Both the stock market and oil prices have been plunging. Is this “just another cycle,” or is it something much worse? I think it is something much worse.
Back in January, I wrote a post called Oil and the Economy: Where are We Headed in 2015-16? In it, I said that persistent very low prices could be a sign that we are reaching limits of a finite world. In fact, the scenario that is playing out matches up with what I expected to happen in my January post. In that post, I said
Needless to say, stagnating wages together with rapidly rising costs of oil production leads to a mismatch between:
- The amount consumers can afford for oil
- The cost of oil, if oil price matches the cost of production
This mismatch between rising costs of oil production and stagnating wages is what has been happening. The unaffordability problem can be hidden by a rising amount of debt for a while (since adding cheap debt helps make unaffordable big items seem affordable), but this scheme cannot go on forever.
Eventually, even at near zero interest rates, the amount of debt becomes too high, relative to income. Governments become afraid of adding more debt. Young people find student loans so burdensome that they put off buying homes and cars. The economic “pump” that used to result from rising wages and rising debt slows, slowing the growth of the world economy. With slow economic growth comes low demand for commodities that are used to make homes, cars, factories, and other goods. This slow economic growth is what brings the persistent trend toward low commodity prices experienced in recent years.
A chart I showed in my January post was this one:
Figure 1. World Oil Supply (production including biofuels, natural gas liquids) and Brent monthly average spot prices, based on EIA data.
The price of oil dropped dramatically in the latter half of 2008, partly because of the adverse impact high oil prices had on the economy, and partly because of a contraction in debt amounts at that time. It was only when banks were bailed out and the United States began its first round of Quantitative Easing (QE) to get longer term interest rates down even further that energy prices began to rise. Furthermore, China ramped up its debt in this time period, using its additional debt to build new homes, roads, and factories. This also helped pump energy prices back up again.
The price of oil was trending slightly downward between 2011 and 2014, suggesting that even then, prices were subject to an underlying downward trend. In mid-2014, there was a big downdraft in prices, which coincided with the end of US QE3 and with slower growth in debt in China. Prices rose for a time, but have recently dropped again, related to slowing Chinese, and thus world, economic growth. In part, China’s slowdown is occurring because it has reached limits regarding how many homes, roads and factories it needs.
I gave a list of likely changes to expect in my January post. These haven’t changed. I won’t repeat them all here. Instead, I will give an overview of what is going wrong and offer some thoughts regarding why others are not pointing out this same problem.
Overview of What is Going Wrong
- The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse. Back in 2008, the world financial system almost collapsed. This time, our chances of avoiding collapse are very slim.
- Without the financial system, pretty much nothing else works: the oil extraction system, the electricity delivery system, the pension system, the ability of the stock market to hold its value. The change we are encountering is similar to losing the operating system on a computer, or unplugging a refrigerator from the wall.
- We don’t know how fast things will unravel, but things are likely to be quite different in as short a time as a year. World financial leaders are likely to “pull out the stops,” trying to keep things together. A big part of our problem is too much debt. This is hard to fix, because reducing debt reduces demand and makes commodity prices fall further. With low prices, production of commodities is likely to fall. For example, food production using fossil fuel inputs is likely to greatly decline over time, as is oil, gas, and coal production.
- The electricity system, as delivered by the grid, is likely to fail in approximately the same timeframe as our oil-based system. Nothing will fail overnight, but it seems highly unlikely that electricity will outlast oil by more than a year or two. All systems are dependent on the financial system. If the oil system cannot pay its workers and get replacement parts because of a collapse in the financial system, the same is likely to be true of the electrical grid system.
- Our economy is a self-organized networked system that continuously dissipates energy, known in physics as a dissipative structure. Other examples of dissipative structures include all plants and animals (including humans) and hurricanes. All of these grow from small beginnings, gradually plateau in size, and eventually collapse and die. We know of a huge number of prior civilizations that have collapsed. This appears to have happened when the return on human labor has fallen too low. This is much like the after-tax wages of non-elite workers falling too low. Wages reflect not only the workers’ own energy (gained from eating food), but any supplemental energy used, such as from draft animals, wind-powered boats, or electricity. Falling median wages, especially of young people, are one of the indications that our economy is headed toward collapse, just like the other economies.
- The reason that collapse happens quickly has to do with debt and derivatives. Our networked economy requires debt in order to extract fossil fuels from the ground and to create renewable energy sources, for several reasons: (a) Producers don’t have to save up as much money in advance, (b) Middle-men making products that use energy products (such cars and refrigerators) can “finance” their factories, so they don’t have to save up as much, (c) Consumers can afford to buy “big-ticket” items like homes and cars, with the use of plans that allow monthly payments, so they don’t have to save up as much, and (d) Most importantly, debt helps raise the price of commodities of all sorts (including oil and electricity), because it allows more customers to afford products that use them. The problem as the economy slows, and as we add more and more debt, is that eventually debt collapses. This happens because the economy fails to grow enough to allow the economy to generate sufficient goods and services to keep the system going–that is, pay adequate wages, even to non-elite workers; pay growing government and corporate overhead; and repay debt with interest, all at the same time. Figure 2 is an illustration of the problem with the debt component.
Figure 2. Repaying loans is easy in a growing economy, but much more difficult in a shrinking economy.
Where Did Modeling of Energy and the Economy Go Wrong?
- Today’s general level of understanding about how the economy works, and energy’s relationship to the economy, is dismally low. Economics has generally denied that energy has more than a very indirect relationship to the economy. Since 1800, world population has grown from 1 billion to more than 7 billion, thanks to the use of fossil fuels for increased food production and medicines, among other things. Yet environmentalists often believe that the world economy can somehow continue as today, without fossil fuels. There is a possibility that with a financial crash, we will need to start over, with new local economies based on the use of local resources. In such a scenario, it is doubtful that we can maintain a world population of even 1 billion.
- Economics modeling is based on observations of how the economy worked when we were far from limits of a finite world. The indications from this modeling are not at all generalizable to the situation when we are reaching limits of a finite world. The expectation of economists, based on past situations, is that prices will rise when there is scarcity. This expectation is completely wrong when the basic problem is lack of adequate wages for non-elite workers. When the problem is a lack of wages, workers find it impossible to purchase high-priced goods like homes, cars, and refrigerators. All of these products are created using commodities, so a lack of adequate wages tends to “feed back” through the system as low commodity prices. This is exactly the opposite of what standard economic models predict.
- M. King Hubbert’s “peak oil” analysis provided a best-case scenario that was clearly unrealistic, but it was taken literally by his followers. One of Hubbert’s sources of optimism was to assume that another energy product, such as nuclear, would arise in huge quantity, prior to the time when a decline in fossil fuels would become a problem.
Figure 3. Figure from Hubbert’s 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.
The way nuclear energy operates in Figure 2 seems to me to be pretty much equivalent to the output of a perpetual motion machine, adding an endless amount of cheap energy that can be substituted for fossil fuels. A related source of optimism has to do with the shape of a curve that is created by the sum of curves of a given type. There is no reason to expect that the “total” curve will be of the same shape as the underlying curves, unless a perfect substitute (that is, having low price, unlimited quantity, and the ability to work directly in current devices) is available for what is being modeled–here fossil fuels. When the amount of extraction is determined by price, and price can quickly swing from high to low, there is good reason to believe that the shape of the sum curve will be quite pointed, rather than rounded. For example we know that a square wave can be approximated using the sum of sine functions, using Fourier Series (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Sum of sine waves converging to a square wave. Source: Wolfram Mathworld.
- The world economy operates on energy flows in a given year, even though most analysts today are accustomed to thinking on a discounted cash flow basis. You and I eat food that was grown very recently. A model of food potentially available in the future is interesting, but it doesn’t satisfy our need for food when we are hungry. Similarly, our vehicles run on oil that has recently been extracted; our electrical system operates on electricity that has been produced, essentially simultaneously. The very close relationship in time between production and consumption of energy products is in sharp contrast to the way the financial system works. It makes promises, such as the availability of bank deposits, the amounts of pension payments, and the continuing value of corporate stocks, far out into the future. When these promises are made, there is no check made that goods and services will actually be available to repay these promises. We end up with a system that has promised very many more goods and services in the future than the real world will actually be able to produce. A break is inevitable; it looks like the break will be happening in the near future.
- Changes in the financial system have huge potential to disrupt the operation of the energy flow system. Demand in a given year comes from a combination of (wages and other income streams in a given year) plus the (change in debt in a given year). Historically, the (change in debt) has been positive. This has helped raise commodity prices. As soon as we start getting large defaults on debt, the (change in debt) component turns negative, and tends to bring down the price of commodities. (Note Point 6 in the previous section.) Once this happens, it is virtually impossible to keep prices up high enough to extract oil, coal and natural gas. This is a major reason why the system tends to crash.
- Researchers are expected to follow in the steps of researchers before them, rather than starting from a basic understudying of the whole problem. Trying to understand the whole problem, rather than simply trying to look at a small segment of a problem is difficult, especially if a researcher is expected to churn out a large number of peer reviewed academic articles each year. Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of research that might have seemed correct when it was written, but which is really wrong, if viewed through a broader lens. Churning out a high volume of articles based on past research tends to simply repeat past errors. This problem is hard to correct, because the field of energy and the economy cuts across many areas of study. It is hard for anyone to understand the full picture.
- In the area of energy and the economy, it is very tempting to tell people what they want to hear. If a researcher doesn’t understand how the system of energy and the economy works, and needs to guess, the guesses that are most likely to be favorably received when it comes time for publication are the ones that say, “All is well. Innovation will save the day.” Or, “Substitution will save the day.” This tends to bias research toward saying, “All is well.” The availability of financial grants on topics that appear hopeful adds to this effect.
- Energy Returned on Energy Investment (EROEI) analysis doesn’t really get to the point of today’s problems. Many people have high hopes for EROEI analysis, and indeed, it does make some progress in figuring out what is happening. But it misses many important points. One of them is that there are many different kinds of EROEI. The kind that matters, in terms of keeping the economy from collapsing, is the return on human labor. This type of EROEI is equivalent to after-tax wages of non-elite workers. This kind of return tends to drop too low if the total quantity of energy being used to leverage human labor is too low. We would expect a drop to occur in the quantity of energy used, if energy prices are too high, or if the quantity of energy products available is restricted.
- Instead of looking at wages of workers, most EROEI analyses consider returns on fossil fuel energy–something that is at least part of the puzzle, but is far from the whole picture. Returns on fossil fuel energy can be done either on a cash flow (energy flow) basis or on a “model” basis, similar to discounted cash flow. The two are not at all equivalent. What the economy needs is cash flow energy now, not modeled energy production in the future. Cash flow analyses probably need to be performed on an industry-wide basis; direct and indirect inputs in a given calendar year would be compared with energy outputs in the same calendar year. Man-made renewables will tend to do badly in such analyses, because considerable energy is used in making them, but the energy provided is primarily modeled future energy production, assuming that the current economy can continue to operate as today–something that seems increasingly unlikely.
- If we are headed for a near term sharp break in the economy, there is no point in trying to add man-made renewables to the electric grid. The whole point of adding man-made renewables is to try to keep what we have today longer. But if the system is collapsing, the whole plan is futile. We end up extracting more coal and oil today, in order to add wind or solar PV to what will soon become a useless grid electric system. The grid system will not last long, because we cannot pay workers and we cannot maintain the grid without a financial system. So if we add man-made renewables, most of what we get is their short-term disadvantages, with few of their hoped-for long-term advantages.
Conclusion
The analysis that comes closest to the situation we are reaching today is the 1972 analysis of limits of a finite world, published in the book “The Limits to Growth” by Donella Meadows and others. It models what can be expected to happen, if population and resource extraction grow as expected, gradually tapering off as diminishing returns are encountered. The base model seems to indicate that a collapse will happen about now.
Figure 5. Base scenario from 1972 Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil” http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf
The shape of the downturn is not likely to be correct in Figure 5. One reason is that the model was put together based on physical quantities of goods and people, without considering the role the financial system, particularly debt, plays. I expect that debt would tend to make collapse quicker. Also, the modelers had no experience with interactions in a contracting world economy, so had no idea regarding what adjustments to make. The authors have even said that the shapes of the curves, after the initial downturn, cannot be relied on. So we end up with something like Figure 6, as about all that we can rely on.
Figure 6. Figure 5, truncated shortly after industrial output per capita (grey) and food per capita turns down, since modeled amounts are unreliable after that date.
If we are indeed facing the downturn forecast by Limits to Growth modeling, we are facing a predicament that doesn’t have a real solution. We can make the best of what we have today, and we can try to strengthen bonds with family and friends. We can try to diversify our financial resources, so if one bank encounters problems early on, it won’t be a huge problem. We can perhaps keep a little food and water on hand, to tide us over a temporary shortage. We can study our religious beliefs for guidance.
Some people believe that it is possible for groups of survivalists to continue, given adequate preparation. This may or may not be true. The only kind of renewables that we can truly count on for the long term are those used by our forefathers, such as wood, draft animals, and wind-driven boats. Anyone who decides to use today’s technology, such as solar panels and a pump adapted for use with solar panels, needs to plan for the day when that technology fails. At that point, hard decisions will need to be made regarding how the group will live without the technology.
We can’t say that no one warned us about the predicament we are facing. Instead, we chose not to listen. Public officials gave a further push in this direction, by channeling research funds toward distant theoretically solvable problems, instead of understanding the true nature of what we are up against. Too many people took what Hubbert said literally, without understanding that what he offered was a best-case scenario, if we could find something equivalent to a perpetual motion machine to help us out of our predicament.
Gail, you’ve written several times at least (including this post) about the important role of worker productivity in signaling distress of the financial system. The U.S. federal government reported recently that worker productivity rose again in 2014. Do you think worker productivity really is still rising in the U.S.? What are you watching for when you look at worker productivity?
Worker productivity = human obsolecense = skills = microelectronic and robotic design = ^ human obsolecence = ^ worker productivity = economic collapse
Since it is couched in terms of GDP, and GDP is primarily a measure of waste, what we’re saying when we say a US worker is “more productive” is really that he/she is “more destructive”.. allowing resources to be burned through at a faster, more “efficient”, rate.
And we worship the men and women who destroy the earth the fastest … click here to check out some of the heroes http://www.bloomberg.com/live
The Koch Bros top my list, followed by Caitlyn Jenner and “Family”
Lidia–I am afraid you got it right. More efficient = more destructive of the earth’s resources. Of course, if the economy is a dissipative system, perhaps that is what the real goal is, just like that of a hurricane.
There is the worker productivity that the Bureau of Labor Statics produces, and true worker productivity when considering what I call “increased inefficiency”.
The BLS will measure some things about, for example, how fast steel is made. But it is not going to look to see that we now need to build desalination plants, to get fresh water, when we could use wells in the past. And it won’t figure out that being forced to use a deeper well because water is being depleted at a higher layer is less efficient, or that having to use horizontal drilling and fracking is inefficient, compared to drilling a simple well.
I keep talking about “increased inefficiency” to get across the idea that it is not just what the BLS is measuring. Pretty much anything that raises the price of fossil fuels extraction and production is increased inefficiency. There is a lot of increased inefficiency elsewhere in the economy too–in education, and in medicine, for example. This is why costs are so high.
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Thanks Gail for the bad news. Actually, collapse, die-off, and forced power down is the better option given what lies ahead if we continue to burn energy, destroy oceans and forests. I’m not volunteering to go through this, but it looks likely that collapse may come relatively soon. If we were somehow able to continue with business as usual, there is the possibility of pushing toward equilibrium with outer space due to massive heat loss which would result in a dead planet.
“Actually, collapse, die-off, and forced power down is the better option given what lies ahead if we continue to burn energy, destroy oceans and forests. I’m not volunteering to go through this, but it looks likely that collapse may come relatively soon.”
Diversifying our energy supply will help quite a bit.
Diversifying our energy supply will help quite a bit.
I thought Gail addressed that?
She tried, but she is stuck on FFs that created this world, and hasn’t looked at the potential economic boom that renewables bring even if we need FFs to help create them. We don’t need to completely abandon FFs but we can cut back considerably and it helps our economy. It MIGHT not show up in the GDP, but we increase our wealth with cheaper forms of energy.
madflower69, please…
We need a fix now. The fix needs to provide lots and lots of energy, of the kinds that work in today’s equipment, much more cheaply than today’s energy. Diversifying our supply, unless it is with a perpetual motion machine, is not likely to help.
“We need a fix now. The fix needs to provide lots and lots of energy, of the kinds that work in today’s equipment, much more cheaply than today’s energy. Diversifying our supply, unless it is with a perpetual motion machine, is not likely to help.”
The reason why we needed to start to diversify was to hedge against rising FF costs. Now that we have hedged, and are 5+ years ahead of schedule as far as anticipated cost reductions, it is now cheaper to use the alternatives.
If you install solar on your roof, you get electric at 6.5c/kwh right now, which is lower then utility rates. After 15 years, it is like a perpetual motion machine, because your system is entirely paid off. I mean you do have added costs of windex, and a cloth to wipe them off with, and a little bit of time it takes to do it. Otherwise, it is free energy.
Even a perpetual motion machine will cost money, so who knows what the payback time for that would be.
We may be heading in that direction, anyhow. There is a recent paper out:
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/pnas-2015-schramski-1508353112.pdf
I would highly recommend the book “2052 A Global Forecast for the Next 40 years” By Jorgen Randers who contributed to the original Limits To Growth. It is a report to the Club of Rome on the 40th anniversary to the Limits to Growth. With newer computer models he updates the predictions Gail uses above. He engages in broad forecasting using LTG and the (in)accuracy in predicting the 40 years after its publication as a blueprint for what might happen in the next 40. It feels very much where Gail is at.
Thanks again Gail for your analysis
Philippe, Gail reviewed Jorgen Randers’ book not so long ago:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/09/25/why-i-dont-believe-randers-limits-to-growth-forecast-to-2052/
I do not agree with the book 2052 at all. See my posts:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/09/25/why-i-dont-believe-randers-limits-to-growth-forecast-to-2052/
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-randers-2052-energy-forecasts-are-wrong/
http://tinyurl.com/qbkh5u4
compelling argument gail but it seems very similar to duncans olduvai theory
specifically SL = E/P SL = standard of living as defined by OECD e = energy p = population
i dont disagree necessarily with the resources argument, but what is problematic is in both camps, that we dont have the maths to capture human behavior 100% nor even predictable to a high degree given N number of situations.
right? so both sides miss that human behavior i.e. actions in the future, CANNOT be capture or discounted by ANY model (thank my atheist gods for that), which is a good thing no?
so what i am really saying is, both arguments, that things will collapse, and that things will be fine and growth will continue, are wrong.
so then where does that leave us? in the middle? HARDLY. shit is going down, its just that there is more possibility for how it goes down and predicting 1 billion sustainable is totally not predictable because we just dont know.
…and predicting 1 billion sustainable is totally not predictable because we just dont know.
And unless you’re one of the unlucky few left remaining, it won’t matter much anyway. But I imagine it will be much fewer than that, if we make it through the bottleneck at all.
I don’t think Duncan was terribly far off. He missed the rapid rise in coal in recent years. He also missed what I call the “overhead” component. The idea that the after-tax income of the non-elite workers much be sufficient is based on the analysis by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov of civilizations that collapsed in their book Secular Cycles.
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Explosive stuff about your past and future you likely did not know:
https://www.academia.edu/8584394/Toward_a_Joint_Future_beyond_the_Iron_Curtain_The_East-West_Politics_of_Global_Modelling
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2015/08/the-limits-to-growth-in-soviet-union.html
I know both Dennis Meadows and Ugo Bardi, so the inability of the Soviet Union people to believe collapse comes as no surprise. The Soviet collapse happened when oil prices were low. As an oil exporter, the Soviet Union was very vulnerable to low prices. It was not until prices rose again, that it was able to raise its production (this time as Russia and other nations separately).
T
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Ok, this article hit me like a ton of bricks. I think the Saudi’s know that the world needs cheaper energy and may drive prices to $30 /bbl or less. Natural gas energy in the US is already priced at <$20/bbl equiv and has been for years. That might create a temporary but lower plateau of economic activity for awhile not unlike the move to zero interests "kicked the can" for awhile. Energy production will surely decline since even OPEC is maxed out. And I can see how the debt problem is likely to explode and create a fast collapse. But even there, money printing to nationalize bad debt may "work" for awhile to "kick the can" once more. Bear with me as I struggle to put a personal timeline together . I think it is: 1) stay long my consevative muni bonds and treasuries, 2) wait till stocks hit 2050 or so on a rebound, and ease into a large short position in inverse inverse ETFs, 3) harvest capital gains, 4) buy gold coins and bars along with a security safe hidden in my place, 5) buy a sailboat to live on, provision it and a find a safe low-population area to hang out.
Maybe short term if you’re lucky. Longer term, purely monetary solutions will be small comfort, especially if they’re implemented last ad hoc at the last minute.
Honestly, better solutions? Give it all some serious thought and soul searching for as long as it takes and honestly figure out which way you want to go. Many of less fortunate members of the human condition and/or those with deep cultural ties might well realize we’ve simply got no realistic choice but to accept our current conditions and go down with the ship as we are. There’s no shame in that. In fact, we’ll be doing all the rest of humanity a much needed service, especially those of us living here in the energy coddled west.
In the event you choose otherwise, realize you’ll be fighting a losing battle over the long term either way, and honestly ask yourself why it is that you feel you and yours should be allowed this extra time based on your contributions to our current predicament, what kind of world do you expect to be living in if your plans succeed, and perhaps most importantly, what makes you fear your own death so much that you would seek to avoid it over the short term at the exclusion and possible expense of so many of your fellow human comrades?
These are the questions I ask myself when I come to the conclusion that – Fast Eddy and all his DNA hyperbole notwithstanding – such a world is not one I find myself either worthy of, or mentally or physically capable of inheriting. And that’s just fine by me.
Mr DNA is very angry with me over my earlier comments expressing my desire to see the human species exterminated… he is apparently…. insulted….
http://amoureuxdulangage.m.a.f.unblog.fr/files/2014/10/flogging-1872.jpg
Der Fuhrer, Mister DNA, is in a RAGE, you traitor proving that intelligence with a dose of universal morality overrides the matrix programming.
Au contraire…
As the saying goes talk is cheap…. on one hand I wish for extermination …
But on the other hand …
I was at Wally’s World today cramming the ute full of end of the world stuff… and yesterday I piled in another large truck of compost … and picked up another load of mulch… if you had a look around here you’d think I was starting up a commercial farming operation …. the neighbours are certainly curious….
Mr DNA wins again….
Let’s listen to Mr DNA’s anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNDl41HfvxI
Why have all these loons and the low imagery showed up all of a sudden?
Don’t you wonder?
“Why have all these loons and the low imagery showed up all of a sudden?
Don’t you wonder?”
Usually the loonies aren’t from the states usually they are from 3rd world countries like South Africa, Australia, Germany, Canada, southeast US, etc. They typically have nazi /racist traits defending their mining industries which are tanking. Like South Africa wants a war so the price of gold goes up, Australians and Germans are defending their coal industry, and Canadians are defending their oil industry. It isn’t all the people from those respective countries, it is just the few loons trying to make a splash.
