world GDP but world “wealth”. Which is something different.
FWIW
Rien,
yes it’s actually not clear wether Tim Garrett is talking about “wealth” or GDP.
We shortly dicussed about that with Gail few months ago ; I keep on thinking he’s talking of GDP, in fact.
I see.
Have you reached any conclusion as to whether efficiency does have any role in the relation GDP / Energy consumption?
It would seem to me that it does not, as things get more efficient, we tends to use more of it. While the total wealth produced will rise, the GDP should not. In my line of thinking I would suspect that GDP is more linked to total work participation rates than energy consumption.
Of course all such things tend to go up at the same time, so its extremely difficult to separate cause from effect.
Maybe there is no difference between cause and effect when thinking about economics? (This last though is still new to me, I would be interested in your take on this)
Rien,
For efficiency, pls have a look at the 7th chart of the first link (Manicore).
It’s the same graph, but made for oil only ; you can see 2 different slopes: on left part the green dots represent the years before 1983, and then you have the red dots for after the oil-shocks, on a more vertical line, which means that more GDP is generated for a given volume of oil.
Remarkable thing is that such “verticalization” of the curve doesn’t exist when you consider all energies together. It would mean that no improvement at all was made in efficiency, at the global scale.
Your remark about Jevons’ paradox (more efficiency => more use) is correct, but it also means that more GDP is produced ; these graphs give an idea of it, as the curve becomes more vertical when the efficiency increases.
Reg. your question about causes and effects, I’m not sure if I understand correctly wht you mean. What I would say is that there are many feedback loops in the system, which make the analysis very difficult ; maybe the best method would be to select the data and see what it gives in “output” (similar to what JM Jancovici made for his graph “Oil only”). Maybe such analysis detailed with breakdowned energies, areas, ..? would give a better picture of how it works, and hopefully better distinguish causes and effects.
I know that Gaël Giraud has made an analyis per country for ca 20 OECD countries (all energies), but his purpose was to check the elasticity and demonstrate that the idea of “de-coupling” (ie GDP without energy) was totally irrealistic.
Stefeun, I have now read the entire article (manicure) and I have the distinct feeling that there is something wrong with it. That feeling might simply come from my present understanding of GDP that does not fit with the suggestions made in the article.
In my understanding, GDP is related to the number of people working, not with the amount of energy they consume. Mind though, the output of the economy does depend on the amount of energy consumed. I thus make a difference between “the economy (as expressed in GDP)” en “total production (as in wealth)” of that economy.
The article also mentions something interesting: total GDP per world capita is decreasing, but the total amount of energy consumption per world capita is increasing. This seems to suggest a decreasing efficiency (but is not proof!) which would contradict the efficiency gains theory.
I’ll think about this some more, but so far I have only managed to convince myself more of my current understanding (no surprise there, lol!)
Rien,
we might have a different understanding of “wealth” and GDP ; maybe I missed something. Pls see this comment by Gail, and following -short- discussion:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/03/31/the-absurdity-of-us-natural-gas-exports/comment-page-3/#comment-31082
Reg. decrease of GDP per capita, my interpretation would rather be that GDP growth is slowing down, while the world population keeps increasing at a good pace (>+1%/year). I don’t see how this could be connected to efficiency.
Rien,
Reg. efficiency: sorry, I missed the second part of your sentence (energy per capita i increasing). So your conclusion looks correct ; I have to dig a bit into that to understand.
Rien,
excuse me, I can’t find where is said that GDP and energy consumption were varying in opposite directions.
At the contrary, the 6th graph shows high correlation between yoy variation of both GDP/capita and Energy/capita, which means not only in same direction, but also similar % values.
Rien,
Sorry again, in 6th graph it’s not about Energy per capita, it’s total Oil production.
I have to dig a little bit deeper.
A thought experiment:
Take a small primitive village of 100 people, no outside world, i.e. no import and export.
Now assume that only 20 people actually work in a payed-for relationship. Suppose further that they each earn 1000 currency units per year. The GDP of that village is then 20.000 currency units.
Now suppose a miracle happens, and they suddenly acquire power tools and the knowledge how to use them. But still the original 20 people keep working in payed-for jobs. They still earn each 1000 currency units per year. The GDP is then unchanged.
Now because they are able to produce more with the new tools the prices of the products must have gone down.
If on the other hand the prices have remained at pre-power tool levels, then (assuming a doubling of output) each could have earned 2000 currency units per year. Now the GDP has also doubled.
In reality though, the economic activity has remained the same, no more hours worked, all work-for relations have not been affected.
However the standard of living has gone up, that is really the only consequence of the miracle of the power tools.
I guess what I want to say with this though experiment is that GDP is not really a useful measurement at all. It may follow oil supply or energy consumption or it may lead it. I do not know and even if it does I cannot see any significance in it. I think that GDP is invented by economists in order to justify some government decision, and now all the world looks at this number and hangs on to every minute move up or down.
As I wrote earlier, I fully expect real meaningful production activities to go up when oil production goes down. Whether this results in a growth of GDP, or not, really does not matter to the common man. But since govt is very much interested in this number, you can be sure it will show “growth” even as oil consumption falls.
Rien,
I’m answering to your comment with thought experiment (100 people of which 20 working and they get power-tools).
1st remark, when your system is closed, why would the population (still 100) consume more? Why would then the 20 working ones produce more, if they cannot sell more?
Now if they can sell outside (ie with unlimited demand), they will produce as much as they can, limited by 1) the resource of raw material, and 2) the energy to transform it. Power is energy per units of time. Man-power is relatively small (as mechanical work) compared to machine power. Generated GDP is directly connected to energy consumption, wether it’s human or machine energy only impacts the level of the output (quantity of produced stuff). With machines the men don’t work more themselves, but are “piloting” external power (somehow, machines are extensions of their bodies). I can’t imagine production going up (ie GDP increase) with energy consumption going down; that sounds possible only with efficiency going up very quickly, which is impossible in the long term.
This being said, I agree with you that GDP is not perfect (euphemism); unfortunately, it’s the only measure of “economical volume” that we have, so we have to deal with it.
NB: I couldn’t find your comment in the “normal flow” ; I don’t know where my present answer will “land”, maybe lost in cyberspaaaaaaace (no-one will hear it cry!).
Dear Stefeun
Assume an isolated community is in equilibrium, with a local economy exchanging either gifts or money. They produce just as many potatoes as they eat, and their weight is stable. An Angel gives them a mechanical potato harvester, which doubles the number of potatoes they can grow and harvest. What happens?
Very long ago, humans learned how to make vodka out of potatoes. So they make vodka. What happens next? They begin to develop health problems and so need doctors, vodka is easy to steal so they need police, there is always some doubt about guild, so they need courts and bailiffs and jails. In short, they get GDP.
Don Stewart
Don,
the potato harvester needs energy to run ; wether it is human, animal or diesel energy matters only for the amount of work accomplished, but the equation remains the same: production = raw matter + energy inputs. For crops you have to add the energy from the sun to the mechanical energy.
The rest of your comment reminds me the “behavioral sink” described by John B. Calhoun in his experiment on rats (disturbing conclusion…):
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
An “energetical” interpretation of this story would be that when a structure cannot adapt itself to an increasing energy flow, it collapses. The rats have unlimited food (energy) but limited space (soon overcrowded) ; as the expansion is impossible, the social structure collapses.
If the amount of food would have been limited in order to feed a number of rats corresponding to normal density in the available space, the population would likely stabilize at some steady level and such behavioral problems would not have developed (maybe other problems, or similar but much delayed in time). Energy in (food) = energy out (burned by the rats for their metabolism and reproduction).
Sort of application of Liebig’s law of the minimum: in first case the limiting factor is the availble space, in the second example it’s the food.
“1st remark, when your system is closed, why would the population (still 100) consume more?”
Because they want to raise their standard of living.
Suppose that their main purpose in life is the digging of holes and filling them in again. With power tools they could dig twice as many holes and fill them in again, their standard of living would thus improve enormously. No extra export needed.
Btw, I am serious in the above! not joking. Who am I to decide what enhances anybodies SOL? (standard of living)
I do not disagree that a higher GDP number means consumption of more energy in our present paradigm. However I question the underlying assumption that the availability of more energy will result in a higher GDP number, and/or the assumption that a higher GDP number requires the use of more energy.
As such, I am quite hesitant to draw the conclusion that the peaking of oil will necessary result in an economic collapse. It would not surprise me in the least if oil peaking would result in more economic activity as measured by the GDP number.
First of all because more people would be involved in food production, and secondly because our politicians have hung their fate on the GDP number. (Though they will try to move away from that! watch for it)
Also, letting these thoughts shimmer over night, have increased my conviction that the GDP number really is useless. It conveys no meaningful information at all. I could for example create a number from the hight of the tides and the stock price of Apple Inc. I could then draw a huge number of very interesting charts. But the number would still be useless.
Politicians love the GDP number because it allows them to wave a number at the public that has a wonderfully sounding name and they can give this number any value they darn well please. Plus, they get to tell the people what constitutes a ‘good’ GDP number and what makes a ‘bad’ GDP number. What is not to like? This is the essence, the purpose of the current day crop of economists imo. A tool for the politicians to wield to make them look good.
Rien,
I agree that GDP is absurd by many aspects ; it measures the economic activity, no matter wether this activity is useful or not (even destructive ones are included!).
But we have a problem to define what exactly “useful” means ; is it only the activities fulfilling very basic needs? Everything is interconnected nowadays and it’s very hard to sort-out. Another point is that we cannot just switch overnight to a simpler way of life ; for example, the overwhelming majority of todays agriculture is oil-addict, and you need 2 to 5 years to turn it back to organic or permaculture (or whatever you call it, meaning re-injecting natural life into the soil). Even those organic techniques are not really sustainable in the long run, and it’s very doubtful that they could feed the huge numbers we are today.
Not only does the GDP number include destructive activities, it also includes “adjustments” that do not reflect economic activity at all but are only included to have a number that can be compared to previous numbers. At least that is what they want to make us believe. In reality though they include all kinds of adjustments just so that they can produce a number that makes them look good.
No we cannot simply change the economic relationships without making a lot of people very unhappy/angry. Currently this manifests itself in monetary problems as money still enjoys a role as the final indicator of our social standing and expectations. (Btw: I think that we must expect a full set of capital controls by the governments before the end-game occurs)
I have studied permaculture a little (I have not followed a course) and I think there are some solutions there, but if “we” can feed “the world” with permaculture seems doubtful. I think it was Don who wrote that “I” am not responsible to feed “you”. That is something to keep in mind!
If I may chip in another slant on this interesting exchange?
If i pay you to do my laundry, and you pay me to dig your garden, and we behave like good citizens and declare that income, and pay taxes on it, by government definition we have added to GDP.
So how did we do that?
What the GDP measurement (together with most economists and politicians) ignores is the energy input factor.
Doing my laundry requires you to obtain external energy from somewhere else
Digging your garden requires me to obtain my energy from elsewhere too.
Therefore, that ‘additional GDP’ is not brought about by passing bits of coloured paper hand to hand, it is the result of consuming sufficient energy to do work. Yet the government insists that we have added to national wealth—which is nonsense.
If I was starving, I couldnt dig your garden—I would need to eat first.