I would suggest starting with 5). I think your ability to do 1) to 4) is likely to be limited.
I already have sufficient money to be retired, I’m just thinking of a way to profit from falling equity prices. I mentioned that stocks will likely rebound from last week’s price declines in the next week or two and I’m thinking of establishing a significant short position in several weeks. If I see any of my holdings fall in price like muni bonds, I’ll simply sell and go to cash. As far as buying gold bullion, I could do that next week if I wanted to. In the coming months, I’m sure that every gov’t in the world will go to serious money printing and high levels of deficit spending very soon (as tax receipts fall and for debt nationalizations). This will cause gold prices to rise. The gold holdings would be for future bartering purposes while living on my sailboat. Seems like a plausible plan? Not sure why you discounted my 1) to 4) since the can be done in the very near future.
“I’m thinking of establishing a significant short position in several weeks.”
Seriously look at -options-.
I don’t know whether gold will work for bartering purposes. I wouldn’t count on it, especially for necessities like food and water. People will not be willing to sell food, if there is not enough for themselves. At a minimum, you need a Plan B. Gold might (possibly) work for bartering for some other purposes, but you had better know the language of the area where you are headed. You may not be well received as a foreigner.
I think you would do better buying fishing equipment for the boat. You might also think about other approaches for getting food–sea weed, for example?
Those with sparkling white faces best get used to the fact that this will not longer be your passport to the world…
In fact given the very negative associations around the world of a white face with brutal violence and oppression (yes most people are aware that the west installs and supports the violent dictators who reject democracy and torture their people while living high on the proceeds of selling out their countries resources) a white face will be a dangerous thing to show in many countries post-collapse….
A lot of people will be looking for payback….
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This is an excellent summary of where we stand — we are in the final count down — if we get another year out of the jalopy that would be a good result…
A couple of comments:
“The electricity system, as delivered by the grid, is likely to fail in approximately the same timeframe as our oil-based system. Nothing will fail overnight, but it seems highly unlikely that electricity will outlast oil by more than a year or two. All systems are dependent on the financial system. If the oil system cannot pay its workers and get replacement parts because of a collapse in the financial system, the same is likely to be true of the electrical grid system.”
I struggle with the year or two scenario … I would expect that as the deflationary death spiral accelerates … the financial system collapses…. and just like in 2008 when global trade stopped on a dime…. I suspect that the same thing will happen again this time…
The oil tankers and oil pipelines and trains hauling oil will stop rather abruptly… I expect strategic petrol reserves would be used to enforce martial law rather than to keep the economy staggering along for a few more weeks…
“We can’t say that no one warned us about the predicament we are facing. Instead, we chose not to listen.”
I do not believe it matters that we chose not to listen. There was never another path to be taken.
The doctor has told us all that we have maximum one year to live. What does one do with that year?
I’m as much of a doomer as anybody, but strictly speaking this isn’t correct.
I would reword it as the following:
The old and sick and those in bad locations and the unlucky have one year to live. The young and healthy and those in good locations and the lucky have longer, provided they make the right decisions.
Nothing will happen overnight. And you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the people next to you. Think if all of the obese people in America really started to suffer consequences, as in die, rather than being supported by the health care system. That is a lot of food that is freed up for others to eat. Same goes for the elderly.
Dolph, +1
You have to get outside of the big cities to see it, but thaks probably mostly to the fact that, due to soil depletion, the nutrition of our food supply has dramatically declined over the last 40 years, a tremendous number of people are in really, really bad health. Even in midtown Manhattan, a few years ago you began to see people who seemingly could walk but are pretty obese riding electric scooters to and fro. This was a really telling sign. Until recently, people in Manhattan used to be less obese and more fit, on average, than many other places, because among other things, you have to do a lot of walking to get around in Manhattan and you have to walk up a lot of stairs. If we have a pretty rapid collapse and government support systems fall apart and/or food deliveries become erratic, a lot of people are just going to die, quickly. These millions and millions of people who are really overweight and/or otherwise in poor health are not going to be forming into bands of roving marauders. If gasoline supplies are also disrupted or become strictly rationed, a lot of people aren’t even going to be able to seek “greener pastures” and relocate. It’s difficult to imagine that many Americans will be a) willing, and b) even have the physical capacity to simply take to the roads with a handful of possessions like war or climate refugees in Africa. A lot of people in the cities esentially will be trapped and will die in place.
There was a pic Zero Hedge posted awhile back. It showed in America how looked back in the 50’s vs today. People were thin, there was a well dressed mom and dad with their child and they were all thin but smiling. Then they showed the comparison of today’s America. It showed obese and badly dressed individuals standing in front of Walmart looking down at their cellphones.
It just shows a civilization in decline and this isn’t just an American problem either. It’s a reflection on Society as a whole. You can find people dressed and just as obese in Europe and Asia.
What about all the ex-military types in America — there must be many hundreds of thousands of them…
Not everyone in America is an obese weakling…. there are plenty of hard core potential marauders around….
No matter where you are in a country of 300M+ … there are millions with weapons who live well within the limits of their last tank of petrol…
You’re largely correct, but I think you’re probably overestimating the number of isolated instances of strong-willed people coping just fine, and underestimating the number of instances of people of any capability simply being overwhelmed by local circumstances, often seemingly completely innocuous. Highly technologically advanced industrial civilization has become “the very air that we breathe,” and thus almost all of us completely discount our reliance on it, right down to the most mundane of details. Simple things like cuts and minor health (dental, sunburns, rashes and other minor dermatitis issues, etc.) issues that all of a sudden must go untreated or linger until they become life threatening and/or possibly infectious, etc.
I agree that a year or two gap between electricity and oil collapse is probably too long. I didn’t really want to say that they would go down at the same time. In some ways, petroleum is more resilient than electricity. I know that it took a long time to get electricity to farms in the United States. Many of these farms had oil powered equipment (cars, trucks, washing machines) before they had electricity. Because electricity is portable, it seems like there is a possibility that at least some oil uses will outlast the electric grid, for a while.
You are probably right that there was no other way. The only alternative nature really gives us is grow or collapse. Perhaps a lot of effort put into birth control and two child families might have kept growth down, so it could last longer, but we would still run into limits sooner or later.
I agree with Fast Eddy’s and numerous others’ analysis that there was almost certainly no other way on the way up. Our inevitable exponential growth was likely a given from the start. And I think James II might have really hit on it.
http://megacancer.com/2015/08/03/dual-systems-theory/
Outstanding thoughts….
“The idea that humans could evolve long enough in technological society for controls to become viable through education is beyond reasonable since the subconscious desires and urges are rarely amenable to good sense and voluntary modification, although quitting addictive behaviors is possible for some.”
China’s slowdown and cheap oil http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34060921
Reporter killed while doing a TV broadcast in Virginia.
I’ve long believed that America is not going to be a particularly nice place on the other end of collapse. It is a racially and class divided country filled with angry people. These social aspects have to be taken into account, even if on paper America has a lot of space, energy, and resources remaining.
The system is breaking.
I do not think Trump is going anywhere, but if you listen to his rhetoric and substitute “jews” for “mexicans” it sounds like Europe in the 1920s.
I realize that I am flirting with Goodwin’s Law, but there is a resemblance. Or a nicer level he sounds like a mashup of Putin, Berlusconi, George Wallace, Huey Long and Juan Peron.
I worry about a more subtle future incarnation of Trump.
Right at some point we will get someone who has all of the approval of TPTB, as Hitler did. Because at that point even TPTB will be begging anybody to restore order. And then he will unleash his own agenda.
Alternatively America will collapse into civil war, and then it will be left to the new governments to determine their political future.
In any event I don’t see much of a future for the United States. But it was a great show while it lasted.
And don’t forget — America is fully armed.
America has the potential to be exponentially more violent than Nazi Germany …. you’ve got the guns + polarized population + the racial divide….
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s1.feuerwerks.com/product/H/H-115.png
America is and has long been exponentially more violent than Nazi Germany, it’s just that we in the privileged white majority have long since chosen to ignore it. In our case, ignorance is indeed bliss! But fear not, the stormtroopers will be coming for us mere plebes all too soon as well.
“America is and has long been exponentially more violent than Nazi Germany,”
I don’t think we are as violent as Nazi Germany, but I agree we have always been violent.
The citizens of the middle east, south and central america, and indo-china might challenge you on this….
That, mr, depends on how you interpret things that has happened and happens as we write…
It is not race it is north versus south. I won’t go through the details I do not want to offend anyone. Both parties will be far happier with the other.
Or a nicer level he sounds like a mashup of Putin, Berlusconi, George Wallace, Huey Long and Juan Peron.
I know you probably didn’t mean anything by it, but Putin is actually a visionary leader of uncommon wisdom and restraint as world leader standards go these days. We would all probably not be alive to have this discussion if he weren’t, given the US’s obvious provocations toward all out nuclear war in the past year or so. Closer to the truth to include Clinton, Bush, and Obama in that crew if you’re trying to make a statement about crazy leaders.
Trump on the other hand, is pure theater at this point. He’s smart enough to realize that’s what separates him from a field of Republican sheep too intimidated by the national spotlight and modern mass-marketed political realities to actually say anything of substance. In fact, he’s very likely merely a well-funded political dark horse meant only to shake things up in the early running and separate the potential winners from the obvious losers. In any case, if he progresses very far in the election sweepstakes from here on out, expect a suitably more somber and serious Donald to emerge.
But I doubt even he seriously expects that, if for no other reason than it would seriously impact his ability to earn in the short term, even allowing for any possible long term presidential legacy rewards, if indeed there are any going forward.
Unfortunately, you may be right.
Hubbert was relying on nuclear energy to take over fossil fuels as the primary energy source for an expanding high tech civilization. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father the US nuclear navy, was also very much aware of the strategic importance energy sources.
There are two types of nuclear energy: fission (essentially the conventional 400+ nuclear fission reactors that exist today in several countries) and fusion (no commercial fusion nuclear reactor exists today but there are several experimental ones – and there could be operating fusion reactors within unacknowledged “black programs”).
Theoretical nuclear fusion was well known at the time Hubbert wrote his famous report.
However the nuclear proliferation issues related to the technology used to reach controlled thermonuclear fusion were far less known than today.
Fission nuclear reactors are a dead end as a viable option for replacing fossil fuels as the primary energy source of human high tech civilization. There is simply not enough economically and technically extractible uranium and similar nuclear fuel on the planet. Furthermore, the “breeder reactor experiment” attempted by several countries is an economic and security failure.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion however remains a theoretical option for replacing fossil fuels as the primary energy source of human high tech civilization. If a commercial fusion reactor capable of reaching the temperature required to fuse hydrogen and boron can be developed, it would require little shielding against radiation because that fusion reaction produces little neutrons. Furthermore both hydrogen and boron are abundant on the planet (H2O=water and 2/3 of Earth’s surface is water…).
The real problem, if a commercial fusion reactor can be rapidly developed, is one of nuclear proliferation and of geopolitics. If one can produce – with a commercial fusion reactor – a high energy fusion reaction (the energy of the Sun) without the need for a trigger fission reaction, it implies that one masters the technology for producing scalable fusion explosive devices without the need to also know how to build a fission bomb. Furthermore, in a world where unlimited low cost fusion energy is available and nuclear deterrents exist among the “big players”, the country that has the largest market and the cheapest labor would likely first economically rule, then technically rule and finally, not so long after, simply de facto vassalize the rest…
If the above mentioned nuclear proliferation and geopolitical issues could somehow be resolved, then humanity would enter in a race against time to: (i) develop a safe and relatively cheap commercial fusion reactor; (ii) to replace all the existing fossil fueled electricity producing plants by electricity producing fusion reactors; and (iii) replace the currently existing oil fuelled transportation system with an electrically fuelled one (planes and boats would be likely be last on the list).
If the commercial fusion reactors that we can put on line have a high enough EROEI, humanity might be able to credibly borrow “from the future” the capital needed to finance the related huge investments and ensure that the financial system remains operational until the transition is completed.
“IF” all this can be achieved and I agree that it is a big “IF”, the next big challenge for human civilization would be to survive the depletion of Earth’s other strategic resources until it has developed the capability to reach the resource bases of the “Other Earths” orbiting around other stars, which the Kepler satellite and related efforts are currently attempting to identify or have already discretly mapped…
If controlled thermonuclear fusion cannot be relatively rapidly used as the primary energy source of high tech humanity, the present planetary human population level will not be maintainable while managing the rapidly declining EROEI of the remaining planetary fossil fuel reserves and the depletion of other strategic mineral resources. A high tech civilization will somehow need to be maintained, in particular, the ensure the continuing maintenance of the currently existing +400 nuclear fission power plants and the numerous other storage sites for their most dangerous radioactive spent fuel, whose life spans over thousands of years… A loss of control over these facilities – as a result of civilization collapse or otherwise – would, through trade winds, spread deadly radioactive clouds all over the planet within a relatively short period of time and bring an end to life, as it is currently known, on Earth…
If TPTB are still able to exercise enough power – i.e. before a financial system crash or a potential widespread military conflict destroys existing functioning high tech societies – they are likely to attempt to execute a “controlled” human civilization “crash” in such a way that it would leave operating a few sustainable high tech “civilization islands”. These would essentially rely on currently existing renewable energy facilities (solar, wind, geothermal and hydro) and remaining, readily usable, fossil fuel reserves.
The ultimate objective of reaching the resource bases of “Other Earths” would however remain, in particular to minimize the risk that a future planetary disaster would threaten the existence of the remaining humanity and, in particular, of TPTB…
Nice analysis. Way too late for nuclear fusion at this point, if indeed, it ever becomes viable at all. I think the controlled crash is already on the drawing boards and in the very preliminary stages of execution; of course no one in the know would ever dare speak of it. The “other earths” idea deserves to be ridiculed and scrapped for the lunacy it represents on so many grounds, not the least of which is that it represents a total moral and intellectual failure on humanity’s part. If we can’t make a go of it on our home planet, what makes anyone think we’re worthy of looking elsewhere for other environments to destroy? “Invasive species” indeed!
I’m very excited about the new technology coming out such as the Searl Machine and the crystal cells. It’s unfortunate that some of this technology has been suppressed and hidden in the past, but it’s now time to see these devices come to market.
The Searl Machine will cost about $2k and will be about the size of your trash can. You’ll be able to plug in and have all the electricity you need for life.
The crystal cells are in beta test by 32 Native American tribes in the PNW. I do not know the price point at this time, but a shoebox size contraption of these cells can power an entire city.
Nuclear needs to go away, period. It is too unstable, too toxic, and no one knows what to do with the nuclear waste that remains radioactive for 20 generations. It is currently causing havoc in Japan as it continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean. Since the disaster there have been no baby Orca whales that have lived past 3 years old and the whales have stopped singing. I would not be surprised if Japan ends up getting evacuated. The residents who could leave have done so already.
Oil is abiotic and the Earth needs this substance to grease the many plates that make up the planet. We need to stop using it or earthquakes will become more frequent and more deadly. The middle east wars to protect the oil needs to end.
Which crystal cells are you talking about?
There is no way the Searle machine will be 2k, if they get it to work. The machining they need will cost more then that. There have been several attempts to get that to work and all of them have failed, although the Searle machine does look like the most technically advanced.
I think I saw this on the Shopping Channel the other day….. they told me if I acted within the next 3 minutes that I would get 3 of these machines + a bonus sack of blue crystals that would cure cancer…
Sounds like a transparently thin vamp on Breaking Bad’s blue crystal meth.
Wow. How many here are getting paid by the government to post?
I spoke with Prof Searl personally. $2k per unit is the price he quoted to me.
The crystal cells are coming out of Germany. The company meets with Obama about this new sustainable technology soon. But carry on with your doom and gloom. At least now I know I no longer wish to swim in this cesspool.
“I spoke with Prof Searl personally. $2k per unit is the price he quoted to me.
The crystal cells are coming out of Germany. ”
2k isn’t bad. It just looked like it cost more then that in manufacturing and assembly. Maybe they shrunk the design a bit.
I am interested in the crystal cell technology. It is actually possible. At least according to what I read about late 1800s/early 1900s technology. however, the output was never very high. Tesla had some interesting things written on the subject. I don’t know if it is true or not, but it is worth a look.
$2k per unit… that’s mighty expensive snake oil!!!
Did I mention I have this renewable energy gig going down here in NZ…..
Yep – me and Tommy Vu (]http://www.infomercial-hell.com/blog/2006/06/22/hard-time-in-prison-for-tom-vu/) teamed up on a a JOINT VENTURE …
I like to stay in the background kinda like the MASTER MIND — while Tommy is the public face… as you can see he was very convincing in his previous gig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc
So it’s like this:
I takes me a solar panel… then I git me a big ol stud sheep…. I then mate them (don’t ask how – that is the patented top secret thing — I don’t even tell Obama about this when I meet him — the CIA is crawling all over my farm — phones tapped — NSA is on my computer…. but I hold my cards close…. this is the trillion dollar idea I’ve got here… ain’t nobody gonna steal it!)
Enough of this digressin…. ya’ll must be wondering how ya can be rich (and have a yacht with chicks…)
Well what comes out the back end is a SHEEPLE … you can hook it up to the grid and you get money for nothing chicks for free…
It just so happens I got some prototypes all ready to roll out … and I’m giving the FW people the first shot at it (because I love you guys and gals SO much! — and because we’ve identified Koombaya types as the most suitable investors for this once in a life time opportunity)
If you ACT NOW (NOW dammit — not later — you MUST ACT NOW — otherwise you will MISS THE BOAT) …
I can send you a pair of these here units + free T-fal frying pan bonus and a ginzhu knife…..
For the low low price of $999 + shipping an postage….
And not only that … if you call within the next 13 seconds… I will send you a framed… signed photo of me with Obama and a SHEEPLE — which I received (and am allowed to use to endorse my scam…. uh hum… ‘OPPORTUNITY’) when I contributed $100,000 to his last election campaign
So go git the phone and call 1 800 FASTEDDY…. That’s 1800 FASTEDDY.
And have your credit card ready — and don’t be askin no questions because there will be thousands trying to call in and Fast will shut you down real quick if you read out anything but the digits… show me the digits… and I’ll be needin the expiry date … and that 3 digit thingy on the back — I will need that too….
You mess around and NO SOUP FOR YOU!….
All rights reserved — Fast Eddy Corporation PO Box 778941 Nowhere New Zealand.
You may have seen Admiral Rickover’s speech from 1957, predicting Peak Oil. I thought it was very good.
I agree that nuclear fission energy cannot be expanded very much for the reasons you mention, plus other reasons–one of them high cost, especially for countries that are intent on preventing accidents.
I think it is too late for thermonuclear fusion to be developed and have any impact. We need more energy now, not 10 or 20 years from now.
“We need more energy now, not 10 or 20 years from now.”
isn’t the indication that the commodity prices for oil, ng and coal a sign that we have enough energy? It is to the point where they are calling it an oil glut.
We should double down on our efforts for renewables and electric vehicles since we -can- right now free up important fossil fuels for important purposes.
Whenever I read the word ‘renewables’ this happens:
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/CMv0V9LqLRo/hqdefault.jpg
“Whenever I read the word ‘renewables’ this happens:”
Is that a picture of you right before your self-extinction?
You are right I should call renewables next generation fuels, but renewables are really this generation, so that doesn’t work. I could call renewables clean energy, but the NG industry, tries to get in the mix. I could call renewables non-fossil fuels, but that is too many negatives. I could call renewables self-perpetuating fuels, but that is too long. I could call renewables free energy, but free energy is a whole other ballgame and doesn’t accurately describe all the fuels. I could call renewables God’s fuels. Would you like me to refer to Renewables as God’s Fuels?
I can’t think of a reason why I should be able to call renewables God’s fuels.. I will offend the athiests and agnostic people by calling renewables that. I could call renewable fuels green fuels, but some of the renewables have little to do with plants.
Since I am out of ideas, I will keep refering to renewables as renewables. But I will make a deal with you, once you get your solar system set up and your electric car, I will let you refer to what I call renewables, as something else.
I am thinking shopping carts would be more useful than an electric car….
I’m still working on the yard crew over at the University and I heard this Prof. talking to one of the kids and he was telling him that the term renewables came out after the oil embargo in the 1970s. He said that all these people started going on about alternative energy and they were really hopped up about getting woodstoves and stuff and the oil people didn’t like the notion that there is an alternative. They didn’t want anyone to think that was an alternative to the fossil fuels. So they started this thing about renewables. and they put out the word to the writers there that they weren’t to use the term “alternative energy” any more. There is no alternative. From then on anything that wasn’t oil and coal and gas was renewable. Like it was all worn out but it could be renewed or something. He said that was pretty crazy since hydro and wind and panels are all solar. Even the fossil fuel is solar that’s been stored by plants. He said Sunshine is the only income we’ve got and we act like it not always been there for the past so many billion years.
We’ve had some nuclear and some geothermal but most everything on this planet is from solar. What do I know? That Prof. makes more in a day talking at those kids than I make in a month raking leaves and picking up trash. That’s all I know.
“Renewable” sounds like “perpetual motion machine,” but doesn’t have the obvious impossibility associated with it. Clearly, renewables aren’t renewable–they are part of our fossil fuel system, and they use minerals for which high quality ores are limited in supply as well.
“They didn’t want anyone to think that was an alternative to the fossil fuels. So they started this thing about renewables. and they put out the word to the writers there that they weren’t to use the term “alternative energy” any more. ”
Your professor is actually right. In fact, most of the hype and laws against alternatives can be tracked back to the FF industry. They typically use slanderous terms in the court of public opinion like Kumbaya’s is a new one. Sheeple didn’t really go anywhere. Hippies and dirt farmers were both used negatively. You see it a lot on this blog.
“Isn’t the indication that the commodity prices for oil, ng and coal a sign that we have enough energy? It is to the point where they are calling it an oil glut.”
Madflower, the elevated oil prices which pertained up until last summer were fundamentally the result of supply constraints. These elevated prices stimulated the production of more oil than the global economy could afford without adding unsustainable levels of debt. So now that we are reaching debt-saturation point, we find ourselves in a situation of oversupply, softening demand (somewhat disguised by strategic purchases) and lower prices.
In other words, insufficient quantities of lower-priced oil have with cunning irony temporarily created a surfeit of lower-priced oil.
“In other words, insufficient quantities of lower-priced oil have with cunning irony temporarily created a surfeit of lower-priced oil.”
In otherwords, you agree that we have an oversupply of energy so adding more isn’t going to help right now. You are speculating this is just a temporary drop in price because some of the oil producers are selling oil at below cost, and eventually the market will correct itself and prices will go back up. To what? Corn Ethanol helped spark a glut in because it was cheaper then gasoline on a per btu basis last October. Electric cars with 15c/kwh electric are competitive with <2 dollar gas, and the average cost per kwh for solar depreciated over 15 years, is 6.5-7.5c/kwh using real 2014 numbers, and that is most of the US using the 4.2 hours of solar. So if you want to do the extra work, you could be driving around for <1 dollar equivalent gasoline. If you use Wind energy, which is clocking in at 2.5c/kwh wholesale you are less then 40 cents.