Magnify that to armaments factories.
They produce billions of $ £ worth of ‘stuff’ through the consumption of energy inputs, steel–oil–and so on. The workers receive wages, (adding to GDP) which they then spend (more GDP down the line)–you get my drift on this. But the original money came from taxpayers energy inputs in the first place. Therefore we are led to believe that money circulation is Gross Domestic Product, and of course where munitions are concerned, producing something which by definition must be destroyed by use!
That leads us to the conclusion that wars are necessary to keep people employed.
Actual GDP is a measurement of collective energy consumption and use. Unless your employment is producing energy at base level (ie a farmer, or miner or fisherman say) then your employment (no matter how elevated or menial) is a net consumer of energy.
We can only increase GDP by burning fuel. When our politicos crow about % growth increasing, what they really mean (but fail to understand) is burning fuel at a faster rate.
Dear End
See my nearby response to Shatatodd. I do not agree that the only way to increase real production is to use more energy. But I agree that, the way GDP is measured, it is highly dependent on the consumption of commercial energy.
When a market gardener applies their specialized knowledge and specialized tools, they increase production beyond what a generalist gardener with no special tools can achieve. It is possible to think of very complex and expensive tools which might be used, but the principle holds for simple and inexpensive tools wielded by a specialist. The Fortiers claim that their acre and a half is the right size for what they do, and is adequate to produce a reasonable income. They reject the notion that they need to ‘scale up’ through the acquisition of things like large tractors and more land. One of the secrets to their success, they say, is keeping costs down and one of the secrets to that is keeping the garden small and doing a lot of hand work…but doing it intelligently.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the Canadian dollar collapsed tomorrow. The Fortiers would still be producing real food which could be traded with their neighbors. (Of course, financial collapses create a lot of collateral damage…but you see the principle.) I do not believe that the neighbors could grow anywhere near as much proportional food, collectively, as the Fortiers are producing. One of the reasons is the multiplier created by specialization. I agree that the degree of specialization would be forced down in the event that fossil fuels also collapsed and became essentially unavailable. A ‘soft collapse’ would permit more specialization and the consequent increased productivity to continue to exist.
Don Stewart
PS By ‘proportional food’ I mean per acre gardened. If all of the neighbors dig up their lawns and begin to grow food, they might produce as much as the Fortiers, but the production per acre would be smaller. Not that that’s a necessarily bad idea. But some specialization increases real output.
Dear Don
I did specifically exclude farmers form the ‘energy economy’ GDP thing
they are net producers of energy, even taking into account tractor fuel etc.
If they weren’tt they would go broke.
I still maintain that every other form of employment depends on net consumption of energy–the source of it is irrelevant.
Oil is sufficiently cheap that I expect that farmers are still net users of energy, especially if wide boundaries are considered.
In fact, I expect that humans have pretty much always used more energy in creating food than the food-energy that comes from food. This occurs because we cook our food. It also occurs now because we need a whole networked economic system to make the current food production system “work.” We need cheap energy, to keep the system operating.
“I expect that humans have pretty much always used more energy in creating food than the food-energy that comes from food.”
I’ve seen numbers that indicate that pre-fossil-sunlight, one unit of energy expended to produce food produced five or six in return.
(Of course, that is backwards these days, and we use soil as a sponge with which to turn fossil sunlight into human biomass.)
Dear Gail and Jan
We have to be very careful about drawing boundaries around ‘food production’ or ‘farming’ when doing our calories in/ calories out exercise. Most calories are expended after the product leaves the farm gate. I think the ratio is something like 3 calories on the farm to 7 calories in the manufacturing and distribution and home processing steps. So the farming itself, while energy intensive, is not the energy hog that the industrial food system is.
I don’t guarantee my 3 to 7 ratio, but it is indicative.
Don Stewart
I was thinking about the energy used in making the food palatable–cooking it, or pounding it to get rid of some of the fibrous parts. People who eat raw food diets today seem to use a blender to assure that they get enough nutrients. All of this energy use needs to be considered part of the “food system.” Humans have controlled the use of fire for over 1 million years, so our bodies are pretty well adapted to a diet using a lot of cooked food.
Dear End
I would still argue that some specialists who are directly using only very small amounts of energy can still produce large effects in terms of outputs. For example, see:
http://www.nicabm.com/brainsale2014/a1-info/?del=7.22.14brainsaleemail2toplc
Now, be aware that I am not promoting the program. But I think that science does support the notion that humans have the ability to significantly promote neuroplasticity of the brain in productive ways. I suspect that the expert knows more about it than the average person. Just as I might buy some carrots from Jean-Martin Fortier, I might buy some ‘neuroplasticity therapy’ from an expert.
I will agree that these experts, living in the US, are living high on the fossil fuel hog. Back in the olden days, one would have consulted a witch doctor or the village matriarch or the crazy yogi living out in the bush, all of whom lived very low on the fossil fuel hog. My point is that expertise is obviously implemented through the resources a society has available to it, but is conceptually independent of using energy to manipulate matter.
Brains are matter, and manipulating them does require some energy. But buying a new jet airplane to manipulate your synapses is in a completely different category than meditating for five minutes to manipulate your synapses. The jet plane requires enormous fossil fuel energy, while the fossil fuels required for the meditation is negligible.
As fossil fuels decline, it will become more important to be able to manipulate our synapses more directly, bypassing the GDP intensive methods. Experts will probably play a role. Many people will fail, and kill themselves either quickly or slowly. A few will become buddhas. Many of us will muddle along as best we can.
Don Stewart
“I did specifically exclude farmers form the ‘energy economy’ GDP thing they are net producers of energy, even taking into account tractor fuel etc.”
Farmers are not “net producers of energy,” as it is well-documented that the food system requires ten calories of energy to produce one calorie of food.
I also think that today’s farmers are net energy consumers.
In the past they were “creaming” the sun energy they were able to transform into crops, and today most of the energy input comes from fossil fuels, either directly (diesel for machines, Nitrogen fertilizer) or indirectly (P & K fertilizers are mined, refined and transported with use of oil).
More generally, yesterday we were buying the men’s work, today we’re buying mostly machines’ work (= fuel, ie measurable) ; the matter itself has always been accounting for zero in the price.
Salut Steph
Barter was not at the origin of money. May be you’ll enjoy reading anthropologist David Graeber’s book “Debt: the first 5000 years”. While he misses the energy issue, he nevertheless draws a very interesting history of money.
http://libcom.org/library/debt-first-5000-years-david-graeber
If you are not up to reading the book, David Graeber’s Debt the First 5000 Years, you can find five reviews here
Thank you Interguru!
Maybe I should read the whole book ; Gaël Giraud, one of our most interesting economists (the best French one I know) is a big fan.
Salut Christian,
Merci pour ta remarque.
I know David Graeber has a slightly different view, that places the debt at the very origin ; the exchange doesn’t need to be actually made against anything but a verbal promise, as long as it remains within a relatively small community: I owe you something, I’ll give you something equivalent later. Note that the number of transactions must remain very low, or it quickly becomes ununderstandable. Graeber says that physical money appeared once deals had to be made with people from outside the small community (caravaneers, etc..).
OK, sounds wise ; everyone can notice that such oral deals are still going on nowadays within families or circles of friends. But this is about the origins, and -as far as I understand it- it doesn’t fundamentally change the interpretation of what happened afterwards (I didn’t read Graeber in-extenso).
Christian,
found this review of D.Graeber’s book, not really laudatory ; it’s in French:
http://www.pauljorion.com/blog/?p=59642
maybe the auto-translation is readable in English:
http://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=fr?sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A//www.pauljorion.com/blog/%3Fp%3D59642
You only bartered with strangers or enemies.
Wealth Of Nations was a Fairy Tail, based on realities and practices that never existed.
Dear Gail
Relative to the increasing cost of producing oil in Scotland. Here is an interesting analysis of the oil and gas industry in Britain comparing 1992 and 2006. The best way to get it is to search on this phrase
Extract taken from United Kingdom Input-Output Analyses, 2006 Edition
I particularly recommend looking at charts 10.15, 10.16, and 10.17. This gives you, among other things, a picture of what happened as the supply of oil and gas in Britain jumped between the years 1992 and 2006. Things like manufacturing did not increase much at all, but things like transportation increased tremendously. It looks to me like they had a consumption boom, with no boom in the production of tradable products.
An exception to my last sentence may well be the financial sector, which I believe also boomed with the great run-up in world-wide debt.
A close reading will reveal that the industry in Britain was already past its prime in 2006, and the Gross Value Added was not increasing much at all, even with the help of big increases in Brent crude.
It’s interesting to speculate about whether the country could trace a path back to where they were in 1992, at a much lower consumption level.
Don Stewart
With all of the debt we have now, it is hard to see how we could trace a path back to 1992. Jobs depend on “unnecessary spending.” If we reduce energy use, fewer people drive to restaurants or go on vacations, and jobs in those sectors drop. Industrial jobs have moved on to places where cheaper energy is used–mostly coal. Jobs also tend to move to where wage costs are lower. These tend to occur in warm countries that do not need to spend much on heat. If what is spent on heat is money spent on coal, this keeps costs low too.
The Master of the Universe will not go down without trying to maintain BAU:
http://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/local/environment/2014/07/18/obama-opens-east-coast-to-oil-search/12846641/
“The Eastern Seaboard is being opened to offshore oil and gas exploration for the first time in decades with the Obama administration’s approval Friday of sonic cannons that can pinpoint energy deposits deep beneath the ocean floor.”
“One thing we find is, the more you get out and drill and explore to confirm what you see in the seismic — you end up finding more oil and gas than what you think is out there when you started,” Radford said.
Does anyone believe that commercial quantities of oil and gas in this area? Best guesses? There certainly wasn’t much onshore or shallow offshore along the Eastern Seaboard. As the old saying goes: “Only the drill bit knows”.
Exactly! These folks are so desperate they will venture ANYWHERE for the last drop.
After all, it is good to the last drop!
As the hamster spins the wheel
Doesn’t matter if they find 10 Ghawar sized fields — cost is the issue.
We have plenty of oil — the problem is it is too expensive to extract/refine.
I wonder what those sonic cannons do to the sensitive hearing of marine mammals?
Stilgar, you can bet that those sonic cannons do nothing good to the marine environment. There is no free lunch anywhere we turn. Find oil here, destroy marine mammals there. Find gas here, pollute groundwater there. The trap has sprung.
Yeah, the ‘Great Gaia Degradation’ is on unfortunately. We know we are doing it, yet apparently powerless to do otherwise.
Its that cognitive dissonance ringing through again. “We’ll just find more oil!” Yes, but the oil is killing the planet.” Oh, yeah, I forgot… GWBush was right once in his life when he said that we were addicted to oil. We act like a crack addict. We’re willing to do anything to get the next fix, even if it means its killing us.
The Economist articled concerning Venezuela’s oil Industry and the lack of trained, educated personal. Very interesting
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21607824-venezuelas-loss-thousands-oil-workers-has-been-other-countries-gain-brain-haemorrhage
IN 2003 Venezuela’s then president, Hugo Chávez, fired more than 18,000 employees, almost half the workforce, of the state-run oil corporation, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Their offence was to have taken part in a strike (pictured) called in protest at the politicisation of the company. Their punishment was to be barred from jobs not only in PDVSA itself but also in any company doing business with the oil firm. The axe fell heavily on managers and technicians: around 80% of the staff at Intevep, PDVSA’s research arm, are thought to have joined the strike. At the stroke of a pen, Venezuela lost its oil intelligentsia.
It was a blow from which PDVSA has never recovered. The firm’s oil production has since stagnated (see chart), despite a big run-up in prices. The financial crisis bears some of the blame for that, as does the economic mismanagement of Chávez and, since last year, Nicolás Maduro. But the loss of skilled personnel was a huge handicap, hurting exploration and managemen
Read ‘Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela,’ by Rory Carroll, the section on the destruction of the the electrical generation infrastructure. I think it was contemporaneous with the above.
Venezuela learned from the failed coup and lockout of the industry of the corporate control to never go down that path again.
Let them have their revolution, they will probably not get it right the first time, and corruption and violence is rampant, but the heavy oil is not getting any less valuable.
It really isn’t that complicated.
The 20% of the elite have recognized that they have little chase of getting control thriug the electoral process, so they are attempting a forceable takeover.
You have just said it Gail, human civilization now needs the resource base of a few “other Earths”.
And you know what, TPTB are also very likely aware of it. In fact, they have just been looking for exoplanets at least since the beginning of the 1990s and have officially started finding some since 1995. In 2009 they even launched a specific device to look for them: the Kepler satellite. Officially, today about 1000 exoplanets orbiting around other stars have been found. Unofficially the count is closer to 3000 exoplanets currently identified.
The real objective of this search is of course to find at least one “other Earth” i.e. a planet of similar gravity, orbit and atmospheric conditions as Gaia that humanity – or more specifically an elite subset of humanity – could readily inhabit if they can reach it relatively rapidly. Think about it, “another Earth” is not a planet like Mars: you can readily start inhabiting and cultivating it with a minimum investment as some did not so long ago in the “Wild West”…
Given that a few military “black” satellites – even more powerful that the now defunct Kepler satellite – are likley to have been brought on line to find this “other Earth”, you could reasonably bet that at least one has now been found within a hundred light years (perhaps much less…) of the Sun’s solar system.
If that is the case, the next question is: how can it be reached relatively rapidly (a few months or less) from Gaia?
Some people find it strange that officially our space program is not making a great deal of progress despite the fact that we have reached the Moon almost 50 years ago ! The Wright brothers first flew in 1903 and we reached the Moon in 1969 ! Yet from 1969 to 2014 not a great deal appears the have been done in terms of human space exploration… Many have speculated that the “lost trillions”, to which Donald Rumsfeld was referring to in his 10 September 2001 press conference, may have been discretely invested in a much more expansive covert space program; including a vast research effort related to exotic deep space propulsion technologies.
May be the sudden search for “other Earths” is linked to the fact that a few breakthroughs have recently been made in terms of faster-than-light human deep space travel ?
What energy source would be required to power such a starship ?
Very likely controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fusion, which has been officially under development since the 1950s but has been strangely stalled by technical difficulties and lack of funding… A more efficient fusion “black program” however very likely exists for key strategic reasons:
1) The first group to reach another Earth (with an exclusive deep space travel technology) will have access to a huge virgin resource base and could use it as a “safe heaven” to get rid of all of its Gaia based competitors, while making a fresh start with a “selected all star” human subset…
2) Controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fission can be used to produce electricity, as in a traditional fossil fuel thermal power plant, but it can also be used to make small fusion weapons that do not need a fission trigger. This technology therefore presents a deadly nuclear proliferation problem because it can be copied by competitors for civil (economic war) and military purposes. Hence it needs to be kept “deep black” until you can “get rid” of competition. Otherwise, with unlimited energy, the one who can produce at the lowest cost will eventually win the economic war and the one who can afford to suffer the largest losses will win a military conflict…
TPTB know, at least since the 1972 Club of Rome report that they have a “Limits to Growth” problem…
Does one really think that they do not now have at least a few “options” to attempt to deal with it ?
One might truly be surprised to know how far they could be willing to go to solve that Gaia based “Limits to Growth” problem…
As one the most remarkable human beings ever to have existed, I demand the right to live on this second Earth! Where do I sign up? How have ‘they’ missed me? I demand to know!
If I’d known about this, I wouldn’t have bought that valley in deepest, darkest (darker than you can imagine) Wales, with the cave system that I then packed with Knorr rice packs…….
Forget it, xabier, Even the most perfect Earth duplicate would have bacteria and viruses against which humans have no immunity. Remember what happened to the Martians in “War of the Worlds”.
Maybe they would eat the Martians would eat the Knorr rice and perish?
🙂
I think I’d rather starve than eat Knorr powdered packs…
But Paul that powder keeps them “fresh” and “tastey” like twinkies.
Makes life worth living. Now wonder you are so tight. Loosen up and take what comes.
I, myself, will stock up on those Rice packets and put them in the attic and forget about them. But if the worse happens, yummie”
If you eat enough of them, the preservatives would be enough to keep your DNA preserved during the multi-generational interspace travel to reach planet Knorr.
That is the whole point of them! Buy, store and forget….we have a problem, there is a solution.
Of course a few exceptional subjects, like Xabier, will need to be volunteered to test the new gene therapy against the spectrum of bacteria & viruses of the newly found “Other Earth”… but that will likely be done well before colonists are allowed to populate “New Eden”…
unless you speak Welsh—youll be first on the menu
End
I’ll take at least one Welshman down with me – choking, I’m quite inedible.
I’m working on a warp speed drive system right now.
Am also looking for investors?
If it runs on shale gas, I’m in!
Limits to growth has two solutions
1—Find more fuel to burn
2 …Reduce the number of people.
As to the means of reaching ‘other Earths’—dont be fooled by notions of advancements in technology. The Wright brothers and the moon landings used exactly the same means of overcoming gravity…ie the power of exploding chemicals. Nothing has improved on that basic system, in the sense of lifting functional and practical amounts of weight.
If by some realisation of fantasy, ‘resources’ were found xxx light years away, the same process would start over.
Why?
Because you cannot make large scale use of any resource (other than by eating it) without the use of heat…and even if you do eat it, the body converts it to usable energy via heat.
So—find a planet awash with oil, with mountains of iron and gold—or whatever. Useless until you convert into something usable. That use is invariably part of the process of ongoing conversion into still more stuff
And there we will go again
For those than have not prepared for a food shortage, I recommend buying a new product by the Knorr group under Unilever called “Rice Sides”. Net weight is about 6 oz per package and has 2.5 servings that will consists of about 700 calories per packet. They come in many flavors, such as, Cheddar Broccoli, Mexican, Spanish, Chicken flavors. I have tried them and well worth the price on sale. the cheapest price i saw them for is a dollar, but I imagine one could half that price at wholesale.
Seems to me these could last in a cool dark place for YEARS.
Also, the convenient packet will be handy if on wishes to use them as a trade item in barter.
Naturally, if one stores bulk rice and noodles these will go a long way further from making dinner boring.
http://www.knorr.com/product/category/245879/rice-sides
I believe people will still be conditioned to value “flavors” in their dishes after the immediate fall.
Happy eating.
Why pay for the packaging when you can buy a 50 pound bag of rice from Costco or Sam’s Club for $25?
But does a bag of Costco rice last FOREVER!?
Yeah, it pretty much lasts forever if you keep it cold and dry.
“if you keep it cold and dry”
I’d say it will last a very long time if you keep it dry and sealed away from vermin — air-tight, if possible.
The “forever” part is unreasonable, but “years” of storage doesn’t really require cold storage.
A big Rubbermaid in a root cellar will work.
If you want food that lasts for years with the biggest calorie punch per pound, go for peanut butter…read the Kcal on the label–(for those readers here who don’t do that)
I occasionally open 12 yr old jar—perfectly fine
Exactly right. “Forever” in a human term that is.
I wouldn’t touch Knoor with a 10 foot pole.
http://healthwyze.org/index.php/component/content/article/605-the-gmo-boycott-list.html
Look under Unilever.
Starving people will gobble it down
Australian bill sees whistleblowing on intel ops punishable by up to 10 years in jail
http://rt.com/news/173264-australia-asio-whistleblowing-jail/
sounds like a test before implementing everywhere.
The Orwellian nightmare is just around the corner.
Salmond’s oil strategy in tatters as North Sea drilling slumps
Five-fold increase in costs slashes North Sea drilling in a further blow to Alex Salmond’s Scottish independence campaign
Alex Salmond’s strategy of placing oil at the centre of his economic plan for an independent Scotland was shattered yesterday as it emerged that drilling of new wells in the North Sea has plummeted.
The latest study from Deloitte has shown that exploration drilling in the area known as the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) fell by 58pc in the second quarter, with just seven new wells sunk compared to 17 wells in the same period a year earlier.
The cost of extracting oil in North Sea has quintupled over the last decade discouraging companies from increasing their investments. The findings come as the Government prepares to review tax policies in the North Sea to help stimulate interest as international oil companies push for greater incentives to drill.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has recently lowered its projections for North Sea revenues by a quarter, the equivalent to £21bn less revenue over the next 26 years.
“It’s no secret that the costs facing oil and gas firms on the UKCS have been a significant issue for some time now. Understandably, it tends to be more expensive to operate in mature fields where oil is much more difficult to recover. Research suggests it’s now almost five times more expensive to extract a barrel of oil from the North Sea than it was in 2001,” said Derek Henderson, senior partner in Deloitte’s Aberdeen office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10973213/Salmonds-oil-strategy-in-tatters-as-North-Sea-drilling-slumps.html
As usual, follow the money; or, it’s all about the dollar.
Staying under the umbrella of the dollar reserve system, with the coordinated ability of CBs to print money to pay for social programs, keeps the masses under wrap. Sheltering under the US/NATO military shield, which (en)forces countries to use the dollar system, allows elites to pilfer as much loot as they can during the interregnum.
The dollar is the only thing holding this game together. I really wonder if the West’s technological advantage lends itself to a truly effective ABM system. When push comes to shove, it may be necessary to initiate a 1st strike to knock out the USA’s last remaining obstacle in keeping the dollar alive for a few more generations.
“keeping the dollar alive for a few more generations”
LOL. It’s difficult that any existing currency would find the way to hold on for less than one generation.
I am now 99.9% certain that the US was behind that shoot down. I posted a few things on a UK message board at 8am my morning and within seconds the trolls were out trying to shoot me down. It is the middle of the night in the UK and there were many hundreds of comments on the story — so rather strange that within seconds I was being called a tin hatter etc etc etc… As we know – the UK intelligence services have a division that trolls messages boards engaging in activities to discredit people who post facts…
Which leads me to believe that you are correct — first the US supported puppet/terrorist ‘rebels’ gassed women and children in Syria and Assad was blamed — then the US puppet in Ukraine is ordered to take down a plane and Putin gets the blame >>>> the US is truly desperate — China, Russia, BRICS appear entrenched in their position that the USD is done…
Something has to give — will the cornered rat launch a first strike against Russia (China?)
A very dangerous situation we have here — far more dangerous than the cold war — because the US empire is under serious threat.
“I am now 99.9% certain that the US was behind that shoot down.”