Thus the question. what can it go back up to? The value of work that it can do has dropped. While I agree, this is a market correction, the question is at work price can it go back up to? It isn't the same market as it was 10 years ago. The dynamics have changed.
“the question is at work price can it go back up to?” I meant what price, not work price. 🙂
“In otherwords, you agree that we have an oversupply of energy.”
No we have an undersupply of energy that has temporarily created the illusion of a glut.
“No we have an undersupply of energy that has temporarily created the illusion of a glut.”
The market consensus doesn’t agree. The price has tanked. If there was a shortage, then the price couldn’t tank. What I would agree with is that because some oil producers are losing money, that the price is artificially low, which eventually leads to higher prices because of a market correction. In otherwords, for producers losing money, eventually the money runs out, they go bankrupt, the supply tightens and prices go back up in the market correction. It is a normal course.
Again the question is how high can oil prices really go?
We have an under-supply of energy that can be cheaply extracted.
“We have an under-supply of energy that can be cheaply extracted.”
The price of extraction of the energy is rapidly declining.
http://solar-power-now.com/cost-of-solar/
“The market consensus doesn’t agree. The price has tanked. If there was a shortage, then the price couldn’t tank.”
Not true. There is a shortage of cheap oil. These low prices, which are not actually low in historic, inflation-adjusted terms, and a glut of oil (not to be mistaken for an abundance of net energy) are fundamentally the result of supply constraints relating to the finite nature of oil:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/03/09/the-oil-glut-and-low-prices-reflect-an-affordability-problem/
“Not true. There is a shortage of cheap oil. These low prices, which are not actually low in historic, inflation-adjusted terms, and a glut of oil (not to be mistaken for an abundance of net energy) are fundamentally the result of supply constraints relating to the finite nature of oil:”
Very true. Affordable oil, just means it has to cost less then the competition. At 100/barrel for oil. Biofuels which clock in around 70-75 are cheaper. Thus oil started to tank, when we had another bumped crop of corn.
Because of cheap NG, most coal, and oil derative electric production switched to NG, lowering demand.
Then because solar and wind are starting to clock at rates in some cases less then the cheap fracked NG, you are seeing another shift. And once the systems are paid off. Anything you get from them costs next to nothing. You can right now find systems for 3.48w which over 15 years means you pay yourself 6.5c/kwh, and after 15 years it is free energy.
To add to that you have electric cars/hybrids hitting the road, now that the jitters of owning one have subsided a bit. The market is starting to increase. Which using a Volt, gas has to be cheaper then 2 dollars a gallon with 15c/kwh electric rates. At 6.5c/kwh gas has to be less then a dollar a gallon to be cheaper.
To explain the point further, since energy is traded and calculated on a per btu basis. The utility scale solar system you put in at 1.55/w over 15 years equals 42.50/barrel oil. After that it is free energy, which means oil has to cost zero to remain competitive.
China put in 66gw of solar electric, and India is putting in 175gw of wind and solar.
The 100gw of solar for india is equivalent to 240-300/barrels a day in production.
My question which you haven’t answered yet. Is how high can oil go?
I second your thoughts, geothermal and nuclear fusion is precisely the type of goal where I would put the rest of the fossil fuels in action, as a last attempt to leverage renewable tech manufacture, research and development in order to make the energy-resource consumption curve wider, which only would work if nations were willing to collaborate as they would if we had a common recognized external threat whilst breaking BAU in the process.
From there we have 2 directions going spaceborn possibly to the moons of the solar system for resources and begin to build structures to harness sunlight in space, as a very early prelude of a Dyson sphere the other way would looking into the Earths deeper crust to harvest heath and rare minerals or even volcanoes enhancing geothermal technology.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/05/are-volcanoes-the-energy-source-of-the-future.html
In the other hand we have the problem of the grid, but what if some regions of a country suitable for microgrids and for certain types of energy were developed, although the way to store the energy or transform it into fuel is still a challenge.
Nontheless a change of mind is required even if mars and venus were terraformed, with our exponential growth in all senses we would be in the same predicament we were escaping from in no time.
Thanks!
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Thank you Gail for your hard work for another valuable essay. Hope the time frame you project is off sometime in a decade or two. Perhaps the PTB will string us along with more tricks, if that’s possible.
I hope I have the timeframe off as well. Let’s all hope the PTB can pull out some more tricks.
One idea…
http://www.planetizen.com/node/80812/comparing-worlds-transit-systems
Not sure why it’s important to compare transit scores among major industrial cities. We may need to think of transit in very different terms than is conceived in these centers. For one thing, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) seems to be gaining surprising support, seen as more flexible and cheap than rail.
There are billions of cars on the road today. If gas went away tomorrow, how could they be used? Could they be retrofitted with “synapses” which allow them to link together like train cars? At certain stations, they could be released from the “train,” allowing occupants to travel to destinations away from transit’s reach. All kinds of questions though. How do you get each car to take on the general passenger? Gas would still be needed for those off-transit routes. How would it be procured? Would the public use the system? I think this “idea” is a little fanciful. Maybe the future in the west will be much more like the third world–minibuses, walking, etc.,–than this.
One way to ensure the latter would be to radically restrict car travel by narrowing their routes while expanding routes for buses and bikes…
Modify message
This makes a good listen, but it leaves out BAU, and ideas for facing it:
From comments to this article:
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/09/08/how-to-make-big-box-stores-less-terrible-for-walking-8-expert-tips/
“The big box stores all need to be exploded.”
7 billion people and a corrupt economic system can’t change suddenly. If big box stores were exploded, hundreds of millions would lose work, including those employed in the production and delivery system. .
I had never thought much about such issues till I began to read (OFW). But there tends to be zero sum thinking there as well. Since deadly chaos would ensue were the economic order to quickly collapse–cause and/or effect of big box explosion–the thinking is that global industrial capitalism must continue unabated else its collapse doom us all sooner rather than later. It must therefore grow by any means possible (since it is a Ponzi scheme based on infinite growth).
So those concerned about the “environment,” as we are, are stumped for an answer. Whether or not it’s an approach that can make sense, I tend toward thinking we need to engage with the big box store as well. Without jettisoning jobs, compensating new ones for lost ones, etc., might the economic order be stabilized in some way? But how can that help the environment, which must continue to be mined and polluted at ever increasing rates so as to keep the Ponzi scheme afloat?
OFW believes the economic system will crumble due to its own contradictions, and crumble surprisingly soon. I’m agnostic as to the timing, but am pretty sure a Ponzi scheme can’t go on forever… So, can there be a softer landing if we engage the big box stores and try to make them part of a “solution?” I don’t know. Money is utterly corrupting, and stores run on money. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries manage the economic system far more thoughtfully than does the US. There is much lack of clarity in the status quo.
“The big box stores all need to be exploded.”
It is orders of efficiency.
The local retailers got replaced by the big box stores. Because the big box stores, can handle more items at a smaller profit margin, and can manage to get wholesale prices and sell direct.
The big box stores have fierce competition from internet retailers. Who can get the same wholesale prices, but their cost of doing business is less.
Walmart took it to a new level, by essentially bullying local governments into giving them tax breaks, road work and other incentives they didn’t offer to local retailers. So even if a local retailer got the product for the same price as walmart, they have to charge more money, because they have higher costs.
some of the internet model existed previously through mail order. You got the sears catalogue, ordered your stuff then it arrived 6 weeks later. With amazon, you can get next day, or two day shipping usually.
In a knee jerk moment, I contracted to put PV solar on my roof. Just going on intuition and osmosis (what I glean through Gail and others) I see “renewables” as highly limited in utility. They can’t run BAU. They require FFs to make, transport, install, on and on. The mining for materials is a factor in huge, ongoing genocide. And more. But can what I have on my roof be helpful in the context of a broad mix of other things–material and behavioral? I say yes. It’s the thinking that any one thing solves the “problem” that I find so problematic.
“In a knee jerk moment, I contracted to put PV solar on my roof.”
Congrats!
“But can what I have on my roof be helpful in the context of a broad mix of other things–material and behavioral? I say yes. It’s the thinking that any one thing solves the “problem” that I find so problematic”
Behavioral is a huge issue in the States. There is a whole generations of people that were taught to look down on people because they weren’t using FFs.
I also agree, that trying to say there is one solution is wrong. People who are against renewable energy, try to peg it to a single source, since it makes it much easier to attack.
The person I quoted was making the environmental case for internet buying–you buy only what you want and don’t get hypnotized into buying all the tempting items in the store that you can do without. So, referring to the article, there would be no need to make the big box store shopping a more walkable experience. Just get rid of the whole thing and consume a lot less.
I may be representative of lots of people who are not comfortable shopping online, and like the familiarity and sense of security store shopping brings. Walmart has displaced the corner store, but it doesn’t seem that Amazon is displacing Walmart. It seems also that Walmart provides more jobs than internet vendors do. So I’m not personally pushed to reject the big box by switching to the internet. At the same time, I’m appalled by the waste and destruction the big boxes cause. I’m curious as to whether the big boxes could keep going post a softish collapse. That would require them to change in many ways. Also, I’m averse to the creative destruction model of business. I think this is a place where you stop, tie the knot, and try to make what is here now work many times better than it does currently. But I’m mostly trying to get clear in my own mind what it is I believe (right or wrong). I’m not betting on outcomes of any sort.
“Walmart has displaced the corner store, but it doesn’t seem that Amazon is displacing Walmart. ”
They fight over certain sectors of the marketplace. The market is so huge, that they both can exist and really serve different customer bases. It is the same for FFs and Renewable energy right now. Renewable energy is picking up steam since it pays for itself. But it is a major investment, with a long term commitment as well. I don’t see Solar and Wind completely replacing fossil fuels right now, but there is a long way to go before saturation of the market or the grid in the US.
WithheldName Artleads • 8 hours ago
Great points. We can hope the “big box economy” slowly continues to decline as people wake up. But even if there are a series of sharp contractions, our society has so much breathing room that the pains would almost be trivial…or COULD almost be trivial (if our society was more enlightened and had its priorities straight). We are the richest society that has ever existed and our lives are overflowing with abundance: excess housing space, excess vehicles, excess clothing, excess food, excess tools, excess consumer goods. If we even began to better share our excess resources and eliminate the waste and absurdity, we could all be twice as happy and healthy with half the resources we have now. Examples?
– Billions of dollars for stadiums that sit empty 300+ days a year.
– Billions of dollars for new churćhes that sit empty 6 days a week.
– Average home square footage doubled in the last couple generations…as family size has shrunk.
– A third to half of all food in America is discarded before ever being eaten.
– Average trip in a car is 4 miles – a distance that could be bicycled by most.
– 90% of people commuting to work alone in cars that can hold 5 people.
– Billions of dollars spent on gym memberships each year when most people use motorized means to get around and do other basic things like clean.
– And so on and so on
“We can hope the “big box economy” slowly continues to decline as people wake up.”
Oddly enough I think people are waking up. They realize the excess of the 80s credit fiasco could kill them. Namely because most of their parents got sucked into the trap.
I think you are seeing more “can do” types of attitudes, and not waiting for corporations to come out with the solution. It is a regression of sorts, in part because it became cool again, and in part because of necessity and living within your means.
The tiny house movement is almost exactly what you are talking about though. I keep seeing stuff on that in the media.
I wouldn’t count of the Scandinavian countries lasting longer than anyone else. We are all in this together.
Speaking of a PTB trick, for what it’s worth.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/its-hot-outside-could-this-machine-be-the-answer-to-global-warming/
The article says 5% of the CO2 from a steel plant could be captured and turned into a useful fuel. That leaves 95% of the CO2 still emitted. Does not seem the world is saved yet.
Agreed. But funding and scaling are limitations too. Rich countries could certainly afford to buy a couple (machines) for each of their nuclear plants so they have a bit more protection post FF collapse. And these devices can only be built while there are FFs.. They are not THE solution to anything. Nothing is. 🙂
“China Stunner: Real GDP Is Now A Negative -1.1%, Evercore ISI Calculates”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-26/china-stunner-real-gdp-now-negative-11-evercore-isi-calculates
yes but the DOW is up huge today!!
It always bounces after a crash. The question is the longer term.
Must’ve been a pretty big dead cat…
Rubber cat: http://www.zymetrical.com/images/rubber-cat.jpg
LOL.
We still have a few more cats to drop…
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/plunge-protection-team.asp
I get a different image in my head when people say Plunge Protection Team:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS1MesdWqa15dSsufd4Jz3wDogBwfZwGYkGOCKesUHmlNchtjYK
or this:
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQVKkNAqIGJkimj_CuCSKDK3LqkaDppG_SqdMs3Ilq_D5ycFyrLOw
Ha….
“It always bounces after a crash. The question is the longer term.”
Exactly, Gail. There is no such thing a perfectly declining bear or ascending bull market. On the way down people mistakenly think it’s a great opportunity to get bargains that will make them money when the market goes back up, only to find it was a temporary lull in an otherwise overall decline. The Dow is down 2,000 pts. from it’s high, and the Dow futures for tomorrow are down. So please do yourselves a favor and avoid throwing your money away by jumping in now.
Thanks. The quote in the article says:
Our proprietary Synthetic Growth Index (SG!) fell 1.1% mim in July, and was also down 1.1% y/y. No wonder global commodities are so weak. The most recent 18 months have been much weaker than the 2011-13 period. Even if we adjust our SG I upward (for too-little representation of Services — lack of data), we believe actual economic growth in China is far below the official 7.0% yly. And, it is not improving. Most worrisome to us; the ‘equipment’ portion of Plant & Equipment spending is very weak, a bad sign for any company or country. Expect more monetary and fiscal steps to lift growth.
Of course the MSM ignores this http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-22/forget-recession-according-caterpillar-there-full-blown-global-depression
31 months of declining profits… a lot of CAT business would have been in China therefore this would be a reflection on what has been happening there for the past 2.5 years…
“The world economy operates on energy flows in a given year, even though most analysts today are accustomed to thinking on a discounted cash flow basis.”
I think you are confused. The economy is money, money == work. work is related to energy, but to increase the value of something does not mean you have to spend money on energy to do the work. in 2006, the US imported 5B barrels of oil at 100/barrel that propped up the global economy 500B dollars. If oil at the time was 40 dollars, then it would have only been 200B dollars. The US pumped more oil over the last several years, and the imports dropped to 3B barrels, so 300B left the economy to support the worlds GDP. So if you just look at the global GDP, it shrank, it does not mean there was less work being done. Now that oil prices have plummeted the Global GDP will drop because the amount of money changes hands just in oil trade will have further decreased.
To add the the further decrease in the global economy, the rest of the world is importing less oil, as renewables, efficiency and electric cars start to come into play. Over a million PHEV/BEV are on the road (or will be shortly) around the globe.
“If we are headed for a near term sharp break in the economy, there is no point in trying to add man-made renewables to the electric grid. The whole point of adding man-made renewables is to try to keep what we have today longer. ”
Technically over the long term it is intended to give us options to give us economic independence from the fossil fuels.
In the short term it buys us time, but it also reduces our costs. If I put in a solar panel system, and get it to pay for itself after that I have more money to spend. I have increased my overall wealth.
I technically have free energy after that period, and can spend my money on other things like maybe an electric car, which since I am not paying for energy, it doesn’t cost me anything.
It doesn’t add to the GDP through energy costs. But I am realizing a financial gain.
What we are seeing right now is confusion in the markets. Because renewables are gaining traction, which does mean a contraction in the global GDP related to energy. It is a period of correction in the markets. Do you invest in coal, or do you invest in solar? Given the markets are forward facing, the smart money is going to start draining out of fossil fuels because there is no long term security in investing in them.
What is going on in the markets is a correction and some confusion. Renewables just threw the market and most economists a curveball. Most of them still can’t figure it out.
PHEV/BEV is less than one percent of global car fleet, plus the clear trend is young people NOT buying cars anymore (ever?), however PHEV/BEV bicycles and various “short range” ultra light transport gadgets usage will likely explode in almost any scenario into the near/midterm future..
Agree with your point on renewables to some extent, however you did not take into account that most/large part of renewable rocket rising usage regions are usally post industrial service oriented economies, think north/western EU etc. If global commerce collapses hard say for a decade or two, before new economic system takes solid roots, those services oriented economies will have to at least partly retool back to some basic manufacturing baseload hence needed fossil energy production of some sort back in the business (coal namely)..
I’d argue there will be hodge podge future of various semi-autarky regions (Russia’s sphere of influence), zones of utter chaos near affluent centers (think Greece/Southern Italy vs Germany), possibly north america splitting apart etc.
“PHEV/BEV is less than one percent of global car fleet, plus the clear trend is young people NOT buying cars anymore (ever?), however PHEV/BEV bicycles and various “short range” ultra light transport gadgets usage will likely explode in almost any scenario into the near/midterm future..”
The younger generation is also vastly more interested in electric vehicles and renewables. In the US it was like 60/40 but in china it was like 90/10. They are a generation that knows at some point they will have EVs and renewables, and not ICE enginecars and oil. They also seem to be a lot more interested in electronics then previous generations.
“Agree with your point on renewables to some extent, however you did not take into account that most/large part of renewable rocket rising usage regions are usally post industrial service oriented economies, think north/western EU etc. ”
That is because they typically have more money so in essence they are funding technology development to help drive down prices, and make money doing it. 🙂
The manufacturing they currently have doesn’t really use rely on coal, because of the crackdown on emissions, and in part because of the 1973 oil crisis. Most industry in the states is using NG and electric. Coal IS used to generate the electric for manufacturing, but changing that isn’t nearly as hard as switching from NG to electric. I am sure some industries still use coal, but they are limited, and having special needs that require it.
madflower, et al., exergy:
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2010/10/work-exergy-the-economy-money-and-wealth.html
http://www.exergy.se/ftp/exergetics.pdf
https://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/DyUMPHW1jsSmjoZfm2XEqg/1.3-Hermann.pdf
https://gcep.stanford.edu/research/exergy/resourcechart.html
We reached the planetary exergetic log-linear limit bound in 2005-08. Real growth per capita is no longer possible in net energy terms and after imputed debt service costs in perpetuity.
This means we cannot grow the economy in real terms per capita AND afford to build out “renewables” to necessary scale AND maintain simultaneously the fossil fuel infrastructure indefinitely to support GDP growth and build out of “renewables”.
Growth is over.
LTG.
http://contractionism.org/PDFs/Contractionary_Revolution_1st_Edition.pdf
http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/mcculloch.pdf
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-12-29/hubberts-prescription-survival-steady-state-economy
We need a r-evolutionary new world view, set of assumptions, policies, and a universalist, eco-humanist (-humachine?) metanarrative in order to adapt to no growth per capita and eventual de-growth.
Probability: infinitesimally small.
Kuntsler’s book The End of Growth … was well-titled….
‘The End of Growth’ is written by Heinberg, not Kunstler.
The Long Emergency is Kunstler. By long he means generations until to adjust to the new normal.
Ah yes… my bad… both excellent books — both well titled
You say
Do you have a calculation backing up your first statement?
“We reached the planetary exergetic log-linear limit bound in 2005-08.”
Any source for that affirmation ? It would be very interesting to look at the calculations.
I think I tried to ask the same question.
Yes, I saw, I was trying to back you up 😉
Exergy is very interresting, I have search for more but didn’t find many publications on the subjet (even less in scientific literature)
Without having the chops for this kind of analysis, I can only say I welcome it greatly. For what it’s worth, and for soft headed among us, Terrence McKenna comes at this (your last paragraph, especially) in a completely different way. Almost any of his series of long videos touches interestingly on the subject.
The economy not only has $$ attached to it, it also has energy flows attached to it. The energy flows are in some other units–say barrels of oil equivalent. The amount of “work” a barrel of oil equivalent can do stays the same, regardless of whether the price is $40 dollars or $80 dollars or $300 dollars per barrel of oil equivalent.
We have lived in a world where the price of a barrel of oil has risen rapidly, from $20 barrel to $40 per barrel to $80 per barrel, to $100 per barrel, and now back down to $40 barrel. What has changed is how much effort needs to go into extraction of that barrel of oil–we are in effect becoming more inefficient. We need to dig deeper wells, and we need to use fracking, and many other things. The higher cost is paying for essentially useless items, except these are the things we need to fight diminishing returns. There no longer is cheap to extract oil available in most parts of the world.
The quantity (that is Barrels of oil equivalent) of oil and other energy products determines how much goods and services that can be produced. Some of these goods and services are the essentially useless items needed to fight growing inefficiency. This leaves us with fewer barrels of oil equivalent for other “regular” uses, like operating cars. The economy becomes a poorer place, because more energy is going into fighting inefficiency.
When solar panels are made, they take another big up-front amount of energy, in barrels of oil equivalent. (Actually, the fuel is likely to be mostly coal.) But this fuel cannot be used for other purposes.
Both of these tend to act the same way on the economy–they tend to be big absorbers of energy in barrels of oil equivalent. The hoped for pay-back from the solar panels comes almost entirely in the future.
What happens is a real mismatch with wages. If, when oil prices went from $20 to $40 to $100 barrel, wages of individual workers went up correspondingly, there would be no problem. It actually tends to go the opposite way–wages of individual workers tend to drop, as oil prices rise. Workers can’t pay the high cost of extraction, os the prices come back down. I try to explain some of what happens in this post: How Economic Growth Fails
Ha I finally found this post again!
“The amount of “work” a barrel of oil equivalent can do stays the same, regardless of whether the price is $40 dollars or $80 dollars or $300 dollars per barrel of oil equivalent.”
The value of the work that can be performed by the unit of energy is a reflection of its price. If it is too expensive, either the work will not be performed or there will be some other source of energy used in its place that can provide the work, at a value that is deemed more profitable.
That is pretty fundamental free market economics. And you pretty much said that here:
“The quantity (that is Barrels of oil equivalent) of oil and other energy products determines how much goods and services that can be produced. Some of these goods and services are the essentially useless items needed to fight growing inefficiency. This leaves us with fewer barrels of oil equivalent for other “regular” uses, like operating cars. The economy becomes a poorer place, because more energy is going into fighting inefficiency.”
The key difference where we disagree is the fact that cost of extraction for wind/solar/biofuels is dropping to a price that is competitive or less than traditional FF energy extraction and processing techniques.
http://solar-power-now.com/cost-of-solar/
The cost of turnkey residential solar has dropped from 8 dollars to 3 dollars a watt over the last 10 years. (utility solar is like 1.55/watt) The cost of oil extraction has risen over the last 10 years because of diminishing returns. The two lines on the graph are starting to cross. Then the fundamental law starts to kick in as the market changes with a market correction.
The same thing for electric cars. If the cars were both the same initial price. the electric car costs less to operate. There will be a fundamental shift in the market.
Whether or not we can get that all from renewables is rather a mute point since the market is driven by price.
The current artificial low prices for oil, will eventually subside as the companies go out of business. As prices rise, people will re-evaluate their options.
Hi Madflower69,
Regarding GDP and your statement ” The US pumped more oil over the last several years, and the imports dropped to 3B barrels, so 300B left the economy to support the worlds GDP. So if you just look at the global GDP, it shrank, it does not mean there was less work being done.”