BULLS**T What kind of weed are you smoking down there in Bali, Paul.
I’ve come to the conclusion that you are on the wrong board. It appears you’re not mercenary enough to be a troll, so I suspect you might actually believe what you’re posting. If so, LOL or, it sucks to be you. Secondly, Huffington Post or some other left leaning forum would probably be much more to your liking.
I am in agreement with Paul – dollars to donuts, the CIA was behind the shoot down. The only difference is that I think it’s entirely practical and logical. Paul, OTOH, still has some deep seated psychological reasons why he opposes/abhors a superior, stronger state. Let’s say the USA’s ABM system is effective to the point of reducing retaliatory strikes to a minimum. Paul, of course, will go ape-shit that the evil empire has once again triumphed. It wouldn’t be implausible to see the DOW shoot above 25,000. What are all the ankle biters going to do?
The thing to to remember that there isn’t a person alive today who should really be here. It’s all an illusion provided by 200 million years of stored solar energy contained in our very obedient energy slaves. 100-150 years ago, our ancestors should have died due to resource constraints and population overshoot. The boys & girls running these operations know the score. There’s no distinction whether 6 billion should die, or whether they shouldn’t have been born in the first place.
When you have everything, the only thing to do is play chess on a global scale to stave off boredom. Johnson nailed, as Boswell recounted. (Anyone read Boswell’s diary published a few centuries after his death? Debauchery on a grand level denied and suppressed today to the masses under the cover of religious piety. But the elites of course aren’t bound by societal conventions. LOL)
You’re so smug in your certainty. I’m in awe of your deductive powers.
Boy, thanks for the tip about Johnson, that was real fun to rewad about that clap, i mean chap:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/13/james-boswell-history-gonorrhoea
To give an idea of his sexual activities: between the ages of 20 and 29, he slept with three married gentlewomen, four actresses, managed a fling with Rousseau’s mistress, kept three mistresses and had connections with at least 60 streetwalkers. His sexual appetite was uncommonly large and his friends tended to regard his frequent infections as something of a joke.
I understand your position however what I wonder is do you ever draw the line — or should we just stand back and accept any atrocity because ‘might is right’
Was it ok that Hitler gassed millions?
What if the US decides that they want to hit Russia with a first strike and they incinerate tens of millions?
What if Israel decides that the best way to deal with the pesky Palestinians is to simply murder every last one of them using chemical weapons?
And what about when the US Deep State decides it is in their interests to roll out the totalitarian nightmare that they are clearly building up to?
Do we always simply let them do as they want?
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.
These people have no affinity for nation — they would slaughter each other in a heart beat — their only allegiance is to money and power.
Make no mistake — they will eventually come for you.
Yeah, they’ll come for you eventually, especially if you’re a traitor to your country.
Smoking weed in Bali will get you 6 months in jail minimum with a huge bribe required.
Who better than to ask about what happened with this airliner than the ultimate insider — Wall St Journal Editor and high level Reagan official — Paul Roberts:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/19/happened-malaysian-airliner-paul-craig-roberts/
And he is DEAD ON when he calls the western press Whores – I would go further – they are AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea ridden whores — with rotting teeth.
Oh, yeah, and I forgot the other big lie. That the US invaded Iraq for the oil. Well, the US voluntarily left Iraq and without the oil, too. Hmmm, these theories are so compelling. If only the would bear fruit once in awhile.
And the next thing you know Seymour Hersh will expose the US LIE in Ukraine — and the western press will again not publish another story that should get him yet another Pulitzer.
This is the article he wrote exposing the US LIE in Syria – which you will not be aware of because the WHORES — I mean the western press — will not publish this:
SEYMOUR HERSH EXPOSES US GOVERNMENT LIES ON SYRIAN SARIN ATTACK
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published an article demonstrating that the US government and President Barack Obama knowingly lied when they claimed that the Syrian government had carried out a sarin gas attack on insurgent-held areas last August. Hersh’s detailed account, based on information provided by current and former US intelligence and military officials, was published Sunday in the London Review of Books. The article, entitled “Whose sarin?,” exposes as a calculated fraud the propaganda churned out day after day by the administration and uncritically repeated by the media for a period of several weeks to provide a pretext for a military attack on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/10/pers-d10.html
Of course if they publish that it opens a can of worms — the US is arming Al Qaeda/ Al Nusra (ya those guys who eat the hearts of Assad’s soldiers) — so if the CW came from the rebels then ….. well you see where this goes … and you see why the US is killing the Hersh story at the highest level.
Now if you really want to go down the rabbit hole see these two images:
http://21stcenturywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-Britam-Leaks-Daily-Mail.jpg
http://joequinn.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Britam-email-Doughty.jpg
Then do some google image searches related to this and you will see Ukrainian passports and all sorts of other documentation that would appear to support the false flag.
How low can a country go? Gas women and children… shoot down airliners…. murder 500,000 babies and children http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4PgpbQfxgo … how many hundreds of thousands are dead and maimed over the WMD lie in Iraq… how many Vietnamese were murdered and how many deformed babies are born because of CW used in that war?
What would it take to get Americans to recognize that they are lead by what most religions would refer to as devils?
The power of spin is truly awe-inspiring — tell people America stands for good enough times and they actually believe it.
USA USA USA! CNN CNN CNN!
“Oh, yeah, and I forgot the other big lie. That the US invaded Iraq for the oil. Well, the US voluntarily left Iraq and without the oil, too. Hmmm, these theories are so compelling. If only the would bear fruit once in awhile.”
I always understood the ‘other big lie’ to be that the US invaded Iraq over non-existent WMD.
As for Iraqi oil — the point was not to steal their oil — it was to get the oil onto the global market without Saddam being able to leverage his few million barrels a day to get his way in the region.
That said American companies particularly Haliburton did very well from that war … Other NATO countries who played ball all did very well with their oil majors taking big hunks of the spoils
If you want a parallel see Russia — they have the ability to hugely influence Europe because they can simply threaten to cut off gas supplies.
The US (and the EU) don’t like that situation of course — but there is very little they can do about it because Putin is armed to the teeth.
Sure the US can foment unrest on the door step of Russia (Ukraine) … but Putin is not Saddam – he will not easily be unseated.
A traitor to your country? America?
The country that pepper sprays peaceful protestors…. that has stockpiled nearly 2 billion bullets — many sniper rounds — that are to be used against its people — that is rife with corruption from top to bottom — that is not democratic rather is run by the deep state — i.e. fascist type corporate elements see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YhDnQKIGbE
Sounds to me like the leadership of America is the traitor.
And the people of America are mostly defending the traitors. The sheep have unlatched the door and invited the wolves in amongst them.
Of course if one speaks of this the NSA is recording every bit of what you say and write — and at some point they WILL come for you — because tyranny does not accept dissent.
The funny thing is that in many instances where tyranny has grabbed hold — it was welcomed … and by the time it showed it’s real face … it was too late to do anything about it.. because at that point even a whisper of dissent will get you sent to the dungeons and torture chambers.
Paul,
I thought Saddam was going to sell oil in another currency than the dollar, which is what Libya was going to do.
THAT is what got them in trouble. When Saudi Arabia can’t exchange their dollars for gold they will do the same thing. THAT will make things very interesting.
Herbert – yes that was my understanding as well — someone recently posted a link to a report published by the Guardian that indicated that Saddam was unseated because he could hold the world hostage by denying oil.
Perhaps the two issues are related…
At the end of the day the take away from that war is that the US Deep State DID use a false flag (faking WMD) — and they DID use this as a pretext to invade a country ILLEGALLY and murder tens if not hundreds of thousands – leaving behind what is effectively a failed state where millions live lives of hell.
If the US was behind the shooting down of the airliner in Ukraine … a few hundred people are dead…. big bloody deal … that’s like a flea on the back of an elephant … when compared to what the US did in Iraq.
it is standard operating procedure for the CIA to use false flags and other dirty tricks — when you catch yourself believing the utter utter propaganda that spews 24/7 from the likes of CNN (I am in an airport lounge writing this with CNN blaring in front of me — I had to ask the manager to flip to something else before my head explodes!)…
REMEMBER — the US used the mother of all false flags as a pre-text to invade Iraq and destroy an entire country.
Might I suggest the best way to get an idea of what is truly happening in the world is to watch 1. RT.com 2. BBC or any other pro-US media 3. CCTV China English. That gives you the perspective of each of the major players (Russia, China, US) — then you try to determine where the truth lies.
Listening to only one side of any story will absolutely not get you anywhere near the truth.
Paul
Slippery Salmond is also planning expropriation of private land as a populist policy – we of course are all familiar with the vast number of Scots starving for want of vegetable plots, so it’s urgently needed….
Of course, if he did actually want to give a garden to every Scot as a hedge against collapse it would be interesting, but I suspect that is far from his mind.
Right — however the point here is that shale oil is barely able to make up for the drops in conventional oil production as the big fields around the world peak…
At some shale will not be able to offset that losses — and that may happen well before shale itself peaks — based on what is happening to North Sea, Alaska, Ghawar etc…
Interesting!
Dear Gail and All
Here is a short video with some ideas about healthy brains from a psychologist. I am giving you the link because depression and stress are known to reduce one’s ability to think innovatively to solve problems…and are occupational hazards of Limits to Growth students. The talk is aimed at therapists, but it is general enough for anyone to get something out of. Please also note that I am just passing along a link….definitely not practicing medicine.
The big things i get are:
Challenge the brain with new learning
Aerobic exercise
Weight training
Meditation
Avoid reinforcing negative learning
I am a little surprised that social contact isn’t on the list. Some people would add biophilia practice (aka a walk in the woods). My own opinion is that an hour spent walking in the woods by a stream is worth at least two hours walking a track or treadmill in a gym.
‘ I’m sending you this list of 7 fundamentals of brain change.’
You will have to give your name and email address. You will then be on her mailing list. She is not intrusive, but eventually she will have something that requires a payment, such as a series of speakers.
Don Stewart
PS I hope that the link embedded in the words ‘this list’ make it through the sieves.
Sorry, link did not make it. You’ll just have to trust my summary…Don Stewart
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-18/world-gdp-hopes-are-collapsing
Yes–estimates of world GDP are dropping. These estimates all relate to 2014. I am sure a comparison to earlier years would look worse.
You mean it wasn’t due ro a bad winter?…just kidding
Paul- you should check the international aviation site flightaware.com – that will really help – gives a ten day history of flightpaths of almost every commercial flight
Dear Gail and All
There are periodically arguments about religion and God here. I don’t personally find the arguments very interesting or persuasive, for reasons I will try to explain. Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Prize winning physicist at MIT, and former Roman Catholic, has gathered some English Language articles at his website:
http://www.frankwilczek.com
The lead article deals with the origins of natural languages such as English, and the difficulties we run into when we try to use them to talk about the real world…which doesn’t match our preconceptions and thus our language. Whatever preconceptions the ancients had when they talked about ‘God’ were pretty wildly wrong….with the possible exception of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans may have been wrong…but usefully wrong. But most of us have constructed a ‘God’ in our own self image, which turns our to involve a lot of errors. (At least mine has errors…you might have it exactly right, for all I know.)