The GDP is not just a sales figure. From wikipedia: “…GDP is a measure of ‘value added’ rather than sales”. To be honest, I can only relate the following problems with GDP estimation:
Points from this website: https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product (which I’ve heard from other sources):
1. It includes hedonistic elements. “or instance, computers are hedonically adjusted to account for the idea that, because they are faster and more feature-rich than in past years, they must be more additive to our economic output. ” This is ridiculous.
2. It includes imputations. Talking about the 2003 GDP estimate …”First, that 11 trillion included $1.6 trillion of imputations, where it was assumed that economic value had been created but no actual transactions took place. The largest of these imputations was the “value” that the owner of a house receives by not having to pay themselves rent. If you own your house free and clear, the government adds how much they think you should be paying yourself rent to live there and adds that amount to the GDP. ” This is ridiculous.
3. It depends on calculating the inflation rate (AKA GDP Deflator). The inflation is in the denominator so…you can guess that they probably manipulate inflation to inflate the GDP. Also ridiculous.
And, lets not forget the illegal drug sales they now include (and prostitution in the UK).
Gail, thanks for very interesting article.
However, I’m afraid we have to differentiate in time and space.
In case the [current version] of global financial system falls apart in relatively fast order, lets say the process will take aprox. 6month to 2yrs at maximum to fully reveal about all the adverse effects/dominos, do you really think that during this process and afterwards people will just sit it out and die, perhaps somewhere it’s expected reaction and very likely but certainly not guaranteed everywhere as performed act in some sort of global sync!
Let me repeat my thesis that in such situation parts of the world will attempt some degree of autarky and or closer alliance of block of countries with obviously widely different results. Prime candidate being Russia, although people got a bit soft there by relying on western produced consumerables, the people in power are in not the same extent the clueless bunch of the 1980s, namely technology transfers (joint ventures) secured some sort of production in situ to go forward with domestic workforce and baseload energy/raw material sources whatever comes bad in pipe globaly to them.
Moreover promising EROEI projects like commercial fast breeding reactors now under construction/near completion (~1GW electricity output) going online before 2020-30s won’t be scraped, when Russia is already aware of the fact going to be more dependent on harder to get expensive fossil fuels of arctic/far east regions into the future etc. In short, your scenario will likely play almost to the described full effect/havoc perhaps in increasingly ungovernable western Europe, parts of NAmerica and Asia, Africa, but not everywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, in short I do expect unprecedented tremors, profound change of living arrangements and ideologies applied or pushed around, but certainly not extinction level hazard, at least before 2050-2100..
PS Here is a nice graph which suggests we are indeed about to enter severe recession or worse shortly, but that’s not the end of the world either.
http://www.artberman.com/wp-content/uploads/CPI-Adj-Oil-PricesKeyEvents_24-August-2015.jpg
(linked from discussion at http://euanmearns.com/opecs-gigantic-blunder/#comments)
But there will be no energy — without energy at best you get a very primitive ‘civilization’
?No energy, seriously?
A lot of steps in sequence must be taken in order to regions such as Russia or N.America to fold even their “own internal shop” and let die as dark cold energy starved star. Most likely won’t happen in next decades, perhaps few centuries, refer to M. Greer on that one..
But very different “civilization” setup with quite different priorities in energy consumption on both personal and overall aggreagate level, yes we could be talking relatively soon..
The only way you can maintain the system is if the Govt’s use their military for the up keep of the system. Beyond that it will be mass pandemonium if there are no jobs and businesses are shutdown and people are not getting paid. I like Greer but he’s just a blogger and lately he’s been getting a little too wishy washy.
Once shortages begin to bite hard, I imagine that military service – even if it’s just for meager rations, minimalist shelter, and barely adequate medical care – will be an attractive option for the young again. Even a blatantly imperialistic force that engages is rampant, random slaughter of innocents will start to look good to those with no other options.
I think that going to jail has already become an option of choice for some folks who cannot support themselves. How else can they get a roof over their heads, adequate nutrition, and healthcare, and someone else to worry about satisfying their needs?
I believe that during the great irish famine many committed criminal acts just so they could get a meager meal in jail….
I was a juror in a trial where one of the policemen testified that every fall, in his area, there were people who would commit minor offenses so that they would be put in jail for the winter.
The trial was a murder trial. The “plot” was that one man had killed his best friend, when they were both drunk, supposedly so that the killer could get the other man’s money ($150?) so that his family could install a suitable toilet so DFACS would not take the murderer’s two children away from him and his wife. They lived in a shack without running water or a toilet.
The various people who testified were folks who listed their place of residence as, “A car parked in front of 123 First Street,” or something similar. It was an introduction to a different way of life.
You bring up a good point. No doubt national militias are already preparing how essential services and resources will be managed if not run by enlisted corps.
Compare this preparation with the power vacuum in the middle east and the ensuing social crisis, refugees and slaughter. It is not as if the oil “economy” has no role. But more to the point, the lack of regional cooperation (=regional government?) among ME states has allowed crisis conditions to fester. The only preparations are thus military operations targeting other nations, tribes and factions. It is every trbe for itself. Small is not necessarily beautiful.
There will be some energy for some time in my area of the globe. There are many hydro electric sources plus millions of acres of peat bog and per my estimate 7 years worth of trees for heating through our brutal winters. Not a lot of energy but also not 0 energy.
An engineer in the hydro electricity industry was on this site some months ago explaining how complicated a hydro electric power plant is to operate and maintain….
There are thousands of very specialized parts that are sourced from around the world — which require very sophisticated machinery to manufacture them ….
There is also the massive grid which is made up of thousands of more parts…
These parts break … if you can’t replace even a single key one the entire system goes down…
As that engineer stated — most people have not the slightest clue what is involved — there will be no power coming out of hydro dams post collapse.
Most Hydro dams in the West keep spares on hand for the most critical components and have on-site fab shops for the mechanical parts (so short term they would be okay unless the engineers and crews take off), the biggest problem would be one of grid balancing. Every power system is a balance between source (the dam) and load (your TV, arc furnace….etc) if this is not in balance you either get brownouts or surges (exploding your TV), the challenge will be keeping the gird in balance so that people can have usable electricity, if the grid is falling apart due to work crews abandoning their posts and damage being done due to looting and rioting then keeping a grid up with be incredibly challenging. Also stepping down the power from transmission voltage 3ph >69KV down to distribution voltage (3ph 600 V) to ‘home voltage’ of 1ph 120/240 VAC would be a big challenge if the distribution infrastructure is being damaged and few people if anyone is around to repair it. Further complicating this is that in the utility space the large oil-filled and vacuum transformers are non-stock items as they are expensive and are actually frequently stolen and as of this morning (I quoted out a couple transformers for a client) the lead time on these is 14-18 weeks so there really aren’t storehouses of transformers anywhere that could be tapped to maintain an electric system, in the event of collapse, once a transformer goes it won’t be replaced meaning lights out.
http://www.spotlightnews.com/videos/2011/sep/15/27/
http://www.fab3r.com/images/gi/Hydro-Energy-Francis-Runner.jpg
To make matters worse, transformers are kept out in the open, without any kind of protection except a little fence.
Let’s see if this photo link works:
An old water wheel mill still operates twenty miles up the road from my house. the historical society that maintains with state parks system puts on a great festival of old skills and crafts at the mill yearly. They grind grain used in local restaurants. I buy it myself for a “donation”. A bill in the state legislature allowing them to sell to the open market was whacked recently for health standards. Hard to keep rodents out of the works. Tsk tsk…
I am curious … where do they get the spare parts to repair the water wheel these days…
It goes without saying… a hydro dam is slightly more complex than a water wheel…
http://www.climatechangecafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Colorado-dams_006_2012.jpg
You should take a tour. Quite fascinating. The entire works of this massive 36 ft wheel and gearing are made of wood and fabric/leather etc. The gears are lubed with wool which they found was better than oil.
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=482
Steven R
Yes, wonderful – enduring – machines: at which I trot out my old favourite line, ‘that in 1940’s Britain, there were surviving mils with main working parts 500 years old.’
Totally irrelevant to our common fate, as that world has gone for good, but worth reflecting on what craftsmanship can do.
Careful selection of original materials, skilled maintenance, all on a local basis.
I missed that Fast Eddie. TY for update. It seems machine shops should do quite well as things are loping downward. I recall my uncle who was a gunnery captain on a WWII destroyer amazed that the Japanese were able to provide a wide range of custom parts for the Navy after being bombed to smithereens.
No matter, large rivers will provide power of one type or another as they have in the past.. The town I live in, Minneapolis had huge industries such as grain milling, lumber cutting, metal working long before electricity was used. Then the Mississippi River would turn large wheels to power all sorts of machines including saws, lathes.
Michael, argh.
Have you not noticed a general decline in water levels due to increased evaporation and reduced snowpack and glaciers? The Mississippi, the powerful river you cite, had a period not that long ago in which they couldn’t even traffic it any longer:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-usa-drought-barges-idUSBRE8711KC20120802
I live in an area of the country that was once largely powered by hydro, and the rivers are a shadow of their former selves, except in times of super-storms which create flooding. A supposed year-round stream on my property dried up in July.
When the trees are sick (as they are), they can’t execute their rôle in the hydrological cycle.
“trees have placed themselves in the cycle that circulates water from the soil to clouds and back. They are able to maintain water in the liquid phase up to their total height by maintaining a column of water in small hollow tubes using root pressure, capillary action and the cohesive force of water. ”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-large-trees-such-a/
Fewer trees => less ground water => fewer trees => less ground water, in a diminishing cycle. Permaculturists like Geoff Lawton have done remarkable things (“Greening the Desert”), attempting to re-establish healthy cycles, but (and I say this as a graduate of one of his courses) I just think increasing heat and other adverse factors will ultimately defeat any efforts in this space. I also think there are chemical and atmospheric effects on soil micro-organisms which contribute to the infelicitous conditions trees and other plants are experiencing, and will continue to experience to ever-graver extents.
Then there are questions like, what would the “saws and lathes” you mention actually do? Encourage the cutting-down of more trees, which is hardly any solution.
The thing is….
There are no solutions.
“Have you not noticed a general decline in water levels due to increased evaporation and reduced snowpack and glaciers?”
Fossil fuels use a lot of water. The #2 use of freshwater behind agriculture. Making gas requires water, as does making electric. We are also seeing warming, which I personally think is keeping it too hot to rain as much.
The groundwater issues are more because the bogs and marshes have been filled in with shopping malls, and we dredged and straightened out rivers to flow water out faster. Standing water fills the groundwater reservoirs, not trees.
“It seems machine shops should do quite well as things are loping downward. ”
That is great, but we actually don’t have very many machine shops left in the states anymore. They have mostly been outsourced. So we don’t have very much equipment to work with anymore. So you don’t really have to worry about how to power them.
Even the custom performance car machine shops have all but disappeared.
Lidia asked about a general reduction in water supply. There is not a reduction of water in the area of the planet where I live we have had plenty of rain over the last 10 years following a somewhat low snow winter last year, but the 2014 winter brought about 2 meters of snow. The northern part of the Mississippi appears normal as do other major northern tributaries that flow in this area such as the St. Croix and Minnesota rivers.
Lake Superior ( touted as the larges body of fresh water on earth) on our Northern border is above normal levels as are the many rivers that flow into it from the State I live in (Minnesota).
As for there being no solution, I agree if the expectation is that BAU continues as it is now forever, If we talk about rolling back the clock 125 – 150 years or so in terms of lifestyle over the next 100 years, a reduced planetary population of humans, I think both are reasonable probabilities.
My Grandmother was born in Ireland in a stone house with a thatch roof, no running water and Peat for marginal heat.. She lived to be almost 100 years old. One of my Grandfathers homesteaded in Montana and lived two years in a Sod house he built with his cousin Pete, he did not live so long (84 yrs) but seemed to have weathered the experience well.
As for machine shops being outsourced and the numbers low in the USA I agree as I know some machinists who have lamented this for years. Yet there are still some machine shops and if you have them you can build other ones.
Humans are resourceful and though most living in the West today have never suffered any “privations ” for most of human history there was not a lot of creature comforts and a load of struggles…..well here we still are.
Hydroelectric is better than most resources, but it is still necessary to keep wires and transformers repaired or replaced. Also, dams fill up with sediment. Peat can be burned directly.
Keeping the wires going is expensive. The power company in my area has a huge division dedicated to “Vegitation Management” they burns through about 5-10% of the yearly income for this function alone. Of course if things get bad power wise they may have a lot of help with all those pesky trees.
To think that the grid can be maintained post collapse is absurd…. the ignorance involved in holding that position is colossal…
I operate outside the world of numbers and the kinds of analyses that Gail does so well. It’s all so complex that I find it just as effective to make intuitive guesses from what I “pick up” on blogs.. So I’d say MS society had best try to make do without a fossil fuel grid of any kind. While the lights are still on, preparing for this eventuality would be nice, even if unduly optimistic.
But since nuclear plants not exploding depends on fossil fuel energy to manage them, a sub-system of civilization would need to be put in place to maintain nuclear plants indefinitely. So, somehow amassing and reserving all conventional fossil fuels for that purpose would seem necessary, even if also highly optimistic.
If nuke plants are not maintained, everybody dies when the power goes down. If, against all odds, our species could survive all the OTHER catastrophes, it would require the sacrifice of allocating the available fossil fuels exclusively to the nuke management “civilization.” But there are any number of other lethal threats to us even then. Two very uninformed cents.
Yes, even keeping the wires up takes constant maintenance, using trucks with cherry pickers on top and at least two pickups to accompany the big truck.
Two weeks ago, my neighbour, out for a jog in our rural area, came back by my garden while I was out weeding and yelled at me over the fence, “Ann! Ann! Call BC Hydro quick! The transformer up by {so-and-so’s} house is steaming and arcing to the pole. The pole is on fire!” I ran back to the house and she ran to her house and we both called. They showed up an hour later with said trucks and fixed it. But that pole is out in the middle of nowhere and if she hadn’t seen it, you would be reading about another fire in British Columbia.
Maybe governments will be able to do something. Let’s hope that they can come up with something creative. If they don’t, major governments are likely to disappear with the financial system. New local governments may spring up.
I can’t know all of the things that will happen, but local fighting would seem to be more likely than a major new source of energy coming online and saving the day.
People have to learn to do more for themselves, while depending less on large industrial systems. And they have to learn to see that as positive. For instance, the way land-use is organized now is as counterproductive as it is possible to be in face of coming changes.
“People have to learn to do more for themselves, while depending less on large industrial systems. And they have to learn to see that as positive. ”
I agree. Really in the 80s, we had a fundamental shift in the US, where the policy and laws favored the large corporations over everyone else. I think that is starting to change. It skipped almost a whole generation though.
Yes. Hadn’t really seen the 80s as the decisive turning point, but maybe you’re right.
As I keep learning, there isn’t money or energy to do big government things. But government can set up structure and let communities figure out the details for themselves. Since government can’t do costly upkeep of anything, it’s inputs should be low-keyed and require minimal upkeep. Minimal paving, for instance. Letting nature do the heavy work. People need to use their bodies more and machines less. Live/work space, etc. People won’t generally be able to produce most of their food, so providing good and affordable food staples would be the role of (which level?) government.
Reblogged this on ΕΝΙΑΙΟ ΜΕΤΩΠΟ ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑΣ.
Thanks!
No one should doubt that there are limits to growth. However I think it is fair to say there are also limits to any analysis of our current predicament. The most important of these analytical boundaries, for those seeking a way to survive the coming paradigm shift, regard the analogies we use to get our respective points across. In other words, the dialectic of collapse must be considered part of the collapse. The validity of this feedback idea should be self-apparent to physicists, long time observers of human systems, and biologists generally.
The bones of Gail’s argument in favor of rapid collapse is an economic one. While economic contradictions are evident at this time of instability, these contradictions are symptoms rather than causes. True, economics model resource dynamics. However the focus here, as at other academic gatherings, assumes the existence of objectivity in markets. Nothing could be further from the reality of markets. Markets are quickly corrupted into structures that maintain the distribution of political power and status.
The scope of changes the world faces, the cause and effect, make for a beautiful fiddle score. I will not make you listen to those discordant strains or prompt the cacophony of call and response further than I must. But I will say, that if your concern is survival with the least amount of misery, then you should be able to see that the only theme in which we need invest emotional and physical energy is in the adoption of the new paradigm. Devil in the details, I know. But just as Gail points out that the existing economy self organized into the complex organism we watch struggling today, the next phase of human organization will also self organize.
The new paradigm will reject the use of economics as a power structure benefitting an elite cadre of opportunists. In the sense that all power is political one might easily confuse a new trend restoring “economic power” to centralized government as a step back towards monarchy or oligarchy. But more powerful government is exactly where we are going. temporarily this will mean Global scale governance. But that will evolve as the new organizing principles evolve and feed off o the order maintained by this first phase of political reorganization away from economic fiefdoms.
Devil in the details, again, I know. And education is key. But consider whether anyone here really believes that the generation that outlives us is really going to stand for the economic BS we survivors of the early industrial revolution and the financialization of resources stood for. The youth know the score. And I strongly suspect that the average age of us doomers here on OFW is much closer to 60 than 25.
This piece is instructive of where I am coming from and references a conversation started at automaticearth (Nicole Foss) :
http://depopulationtreatise.blogspot.ca
Steven, the rentier Power Elite Rockefeller-Rothschild banking syndicate long ago envisaged a world gov’t, but they perceived such an institution run by themselves, the top 0.001% Power Elite and their bankster oligarchs, ministerial intellectuals, corporate manager caste, and a co-opted warrior caste; they did not include provisions for sustaining the mass of the human ape population.
In fact, as part the implications of LTG, they concluded that mass human ape die-off was inevitable by the end of the 21st century.
So, there likely will be a world gov’t, but it will be like “Elysium” and won’t include 90%+ of the planet’s human ape population.
But that’s evolution, and human beings collectively on a finite, spherical planet are not unlike a pathogen or cancer. Nature/thermodynamics has a cure for us, and that’s an encouraging thought.
I was under the impression that there already was a world government
The people in charge would be the owners of the Fed — they print the reserve currency and use that to control every country, bank, corporation and individual….
“I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, … The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply.” Nathan Rothschild
“Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws. … Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.” — Mackenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister 1935-1948.
Fast still two nation that are not controlled Iran and North Korea both do not have Rothschild owned central banks. I wonder if there was a banking clause in the settlement with Iran. If not, Iran gets bombed.
The Rothschild bank and resource depletion two things no presidential candidate will talk about. But fear not they will make America great again. Oh pleeeease.
I agree with Nicole Foss on quite a few things. I certainly agree that it will be very difficult to have the large forms of government that we have today.
She is probably more optimistic than I am that permaculture and similar agriculture practiced by small groups may represent a way out.
There is no reason that it (permaculture) shouldn’t be a viable way forward assuming it is done intelligently and the places it exists are able to stay out of the light, or defend themselves according. And assuming Fast Eddy’s predictions regarding global radiation poisoning do not come to fruition. But my money’s on Fast Eddy being right. Although I will continue to act (prep) as if it isn’t.
It would appear that the wealthy elite (who could do something about the spent fuel rods) are not concerned about their progeny. Why am I not surprised.
This is what we have done on just a fifth of an acre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TDbihEGtJ4
Any suggestions as to how the elite might save us from the spent fuel ponds?
No, just figured with enough money, something could be done. Throw it into the sun? Burry it on the moon?
Is there absolutely no immediate solution (If money were not an issue)? What is your take?
If there were a solution then we’d have already seen it — the central banks have printed trillions of dollars already — so I don’t see money as being an issue — given that this is a potential extinction event one would think the first thing that QE would be directed to would be these spent fuel ponds….
Unfortunately I do not see any solution — all the information I have seen on this issue indicates the fuel must be maintained in high tech cooling facilities for up to 10 years before it can be dry casked…
Was thinking about parasites earlier…. the goal is not to kill the host because the parasite often dies as well….
We don’t even qualify as a smart parasite….
I’m not saying there is a solution money can buy, but given how QE has been done, I doubt if there was a viable solution, money would be spent to partake in an unprofitable endeavor such as securing waste. Our human priorities are no where near something as noble as that.
All pie in the sky — until one reads the fine print.
Oh – there is no fine print? Just pie….
I think there are a few certainties that we can operate off of here….
1. The global economy and financial system will collapse soon
2. When that happens there will be no energy available beyond trees (which we will likely cut down and burn in short order)
3. There will be very little food (7B+ people will kill and eat everything that moves)
4. Spent fuel ponds will explode http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/364/radiological_terrorism.html http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/making-nuclear-power-safer/handling-nuclear-waste/safer-storage-of-spent-fuel.html#.VUp3n5Om2J8 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html
Beyond that it is difficult to predict what comes next…
My money is on extinction (pity I won’t be able to collect)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfYCrLq1DJU&feature=youtu.be
http://skil.org/Qxtras_folder-2/rapidpopdeclineorbust.html
http://www.skil.org/Qxtras_folder-2/overpopulationmeansImurder.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcQYI4yo8mM
Eddy, extinction is too extreme. A 90-95% die-off is not. But, hey, zero vs. 350-700 million is something about which one can be optimistic, right? 😀
Perhaps … but if there is no way to contain the spent fuel ponds …. I am fairly certain this will be an extinction event….
And I see no way of managing those ponds…. they require BAU to be operational.
How long do you expect it will take for the fuel ponds to start melting down? And then how long before the radiation has spread and killed off most of the world?
Reiki In the context of how much Degrowth is enough, with only 1 – 3% of energy sources available, most of this energy will be needed for physical maintenance, guarding, monitoring & continuing reconstruction of containment (due to ionization) of present nuclear wastes.
The way forward is SYLVALIZATION (Latin ‘sylva’ = ‘tree’) or Polyculture Orchard food production, which is the path of all humanity’s worldwide ‘indigenous’ (L. ‘self-generating’) ancestors used for millions of years. Trees are the foundation bio-technology for life on earth. Height of traditional 150 year old indigenous polyculture orchard food trees is a direct correlate to earth’s distance from the sun. 150 year old indigenous polyculture Orchards photosynthesize 92 – 98% of solar energy into food, materials, energy & water-cycle. Tree roots descend into the earth’s substrate as deep as the canopy is high, pumping water, mining minerals & creating vast nutrient colonies. Regional Polyculture Orchards create cold spots on the face of continents which attract warm-moist-ocean-winds at low altitudes inland across continents where 60% of water-transfer is through condensation upon immense trillions of square kilometres of fractal leaf & bark surfaces. Only 40% of water falls as precipitation. Trees (living-carbon) are the prime energy equation for solar conversion & life on earth.