I won’t embarrass myself by trying to talk in either the mathematics of physics or stumble around too much trying to force fit English into describing it. If you are interested, following is a teaser quote. You can explore Wilczek’s essays on your own.
Since we talk a lot here about energy, I will just add this quote from Wilczek’s book The Lightness of Being:
‘A central theme of this book is that the ancient contrast between celestial light and earthy matter has been transcended. In modern physics, there’s only one thing, and it’s more like the traditional idea of light than the traditional idea of matter’. So is everything energy?
Don Stewart
The understanding of the origin of mass that I’ve sketched
for you here is the most perfect realization we have of
Pythagoras’ inspiring vision that the world can be built up
from concepts, algorithms, and numbers. Mass, a seemingly irreducible property of matter, and a byword for its resistance to change and sluggishness, turns out to reflect a harmonious interplay of symmetry, uncertainty, and energy. Using these concepts, and the algorithms they suggest, pure computation outputs the numerical values of the masses of particles we observe.
Still, as I’ve already mentioned, our understanding of the origin of mass is by no means complete. We have achieved a beautiful and profound understanding of the origin of most of the mass of ordinary matter, but not of all of it. The value of the electron mass, in particular, remains deeply mysterious even in our most advanced speculations about unification and string theory. And ordinary matter, we have recently learned, supplies only a small fraction of mass in the Universe as a whole. More beautiful and profound revelations surely await discovery. We continue to search for concepts and theories that will allow us to understand the origin of mass in all its forms, by unveiling more of Nature’s hidden symmetries.
Yes, everything is energy. Matter is precipitated energy. Just a different form or energy. On the other hand energy is just energy but matter has various other properties (quantum numbers) like electric charge, color charge, lepton type, etc…
Ok- what about time?
General Relativity, with its Block Universe model says it doesn’t exist.
Thermodynamics says it does.
Is this a local event, or are we really missing something?
tmsr->edpell
Hmmm… MSM is screaming ‘Putin – International Pariah’ within hours of this attack — yet I am seeing no evidence that he ordered the attack — which makes this stink to high hell of another False Flag operation
SEYMOUR HERSH EXPOSES US GOVERNMENT LIES ON SYRIAN SARIN ATTACK
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published an article demonstrating that the US government and President Barack Obama knowingly lied when they claimed that the Syrian government had carried out a sarin gas attack on insurgent-held areas last August. Hersh’s detailed account, based on information provided by current and former US intelligence and military officials, was published Sunday in the London Review of Books. The article, entitled “Whose sarin?,” exposes as a calculated fraud the propaganda churned out day after day by the administration and uncritically repeated by the media for a period of several weeks to provide a pretext for a military attack on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/10/pers-d10.html
SURELY THIS IS A LIE http://21stcenturywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-Britam-Leaks-Daily-Mail.jpg
AND THIS TOO http://joequinn.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Britam-email-Doughty.jpg
America would NEVER gas women and children — or shoot down an airliner – would they?
Is there precedent for any of this?
Oh right of course — Albright admits to killing 500,000 babies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0WDCYcUJ4o
The ends justifies the means. And when China and Russia are throwing the USD under the bus — the gloves come off and you go toe to toe – bare knuckles.
Paul, you seem to be succumbing to emotional involvement (again).
QE/ZIRP + capital intensive/pollution inducing production (fracking/oil sands/shale) = admission that global peak energy has been reached.
Our very basis of civilization depends on these precious juices – each of us are literally weeks away from reversion to dirty, hungry & desperate animals without these critical energy inputs.
Those who know the score are applying all available means – physical, psychological, financial, social, cultural, etc – to ensure the security of established reserves, and towards the of acquisition new sources.
All is fair in love & war; why would anyone who is familiar with the issues discussed here be surprised, outraged, upset or otherwise emotionally effected by what is transpiring? As we all know, this is only the warm-up act. Again, how do we achieve a 90% population reduction? Does everyone peacefully line-up for processing, or will it be a messy and wild affair?
One cannot just jump into war willy nilly. International relations dictate that certain protocols need to be followed ie casus belli. The US is a master of this game – watch how it unfolds. It will be really interesting if we actually do have an effective ABM system. Then, the neo-cons just might right in that a 1st strike nuclear attack can be survived by the initiating state.
Just because it doesn’t matter because the entire system is about to collapse — and the beasts that ordered the shooting down of that plane will starve along with most of the rest of the planet — does not mean that one should not expose the lies and hypocrisies?
The thing that irks me is not so much the act itself (I expect such acts from the vile human race) — it is more the irritation of observing the USA USA chanting imbeciles who are in effect cheering on the devil — thinking the devil is the good guy.
There are no good guys – only interests.
A parallel would be having to listen to people claim that solar energy or thorium is going to save the day… really does it matter that they think that? Not one bit — listening to fools and idiots regardless of whether it is related to geopolitics — or energy — is rather irritating.
@Paul says “the irritation of observing the USA USA chanting imbeciles”
Sigh. What part of “using all psychological, cultural & societal tools at their disposal” is bothering you? We are tribal animals – nation states utilize & leverage this characteristic to their advantage.
Bourne wrote a critique of this phenomenon in his essay “War is the Health of the State”. Bernays, of course, was on the other side of the equation, being a master at designing and executing large-scale propaganda programs. And for a real master, we’d be remiss is forgetting to mention one A Hitler who could whip huge crowds into a frenzy of patriotic fervor.
Frankly, I’m a little bit irritated that someone of your caliber & insight is irritated. Seriously, it’s unbecoming, and suggests some unresolved issues on your part that need to be worked through. If the coordinated promotion of mindless support for nationalist regimes wasn’t effective, then why would the technique be repeatedly used, over & over again?
If you’re bothered at this juncture, how are you going to possibly be able to calmly analyze future events as the real effect of peak resources begins to bite? Sh!t, we haven’t even got to censorship yet – what are you going to do when the state controls all information, and the people are foaming at the mouth in support of every new inhumane act of barbarity? Man up, dude.
B9K9,
“One cannot just jump into war willy nilly. International relations dictate that certain protocols need to be followed ie casus belli. The US is a master of this game – watch how it unfolds. ”
I am watching, with pop corn to hand.
But if you think the US is better at this game than either Russia or China then it will be a revelation what happens next. While the US has had its ‘wins’ since WWII, I don’t think it has done too well since Vietnam. And the current administration has shown itself to be totally inept at this; re: Syria and now Iraq and not to mention tipping its hand re the SWIFT Financial Network. Russia has been at this game for hundreds of years and China thousands. They take the very long view, 100’s of years to undermine and take over an enemy or a targeted acquisition is not unusual but standard operating procedure. Both the takeover of Crimea and Paracels and the Spratlys Islands in the South China Sea were planned over 60 years ago, at least.
The Almighty US Dollar ain’t no mo, and both Russia and China know it and are taking advantage of the vacuum. I don’t believe the US can go toe-to-toe with either without a first strike. And what is the Chinese expression; he who strike first blow admit he run out of ideas.
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Dear Gail and All
Gardening From Now through Collapse
Jean-Martin Fortier, a Canadian market gardener along with his wife, has written a very good book: The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming.
I have enough books, and I resisted buying this one. Then, the opportunity to pick one up second-hand appeared, the cover is beautiful, and I succumbed. I am glad I did.
Let me explain how I see this book fitting into a certain niche that may interest some of the readers of this blog. Let’s suppose that you think that collapse is coming, but you are not quite sure when it will arrive. Perhaps you even think that collapse will happen over a couple of decades as things get harder and harder. In any event, you want to get into gardening/ farming/ market gardening as a hedge against the future. But you want to make money now, and you don’t want to invest a great deal of money. You live in the temperate zone, close enough to civilization that you can sell food directly to customers, as well as through retail outlets and to restaurants. Then this may be the book for you.
The Fortiers only income is provided by a 1.5 acre farm, which returns sales of 60 to 100,000 dollars per acre per year, with a profit margin of 40 percent. The book tells you quite precisely how they got started, how the farm has evolved, and gives you some hints about how they think it might change in the future. From everything they say, I believe they are happy with the lives they have chosen.
Now let me explore a little bit the notion of collapse, and how that has NOT been a factor in their thinking (at least that I can detect). But how their example might be a very good guide to how to survive a collapse, whether on a Black Friday or stretched out over decades.
The Fortiers are financially driven…not driven to produce survival food. Thus, they note that growing greenhouse cucumbers is four times as profitable as growing turnips, and that a bed of lettuce brings in as much as leeks, but in half the time. They explain why they don’t grow potatoes or corn. If they had a larger property, or were oriented at household survival, they would make different choices, perhaps.
And so we can see how a market garden such as this one can fit into a doomer’s survival strategy. You can make money nearly from the beginning, avoid large debts, begin to build up your soil, accumulate small tools, and learn the skills needed to garden. An acre and a half should get a family through tough times, but the selection of crops would need to change.
Likewise, Fortier explains why he buys compost rather than make compost. One can only do so much, composting is a skilled undertaking, and their plate is full. But, in a collapse, he COULD make his own compost. Fortier uses the industrial supplies which are currently easily available, which might not be available after a collapse: black plastic tarps, irrigation systems, walk-behind tractors. I don’t think a person can make any money today unless they use these tools…simply because everyone else uses them, they increase productivity, and one has to remain competitive. After a collapse, as these tools wore out, he would need to begin gardening more land, but less intensively. In a collapse, we have to assume that lots of people will die, and more land will likely be available. Survival strategy is about being prepared for the change …not trying to garden now with Stone Age techniques on very small plots.
For example, Fortier explains why a shot of nitrogen (from blood meal, fish meal, or chicken manure) is necessary in the early spring when the ground is cold…because the soil microbes are still inactive. Post collapse, blood meal and fish meal aren’t likely to be available, and chicken manure only if you supply the chickens.
Fortier has a very good discussion about tillage. He never uses a Roto-Tiller on established beds, but he does have a rotary power harrow for his walk-behind tractor which stirs the top 2 inches of the soil without turning the soil the way a moldboard plow or root-tiller turns soil. He cautions against rigid adherence to no-till, while still concluding that : ‘I am confident that we will develop better ways to harness the biological power of the soil, instead of relying on mechanical solutions. Relying on and working in harmony with ecological systems is the wave of the future’. In short, he foresees the need to change, but will do so when he clearly sees how to do it profitably. Or, I might add, when collapse forces him to make the changes more quickly.
There is plenty of detail here on lots of specific subjects. It wouldn’t help you much if you lived in the tropics or the Arctic, and probably not much if you lived in the sub-tropics. But if you find yourself at the point in life where a small farm or market garden sounds like a good idea, but you want to make money in the near term with only a small up-front investment, this might be an excellent book to look for.
Don Stewart
PS There are alternative strategies and techniques if you are so inclined. Carol Deppe is more oriented at calorie crops instead of high value crops. And I think that Emilia Hazelip is still one of the best examples of pure gardening which does not use any sort of tillage. But I doubt that Deppe or Hazelip could produce as much income per acre as the Fortiers.
When the collapse comes all will be altered as far a “business model” is concerned. I remember hearing Elliot Coleman, organic maine farmer and author, pointing out his most “profitable” item was flowers! Seems folks are willing to dish out $5-10 for a bunch without thinking about price on these, but counting pennies on what the price per pound for the pole beans!