Human ‘Agriculture’ (L. ‘ager’ = ‘field’) crops after Polyculture Orchards have been burned or cut-down, photosynthesizes only 2 – 8% of solar energy with over 90% of energy pushing dry continental winds towards the sea creating permanent deserts like the Sahara or Middle-east. Ager roots descend only short centimetres leaving the earth & substrate hard-packed & unproductive. Agriculture creates scarcity, fear & militarization, which gives empires violent control of scarce resources but is actually only 1% as productive as Polyculture Orchards for all returns. Unfortunately militarization & institutionalization also create subservient people who generally submit to authority willingly & aren’t concerned about truth. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/1-indigenous-welcome-orchard-food-production-efficiencies
Don’t want to burst your bubble, S.R., but this might give you pause. I tend, also, to over-estimate the potential of the young — then I have a girl around 14 or 15 walk from behind parked cars right out in front of my barely rolling vehicle in a parking lot — so close that I have to hit the brakes hard enough to make a little screech on the pavement to stop a few inches from her. She looks up from her smartphone at the noise with an expression on her face that I can’t clearly interpret — it is either abject ignorance or abject arrogance — and she continues her casual walk across the front of my car, never in the least breaking the rhythm of her casual, unhurried stride. Meanwhile, my knees have begun to weaken and quiver, the followup to rapid adrenaline release. And then there’s this disturbing article from The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
I am not encouraged.
Lizzie
Lizzie, I have had precisely the same experience numerous times in recent years. I’m considering wearing a diaper as a consequence.
I was amused by the term “microaggressions.” Micro indeed! I’ve noticed the PC lunacy among the young a lot lately too. I think I’ve become noticeably more aggressive because of it.
And then there were the three 20 something US kids and one aged Brit who tackled the Islamist gunman and saved a train load of people. My wife had uttered the same ideas as Lizzie the day before this incident. We were talking about the sacrifices of our parent’s generation. When this came on the news she said, “I stand corrected. Some of the young will act and do their best”.
regards
That said, I never trust that any such incidents are false-flag setups anymore. This one seems a bit convenient for my tastes, although the American “heroes” might well have been none the wiser of what was actually going on.
I have not read beyond the headlines on this because I am assuming it was a false flag…
Indeed. I noticed it’s been the occasion to try and implement airport-style TSA security theatre around Amtrak stations. Though I live 5 minute’s walking distance from an Amtrak station, already I don’t take it because it cost 3-4x what it would to use a car, including overnight parking in NYC! If they need to strip-search me on top of it then I I believe I can just as well stay at home.
I had the crazy idea that I might go to Montréal on the train. Driving, it would take 2.5 hours. Amtrak? 11-12 hours, and that’s AFTER I drive 45 minutes to another Amtrak station.
Google tells me it would take 15 hours on a G*-d* bicycle.
What’s fascinating is the “throwing good money after bad”.. in Iraq, say.. or in this Amtrak/TSA boondoggle…. Boondoggles increasingly suck resources away from coherent projects. Soon it will be “all boondoggles, all the time”.
+
Its not just kids, by the way….
Point taken – but to some extent this behavior is a modern affectation. Overgenralizing affect and other facia is a mental trap, just like the preoccupation with external electronic organs (-so fashionalble these days like powdered wigs of yore?). The youth, to use the term somewhat broadly, are well aware of their environment. Perhaps the significance of the historical moment eludes may, maybe even a majority at this point. Many of us on OFW enjoy the conceit that we have better information than the rest. To be so smug blinds us. Passion is the better part of learning and the young have way more skin in the game than the rest of us, like Eddy, who are almost eager to jump on the knife. The young learn fast.
“And these children that you spit on as they try to change their world, are immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware what they’re going through.” David Bowie
I agree that this is a fairly old group. Young people are too busy with their lives to spend much time on such a gloomy topic.
I don’t think, though, that we will ever see any world government. Instead, collapse will tend to make governments fall apart. We will see self-organized local governments instead. Often, this will consist of a single person–perhaps a “King” or some other self-appointed leader.
Education only works if it is directed in the correct direction. I see a lot of education directed in useless ways, given what we are facing.
I’m curious to what education you think is useless. Is it just the result of over specialization and job evolution that has made many fields obsolete?
We think we know a lot of things that we don’t know. So most of economics right now is close to useless.
The agriculture we are teaching is mostly a type of agriculture that cannot continue. The business courses we are teaching relate to a kind of business operation that cannot continue. Medicine is based on a system that cannot continue. There used to be different procedures used that did not require fossil fuels, but current schools don’t teach them.
Math is useful, at least to a certain level. Reading and writing is useful. We can use clay tablets, if nothing else.
Some of science is useful–but an awfully lot of it is irrelevant to a much simpler lifestyle. If we end up going back to using draft animals, then we need to know about how to raise them–something else that is not being taught in school.
“The agriculture we are teaching is mostly a type of agriculture that cannot continue. The business courses we are teaching relate to a kind of business operation that cannot continue. Medicine is based on a system that cannot continue. There used to be different procedures used that did not require fossil fuels, but current schools don’t teach them.”
If you don’t have competition then there is no impetus for change. It results in stagnation.
This just about says it (as I have come to appreciate). It’s helpful to hear it said, as well.
Hi Steven,
I always like your comments so please don’t be offended. 🙂
“True, economics model resource dynamics.”
I’m not sure that the dominant neo-classical model can be described as such. My opinion is that traditional economist have failed to model the economy as an energy flow.
“the adoption of the new paradigm”
Given the history of political events of the last 50 years, I don’t think that this has any chance in hell. Sorry! Gail’s previous article describing the effects of Kyoto Treaty and the resulting increase of CO2 due to China (since 1997) shows that we can’t manage a graceful degrowth.
“the next phase of human organization will also self organize. “
I think you might not quite understand the underlying dynamics of dissipative system. Self-organization requires an energy input and results in higher complexity. The opposite is about to happen. That is, chaos will be followed by entropy until the world reaches a level of equilibrium far below the carrying capacity that was exceeded. The “distance” between organizations, both political and economic, will also be shortened. The world will descend into localized or regional pockets of survival. This is part of the entropy following “dissipation”.
“The new paradigm will reject the use of economics as a power structure benefitting an elite cadre of opportunists.” You are right about descent into more centralized government, but I suspect that we will have a neo-feudalist system after collapse. This makes sense to me because of economic impoverishment of people, the lack of mobility, and the concentration of local power into warlords. I would like to avoid this scenario, by the way, but I am not sure how this can be accomplished given the narrow bottleneck that humanity must now pass through.
“And education is key”
Regarding education, keep in mind that economics plays an important part in distributing the surplus energy for an agrarian society and may not support our high level of 16+ maturation. Our current system will not exist in the future but will instead return to levels such as those before the Industrial Revolution.
I think you might not quite understand the underlying dynamics of dissipative system. Self-organization requires an energy input and results in higher complexity. The opposite is about to happen. That is, chaos will be followed by entropy until the world reaches a level of equilibrium far below the carrying capacity that was exceeded. The “distance” between organizations, both political and economic, will also be shortened. The world will descend into localized or regional pockets of survival. This is part of the entropy following “dissipation”.
+++++++++++ :):):):):):)
So I am guessing you contradict yourself just to argue and probably have no actual clue you are doing it from one argument to the next.
Which is it? Everyone will be either eaten by thugs who will then die because there is no one to actually till the earth and tend the critters.
Or
localized and regional pockets of survival?
I think it might be a good idea to make up your mind what your actual stance is before you go and argue with every comment on the article.
I’m not sure if you are addressing me or FE, but just in case…
Violence is part of the Chaos and the Descent. How do we reach “a level of equilibrium far below the carrying capacity that was exceeded” is the scary part and I honestly don’t know. Or think about it too much.
I wasn’t addressing you alturium. We may disagree on a couple of points but your views don’t change depending on who you are replying too therefore I would not be pointing out any hypocrisy on your part 🙂
I feel so honoured to be singled out for special mention!
Besides I said “every comment on the article” I only see you replying on sub threads occasionally NOT every last one.
Last thing I want to do is encourage FE 🙂
I am standing by 🙂
Not offended in the least, (nice backhand though)…
Energy flow is just one of the missing details – the most important.
No problem with dissipative structures and heat death…
My problem is with the dependence of conclusions expressed at OFW on limited information about social structure independent of energy relations. The current era is a blip even compared with the last 1000 years.
Social structure has a life of its own. Interaction with MR. DNA would be interesting to explore, but beyond present scope.
In a crisis situation people will cling to structure. All who post here are aware of this and their contempt for this “instinct” of the herd is oft cited.
If they do not create their own structure, they will accept almost any replacement no matter how vicious (earning my contempt as well). But hey, we are social animals, right?
Upshot is that this makes it hard to predict outcomes. Economics, at least trade and monetary based economics, are not necessary for social structure. Rather they are necessary for certain types of social structure (different flavors of vicious?).
The predictions and opinions here are based upon economic arguments and an economic model. Models can identify data and run outputs that are inconsistent with boundary conditions and assumptions. But they depend upon empirical discoveries for forecasting.
At OFW I have the impression that we are just running the same data and assumptions through the model to get the outcomes we expect (want?) to see. this is a common characteristic of societies under collapse, and all other societies as well. Massaging, sorting and filtering the data to fit the hypothesis.
Food and water seem to be basic necessities. I don’t see these as being terribly “hard to predict,” if current systems break in many ways. We can have social structures of various kinds, but without food and water, they are not very helpful.
I agree that the challenge we face over the next few decades will tax social structures. Some will act out in ways inimical to structural stability. Some structures will stand, others will fail. There will be feedback effects due to energy contraction. The outcomes will follow non-linear pathways. Hard to say or infer much else.
One thing is sure, where semblance of equanimity prevails, structure will be most durable. Where structure endures, options are more numerous. These junctions switch between cause and effect and feedback as well. If the switching is favorable, response time then becomes key.
Having an extensive background in cultivation and wildlife management, I think that many areas may still plan a way out that provides adequate food and water and prevents loss of biodiversity. For example, in my area there are literally thousands of tons of pork on the hoof in our coastal mountain ranges. These animals, even though invasive, have replaced functions of native species and processes long since extinct, but are not native. Hard to say with certainty what the negative effects of exterminating wild pigs to feed hungry humans would be. But one immediate effect would be the salvage of a surpassingly great quantity of acorns, the staple food of wild pigs, that humans and other species could also utilize.
Also, technology and information will always come into play. Which tech and ag increase entropy is not always easy to say. Long term we are all goners. All sustainability is relative. If there was one measure for improving our chances it would be to stop issuing patents. Innovation and discovery, especially in the fields of medicine and materials is sorely needed now. Patents dampen the rate of discovery and needlessly create misery and inefficiency in healthcare, eg exhorbitant pricing for Hep C drug, insulin etc.
As for getting through the population bottleneck, only cooperation among nations will work. That is not a local issue and will never be solved by local governments. Food and water, however must be locally managed, but trade (or some compassionate substitute) will be essential through the bottleneck period.
“As for getting through the population bottleneck, only cooperation among nations will work”
I do not expect much in the way of cooperation …. rather I see a feeding frenzy with 7B+ ripping into anything that lives — including each other….
http://atlantaseos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/shark-feeding-frenzy-from-icisdotcom.jpg
My point being that the feeding frenzy is what occurs if we fail to plan at larger scale. fast Eddy, I expected you would point out the difficulties of enforcement pregnancy. However you got the better of me, bypassing convention and jumping from the enforcement stage of the bidding directly to the feeding frenzy stage.
ugh careless typing ” ….enforcing low conception and pregnancy rates….”
“One thing is sure, where semblance of equanimity prevails, structure will be most durable. Where structure endures, options are more numerous. ”
Something that might aid structure is to MAP globally land ownership. Someone thought that mapping their land makes it easier for people to hold on to it.
If finances are concerned about the future I believe the world was our past savings in terms of the sun and the planets core energy stored plus resources. The planet has a regenertive cyle that is too slow compared to our energy leveraged industrial economoy, with a more responsible financial system in the past we could have earned a couple of decades and more options to sort this out. Had we put more fossil energy and effort on developing techonlogies to harness other types of energy sources we could have overcome this problem.
I still hope for a narrow window of opportunity…
The “infinite energy” crowd never seems to grasp the concept of pollution, particularly in the form of waste heat which has been negatively affecting the natural planet for over 100 years.
300 million years of stored sunlight, used up in less than 300 years…
Like yeast in a batch of sugar. I don’t think now that we really had an opportunity 50 years ago to change our path. Our evolutionary genes favor expansion and positive growth, and ignore the warning signs. We may have reached an evolutionary dead-end. I think it will be task of future generations to ponder such topics amid the ruins of our industrial civilization.
Here is a good image:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCKPBuJ76zMcCFYlViAod83cKow&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBacterial_growth&ei=8vHgVaOADYmroQTz76mYCg&psig=AFQjCNFxwED6YRFmauTA8WDi9i0Jzzjoug&ust=1440891756320570
Oops.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Bacterial_growth_en.svg/2000px-Bacterial_growth_en.svg.png
I am reminded of what Richard Duncan warns in his ‘Olduvai Theory’: once the grid collapses, we are back in the Dark Ages. Both literally and figuratively it would seem.
Very much so.
I wonder how a primitive man would respond if told there were thousands of spent fuel ponds spread across the world — each one many hundreds of times more dangerous than Chernobyl —- all of which will explode unless they are kept cooled using high tech systems…. which require operational expertise … electricity … spare parts….
Fast, a well managed pool will not explode even if it runs dry. It may smolder and give off some particulates. Of course if some greedy bastard piles an almost critical amount of nuclear material together and lets it melt into a critical pile, well…, I guess we call that evolution in action. Ever read Herman Khan’s book On Thermonuclear War? Radiation — no worries.
There is indeed a close connection with Richard Duncan’s Olduvai Theory. What Ricahrd Duncan talks about (for example, here) is total energy consumption per capita. The after tax wages of non-elite workers that I talk about is very similar. It is the energy products that get back to workers, after energy products have been skimmed off for a host of other purposes, including more energy to make energy, plus more “overhead” for things ranging from birth control (or mandatory medical coverage in general), to vastly expanded advanced education, and to goods/services to care for the elderly.
Gail: As I see it, the key to survival is to establish a new paradigm based, not on future, but current income, where income includes economically (and ecologically) viable fossil fuels, human and animal labor, and sustainable food production. In a word, “balance.” Just a financial budgets must balance, eventually so must ecological ones.
The problem is that a sustainable, balanced budget is not quite so comfortable, and we have become lazy and, another good word, “jaded.” It is time to get past that.
Of course, those who “have” things never want to give them up, or worse share them. And the danger now is that it will take a “French Revolution” to reorder society.
Thank you for your very insightful (or is it inciteful?) commentary. Much appreciated.
Craig
That would seem to require a complete write-off of all existing national debts, for a start. Not a chance.
Our problem is that there is no way to balance the budget for 7.2 billion people, even if we were to get rid of all of our farm animals and pets. We seem to need a whole lot lower population to get along with what we really have. This is an unpleasant outcome.
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Great article. Thank you.
Reblogged this on Druidovik.
Thanks!
You’re very welcome!
Dear Gail, I’ve read your blog for a couple of months and wanted to thank you for your analysis and insight. I think the problem we have at this point is a completely solvable economic software, number in a computer issue. The actual resources are there, even oil and gas in sufficient quantities for the foreseeable future. Deflation is occurring because of a lack of demand, well maybe this time the powers need to do quantitative easing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Automation will cause a speed up in wage deflation since a lot of companies will be fighting for survival in a deflationary environment, so for the most efficient to survive they will automate as fast as possible because they can write off automation on taxes whereas people cost them in unemployment insurance and social security. We need a socialist base economy (guaranteed minimum income worldwide) with a reach for sky capitalism layer built on top. The minimum income should start out for only people 50 and above initially so the job market can be opened up for the young to start their families and the high population growth areas of the world would probably not have as many children because they would see that in older age they would be taken care of. As far as energy goes we need a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion. There is a new design out of MIT that can supposedly almost double the magnetic containment which results in 10x power out (2X implies 2^4). Unfortunately, we don’t have functional leadership (they are more concerned with dysfunctional conflicts & unnecessary wars) so your prognosis may turn out to be the true one even though it doesn’t have to be that way.
The thing is….
The PTB are aware of the causes of what we are experiencing …
They have the brightest minds at think tanks working out how to keep BAU going as long as possible — by whatever means necessary….
All that we are seeing — from the housing bubbles — to QE — to ZIRP — and other policies that have been in play for decades now —- have without a doubt been modeled and tested …
I doubt there is not a single stone left unturned in the quest to keep the hamster running on the wheel…. because the PTB know full well that when the hamster stops — that is the end for them too….
Therefore… if there were ways to extend this game longer — no matter how crazy the scheme (can anything be more crazy than printing money — or stepping in to buy the stock market to keep it from crashing…) the PTB will not hesitate to try it….
It does indeed look as if the central banks are out of tricks…. the end game was always going to be a deflationary death spiral….
We are going to find out if they have any more magic tricks in the very near future…. because we are now looking into the abyss…. global trade is falling — and commodity prices are crashing >>>>>> in spite of trillions of dollars of stimulus….
If someone does come up with an idea to push the collapse out more than say one year…. that person would be a brilliant thinker indeed….
However given that money printing has always been the last resort when faced with economic collapse…. my money is on there not being any further acts to this tragedy.
The end is nigh…
I am working for a company that just announced 15% layoffs. It is amazing how motivating that has been. Everyone is now executing with a sense of urgency. That mouse on the wheel can be made it go a lot faster just need to apply a little flame. That is, I think there are still tricks to play.
However the 15% that were laid off will not be buying much ‘stuff’ going forward…. which is like putting a brick onto the back of the hamster….
I think it is a little late to get started with a big fix-it, especially on the energy side. We tried nuclear, and then solar and wind. Neither of those were great solutions. Getting nuclear fusion to work as essentially a cheap perpetual motion machine is highly unlikely, but that is what we really need.
Maybe there is some additional QE that can be a temporary fix, but at most I expect it to be just a temporary bandaid. We have an underlying problem that is hard to fix.
I agree it is a little late to change course. It seems to me a choice was made years ago to power our economy with fossil fuels and not nuclear energy. I don’t think that is a reversible choice. Especially without huge inputs of additional energy to modify and or rebuild the current infrastructure to accommodate nuclear power. Not to mention the technology isn’t really there yet either. I think the best we can hope for is to extend QE and stop pursuing “alternative” energy and use the last remaining reserves of fossil fuels to power down industrial civilization more cleanly.
Yes, obviously there is plenty of resources in the ground, but they get still more difficult to get up. I.e. it costs more and more money to have sufficient volumes of the stuff. That means that even if we can produce more coal and oil than today the problem is that the net energy to our disposal gets smaller as money is just a meter for energy. You probably agree that every material item is a product of a certain energy consumption. What about wages? You eventually spend your money on material items! No, I place a great portion of my money in the bank! The bank knows better than you and me to lend that money out for activities that requires energy. Taxes? Governments also spend their money on more or less the same things as you do. Every dime eventually ends up in energy consumption.
Hi Jeffrey,
I was about to reply to your comment about Automation leading to deflation and “so for the most efficient to survive they will automate as fast as possible” by pointing out that automation requires more complexity and more energy but then another thought came to mind.
There seems to be a real push for self-driving cars and automation recently. Perhaps it is the hope that automation (ie. robots) will provide the slave labor of our future society that will release us poor humans to pursue more philosophical endeavors. We will all be a member of the rentier class, finally.
Perhaps there is conspiracy element to this narrative. That the elite will inherit the Earth (post-collapse) and that robots (sans serfs) will be slave class. Kinda like Isaac Asimov’s Spacer worlds. Where a few humans lived on each planet, serviced by an planet of robots.
Hmmm….
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“We can make the best of what we have today, and we can try to strengthen bonds with family and friends. We can try to diversify our financial resources, so if one bank encounters problems early on, it won’t be a huge problem. We can perhaps keep a little food and water on hand, to tide us over a temporary shortage. We can study our religious beliefs for guidance.”
I’m really hoping to see a shift in the discussion to expanding and detailing this list of suggestions. Clearly, if a financial collapse is imminent, preparation would be a good investment of our time. So what should one do? The survivalist forums seem almost gleeful that a collapse will enable the prepared to inherit the world, but their plans seem short-term at best, and perhaps counter-productive (ie. violence). Folk here on Our Finite World seem a bit more level-headed.
Here is a more thoughtful set of approaches…
https://www.transitionnetwork.org/
http://teresamcguffey.com/greenwizards.org/index.php?q=forum
You might want to read this as well:
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/08/nicole-foss-the-boundaries-and-future-of-solution-space/
Stefeun!
That was a great article by Nicole!
Agreed. There is an interview with Nicole Foss in Episode 70 of the Extraenvironmentalist podcast (http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/2013/12/10/episode-70-downloading-responsibility/) in which she is hopeful but focused a bit on the larger scale. Stefeun’s link has suggestions one can apply as an individual right now.
Stock up on can goods, non perishable foods, 15-30 day supply of drinking water in 5 gallon (rule is a gallon per day per person) containers, self defense, guns and ammo.
The problem with all of this (and I am guilty myself of an addiction to Wally’s World) is that it assumes that something comes next…. that there is a future that to a certain extent resembles the present….
Kinda like getting ready for a hurricane — or an earthquake — or a war…..
There is the assumption that if one can survive the worst of the event things will return to normal…. things will get better… in a relatively short period.
The problem here is that things will never return to normal…. because there will be no energy available….
All that we have known — all that we have taken for granted — every convenience – every comfort — is about to come to an end.
So what are we preparing for? A life of misery, suffering, deprivation, disease, violence….
Take the worst slum on earth and assume 100x worse (no medicine… no food… ) and understand that this is what life will look like (assuming you are one of the unlucky ones that survive the initial calamity)
I suspect the unlucky ones will envy those who died quickly.
No question but as you like to reference Human DNA. It’s in our DNA not to want to die even if we’re on our deathbed. People will try and prolong the inevitable as long as possible. There is nothing wrong with trying to prepare for what’s coming even if it’s bad.
Agree with everything you’ve said up to “So what are we preparing for”.
Maybe some or all of the delightful list you present, but I have been prepping
with a more positive expectation (possibly unrealistic of course).
My prep location is similar to yours, a remote location on an underpopulated
island in the Southern ocean, with a clean flowing river at my doorstep,
forest behind populated with edible native animals and good soil around
(and 4 years experience of growing my own food).
So the electricity fails – minor inconvenience, no oil products – fine – I never
like driving to town anyway. Disease less likely than now with fewer people contact.
I don’t expect to live forever so ‘something’ will get me eventually, but in the meantime
I will appreciate each day that I get, even if i’m cold and hungry at times.
Agreed.
We may think we are better off dead — but when the time comes — we will scratch and claw and beg and kill — we will do ‘whatever it takes’ to survive… because Mr DNA demands that of us.
A hot water heater is a good water supply during an emergency
Preparing for an unknown future is full of risks. There are a number of interesting sites making recommendations based on their prediction of how systemic collapse will play out; it’s a guess as to which might be the ‘most correct’ approach for ‘success’. I like the Transition Town approach to creating a more resilient local community since it seems most likely that as systems breakdown, it will be your local situation (especially resources) that will determine how ‘painful’ the impact will be for people. I consider my family lucky in that we live within walking/biking distance of many farms (although we also live close to urban centres–Greater Toronto Area–that will be looking at our local food resources should the global food system hit a major hiccup).