Depending on the nature of the “fall”, various approaching will need to be considered.
Don, thank you, for you suggestions regarding the books. I will take a look too.
All very helpful.
Carol Depp is my “gardening hero”, her books speak of much the same experiences I’m making. But also she gardens in a similar climate as I do and that makes most of the difference. I would recommend to get books and also open pollinated seeds from local breeders to get started with.
Back again (oh no!) on necessary balance between fight for resource and empathy / mutual care, but just as an introduction (aaah!).
Reg. first side of the coin (fight, competition, greed, struggle for whatever, etc..) I think not necessary to dwell on that, as it’s amply discussed here.
Reg. the other side (cooperation, empathy, ..) it could be a little bit more complex than we first imagine. Gail you cite for this part the comandment “don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t like others to do unto you” (or turned positively, but it’s the same idea).
Beyond the fact that not any religion or belief is necessary to implement such rule (the ruler can be the state government or even your own morality based on daily life), it appears that it shouldn’t even have to be teached, as searchers have discovered a decade ago that we are pre-equipped with special neurons dedicated to this function (and involved in a couple of other processes connected to social behaviour as well), called mirror neurons.
Tiny digression: my over-simplistic take on the necessity to “teach” good behaviour to “commoners” is that it balances the over-sized greed and hubris of the elites. (end of the digr.)
MIRROR NEURONS
These neurons allow us (and some other species) to physically feel in our own bodies what we imagine someone else is feeling when we see him/her doing something.
Empathy is one of the skills this system provides us ; it’s also involved in understanding intentions of others, learning, communication (language), and many things connected to “mimesis” (thus very important for gregarious species).
from Wikipedia: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.[1][2][3] Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate species.[4] Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring system.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron#Empathy
You can find more than 100 refs and some links at the bottom of the wiki page ; I nevertheless provide some more here:
– MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution
http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge69.html
– Vittorio Gallese: The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis ; From Mirror Neurons To Empathy
http://didattica.uniroma2.it/assets/uploads/corsi/33846/Gallese_2001.pdf
– The Antiquity of Empathy, by Franz B.M. De Waal
211.144.68.84:9998/91keshi/Public/File/41/336-6083/pdf/874.full.pdf
Garrett Hardin had much to say about the empathy problem https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=garrett+hardin+lifeboat+ethics+summary&safe=off
Dear Robert Wilson
It’s rather chilling to read Hardin’s 1974 essay on Lifeboats and Spaceships where he assumes that everyone in the US is in the lifeboat together.
Today, we would more likely envision the Titanic having hit the iceberg, when the private helicopter with the super-rich takes off for dry land leaving the rest of their countrymen to drown.
And over those years ‘foreign aid’ has taken on a very hard edge, designed simply to benefit corporations.
And then Eleanor Ostrom wins the Nobel Prize for her work showing that Hardin was, sometimes, wrong.
Don Stewart
Interesting. I was unaware of Eleanor Ostrom. Will read more. I thought that the final paragraphs of Hardin’s essay The Tragedy of the Commons was chilling – and unworkable. One of Hardin’s books was titled Stalking the Wild Taboo.
— Technically Ostrom won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, not the Nobel Prize.
Robert,
Thank you for the info ; the link you provide doesn’t work here in France, probably because it’s through Google ; not a problem, since I was able to find lots of stuff very easily:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_ecolate_view_human_predicament.html
However, my goal was not to dig into such theories (which I personally find highly questionable), but to say that we shouldn’t have to be teached about “goodness”, since we already have dedicated “hardware” deep in our brains.
Moreover, the recent discovery of Mirror Neurons gives a new point of view to think about all society-related matters and opens new fields of investigation, based on what really happens in our brains. IMHO this is likely to strengthen our theories (and maybe unify some {eg J.Monod & R.Dawkins (?)}, as well as eliminate others).
Perhaps religions simply reinforces natural tendencies. Is there anything wrong with this? If the tendencies were not there, it is hard to believe that religions reinforcing them would take hold.
Yes Gail,
I do think there’s something deeply wrong with that.
They take the glory (of promoting goodness) but not the responsibility (as they pretend it comes from higher power).
I have a big problem with those who pretend they hold “The Truth”, have answers to unanswerable questions, and say they’ve been given the handbook(!!) to teach us how we should live and think. And have implemented all the control structure to insure none of us deviates off the line.
I have a big problem with the presupposé of an afterlife (IMO due to that the concept of nothingness is out of our reach), which moreover would be nice only if you obey, and would be only for humans (although Darwin has demonstrated 150 years ago that differences between us and other species weren’t of quality but of quantity).
I do think that a social organisation based on lies (and backed by violence, as someone said) necessarily leads to perverse structure with double-talk at all levels (“Do what I say, but not what I do”) and schyzophrenia (eg public vs private attitudes).
The bigger the presence of religion the bigger perversity. Maffiosi are mostly very religious, for example ; another example is that church members are able to rape children at an industrial scale and that is fully compatible with their organisation ; or genocide indigenous people. We could go on and on. For me institutional religions are only very good tools for power.
I’d by far prefer paganism, which doesn’t talk about answers but push people to respect everything on Earth ; OK they tend to attribute a soul to everything and put gods everywhere, but why not, as long as it isn’t “proselytic”.
That being said, I unsderstand that you want to pick-up and take advantage of the good things (I understand “nice looking shop fronts”), which I’m convinced do not need to be connected to anything religious to be efficient. But maybe you have no other choice.
Maybe in France we have a different history, with this law of 1905 (separation of the church and the state). We have built up a very rich network of non-profit-making associations (based on law of 1901) for all kinds of purposes. This culture of laicism (secularism) is perhaps typically French, I don’t know (but I know it still is an everyday’s struggle). NB: laicism doesn’t dismiss religions, it only states that they should not be part of social organisation (esp. the laws).
I don’t think I’ve been raped by any priest when I was a kid, but maybe there something in that direction, too…
Mao got a few thing right:
“Religion is poison”
-Mao
Of course he got many wrong.
Yes Dave,
because he also was convinced (or said so) to hold “the Truth” ; the instruction manual was the Little Red Book.
Akin to Hitler with Mein Kampf, etc…
Defiantly let ideology reign over reality, with the usual consequences.
Simple ideas for complex problems.
China is a product of its Confuciusian and feudal past (which made the Cultural Revolution Possible), than pseudo Marxism.
However, it does have similarities to our religious friends:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12138/abstract
Another “right”….”Many hands do light work”…and of course, his one Mao suit to each person along with one bike (maybe) and AM transistor radio…..they did us all a favor by living the non consumer lifestyle of the Western world
Lets be honest.
China went from a dominant feudal society in the 1930’s, to being a major player by 1950.
Not a minor achievement.
However, it is merely the last of the great industrial economies, and not remotely survivable.
Dear All
If you have paid attention to my notes on the book Wetware, you won’t be surprised by one of the ‘discoveries’ in France about combining solar PV with growing food:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-07-17/agrivoltism
Going into the study, they thought:
‘The main issue, they knew going in, was the effect of shade created by the PVPs on plant productivity. The researchers assumed productivity would decline, though there was scant data in the scientific literature to consult. That’s why they built two different shade combinations, full- vs. half-density, so that they could compare the effects to each other and to the control plots in full sun.
“Basically, solar panels and crops will compete for radiation,” Dupraz wrote in the paper, “and possibly for other resources such as water, as solar panels may reduce the available water quantity for crops due to increased runoff or shelter effects.”
By the same token, shade can improve the productivity of crops in a warming world. Water availability limits many crop productions, he wrote, and shade will reduce transpiration needs and possibly increase water efficiency.’
But they found:
‘the crops under the half-density shading were not only as productive as the control plots; in a few cases they were even more productive!
The reason for this surprising outcome, according to Dr. Hélène Marrou, who studied lettuce in the plots, was the compensating ability of plants to adapt to lower light conditions. She reported that lettuce plants adjusted to decreased levels of radiation by (1) an increase in the total plant leaf area, and (2) an increase in total leaf area arrangement in order to harvest light more efficiently.’
Back to me. Wetware explains the complex ability of plants to adjust to their environment, by somehow focusing on the most salient points of the flood of information they are receiving, and to use that important information to modify the way they express genes.
I have written here about my experiences in North Carolina using shade cloth and measuring leaf temperatures with a UV meter to keep the plants in the most productive photosynthetic temperature range.
I have worked on a farm here which has elevated PV panels. The answer to the water problem, I think, is that each panel dumps water into downspouts which feed into swales. Think of rows of panels on contour across a slope, with the drainage off each panel feeding the crops just downslope with a swale slowing the water down and letting it sink into the soil. I think these guys need some Permaculture help on the water. Tilting panels are not necessarily a very good solution, and are just increasing the expense. Furthermore, many plants such as tomatoes do much better if they don’t get rained on.
I don’t want to argue about whether the PV panels are a big mistake to begin with. Just pointing out that plant scientists are slow to pick up on cell science and permaculture.
Don Stewart
The latest from Ambrose Evans Pritchard http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10972348/Fed-kicks-off-global-dollar-squeeze-as-Janet-Yellen-turns-hawkish.html
See the comments — one of the world’s best finance journalists is being roasted over a blazing inferno… nobody is believing any of this.
I am sure AEP does not believe this garbage — how could he?
Add that together with his energy article the other day where he stated cheaper alternatives would knock oil (something else that he MUST know not to be true)
Message – the PTB are getting increasingly desperate — they are pumping out the stinking dung heap of lies through the MSM — following the strategy of ‘tell the lie enough times and people will believe it’
However at some point the people don’t believe the lies — usually that point is reached when they don’t have job — and neither do most of the people they know.
It is my understanding that the latest increase in jobs comes mostly from more part-time jobs replacing fewer full time jobs (work around so that companies do not need to cover employees under Obamacare). So the job increase is a real sense phony. It is very clear what higher interest rates will do–pop debt bubbles, if high oil prices do not. Not a good idea!
Yes — and if we know that (because that is what the facts say) then AEP knows that.
His bosses prefer that he spew lies.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-16/20-signs-terrible-drought-western-us-starting-become-catastrophic
Paul, keep in mind zerohedge makes money on ads by sensationalizing articles to draw in posters and readers to ring up the website ticker to help sell more ads at higher prices. When I first discovered that website I was mesmerized by what they were writing about because it seemed so fantastic. But after awhile I realized what they wildly conjecture about never amounts to anything. They lead the reader to think things could come unglued at any moment, but in reality it doesn’t. They take some scrap of information and run with it, spin it, supercharge it until it seems like an ‘ah ha’ moment of the most amazing graphed information ever. Graphs can be interpreted many ways, so they don’t prove anything about the future. If only life could be so exciting and predictable. By now the stock market should have collapsed at least a thousand times. Now I read their articles with a grain of salt and never read the posted messages because they are from people just venting their personal frustrations and projections. It’s tabloid collapse sensationalism.
Zero Hedge is doing the job of the MSM — it is exposing the lies that the MSM is spewing.
Is it sensationalizing things? Um…. I don’t think it is at all.
The imminent implosion of the global financial system and civilization are quite sensational in themselves.
All ZH is doing is pointing out the direction we are headed in.