I would recommend some of the following sites to consider in a person’s search for ‘solutions’:
1) http://www.peakprosperity.com
2) http://www.theorganicprepper.ca
3) http://postgrowth.org
4) http://www.strongtowns.org
5) http://www.resilience.org
Perhaps reffer a bit to historical accounts/literature of past collapses. Generally speaking, such reset would knock on the doors of everybody at certain moment personally, it’s a gamble. Try to be practically usufull in the new arrangement where many psychos just appear from the woodwork as maniacally trying to carve the most meat of the dying system for their brand new fiefdoms. Hands on medical knowledge and craft arts/lost old technical stuff, scale animal husbandry are potential good bets..
Let me add Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity.com, Gail has spoken on his podcasts. http://www.peakprosperity.com/ Also the folks at PCI produced http://www.resilience.org/. Both places discuss actions one can take to build greater resilience.
Chris Martenson aka The King of Koombaya — offers salvation — from behind a paywall….
How quaint….
Oh did I forget to mention how I once dipped a toe onto the Peak Prosperity blog taking a rip at some jack ass who was flogging snake oil… ahem … thorium….
I posted commentary that demonstrated that thorium was not feasible…
I exposed how the jack ass actually was involved in a thorium startup (not disclosed on the podcast)
I asked The Koombaya King if he was getting paid to have this jack ass on his show….
All comments were deleted.
When I read the words Chris Martenson — the first thing that comes to my mind is ‘low life’ — ‘opportunist’
He is right up there with the televangelists flogging salvation….
Hey, Fast, I still like thorium. But am sad no one has bothered to do anything about it.
Unfortunately — even if the hail mary pass was caught — it is too late for any of these technologies…
Yes like diversifying our energy supply. 🙂
Yes diversification is good:
– dried animal dung burns quite well
– tree bark is a good option
– trees are also good although you have to cut and split them and let them season before they will burn
– perhaps in some places we might be able to scoop some coal from open pits…
I have enough wood lot the trick is keeping the New York City people out. I am 100 miles north of NYC.
Yes — keeping the hungry (who will have weapons) away from one’s patch will be a problem….
Perhaps others can give some thoughts.
The survivalists seem to think that after a temporary situation, things will get much better. Many think that small quantities of products made by our current system will continue to be made for a long time. I doubt that this will be true. Instead, those who plan to be survivors really need to start from a very basic level.
When I read about past collapses, one issue that seems to have been a problem for those trying to re-establish themselves was lack of protection from those who want to steal crops and tools from them. For this reason, new farms tended to be placed on tops of hills, because they could more easily be defended, and the location provided a look out for those coming to harm them.
Clearly, those setting up new agricultural areas will want to work in groups, because there are so many tasks that need to be done. Having a group also allows better sharing of food and water, as well as allowing some to specialize in defense. Somehow, the issue of clothing and building homes must also be handled. Humans need at least some of their food to be cooked, so adequate fuel supplies are important as well. The group will need to keep population down, because the carrying capacity will only be as high as that provided by minimum food and water supply over a period of years, and these will fluctuate.
Soil erosion is likely to be a problem on top of a hill, unless primarily perennial crops are used. In fact, even on level land, soil erosion is likely to be a problem over a long period, if crops are cultivated. If irrigation is used, over a period of years salt deposits may also build up. Finding enough soil amendments to keep up fertility is likely to a problem as well. It is possible to use waste from animals for fertilizer, but this requires additional land for the food the animals eat.
If this view is right, starting over may be a challenge.
“When I read about past collapses, one issue that seems to have been a problem for those trying to re-establish themselves was lack of protection from those who want to steal crops and tools from them.”
This is an issue only because those moments of strife are the interesting parts. The small communities that lived out generations without much conflict are rarely studied or written about. Even a ravaging warlord with a lukewarm 85 IQ can tell you it’s more lucrative to get the people working for you than killing them and having those bodies stinking up the place. In a sense many people today are hampered by the over population we suffer under that makes us value life cheaply these days. It was not always so and before a collapse has run it’s course it will turn around.
The world today is a small place. As a collapse unfolds one thing that happens is the world gets bigger and bigger once again. In any collapse situation there have always been pockets that remained basically untouched physically. The trick is picking those pockets before it all goes down.
North America is a much safer place than many understand. The possibility of nuclear pools melting down all over the place aside, it takes real work and a highly tuned future time orientation to make it in Northern latitudes that have actual seasons without fossil fuel input. Simple looting hordes would NOT have those talents and would mostly drift South during the first Winter or starve. Yes there will be isolated homes they can loot but how many would yield a bag of chips and 6 pack in the (now dead) fridge before they found a good one? How long would it take say 20 looters to actually find enough resources in an area and move on? Without fossil fuels it would be almost impossible very few groups of warriors in the past actually managed to live off the land looting for long.
There are survivalist, there are preppers and there are homesteader/sustainable types as well. Many will fall prey to the collapse but there will always be some who manage in isolated pockets to continue. 500 years after the collapse people will read about all the skirmishes and little wars fought over land and resources and not care a wit about the sheep industry that flourished in Oregon or where ever, or the farming communities in Northern Iowa because no marauding hordes ever went there. Perhaps the golden age of upper Michigan will spawn a new Saint Patrick to travel into savage Florida. You get the idea.
“it’s more lucrative to get the people working for you than killing them”
Let’s examine this…
So we have a community of peaceful farmers living in a remote area minding their own business.
Then a warlord and his gang of wild dogs shows up looking for food — and women.
So the warlord says to the leader of the community ‘hey bud — we are hungry — and we want some ass…’
And the leader says sorry but you can’t have our women — but we will give you what we can spare….
Of course the warlord then says ‘we will take your food and you will get out in that field and work or we will kill you — and as for the women — we have the guns — we do what we want’
And the farmer either stands his ground – and dies — or he goes into the field and ‘works’ for his new master — and hopes for a few scraps…
At least that is what has happened throughout history.
Eddy, – That sounds like a more likely outcome than the one put forward by Preppy, but it is not completely inevitable. If the warlord and his thugs can be held at bay until they run out of food, then their siege may not be successful. All the new farming community may have to find is a good way of keeping the thugs out until they run out of food and starve. Do you have any suggestions as to how the marauding hordes and looters can be kept at bay for a few weeks?
The actual question isn’t if the farmers can keep anyone at bay or for how long. The question is can the thugs actually find enough to eat if they keep killing all the producers they come across. The answer is ultimately NO they cannot. Continuous looting requires too much travel time and not enough capacity to carry what you need from place to place. The only large group of marauders I know who were able to pull it off were Mongols and even they had to stop from time to time, sometimes for a generation or more. They only managed because they brought their own producers (Horses) with them and they acted as a large scale unified force. A bunch of small bands 10 to 2000 strong will die out rather fast. The successful thug types always eventually stop and become landed gentry or some type of aristocracy or they end up dead and there are always areas the looting thugs never quite make it to during any given collapse. They may make it during the next one three or four or more generations down the line. Britain is a good example as it took several generations for the Saxons, Angels and Jutes. to begin raiding there after the fall of Rome.
As for killing everyone Blah Blah Blah Examine the Saxon invasion of England or even the later Norse invasions and then the Norman invasion. Did they wipe out every man woman and child? Sometimes the Vikings did when raiding smaller towns and villages but then what happened eventually is they settled.and their tactics changed. Eventually even the Norse were using native conquered Irish and English troops in their larger raids and wars.
North America has some newer and unique problems however as it tries to become profoundly Multi-Cultural and therefore set’s itself up for a shattering unlike any collapse that has come before. The main advantage it has is harsh seasons and size and that sheer landmass will insure that remote areas remain basically untouched by looting thugs during the short and mid term. Long term as other areas adapt and spawn off their own tribal cultures once again there maybe invasions etc. but it will take generations to get there.
The fact is history itself shows us life goes on after every ending. Eventual cooperation between humans is ultimately necessary to make life easier and more enjoyable and it always wins out over violence and looting. Eventually.
Why wipe everyone out? Why move from settlement to settlement?
All you need to do is attack one settlement and enslave the people…. establish that as your base … then expand your territory enslaving more and more people….
Until you have what is known as an Empire.
One way or the other — violence will always win out — if you think you are going to be able to establish some island of Koombaya in the post collapse world — and be left alone to grow your organic pumpkins…..
You are in for a very big surprise.
You need to read a little more history…. you are never left alone … wars were a constant…
Farmers generally don’t do very well against marauders… even if you have plenty of weapons … it is rather difficult to defend a large patch of ground…
Looking at history the best choice would be to band together under what you hope will be a relatively benevolent war lord (king…) and build a castle…. and hope that he can protect you from the really nasty war lords….
I am hoping for a Khaleesi type to establish in my area — she is very pretty… and seems sensible — I could see myself joining forces with her and her dragons….
http://cdn.spectator.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/da.jpg
I agree with you Pioneer Preppy,
NA has a lot of advantages, post-collapse.
It has a lower density than Asia and Europe. It has a lot of arable land, some pockets of energy (coal). I think that northern climate people have an advantage than the south. Northern climate people will have will have to cooperate at higher level to survive. They have to plan for the winter, which also knocks them down a notch for real estate value. I’m thinking of the Romans vs Barbarians too.
And I agree with your excellent observation about survival pockets. There will be survivors, it’s just impossible to identify where those pockets will occur but we could sort of describe the ideal location.
Many will fall prey to the collapse but there will always be some who manage in isolated pockets to continue. 500 years after the collapse people will read about all the skirmishes and little wars fought over land and resources and not care a wit about the sheep industry that flourished in Oregon…
Was just up in Corvallis Oregon last month. Beautiful area. I have three words to describe Oregon: poor, poor, and poor :-). But I have to wonder if those areas will actually become the richest areas, post-collapse. Land, Trees. Lots of trees = energy to cook with.
So Fast Eddie. Name one time in the history of the world where violence and enslavement won out? One example. Just one where the people were all killed or enslaved never to assimilate or rise again. Cooperation and peace always win in the end. Even when violence, looting, theft, rape etc. win they lose. It really is that simple.
“Cooperation and peace always win in the end.”
Which street do you live on in Koombaya town?
I’ll send you hard copies of this series of books http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-History-of-the-Renaissance-World-Audiobook/B00FA4VID4
Like I have said (must be 8978 times now) — yes we cooperate — and cooperation will ALWAYS win in the end….
Because an army with a nation behind it will always destroy an individual or a nation or a group of individuals who do not cooperate.
History is one endless story of murder and mayhem…. pillage and rape….
That’s a very dark world you live in. Might want to reference my initial reply to Gail about it and the modern day issue of holding life in general so very cheap.
History is filled with acts of violence and horror. No argument there but if it wasn’t filled with more acts of cooperation, sacrifice and peace we would have never evolved beyond cave dwelling hunter gatherers.
Again please point out one time in history where an entire population was lost in one generation or less either by war, pollution, societal collapse, natural disaster or martian invasion. Just one and Atlantis doesn’t count. People always survive and in most every scenario isolated pockets have survived for generations almost intact. The only exceptions I can think of would maybe be Easter Island and the Sack of Carthage and I would rate both of those to be so small overall to not even apply to the type of collapse we are discussing here. The collapsing societies may disappear on a large scale but the remnants continue and eventually become something else or are absorbed into some other culture but that always takes generations. Even years after the fall of Rome parts of the Western Empire were left untouched, the Eastern Empire didn’t collapse for centuries.
Societies, civilizations and Empires have risen and fallen over and over, yet part of each always survives and rebuilds. If it didn’t you wouldn’t be here looking at your monitor thinking dark thoughts of unavoidable doom today.
I assume you are in America?
You are aware that you are sitting at your computer living a relatively cushy, safe existence because your country has engaged in mass murder as it pillaged the world stealing the resources of other countries?
I don’t stand in judgment (if America were weak you’d be the one under the boot) — I am just pointing out the bigger picture to you.
For a more in depth understanding of things…. here’s my bullet point summary…
How the World Really Works
– The luckiest, fittest, smartest, with the capability for ruthlessness survive – always have – always will
– Resources are finite and therefore ownership is a zero sum game
– The strong always take from the weak – if they do not then that is a sign of weakness and a competitor will take from the weak and will usurp the formerly strong dropping them into weakling status
– Humans tend to group by clan or on a broader basis by nationality (strength in numbers bonded by culture) and they compete with others for resources
– Competition has always existed (I want it all!) but it becomes fiercer when resources are not sufficient to support competing clans or nations
– Tribal societies understand these dynamics because they cannot go to the grocery store for their food – so they are intimately aware of the daily battle to feed themselves and the competition for scare land and resources
– Modern affluent societies do not recognize this dynamic because for them resources are not scarce – they have more than enough.
– One of the main reasons that resources are not scarce in affluent societies is because they won the battle of the fittest (I would argue that luck is the precursor to all other advantages – affluent societies did not get that way because they started out smarter — rather they were lucky – and they parlayed that luck into advances in technology… including better war machines)
– As we have observed throughout history the strong always trample the weak. Always. History has always been a battle to take more in the zero sum game. The goal is to take all if possible (if you end up in the gutter eating grass the response has been – better you than me – because I know you’d do the same to me)
– And history demonstrates that the weak – given the opportunity – would turn the tables on the strong in a heartbeat. If they could they would beat the strong into submission and leave them bleeding in the streets and starving. As we see empire after empire after empire gets overthrown and a new power takes over. Was the US happy to share with Russia and vice versa? What about France and England? Nope. They wanted it all.
– Many of us (including me) in the cushy western world appear not to understand what a villager in Somalia does – that our cushy lives are only possible because our leaders have recognized that the world is not a fair place — Koombaya Syndrome has no place in this world — Koombaya will get you a bullet in the back — or a one way trip to the slum.
– Religious movements have attempted to change the course of human nature — telling us to share and get along — they have failed 100% – as expected. By rights we should be living in communes — Jesus was a communist was he not? We all know that this would never work. Because we want more. We want it all.
– But in spite of our hypocrisy, we still have this mythical belief that mankind is capable of good – that we make mistakes along the way (a few genocides here, a few there… in order to steal the resources of an entire content so we can live the lives we live) — ultimately we believe we are flawed but decent. We are not. Absolutely not.
– But our leaders — who see through this matrix of bullshit — realize that our cushy lives are based on us getting as much of the zero sum game as possible. That if they gave in to this wishy washy Koombaya BS we would all be living like Somalians.
– Of course they cannot tell us what I am explaining here — that we must act ruthlessly because if we don’t someone else will — and that will be the end of our cushy lives. Because we are ‘moral’ — we believe we are decent – that if we could all get along and share and sing Koombaya the world would be wonderful. We do not accept their evil premises.
– So they must lie to us. They must use propaganda to get us onside when they commit their acts of ruthlessness.
– They cannot say: we are going to invade Iraq to ensure their oil is available so as to keep BAU operating (BAU which is our platform for global domination). The masses would rise against that making things difficult for the PTB who are only trying their best to ensure the hypocrites have their cushy lives and 3 buck gas (and of course so that the PTB continue to be able to afford their caviar and champagne) …. Because they know if the hypocrites had to pay more or took at lifestyle hit – they’d be seriously pissed off (and nobody wants to be a Somalian)
– Which raises the question — are we fools for attacking the PTB when they attempt to throw out Putin and put in a stooge who will be willing to screw the Russian people so that we can continue to live large? When we know full well that Putin would do the same to us — and if not him someone more ruthless would come along and we’d be Somalians.
– Should we be protesting and making it more difficult for our leaders to make sure we get to continue to lead our cushy lives? Or should we be following the example of the Spartans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I
– In a nutshell are our interests as part of the western culture not completely in line with those of our leaders – i.e. if they fail we fail – if they succeed we succeed.
– Lee Kuan Yew is famous for saying ‘yes I will eat very well but if I do so will you’ Why bite the hand that whips the weak to make sure you eat well…. If you bite it too hard it cannot whip the weak — making you the weak — meaning you get to feel the whip….
– Nation… clan … individual…. The zero sum game plays out amongst nations first … but as resources become more scarce the battle comes closer to home with clans battling for what remains…. Eventually it is brother against brother ….
– As the PTB run out of outsiders to whip and rob…. They turn on their own…. As we are seeing they have no problem with destroying the middle class because it means more for them… and when the weak rise against them they have no problem at all deploying the violent tactics that they have used against the weak across the world who have attempted to resist them
– Eventually of course they will turn against each other…. Henry Kissinger and Maddy Albright bashing each other over the head with hammers fighting over a can of spam – how precious!
…
Little help from wikipedia for genocide examples:
American Indians, Yuki, Pallawah, Herero, Daurs, Yakuts, Kamchadals, Chukchi, Itelmens, Aleuts, Dzungar, …
Lets not forget the biblical God-approved genocide: Amalekites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, Midianites, Canaanites, Amorites…
In that history of the world series — there must have been 100+ incidents discussed where invaders busted through the city walls and slaughtered everyone inside… women, babies, children….. everyone… the streets ran with rivers of blood…
Of course that could never happen in this day and age… we are superior… we are ‘civilized’
Btw,
Dan Carlin’s podcast on the Wrath of Khan has an excellent counterpoint to the idea that the burning down a stagnate forest can provide new growth.
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/
His vivid description of the destruction wrought by the Mongols is excellent… 10 million people? Who knows!?
But how many of those people were artisans, musicians, intellectuals…? It doesn’t matter, they were all wiped out when the Mongols came through. The point is that human history has been full of violence, probably from the very beginning. It isn’t necessarily the most advanced who survive, but the most ruthless.
Pretty much all of that proves my point. Not a one of any of the examples of an entire people suffering genocide were annihilated quickly nor in most cases completely. Most still continue on and those who do not it took generations to get to all of them. That is hardly the “everyone will die swiftly so we must all throw our hands up in futility” kinda scenario. Certainly smaller groups of the larger were totally wiped out, no one has said it doesn’t happen but there are always isolated groups that remain basically untouched. Almost all of your examples also resort to large scale warfare of nationality v. nationality as well which is an entirely different scenario than we are currently discussing. For that type of scenario to evolve from a world collapse it would take (again) generations for the invading groups to form. Other scenarios include mass colonization, again not what we are discussing here.
You are in fact discussing apple trees to discredit orange fruit. Not a totally irrelevant tactic if there are some similarities but the time scales involved render the examples useless.
The part that tears all of your examples down the furthest is the very same thing Gail mentions here about the current crisis. Every example you point to involves one group being in growth stage conflicting with another. The type of collapse scenario we are discussing here is the exact opposite of that. All groups will be in decline which leads an even greater chance of isolated pockets remaining isolated until growth picks up once again. That could be 100’s of years down the road.
Decline changes the risk v. reward dynamic for all groups from familiar to tribal etc.
Maybe we are talking different scenarios, but here is how I see the near and future potential situation: the world’s capacity to feed 7.2 billion people drops to 1 billion (or lower) in a period of one or two decades. (I’m not really sure if that is worst or best case).
This will create a scarcity and resource fight never seen before. Past collapses have all occurred in predominantly agrarian societies whereas this one will the end of global industrial civilization. It will an uneven distribution of resources of course. Some regions will be better off than others.
Human nature being human nature, people will want to blame someone and make a scapegoat. Overall, I would say the potential for war and conflict (over the remaining resources) is great. As the years drag on during this “transformation”, people will forget the original reason for why the wars started.
I suppose you could say that I believe that this is our nature, in our blood, and in our genes. We have been fighting for scarce resources (among other things) since the beginning of time.
On the other hand, I’m not really qualified or versed in history to evaluate the statement that violence has only had a minor impact on the evolution on the human species.
Well Alturium it isn’t just history that points me to my conclusions. We are indeed talking about two very different scenarios and the one we have staring us in the face is one unlike the world has ever seen. I happen to agree with you about the resource issues but if this collapse is begun by a financial collapse then about 90% of the world’s population will find themselves resource starved almost immediately. This will create a scenario more like a fast burning virus or bacteria as opposed to a resource fight free for all. The hotspots will burn themselves out quickly which will result in the spread slowing down as the burn out catches up to itself. Indeed I figure at least 80% of the worlds population won’t even make it out of the major population centers as they prey on each other or simply lay down and die. After that the vastness of the globe becomes the best defense against the spread without fossil fuels to make all points reachable.
A long slow decline like we have been experiencing the last five years or more is in fact more a danger than a fast one. This allows a more Tainter-eques collapse to happen that starts at the edges and works it’s way inwards. The resources keep flowing in to the center starving the isolated areas or basically enslaving and killing the innocent as FastEddy likes to describe (in this sub thread anyway).
I cannot fully call which one is going to happen. Perhaps one of the tremors from the slow collapse will break the camel’s back so to speak and initiate a fast collapse.
We will certainly find out I imagine all in good time.
I am loving the speculative narratives on this thread and, at the risk of rising at the moments passing, offer my own.
The global deflation and Limits to Growth predicament coupled with the information revolution present humanity with the greatest learning opportunity it has had to date. Yes, it is different this time.
The main lesson is finally grasped: That hording wealth or resources cannot be justified by “giving something back” in the autumn of the rich person’s life. Because we realize that while some parts of the body of humanity enjoyed the spoils, some extremities were underdeveloped, deprived of circulation. Organic functions necessary to the body were undernourished. The body weakened and became ill.
As the fever passes, the brain takes note and the spirits rise. We must be vigilant in the future for signs of this same malady. But the task at hand requires immediate action.
After the IMF stabilizes global trade through temporary monetary actions, a majority of nations ratifies the first plan to deal with population shifts brought on by resource depletion and the growing body of evidence that, rather than global warming, a sudden, and seemingly counter-intuitive surge in Laurentide glaciation nuclei portends rapid loss of grain farming regions world-wide. Models indicate the timeframe and scale of impacts for these changes are even more dire than the global warming scenarios.
The United Nations Plan Global Carrying Capacity Plan initially garnered much criticism for the linkage of development loans to family planning efforts. But this seemingly draconian measure was balanced by something the earth had never wtinessed before: the nations of the earth created a council and a process by which dislocated populations from regions stressed by environmental and social disasters could be relocated as citizens of host nations paid to take on the added capacity.
“The main lesson is finally grasped: That hording wealth or resources cannot be justified by “giving something back” in the autumn of the rich person’s life. Because we realize that while some parts of the body of humanity enjoyed the spoils, some extremities were underdeveloped, deprived of circulation. Organic functions necessary to the body were undernourished. The body weakened and became ill. ”
I love the analogy. The problem is corporations don’t die as easy as people. They do die, but a lot of them survive the death of their founders. It just isn’t a problem in the states. China and Russia both have similar issues with wealth distribution.
All sounds great — however a slight problem
We are collapsing because civilization was built and maintained by using cheap to extract resources — we are no longer finding these — therefore civilization is going to collapse — billions are going to starve and perish.
We can invent all the wonderful endings we want — but those be the facts.
….It was quite a shock to the world when Nations in the Middle East and North Africa agreed to accept the millions of refugees from Canada and Eurasion Nations north of 60 degrees latitude. After the countless tribulations those formerly failing states experienced at the meddling of Western hands.
Thanks for the suggested reading. I’m familiar with some of the material, and have heard almost all of the recommendations before, but its still good to hear them again.