Zero Hedge is deserving of literally dozens of Pulitzer Prizes – they break more stories than all MSM combined
What they also do is they take snippets from the MSM and comment on them — adding context and analysis.
Hugely hugely powerful site.
Of course there is always CNBs for those who prefer cheerleaders and lies.
Wow! That is an absolutely massive subsidy that would all the consumer juggernaut to buy a lot more stuff… nothing is free of course — that is why the road infrastructure in much of the US is crumbling…
Of course, we could replenish the fund by raising the federal gasoline tax, which is its primary source of financing. That’s what Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, and Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, want to do. But increasing gas taxes is unpopular, so Congress hasn’t done so since 1993, which means that the tax on gas has actually fallen 39 percent over the last 21 years after you adjust for inflation. Instead, Congress has used a series of gimmicks and shifts to keep the fund solvent as highway construction costs have risen.
http://dollarcollapse.com/the-economy/theyre-lying-to-us-part-4-fake-pensions/
RT.com — a good balance for the US-centric MSM spin… excellent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSOVIKi-RgI
As Chomsky often says, get info from many media sources — that have different perspectives (RT, US stuff, UK, Al Jazeera, non MSM) — and that might lead you to the truth about complicated issues.
RT is one of the best out there.
Of course Zero Hedge is another… of course
Although the economy continues to improve, the recovery is not yet complete,” she said. Moreover, while inflation has moved up, she said officials expected it to remain below the Fed’s 2% goal for the full year.
Even if the Fed does move sooner than planned, it still looks many months away, and likely incremental once begun. Most Fed officials don’t expect to start raising short-term rates until next year, according to projections they made going into their June policy meeting. Those projections, which Ms. Yellen noted as an indication of their recent intentions, show officials expect to raise their benchmark rate to 1% by the end of next year. Many officials have affirmed investors’ belief that the Fed won’t start rate increases until about the middle of 2015.
For now, the Fed is scaling down its monthly purchases of mortgage and Treasury bonds, a program launched in 2012 to hold down long-term interest rates and provide further fuel to the economy. The Fed expects to end it in October, having pushed its holdings of bonds, loans and other assets to more than $4.4 trillion.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/feds-yellen-u-s-economy-continues-to-improve-but-recovery-not-yet-complete-1405432838
And meanwhile ‘Belgium’ is stepping in http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/04/15/belgium-is-buying-up-tons-of-u-s-treasurys/ (or the Fed is buying via Belgium and pretending they are tapering to inspire CONfidence that there will be a recovery)
And also of course we have this story which blows away the QE stimulus: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-15/cluster-central-banks-have-secretly-invested-29-trillion-market
What else are they doing that we are not being told about?
@End of More says “It seems to me, that it is that denial factor that is our greatest danger.”
I must confess that I simply do not get, cogitate, understand or other recognize why there is confusion about the concept of “denial”. Simply put, the great mass of people are the marks, and the smart n’ savvy are the operators aka con men who are preparing them for slaughter.
Let’s get real here: for anyone with an above average IQ, concepts discussed here such as exponential growth, diminishing marginal returns, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, Liebig’s law of the minimum, the Seneca effect, ad infinitum are simply not difficult concepts. Therefore, it takes a tremendous ego to (falsely) believe that we are unique and special, and that our collective insight is serious & profound.
Sh!t people, wake up. NO ONE IS IN DENIAL. And by the term “no one”, I mean anyone in any meaningful leadership position. There are only false narratives, wishful thinking and magical promises that dominates secular propaganda, and which essentially copies tricks-of-the-trade from established religions.
See through the con; watch the hands, not the re-directs or distractions. You can either choose to waste your time attempting to educate the sheep as to their perilous predicament, or join in on the con. Joining can be as simple as praying & hoping for BAU, or as sophisticated as planning for the coming resource wars.
“You can either choose to waste your time attempting to educate the sheep as to their perilous predicament, or join in on the con”
Personally I’m trying both, they are not exclusive, not here in Argentina at least. I was already involved in politics before coming in knowledge of PO, and now it works on another scale: before it was largely townscale, now national and global. I’m sure things are much more cooked up in a place like the US, cause PTB are quite longlasting there, a real core of the system, while here top people change and everybody will tell you if they have a plan it surely is to take a helicopter runaway from the roof of the presidential palace as de La Rúa did in 2001…
The core of the system was always rather in the outside, Madrid, London, Paris and DC come to mind. Now it looks like this is breaking forever. This would likely to be the trend in every peripheral place, just excepting some resource gifted (Iraq) or related (Ukraine) ones: in the whole South America only Venezuela is worth something. USD reserve status is the only non natural privilege somebody has upon us… We are all overindebted so equals (excepting Russia, so may be we’d take some rubles along with the yuans, specially as our debt is written in USD).
The Energy Skeptic’s summary of David Fleming’s book on the worlds nuclear prospects. Let’s just say the EROEI is hopeless and the scale of the waste problem terrifying. http://energyskeptic.com/2014/david-fleming-2007-the-lean-guide-to-nuclear-energy-a-life-cycle-in-trouble/
Dear Gail and All
This will be perhaps the final report on thoughts triggered by reading Wetware, by Dernnis Bray.
The concluding paragraph: ‘So you could argue that we understand the recognition of features of the external world, the storage of memories, the influence of chance events on behavior, the prediction of future events, better for a cell than we do for a higher animal Given the long-standing correspondence between the two because of their common evolutionary origins, it might be, as Dale Purves, professor of neuroscience at Duke University, said to me, that cells are ‘touchstones for human mentation’. A touchstone is a slab of dark mineral used to test the quality of gold and silver from the color of the streak each produces on it…not a bad analogy.’
If, as I have maintained, the end of cheap energy, the exhaustion of debt, and the other Limits to Growth outlined in this particular post by Gail, and in previous posts, also imply, as I have claimed, that we must redirect our thinking toward an increase in reliance on biology and a reduction in reliance on industrial chemistry and physics, then we need to have a mature understanding of what biology can and cannot do.
On page 227, we find a discussion of that quintessentially modern phenomenon, machine computations, as compared with computation is a cell: ‘The computational processes performed by a cell have features that distinguish them from any human-made machine or electronic device. The most obvious difference being that they are based on chemical reactions in aqueous solution. They require a continual supply of carbon atoms and chemical energy, considerations that do not apply to electronic circuits. Connections in a cell-based computer are made by the physical processes of diffusion and molecular recognition. This renders cell communications comparatively slow and inaccurate, but, as if in compensation, it also makes it possible for large numbers of connections to be made in a minute volume. Cells are not limited by the size of wires or overheating; their energy consumption is minimal. The brain of a fruit fly performs miracles of visual processing and flight control with the consumption of micro watts of power. A supercomputer, by comparison, uses megawatts—a million million times more energy.
A cell operates as a massively parallel system….
It is impossible, I think, for us to envision the richness and diversity of cell chemistry. The level of derail is atomic in dimensions but astronomical in variety…’
How can a functioning cell be made in the face of such complexity? And the answer is revealed on page 231: by making subassemblies and linking them. Those who have written computer programs will know that one of the keys to success is to write lots of subroutines and then link them. Nature through biology does the same thing. The same basic components of many biological processes which operate in humans also operate in single celled creatures, which provides the basis for the statement in the opening paragraph. On page 231, the author considers the implications of subassemblies: ‘A living cell …is made as a hierarchy of smaller subassemblies, each of which is independently stable. If there are occasional hiccups in the supply of materials or interruptions in the process of biosynthesis, then the process as a whole can keep going. …Cells in tissue culture continue to grow and divide despite major perturbations in the supply of nutrients…The number of molecules of particular proteins in an animal cell fluctuate wildly, and yet the cell appears unchanged…’
How can the relatively small number of subassemblies be put together to make such a wide variety of plants and animals? ‘Superimposed on the hierarchical framework of defined components of a cell there is another layer. This second layer is highly flexible and can take an almost infinite variety of forms, like soft and responsive flesh on a bony skeleton The deep question is whether this higher layer in the construction of cells is itself organized. Are their hierarchies, or at least rules, in the protein-modifying, RNA-splicing, gene-regulating processes of a cell?…I do not have an answer to this question. But two features of cells might be relevant. One is the sense of time, or causation—knowledge of the way that things in the real world follow a certain sequence. The other is integrity, which enables a cell to distinguish between what belongs to itself and what belongs to the outside world.’ In short, there are reasons to think we will discover order and rules.
The author next poses the question ‘why do cells record the past?’. ‘If the cell can use the past to read the future—to gain even the slightest inkling of what will happen next—ah, then, what an advantage it will have! This is why a swimming bacterium stores a record of its environment over the past few seconds—simply to help it predict the future.’
He gives an example involving E. coli (a particularly well understood bacterium). When the E. coli is eaten by an animal, there is a sudden increase in temperature as the bacterium enters the gut. The E. coli switches to anaerobic metabolism and shuts down aerobic metabolism. An E. coli in a laboratory subjected to a rapid increase in temperature will make the same response, even though there is no shortage of oxygen. The E. coli’s memory has prepared it for thriving in the gut.
Another example is the apparent ‘group memory’ of bacteria in the face of penicillin. Penicillin will kill most of the bacteria, but not all of them. Penicillin is effective against normally growing bacteria, but not against slowly growing bacteria. A colony of bacteria always has a few slow growers, which survive the initial blast of penicillin. If you compare the philosophy of Global Capitalism (there is only one way) with the philosophy of the bacterial colony, the implications for survival in a crunch are obvious.
The author also considers how cells make decisions: ‘how a cell uses its knowledge of the world in a thoughtful manner when challenged. A thousand chemical voices clamor for attention every instant of an amoeba’s existence How does it decide what to do?’ Since no one knows the answer to that question, he speculates.
In summary, suppose we believe the biologists that subassemblies which can continue to function during challenging times are a key to survival. Given all that you have read on this blog about the fragility of the Industrial Economy, how might you go about achieving enough resilient sub-assemblies that you ‘live to fight another day’? And what sorts of solutions suggest themselves to you after considering your joint heritage with the microbes and observing how they solve problems and have survived for 3.5 billion years? Are you still convinced that we must have uninterruptible electricity, or should we listen to the circadian rhythms written into our inheritance?
Don Stewart
Sometimes I feel like we are talking to ourselves. it turns out that it does matter, nothing would change even if people were listening.
Let’s see the pool they “investigated” a whole 250 families. For a moment there I was certain they were referring to Al Gore.
I can believe that the people who claim to worry about climate change use more electricity than others. The people who worry about climate change tend to be better educated, and because of this have more money. With more money, they tend to use more electricity (also more oil and natural gas) than the less educated.
Giving up electricity usage does not enter the heads of those worrying about climate change. This would be too radical idea. Someone else is supposed to fix the problem–produce electricity without carbon. Magic!
Apologies for the duplication — I am just seeing your comment now
That makes sense — education correlates highly with awareness as well as with affluence… And affluence means more travel, multiple gadgets (replaced more frequently)
Of course such people are still able to believe they are ‘green’ because they drive a Prius and recycle.
I know one couple that has perhaps 10 computer devices between them — adn they have two massive energy consumers (called children) — it seems to me their only concession to saving the world is to remember to bring reusable bags to the grocery store.
The green movement is probably one of the most hypocritical constructs on the planet.
Then of course if they stopped being hypocritical and walked the walk — that would quickly collapse civilization.
Another one of those be careful what you wish for moments…
this is precisely why, after 35 years of championing the solar industry… i have stopped designing, installing and maintaining pv systems.
it used be that people did this because it was “the right” thing to do, wisely implementing conservation/ frugal consumption/ energy audits BEFORE having systems installed. most conscious/ efficient homes were able to operate on 3 to 6 kWh/day (1 to 2 kW STC system).
now that solar is less expensive, people are using it to “put lipstick on their pigs”, justifying their waste with “green” power. typical systems are now powering 35+ kWh/day (~8+ kW STC system). this means “magic green energy” is now powering waste and unconscious consumption… which is why i am retiring, as solar is now a huge part of the problem.
this will not end well…
Nobody every reduces their energy spend — if they save a little money by driving a much smaller car, they generally spend that money on other consumption – of course energy goes into making those other goods.
So even if solar could supply electricity cheaply to people and the piled into solar panels … it would make no difference – they’d simply divert the money saved to more ‘stuff’ (and use the extra space in the garage to store the extra stuff)
But they will of course feel tell you that they are greener for driving the smaller car.
This will most definitely not end well…
“Nobody ever reduces their energy spend…”
“Nobody” is a superlative that I don’t think suits your example. Your statement is only true if everybody has a constant income and they don’t save any of it.
One trivial counter example that is more and more popular: if someone is laid off from their job, they reduce their energy use. There are figures showing western countries are reducing their energy use. Politicians like to slap themselves on the back for that! But the truth is, a lot of people are not working, so they are living on unemployment or savings, and not commuting, and the place where they once worked is probably not using as much energy, either.
One can also voluntarily reduce energy spent by simply making less money! I’ve gone from a six-figure income to a four-figure income in the past twenty years! That is the way that everyone will “reduce their energy spend” — by choice, or eventually, by force of nature. I chose to do it not because it’s the “right thing to do,” but because I am developing skills that will be invaluable when there is no choice but to live simply.
Interesting! I know we frequently read stories about businesses that buy solar panels, and put them in a prominent position, even if it is on the north side of a building, just for the public relations value.
So, indeed, you all are talking about Al Gore!
Why all the snarkey comments about Al Gore? I don’t get that. At least he was out there before nearly any other politician warning about the dangers of global climate change. Please explain.
Gail, why could it be that you are forecasting an energy downslope much quicker than LTG’s industrial output fall?
What makes you think that I am forecasting a downslope much quicker than LTG industrial output would fall? Both the 1972 book, and recent talks by Dennis Meadows make it very clear that the LTG model says
nothing at all
about the shape of the downslope after the first limits are hit. Their modeling was not such that they could forecast that accurately. They do not include the financial system; they do not include anything on how different parts of the world would develop differently, on part versus another–in particular, how much oil exporters would export when they are unable to buy food imports. In general, their expectation was that the world would change so much that their model was completely inappropriate after the first limits started to be hit.
Thus, I do not see why LTG authors should even publish “industrial output” after they hit the first limit, which is very early on. Or, why others should look at the shape of such curves.
I have repeatedly said that Hubbert Curves are inappropriate after the peak because the system does not “stick together.” How do we feed 7 billion people with much less oil, for example? And how do we keep the financial system operating–in particular, oil prices from dropping too low because of debt defaults? What Ugo Bardi calls Seneca Cliffs are much more appropriate, based on experience and common sense. http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-collapse.html One can get to a somewhat similar result just looking at the rapid drop in Net Energy as EROEI falls, (but this is not my approach of choice–it assumes way too many things).
Excuse me, it was not so much quicker. I was just comparing your estimate and IO curve at LTG’s drawing you are using in your posts and there is a difference (say, within the next 20 years your fall doubles the other fall, wich in turn is sharpest than Laherrère’s -just to take a random peak oil folk as you like to say). Now I look again at the original LTG drawing and see your curve is very close to that IO one… (I take industrial output as a token for energy flow, precisely because this flow is industrial i.e. system driven, there is no “energy geiser”).
Perhaps this is not relevant, and I’ve never finished LTG book and didn’t looked at the last Meadows presentation, so believing Bardi’s cliff could be estimated more precisely surely is my fault. Nevertheless, Meadows et al. did produced different scenarios in order to correlate distinct pre and post “peak” patterns, or trends. Certainly, those were broader considerations while now we are left with just one scenario: standard run.
To go to something else, it looks like central banks (at least some, surely those who are buying stocks) are willing to speed up money supply and lending while supranational banking (IMF, BIS, WB?) is playing the slowdown song (and more of this as indicators are going worst each year). Not that somebody will win in the long run… Now BRICS are talking about getting their own IMF, so it is rather going tainterian again: multiplication of the same kind of insittutions, the same pattern of complexity building, adding new players to an overpopulated field, wich is delivering each year a shorter increase in its specific expected output (less economical growth, which is the expected output of lending just as bread and pies are the expected output of bakery). Perhaps we can say the S will HTF at the moment when mean global banking will reach negative returns, easily identified with the word Bankruptcy.
It would seem like at some point the return on investment becomes negative for banks. In fact, in some cases it might be already be–all of those empty cities in China are not generating any real return, for example. There are ways of hiding the problem, though. I know in the US, when commercial real estate prices were falling, loans were extended as if the prices had not fallen–a practice called “extend and pretend.” So it is not clear which part of our problem will hit the fan first.
When to Soviet Union was crumbling, the problem in my country (Slovakia) was, that the country did not lost its production capacity, but the Soviet Union started to be insolvent. There were textile factories that did not get paid for their products exported to the Soviet Union or there were massive stocks of heavy industry products (like weapons, machinery parts etc.) that nobody from the closed system of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or some other allied countries wanted anymore, because they could not afford it.
That is the way the collapse comes: we may produce abundant amounts of cars and electronics, but when the purchasing power is falling, the people (the countries) are deeper and deeper in the debt, there is less and less those who can afford to buy the products. Moreover, when the operation of such products requires further continuous energy costs, owning such products makes no sense for the poor.
Similarly, as Gail Tverberg was writing about marginal producers and marginal consumers regarding the Russian gas to Ukraine, the same can be applied to other products, e.g. when the price of the fuel starts to be too high for the consumer and there is no one to produce a more efficient car, it makes no sense to buy a car or to produce cars.
Good points!
MG
Someone told me that the Moldovans fell into a similar trap, as the demand (or ability to pay) for their agricultural products (apples?) within the former Soviet Union fell, collapsing their economy.
Dear Hideaway
Earlier, you accused Darren Doherty of, essentially, being an incompetent hobby farmer.
I knew that he had been away in Vietnam, but I didn’t know what he was doing there. It turns out that he was consulting for Mars (the candy company) on their expansion of cocoa production. Then, this morning, I saw a news item to the effect that booming chocolate consumption in Asia was creating a global shortage of cocoa.
So…the next time you eat a chocolate bar, you might think about sending Darren a note of thanks for his role in increasing cocoa production?
Darren will be in Tennessee, not too far from me, this fall to introduce his new synthesis of lots of different biological farming systems. Geoff Lawton says it will be very good. Book due in next spring (us, fall for you).
Don Stewart
Thanks for the link.
I reckon in 08 there were those who wanted to bail the failing banks – and those who argued that the moral hazard of doing so would be too great — and that Lehman was the guinea pig that they agreed on for the experiment to see what would happen…
Of course they quickly jammed the trap door shut when the snarling beast stuck his head out…
Moral hazard etc… are side shows though — who cares about moral hazard when the real issue is the collapse of civilization — if creating moral hazard is a side-effect of keeping the hamster running then moral hazard we will have.
It is really nice to have new people on this blog with different perspective. Fresh ideas. Slight off topic but related.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/financial-interconnectedness-systemic-risk-new-fed-report-flags-7-behemoths.html
Interconnectedness is one of my favourite subjects and the article above seems to point that that we are really no closer to solving this issue that in 2008 post Lehman time frame. In fact, as stated earlier, it is orders of magnitude worse than 2008.
Thanks for the link. Of course, it is not just the banks that are interconnected. If the oil price is too low (and amount of oil exports is not rising), we have problems with fighting over resources in the Middle East, and potential loss of exports. This interconnectedness underlies our financial problems.
Gail
I seem to recall that the Saudis are kicking out their foreign servant class, to try to get their fat and lazy natives to ……work!
The Real Purpose Of The IMF
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-14/guest-post-real-purpose-imf
I am afraid the IMF article may be right.
Peak Everything….
Asia’s Chocolate Binge Compounding Global Cocoa Shortage
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-14/asia-s-chocolate-binge-compounding-global-cocoa-shortage.html
Dear Hideaway
Regarding the ‘ridiculous’ idea of putting a milking station in the pasture with the dairy cows.
I believe that Joel Salatin (who doesn’t have dairy cows, I think) included such milking stations in his examples of ‘the portable farm’. But I can’t find his comments with a short search today.
Joel has been promoting the idea that young people with no money, who can’t buy land, can nevertheless run farms on leased land with lightweight, portable equipment such as electric fences and chicken tractors and bee hives and so forth. And, if I remember correctly, the mobile dairies. Joel currently owns the family homestead, but he also leases a lot of land in the vicinity. Consider a young person who leases 3 or 4 different plots of land and decides to produce raw milk for direct sale. Since he or she doesn’t own the land, erecting a big milking shed is out of the question. In addition, the cows may be grazing far from the shed. The young farmer would have divided the plots up into paddocks which are rotationally grazed. The cows would have to be moved between the plots perhaps once a week, but not every day, twice a day for milking. So the portable daily may be a reasonable solution.
At the other end of the spectrum is a ‘walk in’ dairy at a university in Michigan where the cows wander in when they want to be milked and a robot does it. Much data recorded electronically so scientific management can be exercised. Probably lots of investment, also.
Joel is in Australia occasionally. If you plan to tell him that his idea is ‘ridiculous’, I want to sell tickets.
Don Stewart
“Joel has been promoting the idea that young people with no money, who can’t buy land, can nevertheless run farms on leased land with lightweight, portable equipment such as electric fences and chicken tractors and bee hives and so forth. And, if I remember correctly, the mobile dairies.”
Farmers who lease land can harvest trailers instead of building on someone else’s land.
I was going to build a portable chicken coop, until, frustrated with the expense and labour of axles, wheels, and such, I put an ad on our local buy/sell website, seeking to remove derelict trailers from people’s land. I had five offers, and built a chicken camper as a result, with a goat camper quickly following.
We just moved the chickens yesterday morning. We “camp” them up and down the sides of the greenhouse, removing grass and weeds and depositing fertilizer.
Our “mobile dairy” is not so mobile, and is in its third year in one location. But we could move it if our land was taken away, and it cost us nearly nothing to “produce.” When the first one became too decrepit, we moved it into a far paddock as a sun shelter, and harvested a better trailer from a neighbours!
At least in our region, where internships and WWOOFers are common, derelict trailers litter the landscape, and people will almost pay you to haul them away. They may no longer be fit for human habitation, but they sure are a step up for animals who are used to three sides and a flimsy tarp roof!
yes our local donkey sanctuary uses a couple of old trailers–they seem to be a great success