Personally, I’m probably in a much better situation than many of the gang hear on OFW. No debt. Significant savings. Own farmland. Building off-grid. I suppose I’m looking for the magic recipe that will make me feel secure… One thing I have neglected is the community aspect, and sorely regret it. Going it alone, especially when surrounded by critics, really eats up one’s gumption.
“One thing I have neglected is the community aspect, and sorely regret it. Going it alone, especially when surrounded by critics, really eats up one’s gumption.”
That is true with doing anything outside the box. Sometimes it isn’t critic it is haters, who actually want to destroy what you are doing. The negativity takes its toll.
You shouldn’t run into too many haters, and you might find some others. It takes a while to warm up to some of the upstate NYers. They are quite leary of city folk.. I would -suggest- joining a club like a service club. Optimist club comes to mind. 🙂
You’ll probably want to set up a tight defensive perimeter and learn how to defend it. Quickly placed roadblocks (old vehicle?), barbed wire fences, logs to block possible off road vehicle entry points. Anything to slow people down on the way in will give you an advantage. I am starting to get excited thinking about all this stuff as we will be getting property ‘up north’ soon and will be moving our permaculture experiment up there and building this type of defensive perimeter. If we make it in time.
Right now, on .2 acres, we could survive with no external inputs. The only loose ends we haven’t tied up are water in and sewage out. City water and city sewage. Otherwise we produce enough to dry or otherwise preserve to survive.
What we lack is grazing land (Our chickens are feed with store bough feed), a natural water source, fuel (forest) and a humanure system which will all be covered in the move up north.
“I am starting to get excited thinking about all this stuff”
How I wish I could check back with you a few months post-collapse for an update…
Life must be pretty bad if you can’t wait for the world to end…
Life’s not bad, right now, where I am. I’m excited about living the way we should be living, not having to kill people to defend a spot of dirt.
To answer others, I am not investing in any other systems where I am because we live in the shit (city) and would be quickly over run here.
“The only loose ends we haven’t tied up are water in and sewage out. City water and city sewage. Otherwise we produce enough to dry or otherwise preserve to survive.”
Collect the graywater from your roof gutter system. Then you filter it through a whole house type of charcoal filter, so it is potable. You probably want a tank buried in your yard if you don’t have one already. then a pump and probably a water pressure tank to use your existing plumbing.
For sewage, they actually make dry toilets. Or just use an outhouse
Defence perimeters: well, it is always useful to impede the progress of ill-wishers, common opportunistic criminals, etc, who might give up if things look to be not so easy.
However, in Argentina, ranches in rural areas found themselves in great trouble, as the criminal gangs were substantial and prepared to lay siege to properties. One only has to think of the manpower issues around manning a perimeter effectively, and the issue of keeping watch on all access points to a main building in the face of siege….
There was a good reason why in Europe the peasants used to abandon their villages, not attempt to defend them. I have seen abandonment of property, and making it look as though it has already been looted and trashed, recommended for certain urban/civil war situations.
You will not be a bold knight facing down the enemy at the gate: you will be a peasant, so learn from them.
Most people only see bad guys on the tee vee…. but they are there — many thousands of them — in every country…. they are generally a product of poverty — lack of opportunity….
And they will be on the loose….
Anyone who makes it through the other end of this will need to get with the programme….. there is no room on the island for drum thumping koombaya types…. except as slaves…
You either get mean and get ready to kill…. or you will be killed.
We are going back to the jungle…. the primordial jungle…. a world of depravity and violence…
When everyone is hungry there will be no room for niceties…
What will you do when 50 chaps like this show up at the farm gate?
http://cowboybyte.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/tatos.jpg
Ah, body art, how inspiring! Such vibrant souls beat beneath the rough exterior?
I do hope they are being led off to execution.
Hi Gail, what a great post shedding light on current events! I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you feel that simpler and less energy intensive systems will have the opportunity to develop after the coming collapse. I wonder if local leaders (warlords….looking at you FE) will arise or if you feel that the collapse will be so complete and rapid that no systems will have an opportunity to arise?
Insofar as my business is concerned (oil, gas and energy engineering) we have seen a complete business reversal from last year, the only projects that we are seeing out there right now are government projects (the Ontario gov’t is throwing hundreds of millions at wind farms) but the private-sector projects have dried up and while there is still day to day business a lot of my biggest customers telling me that what they are seeing is basically identical to the environment of 2008-2009.
” current events”
Just having a chuckle … imagine if a kid brought this article into class to discuss as a current event… he/she’d probably be referred to the school psychologist 🙂
Heck my co-workers already think I’m nuts for telling them that we are running out of cheap, potable energy. On the plus side I’ve discovered that once the world falls apart my new name will be “The Skull Queen”.
It is interesting that you compare today to the 2008-2009 situation. We lack the tools we had at that time, to get out of the financial mess we got into.
I really have a harder time seeing very much in the way of simpler, less energy intensive approaches being adopted. Even recycling metals will be very difficult, because this needs high temperatures, and it is hard to get high temperatures without burning an awfully lot of trees and making charcoal out of them. Even this may not be sufficient. Without being able to reuse metal in new ways, we are pretty much out of luck on what we can do, except make do with what we have. Some computers can be cannibalized to provide parts for other computers, but even this doesn’t work very well.
The simpler and less energy intensive methods will have to be truly simple–perhaps digging with a shovel, at least until the shovel wears out. Maybe a new one can be made by heating metals. It wouldn’t have to be the whole “pan” that is metal–perhaps just the tip might be metal. Adding draft animals won’t work well, because they eat so much food.
Hi Gail, to clarify my statement; what a lot of people in heavy industry and energy are seeing is a drop off in sales and projects like we saw in 2008-2009. Margins everywhere are being squeezed like crazy and less and less of our customers are being considered credit-worthy. I have several customers who are having a hard time keeping the lights on because the end-users aren’t paying their bills. The other thing I am seeing is a drastic drop-off in quality as manufacturers cut corners which will probably bring about a collapse quicker. I am now seeing mining and gas companies switching to much cheaper armored cable for their primary runs which barely meets code and will probably have to be replaced in five to ten years (if we last that long) and parts like limit switches which used to last for 50-60 years (I have seen some old Honeywell limit switches built in the 50’s still working on job sites) are now being replaced by Chinese-made plastic switches which will last for 100,000 duty cycles (2-3 years in most cases). Everything is moving towards wasteful, cheap and utterly disposable as companies try to keep their short-term purchase dollars as low as possible.
I do completely agree with you on the fact that the quiver is basically empty now unlike in 2008. I think that the Fed in the US will probably try QE4 but I don’t see anything coming from it. IMHO I see a crash followed by a plateau of a year or two as some groups/nations try to hold it together with hopium, duct tape and probably a lot of force (oil producers or those who can take over the oil producers) followed by lights out for all. I honestly hope that humanity can save enough infrastructure and decommission enough of the nuclear material to at least allow whoever survives a shot at an agrarian existence without having huge portions of the world poisoned.
Thanks for those datapoints! First hand observations are always the best.
I have to agree with your analysis. Some people like to think we’ll get back to Little House on the Prairie, but I don’t think so. Even then, we had a lot of resources that were easily extracted, but now, we need 400 ton trucks to haul in order to extract which with smaller grain size requires more power draw to grind. In other words, we have dug a deeper hole that will prevent future generations from being able to mine economically. So it may also be our first and only industrial civilization. But who knows *sigh*?
Alturium
Just been reading about the start of coal mining in Spain: in the 1840’s, the peasants could be sent out to dig and move coal which lay in 13ft seams, at the surface more or less. Just sweat and a wheelbarrow………
Thanks for the additional information, and your idea on how things will work out. You may be correct.
I think this article called, “Falling prices, not markets, the real headache for Chinese firms,” explains a big piece of the problem. Prices have actually been falling since 2011, as measured by the Producer Price Index. Companies are forced to make cheaper and cheaper products, to try to keep their prices down low enough so customers can afford them. All of this is related to diminishing returns and “increased inefficiency” in our whole system.
What an extremely sharp but, alas, gloomy description of what is ahead.
As you will know I see money only as a meter of energy. Debt which plays such an important role in local, national, and not least in the global economy, is nothing but energy which we have tried to ‘borrow’. But as money meters actually consumed energy not expected energy then money and energy must always be balanced – that is in the perfect economic world. But obviously it is not so. Therefore this meter instrument ‘money’ has to lose its value (inflation) to reflect that the corresponding amount of energy still has not been produced but only hoped for – i.e. hoping that the energy production will eventually fill the gap (debt) and catch up with the existing money volume. This is ok when it is relatively easy (cheap) to pump/dig the energy out of the ground but is getting still more difficult as the low hanging energy fruits have already been consumed.
Niels, well said.
To your point but put slightly differently, the value of US oil production per capita in terms of debt-money supply (M3) is where it was in the 1930s-60s, whereas US oil production per capita has fallen 45% since 1970, putting oil production at the same level as after WW II.
This has occurred with total debt and reported GDP (high-entropy, value-added output) having grown many multiples to oil production to debt-money supply.
Put another way, the US currently has oil production/supply to debt-money supply sufficient for no more than a value-added output per capita equivalent to 50-80 years ago.
However, going a step further and including the imputed compounding interest cost of the debt-money to oil production and GDP in perpetuity, since 2005-08, the US has an equivalent value-added output per capita after energy and imputed debt-money interest costs of the 1880s-1900s, which was prior to the major oil field discoveries in the Middle East, Texas, and Alaska.
IOW, the US currently has a domestic capacity for sustaining economic activity after oil and debt service costs in perpetuity that is no higher in per capita terms than a lifestyle for the masses of the late 19th century.
This implies MASSIVE debt/asset deflation; EXTREME liquidity preference (cash and liquidity becoming exceedingly dear); a further decline in the price of oil to the $20s; a collapse in US oil production and consumption; falling nominal wages and interest rates; and the post-2007 average trend rate of nominal GDP decelerating to 2% or below hereafter.
FWIW.
Something is going wrong in the balance. Instead of the price of commodities rising to keep up with the cost of extraction, workers are having to cut back. Young people live with their parents longer, and may need to share a car with other family members. The expected inflation isn’t really there–the money isn’t coming back through the system to workers who might spend the money. The wealthy are (or were) putting money into the stock market, but that isn’t the same thing–it mostly doesn’t lead to more goods (unless a company issues new shares, and uses them for investment).
“Something is going wrong in the balance.”
You are correct. It is the trade balance that is off. It leaves our country and doesn’t return. Then no one in this country has any money. So we have to take out debt to free up cashflow, which eventually leaves our economy.. rinse and repeat. It has to stop.
While I -get- that you are all about Fossil Fuels, the importation of them is part of the problem. It by far isn’t the biggest problem, but it is the second biggest problem, and one that is more easily dealt with.
That’s funny when you think about it. We essentially export promises and import real “stuff.” And since those promises are all debt based, they’re based on either future versions of ourselves or our kids being able to make good on them. Thus, we in the US have constructed a promissory economy that relies in large part on promises made on behalf of future people who had absolutely no say so in making them. Think they won’t be pissed off a wee bit as the true implications of this intergenerational shell game become exposed as the tide goes out on global capitalism? It’s not going to be a good time to be an old person trying to claim and live on a pension.
“We essentially export promises and import real “stuff.” ”
That is actually true for the most part. The problem is we aren’t taking on debt as an investment.
In otherwords, all of the oil we import is being consumed like junkfood. It costs our economy 200-500B/yr. We aren’t creating value added products with it to help sustain ourselves in the long term. The Renewable program actually is an investment, and one of the first we have had in a LONG time and as much as people have complained about it. It was actually extremely cheap, and it seems to be working.
“on behalf of future people who had absolutely no say so in making them. Think they won’t be pissed off a wee bit as the true implications of this intergenerational shell game become exposed as the tide goes out on global capitalism? It’s not going to be a good time to be an old person trying to claim and live on a pension.”
It is actually what is going on. To add the the effect, you have lower wages, higher prices, etc.
Anything that has been done to address the issues, have been fought by the very people the programs have been trying to help, as unnecessary government spending, because no one wants anymore debt except the Republicans unless it is spent on them of course.
Think they won’t be pissed off a wee bit as the true implications of this intergenerational shell game become exposed as the tide goes out on global capitalism? It’s not going to be a good time to be an old person trying to claim and live on a pension.
Agreed! It seems as if we approach this barrier of peak debt and since our debt is promissory which implies a generational effect, the ability to accumulate wealth becomes more difficult.
I like Gail’s analogy of cheap energy being a pump that is slowing down. The older generations are able to accumulate more over time and have a tailwind advantage with higher wages that is stored in investments. Where is the wealth stored today from yesteryear? Houses, stocks, pensions, etc and how much of that is at risk due to collapse?
There is a relationship there between peak debt and generation wealth and wages by age cohort.
I also like Gail’s observation about wealth that has a short time expiration: The very close relationship in time between production and consumption of energy products is in sharp contrast to the way the financial system works. and We end up with a system that has promised very many more goods and services in the future than the real world will actually be able to produce.
The following chart isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it shows the decline. What I would like to see is a normalized to age 0 on the x-axis and y-axis show wealth accumulation by age.
From http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust_2015/features/wealth_and_generations055898.php?page=all
http://wamo.s3.amazonaws.com/mag/1507/1507-longman_illus02.jpg
Actually, if things collapse, I don’t think it will be the kids that are affected by the debt directly. It will be the countries stuck holding the debt. (This will likely happen when the kids are still kids.) The kids will still have problems because there are too few resources for them, but they would have that problem anyhow, debt or no debt.
An awfully lot of debt is going to end up unpaid. Some of it may simply disappear, because it is stored as pixels, and the electricity stops.
Hmmm time to update my checklist, I always forget about electrical grid…
Peak Oil (Crude) [Check]
Peak Debt [Partial Check]
Debt Productivity Is Zero Or Negative [Check]
Peak Energy Consumption [Partial Check]
Financials converging to a square wave drop [Partial Check]
Commodity Pricing Collapse (Deflation) [Check]
Failure to Find an Oil Substitute [Check]
Global capex collapse [Check]
So far, so bad. Next up:
Electrical Grid Failure [On Watch List]
Dead economic zone in the US (see Greece) [On Watch List]
Note to self: ask Gail if I can create and sell t-shirts with the Tverberg Estimate Of Future Energy Production…Those t-shirts might be worthless in another year!
And ah…. Houston ….all systems are go…. 3—3—1— we have …. lift off…..
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TatYYI-mEjE/maxresdefault.jpg
How about a tshirt with the words DEFLATIONARY COLLAPSE? scrawled across the chest?
That could elicit some interesting conversation at a dinner party….
Hmm that could on the back…and the graph on the front. What other charts would it need. I’m thinking smaller graph/charts surrounding her chart.
Maybe inflation was hidden by outsourcing which created low prices of imported goods. So it look as if there is no or little inflation. However, as you explain it, USA and Europe now witness a shortage of ordinary well paid jobs ….
That is exactly it.
So the system is set to collapse unless non-elite workers see some increase in after-tax wages.
What are the chances of that happening?
Nearly impossible at this point. Just look at Europe where in most EU countries runs around 50%. Look at the US where most jobs that are created are low wage, part time jobs, such as fast food workers, bartenders, food servers. You can’t expand future debt and expand the eCONomy on those types of wages. Which is why some get into the stock markets to gamble and offset their wages or incomes (Chinese workers) are a good example of this.
meant to say: ….. “Just look at Europe where in most EU countries youth unemployment runs around 50%
Moreover, everyone can notice that wealth-concentration keeps gaining momentum, and that middle-class numbers tend to disappear. We’re not increasing workers’ wages, but going in the exact opposite direction.
Now let’s imagine, by thought experiment, that wages are significantly raised and workers recover substantial purchasing power. Would we find enough accessible resource and cheap energy to re-start the (real) economy?
This is such lack that actually led us here in the first place. No we’re reaching the end of the extra-time provided by financial manipulations during the last 7 (or 15, maybe 40?) years.
That’d be a fantastic test of the, “resources are limited,” theory. I fear it would prove a most successful experiment.
By that I mean I bet you’re right. If they essentially print money to get it into Main Street’s hands (the only way it could happen, in my view) then inflation would increase to the point that the “extra,” would only exist nominally.
And the dirty little secret post 2008 collapse was the Federal Reserve was paying the Too Big Too Fail Banks, not to lend the money for fear of hyperinflation in the event all of that digitized money hit the streets.
Hi, Rodster — in my “expert” opinion (ret. editor), it is perfectly fine to split the infinitive when necessary for greatest accuracy/clarity of meaning, as in:
“And the dirty little secret post 2008 collapse was the Federal Reserve was paying the Too Big Too Fail Banks, [to NOT LEND] the money for fear of hyperinflation in the event all of that digitized money hit the streets.”
Thanks for contributing that pertinent tidbit. Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist if you will, but I have never believed for a second that the “timing” of the great debacle of 2008/09 was not carefully planned to occur exactly when it did. Don’t forget that the legal groundwork is already laid for the “bail in.” They’ll just lift what they want from depositors’ accounts. In my account, the pickin’s will be slim indeed.
Gail, love your blog — I find the view from the actuarial corner to be a very balancing input. Your efforts are so appreciated by so many — even by those of us who mostly just “lurk quietly.”
Lizzie
The big 2008 problem had already occurred earlier in 2008, when oil prices collapsed in July. Debt at that point had started shrinking. That was what had to be fixed.
Good stuff, one has to always include to his “personal topten doomlist” the possibility we are esentially on borrowed time since early 1970s, so hard crash after 4-5decades would be very plausible option indeed. Un/fortunately there are several competing overall scenarios, so one can’t bet 100% validity to any of them, must attempt to be ~diversified, slow/medium/fast collapse and that’s the madness proper.. lolz
If this were to occur — would we not realize the hyper-inflationary environment that many have been predicting since 2008?
Very low. With our globalized world, jobs keep getting sent to the low-wage country. I remember reading about workers in Africa being hired for $21 month.
Many middle wage jobs have disappeared. And governments are working at getting higher tax rates, because they have so much debt already. They also have made an awfully lot of promises for pensions and healthcare. There are a lot of people now reaching the age when they would like to draw pensions.
Do you think any collapse would also be accelerated, compared to the Limits to Growth predictions, by climate change issues? The LtG proxy for climate change is “pollution” which peaks later than most of the other variables, and therefore could be argued to be a consequence rather than a cause of the preceding peaks. If a collapse quickly knocks down fossil fuel use then maybe climate warming would be stopped well short of current predictions for maximum temperature rises. However events this year seem to be indicating that even small temperature rises can have highly non-linear impacts especially in areas heavily impacted by the Arctic, and we might already be approaching some important tipping points. For example how much worse would the Washington wildfires be if we were already into a financial and resource collapse – maybe the soldiers that were needed would be busy with wars or societal breakdown elsewhere, maybe there would be no way of paying for firefighters from outside of the state let alone outside the country, maybe infrastructure decay would hamper any fire fighting operations. There has also been some argument that warming has been suppressed because of sulfate aerosols from Asian coal burning power plants – if these started to be shutdown then the aerosols would decay over one or two years and warming could accelerate despite the rate of carbon dioxide build up starting to decline.
The forecasts we have with respect to climate change use estimates of fossil fuel availability that are vastly too high, because they do not consider the possibility of near-term collapse. Even their “peak oil” scenario has way too much in it. At the same time, climate is changing right now.
I would take the shape of the LTG forecasts with a grain of salt, because they do not consider the possibility of a financial collapse, and the impact that this would have on the world economy. The LTG forecast looks at the situation from the point of view of an engineer. The model does not consider GDP, or debt, or much of anything else. In fact, the shape of downturns are to some extent based on assumptions similar to Hubbert’s–everything hangs together well, prices stay high enough to encourage extraction, etc.
Given this situation, I think we are basically facing an overshoot and collapse scenario, which is not shown well in the LTG forecasts. This will likely be quite fast, with or without climate change. I am not sure that climate change will make a material difference in the whole scheme of things. For example, in the year 2050, the world might end up with a population of 100 million with climate change, but 125 million without climate change. Percentage-wise, that is a big difference, but does it really matter, if the numbers are tiny, either way?
Bravo on the 100 million versus 125 million point.
Gail – thanks. Similarly to what you have said Dennis Meadows has also stated that once the first extrema in any of the LtG predictions is reached (which appears likely to be either the productivity per capita or death rate in the next couple of years) then the rest of the chart should be ignored. I think by implication he means that in the collapse phase things will happen faster and much less predictably than during the expansion phase or than their models indicated (i.e. there would be far more non-linear feed backs at play than they originally included). I’m still trying to understand how bad this might be but I guess a potential collapse to 100 million in 35 years says all that needs to be said.
100 million by 2050? Ouch. This is the first time in…as long as that I can remember that I’ve felt relatively optimistic.
Honestly, I can’t see that kind of die-off. There would have to be a lightning-fast collapse. In our nearest town, even if the power went out and the cargo trucks stopped arriving, folk would cobble something together pretty fast. We have enough food walking around (ie. livestock) or in bins (ie. grains) to give us at year to work out an alternative food system. Having said that, if the lightning-collapse hit in the dead of winter and took out the natural gas supply, decimation might happen. Disease or violence could do it too, but I don’t see those as likely. Were I in a large city, I’d be less comfortable.
Optimism is nice, but it won’t feed you nor keep you warm…
In a way, I disagree. Optimism can give you the gumption to contribute to feeding yourself and keeping yourself warm. One’s optimism can go a long way to helping others. Defeatism, on the other hand, will make virtually ensure a bad end.
All I’m saying is that I see a drop to 100 million by 2050 to be unlikely. Having said that, it is not something I’ve invested much study into. I would find some justification for those numbers very interesting.
Maybe it is just that the bulk of the world’s population is in (or near) cities and therefore not in a position to make a hurried change to satisfying their basic needs without fossil fuel derived energy. If the bulk of the world’s urban population were to die-off, that might get us a long way to 100 million.
In any case, the potential of a die-off of the proportion that Gail has mentioned, if believable, should inspire folk to action. I mean, if you believe that that kind of die-off is at all probable, you should be preparing right now. I don’t think that things will be nearly so bad, but my week will be spent working on a super-insulated home and building bonds with friends and family.
Thanks Gail for another very good post.
As for the economists who are unable to take into consideration the role of energy, not that I want to advocate their (stupid) point of view, but it’s a surprising matter of fact that thermodynamics was developed very lately compared to other sciences, even ones that are far less immediate than the heat everyone can feel.
Still today, few people grasp the concept of energy, many are thinking that it can just be “produced” at will.
Also liked your remark that energy is consumed in real time, which means that promises on the future (debts) are becoming a bigger and bigger problem as we’re getting closer to the limits.
Working as an actuary in insurance, a person gets the idea of real time vs promises drilled into their heads, over and over. An insurance company sells a policy. It pays claims over a period of years. The insurance company has to keep track of those promises. It also has to figure out how much money it will need to dispense in a given calendar period (and how that might fluctuate), and it needs to be able to estimate how many claim adjustors to hire, again during calendar periods. Actuaries are the ones who figure out all of the details related to these kinds of issues.
Just a question. When insurance policy is priced, one has to assume a rate of return (i.e. interest rate ) on investments. Is our present low rate environment endangering the insurance industry?
It is the long term policies that are most affected. Pension programs have tended to use very high interest rates–at one point, as much as 10% per year, for some pension plans. I am not sure what they are now–probably 6% or something like that. Long term care insurance has been another major problem area. At one point, medical malpractice insurance was sold on an “occurrence” basis, and people with birth injuries were given until about age 23 to file claims. This created another problem area. An awfully lot of pensions are underfunded, and companies have been getting out of the long term care business.
As long as interest rates keep going lower, the value of the debt portfolio goes up. This is a benefit to insurance companies. So the appreciation partly offsets the low irate problem. Of course, if rates go up, or there are defaults, then the opposite problem occurs.
Great post Gail also the one talking about Russia and Ukraine is Superb. Had I been good at math in childhood I would have become actuary, most likely I would have ended becoming and employee of a company and would be looking for managerial position, just as many people I know who live on a daily basis.
At the begining of this year I was thinking on getting a life insurance combo with retirement and health insurance plan… now I am glad I didn´t. But certainly I am not happy with things to come.
HI Gail, thank you for your hard work and always good insights. I’ll be sharing the article with friends and colleagues, and publicly.
Gail said: “There is a possibility that with a financial crash, we will need to start over, with new local economies based on the use of local resources. In such a scenario, it is doubtful that we can maintain a world population of even 1 billion.”
…then
“Some people believe that it is possible for groups of survivalists to continue, given adequate preparation. This may or may not be true.”
I’m confused by these two statements, hoping for clarification as they seem to clash (nice way of saying contradicting). 🙂
Zero is less than 1 billion.
Also, I expect that people who are now hunter-gatherers will have an advantage for survival over people who joined a transition group recently.
100% agree with that.
All the tech solutions such as solar panels and the devices they power will fail in a relatively short period of time….
Leaving anyone who is still alive needing the skills of a bushman to survive…
Or who is a farmer. There were plenty of those before fossil fuels.
But maybe enough time to ease people in a transitional phase.
If people can survive in relative comfort (compared to what the masses will have to face) with some electricity and can stay in areas where they know crops will grow and have the knowledge/skills to turn the petro-agricultural land into organic land after a few years using permaculture techniques there may be a chance.
If you argue that land that has been chemically drenched in fertilisers/pesticides, etc will be useless for the first few years after oil is done with then people who want to survive and use this land eventually will (and have) stock up on adequate provisions.
How many preppers are there in the US now? How many around the world? Its becoming more and more acceptable. Having 2/3 years of food stored up isn’t as daft as what some thought a few years ago.
Actually … I am cheering for humans to be wiped out … extincted….
I suspect Mother Earth and all of the other organisms that inhabit the planet and live in equilibrium (not inventing spent fuel ponds or green revolutions) are also cheering …
The pigs rammed into tiny cages… the chickens with their beaks snipped off so they don’t injure each other… the cows that are kicked and beaten…. the song birds in the cages…. the monkeys and rats used for experiments….
I suspect that they feel like prisoners of war who can hear the bombs falling nearby — they are just waiting for the nightmare to end….
In all seriousness… the damage the human species has done is nothing short of a nightmare for the planet…
I am hoping this is the extinction event.
“The pigs rammed into tiny cages… the chickens with their beaks snipped off so they don’t injure each other… the cows that are kicked and beaten…. the song birds in the cages…. the monkeys and rats used for experiments….
I suspect that they feel like prisoners of war who can hear the bombs falling nearby — they are just waiting for the nightmare to end….
In all seriousness… the damage the human species has done is nothing short of a nightmare for the planet…
I am hoping this is the extinction event.”
Me to, Fast, me to. I want to live, but this planet is best without us…
But Mein Fufrer, Mister DNA, demands we carry on NO MATTER WHAT, you will obey!
Rodster, I do not see the conflict. The number of successful survivalists will be less than 1 billion. Not sure what Gail is meaning about zero is less than 1 billion. I expect more than one million after the first ten years.
I keep calling it “the elephant in the room” — I try to tell someone a little of the basics of this, & it’s like I “can’t get blood out of a turnip” (real “paradigm problems”, I guess — almost totally missing from the MSM).
“Can’t get blood out of a turnip” is probably a pretty good description of the nature of our low price problem.
Gail, this was quite a comprehensive wide ranging post with a lot of projections and predictions thrown in. Bold words indeed although prediction especially about the future is difficult. Jim Kunstler is another blogger who has long been obsessed with prediction involving time lines. I tend to prefer Gail’s method of prediction as being more analytical of what she sees as trends converging to some end point. She clearly lays out a scenario that concludes that it’s all a matter of when not if. The chaotic nature of this networked system makes the when of it impossible to guess and there are lots of triggers which could influence the outcome and timeline besides the factors laid out by Gail and by Donella Meadows et al. Among them could be wars or geologic or meteorological catastrophes or massive governmental miscalculations acting as enzymes. I have tried to see where Gail might have it wrong and I can quibble and nibble around the margins of her thought but I think she has got it figured out. Bold words, bold thoughts, bold conclusions.
I wish I could come to a better conclusion. By the way, I do know Jim Kunstler. I know he reads at least some of my posts.
Wow, Gail, this is industrial scale doom! I don’t disagree with LTG and have been expecting something on this scale for a few decades, but it always just seems to be delayed just that bit longer into the future, along with the financial can that they keep kicking down the road. I’ll certainly embrace it when it happens, but I won’t be holding my breathe like I did in 2008.
I am afraid this is industrial scale doom. I hope I am wrong–maybe Janet Yellen and the others have some more things from their bags of tricks. But it is hard to hold one’s breath.
Great phrase “industrial scale doom” hehehe
Seconded. This is nothing less than Gail’s masterpiece, in that it completely ties up all the loose ends that most people never allow themselves to consider. In the end, there simply are no good solutions for what’s coming at us now. A shrinking energy and natural resource base => a shrinking financial system => a shrinking human population => pain and misery => mass die off. Throw in the current and future environmental degradation from spent nuclear fuel supplies and the like, and the effects of climate change, which will likely not peak from past and current emissions for at least another 100 years, and you’ve got the polar opposite of the mindless cheerleading pabulum we get bombarded with in the MSM press every day. Interesting times ahead ladies and gents!
The last 4 or 5 FW articles have been master pieces…. well done Gail
Add to that a refugee problem too. That’s already happening.
I wish we could come up with something better. Perhaps a happy religious ending. But it is impossible to get to an “economy will grow forever” outcome.
Hi. My first post here. Thank you Gail. Might governments majorly increase the role of the military and quasi military operations to oversee essential tasks such as electricity generation, water and food supply, rationing, railroads, etc? Did not this happen in many countries in the middle 1930s? Might this bring about a much lower but more sustainable living arrangement in many areas for at least a few more years?
I think the question is how well governments can hold up in all of this–something I didn’t really address. If governments can indeed hang together, and if they can keep the financial system together well enough to pay their own employees, then perhaps they can play a role. But if governments can’t manage to keep the system together, I think we move to essentially very local governments, to the extent that there are governments at all. It is the potential lack of governments that makes going forward a huge challenge.
An economics teacher I know from a somewhat prestigious private university in my country points to the politics perspective. He belives we are approaching another cold war between China, Iran, Russia and the OECD countries. Blaming the US. for putting an oversuply of oil on the market in order to maintain the Statust Quo.
I wonder if they have something secret going on in regards to financial-oil failure? or they are they just simply are blind to see the outcome of their super powers game?
Apologize for my English if my comment is not very clear.
Your English is fine.
I suppose there is always a need to find someone to blame for a situation. I think the problem arises basically from diminishing returns and other kinds of “increased inefficiency” (my term for things that add overhead to the system). It becomes impossible for many workers to afford the goods made by the system, and the growth of the system slows. The availability of low interest rate money allowed the supply of oil form shale to ramp up in the United States, but falling demand was at least as big a problem, as I see it.
There is not good way to cut back oil supply in the US, until financial issues force a cutback. The natural gas situation in the US is similar. People are just less aware of it. Its price is terribly low as well.
Your comment is more clear than many Brits and Americans can manage. Fear not!
Or.. based on historical examples…. local ‘war lords’ run the show….
I am not overly concerned about that as I am fairl confident this will all be mooted when the many thousands of spent fuel ponds spread across the earth explode and rain radioactive particles across the surface of the planet for many decades…. exterminating all life (perhaps the next civilization will have cockroaches as the master species… )
The fuel ponds also concern me. Have not heard one politico say a word about them either. There is still time and resources to ameliorate these, not holding my breath that it will happen but have talked to my local Power Company that has two Nuke plants which they say are slated for retirement (no date provided nor plan on how base load production will be replaced).
There is nothing being done because nothing can be done.
The live plants are not the issue – those can be shut down….
The fuel ponds are a problem because the fuel must be cooled for many years before it can be dry-casked….
When the power goes off — the cooling water will be vapourized…. and the fireworks will begin….
Keep in mind Fukushima is nowhere near as bad as it gets — the fuel from the reactors is being cooled by pumping sea water into the hole in the ground where the fuel sits…
And the fuel ponds were cracked — but they never collapsed….
Fast Eddy, Is it possible to ‘safely’ dispose of the spent fuel rods by simply letting them melt into the ‘center of the earth’ or purposefully drop them somewhere, like the Marianas Trench?
I don’t imagine those would be very good ideas….
Here’s a summary of my research on this topic.
Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUSBRE97D00M20130814
The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion.
In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material – See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/20110314781/natural-resources-news-service/fission-criticality-in-cooling-ponds-threaten-explosion-at-fukushima.html
A typical 1 GWe PWR core contains about 80 t fuels. Each year about one third of the core fuel is discharged into the pool. A pool with 15 year storage capacity will hold about 400 t spent fuel.
To estimate the Cs-137 inventory in the pool, for example, we assume the Cs137 inventory at shutdown is about 0.1 MCi/tU with a burn-up of 50,000 MWt-day/tU, thus the pool with 400 t of ten year old SNF would hold about 33 MCi Cs-137. [7]
Assuming a 50-100% Cs137 release during a spent fuel fire, [8] the consequence of the Cs-137 exceed those of the Chernobyl accident 8-17 times (2MCi release from Chernobyl). Based on the wedge model, the contaminated land areas can be estimated. [9] For example, for a scenario of a 50% Cs-137 release from a 400 t SNF pool, about 95,000 km² (as far as 1,350 km) would be contaminated above 15 Ci/km² (as compared to 10,000 km² contaminated area above 15 Ci/km² at Chernobyl).
http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/364/radiological_terrorism.html
Once the fuel is uncovered, it could become hot enough to cause the metal cladding encasing the uranium fuel to rupture and catch fire, which in turn could further heat up the fuel until it suffers damage. Such an event could release large amounts of radioactive substances, such as cesium-137, into the environment. This would start in more recently discharged spent fuel, which is hotter than fuel that has been in the pool for a longer time. A typical spent fuel pool in the United States holds several hundred tons of fuel, so if a fire were to propagate from the hotter to the colder fuel a radioactive release could be very large.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/making-nuclear-power-safer/handling-nuclear-waste/safer-storage-of-spent-fuel.html#.VUp3n5Om2J8
According to Dr. Kevin Crowley of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, “successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material.”[12] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the September 11, 2001 attacks required American nuclear plants “to protect with high assurance” against specific threats involving certain numbers and capabilities of assailants. Plants were also required to “enhance the number of security officers” and to improve “access controls to the facilities”.
The committee judges that successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material. The committee concluded that attacks by knowledgeable terrorists with access to appropriate technical means are possible. The committee identified several terrorist attack scenarios that it believed could partially or completely drain a spent fuel pool and lead to zirconium cladding fires. Details are provided in the committee’s classified report. I cannot discuss the details here.
http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-mass-destruction/nuclear-spent-fuel-pools-secure/p8967
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies. One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people.
“To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Today there are 103 active nuclear power reactors in the U.S. They generate 2,000 metric tons of spent nuclear waste per year and to date have accumulated 71,862 tons of spent fuel, according to industry data.[vi] Of that total, 54,696 tons are stored in cooling pools and only 17,166 tons in the relatively safer dry cask storage. http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/responses/the-growing-problem-of-spent-nuclear-fuel.html
I’ve been thinking a lot of about the spent fuel pond problem, especially considering the industry I work in. I’ve actually been talking to some of the engineers up at the Bruce and Darlington who are customers of mine (I think you said you had roots here in Ontario) and have asked the hypothetical question of what the response would be if there was a collapse of local infrastructure. I’m told that there are mid-term in scope plans that would basically feed the power from the reactor back into the pumps for the cooling ponds. Based on my understanding this would be fine for a collapse lasting a few weeks, maybe months but in the event of a total collapse of everything they would have to get creative. What I have learned is that everything around the world will depend on not only the age of the rods being stored as the older they are the less heat they will generate as well as the dedication of the engineers there. I would like to think that when the chips are down the engineers on site (who have families that live nearby) would do whatever they could to prevent a fire at the fuel ponds. The big problem is the ultimately we don’t know what will happen, some may cut and run, some may suffer breakdowns and some may be fine with a jury rigged system until the rods are old enough to no longer be a fire threat, as I see it there will be a roll of the dice regardless.
I suppose we could hold these things together for some time — perhaps months?
But without a constant supply of spare parts (which are themselves dependent on precision machinery and computers in their manufacture) — eventually they go to pieces….
All this has to happen within the context of a completely collapsed world where people are starving — disease is rampant — violence is erupting….
I think that even with BAU fully functioning — if the plug were pulled on a spent fuel pond (as an experiment) — the engineers and technicians would be challenged to keep the facility operational….
The odds are most definitely stacked against us ….
If the worst came to the worst though and the elite knew that a collapse was imminent then surely if they can’t deal with the situation if the fuel rods are kept in place (and will give off massive amounts of radiation when the cooling ponds have boiled off) then putting them in the ocean at some distance would be better?
Yes of course it would be environmentally disastrous but the effects would not be as instant as having them erupt on land all over the world. Maybe just dumping them all in Antarctica – would they ever heat up there enough to explode?
I still think they’d be able to command enough resources/fuel/equipment to deal with the problem even in a collapse if a government could keep a grip on select areas. Enough for 5-10 years to enable dry casking.
I would expect that dumping thousands of spend fuel rods into the ocean would make the oceans unfit for life of any kind….
Not sure what a world without any sea life looks like but it would not be a place I’d be keen to be alive in….
Just the fact that such an idea is being discussed is an argument for the extinction of humans being a very big positive for the planet
Fast Eddy wrote: “The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site.”
Yeah no, not really. It takes a heck of a lot more sophistication to make fissible material go boom than to just leave leave a few pieces lying in close proximity. Nothing of the sort would happen.
The thing is…
When I spend hours researching a subject… and I find useful info…. I save it in a file… for future reference….
Just in case someone pops up posting the first thing that comes to their minds — regardless of if they have the slightest clue about the topic they are posting about….
Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUSBRE97D00M20130814
The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion.
In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material – See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/20110314781/natural-resources-news-service/fission-criticality-in-cooling-ponds-threaten-explosion-at-fukushima.html
Assuming that governments work together , and the wo9rld “goes back to basics” and not spend so much on unnecessary stuff – this is manageable , right ? we have the tech.
It’s just a matter of collaboration , which is a huge challenge ?
Reblogged this on Permaculture adventures in Sector39 and commented:
Another thought provoking (!) and well researched piece from Gail Tverberg. The limits to growth are staring us in the face.
Thanks!
We certainly need an economic model which accommodates a downturn in our civilization. I don’t think it is impossible but the longer we remain inactive the less likely we will be to avoid chaos no matter what we do. Governments need to survive but the way they behave these days is not conducive to trust, being so partisan and polarised one one side and head in the sand ignorant on the other. It all looks just so unlikely that we will pull any rabbit out of the hat, even temporarily.
Mr. Doyle, I agree with your statement on a need for an economic which accommodates a downturn. Have you found any proposals yet? I’ve done some jury rigging of models for such but have not found any good alternatives.
The continuing debt part is the hard part. Very short term works, but longer term doesn’t.
Sorry to reply so late. I seem to not have signed up specifically with WordPress for this particular blog.
Michael, I am not sure that anything will work but that’s human nature fiddling the books as it were. Our economic system, now being debt based requires inflation to recover the numerical value of the costs in repaying debt. I stress numerical value.The real asset value recovery is not so positive. One 1913 US$ is worth today about 4 cents, max.
However the system works in a helical arrangement. At each spiral the asset value becomes nominatively a little more, wages a little more etc. This worked for a quite a long time except it is skewed today because wages have not benefited at all for 30 years and debt dependency has taken over. The spiral continues and debts get worse. It’s not going to end well.
What it means is that the value of the economy is only going up in nominative terms. Theres almost no real wealth creation now. Our civilization has achieved stasis, plateaued.
We cannot change that, so lets use what we can to deflate and perhaps avoid chaos.
Understanding MMT gives an insight into what a plan might achieve. Sovereign governments are not constrained by such limitations as tax revenue in their ability to buy.
This first insight by MMT is unrecognised by mainstream economists, so don’t expect useful knowledge from them.
The government, assuming something useful survives the initial shock, can ration and organise food etc but people will need money in their pockets to buy it especially in the city. The government can pay a wage to everyone to keep food on the table and services running. The effect of this inflation of the money supply will be entirely naught. Nobody is going to care about GDP or any other measure of the economy. Those days will be gone.
As long as price controls are maintained the money will work.
This is not a super long term solution but just a measure to maintain a working society.
It may gain time for an orderly if that is possible, decline in the population back to a sustainable level. It may well be a vain hope, but better some hope is left to work with.
Another good post. I suspect the unwinding will be very uneven in different parts of the world and be influenced, in part, by the social response ie whether people in general assume an us vs. them response, or, a “we’re all in this together” approach. On another point, Solar panels may help even post-collapse if the inverter has an outlet. It would provide up to 1500 watts of electricity during daylight hours. Admittedly this is not a lot of energy, but as dear wife has pointed out during power outages, ” there is a lot of difference between one light bulb and none at all.”
You are probably right about the social response being important.
I didn’t get into the off-grid use of solar panels. Without batteries, the only use of solar panels is during daylight hours, making the “one light bulb” example not work. So you really need batteries, if you want to keep a light bulb operating. You also need some knowhow, to make your panels function separate from the grid they are tied to.
Solarcity will get you a solar panel setup for free. You pay from the energy savings, For $4000 you can get a battery which allows you to have power when the grid is down,
You can get a modest solar system up and running for very little. I have a couple powering the electric fence and livestock water pump on our farm. The electric fence system has been very close to trouble-free. The water pump system has been more troublesome, but the problems were with the pump, not the solar system or the electronics. The solar-electric parts of the systems were only about $200 for the fence system and $300 for the pump system.
All one needs is one or more solar panels (now approximately $1/W), a charge controller (as little as $30 on EBay), a battery ($0 to whatever you want), and an inverter (as little as $100 on EBay). One can design a system without a battery easily enough as well. These are not complicated systems. If you can cut/strip wires and operate screw terminals, you can set one up. To me, this seems like a worthwhile prep project for just about anyone.
At the moment, I’m putting together a system intended as a portable power source from about $800 in materials. Just waiting for the charge controller to arrive. The realization that I will have a system that will give our household lighting and modest use of electrical appliances for at least a few years (before the batteries wear out) is not a small comfort. In the meantime, I’ll be using it to power tools while constructing our off-grid home.
I’m not surprised you had pump issues. A lot of them typically draw a lot of power to start up, and some of the motors can’t handle the square sinee/modified sine wave inverters
LiFePO4 batteries can handle 2000+ charge cycles vs lead acid of 200+..So they should last quite a bit longer. They are quite a bit better then the lion batteries, but don’t have the density you want for electric cars or small devices. They also have a fairly high round trip efficiency. The other option, the edison batteries are fairly expensive, they last almost infinitely but they are far from maintenance free, and have a much lower roundtrip efficiency.
The two systems I mentioned were DC, no inverter. The pump basically failed because it was moving pond water which, despite a couple of input filters, would clog the check valves and the pressure switch.
I’m with you on LiPO4 batteries. Without digging a lot deeper, I can’t be sure, but the efficiency of LiPO4 batteries might weaken Gail’s concerns about the storage problem.
One thing I can say, even a 40-watt solar panel can save one a lot of work. When I first got livestock, I bucketed water from a pond to a storage tank. Then I used a hand pump. This had to be done every few days in the heat of summer and took about 45 minutes of fairly intense effort. The $300 invested in the pumping system freed me to spend that time and energy elsewhere and, when the system was in good working order, allowed me to be away from the farm for longer and with less prep. The electric fence is even more important. Without it, I don’t have a farm. (Non-electric fence for sheep is incredibly expensive.)
I accept that solar can’t keep our society running as is, but if things are about to fall apart (something I’m far from sure about), a solar-electric system, even just a single modest solar panel, will be an asset.
markfox,
Why not an old fashioned windpump for the livestock water pump? My grandfather had one that lasted 50 years before the well went dry and a storm blew the blades off.
Someone loses on this arrangement. I expect the electric company is giving way too much credit for the electricity–it certainly is not worth retail electricity price. Also, the investor who has the loan that is behind this must be using some of the very low interest rate money that is available to finance this deal. If the electric grid no longer works, them where is not much chance the investor will get his money back. The winners are the company in China that made the solar panel, and the coal company in China that mined the coal to make the panel.
“Someone loses on this arrangement. ”
Supposedly it is actually the home owner. There is a lawsuit against SolarCity. I haven’t looked at it that closely, but supposedly, the home owner breaks even after like 15-20 years. Which for no money down, isn’t that flaky of a deal. I have seen a lot worse. Rent to Own was a lot worse. I think SolarCity charges 6% interest.
If the homeowner gets a credit, it is set by state law. In most states ( I think ) it is the retail price. The electric utilities complain, rightfully in my opinion, that it should be the wholesale price, because the solarized homeowner is still using the grid and should pay for it. When I brought this up to a Solar City rep, he conceded my point but said it was no big deal now because solar electricity is less than 1% of the power. Stay tuned.
The whole thing is financed by paper put together bu Goldman Sachs. It should be good unless the whole grid implodes, in which case the paper holders will have more worries than useless bonds.
It -sounds- nice.. but first it doesn’t give much incentive for the homeowner to install panels, and that is -really- an object. And it doesn’t really work.
The utilities who are complaining, are the same ones that didn’t upgrade their substations in the 80s, that allowed the transmission back up the pipe and keep filing lawsuits, for netmetering, carbon emissions, etc. Chances are especially with solar, they aren’t losing money because it is sold during peak times of the day, when they happen to charge the highest rates so it is really a ploy for the homeowner to take all the risk, then the utility pays them 3 cents and they turn around and sell it for 20 cents. So they make 17 cents , then what they do is lower the wholesale price to 2 cents and add a bigger service charge. If the grid gets flooded they just dump the load and don’t even think twice about it since it is 2 cents.
All I am saying is it ends up to be counterproductive to the goal. The utilities need to change and can’t do BAU anymore. They have been doing the same thing for 50 years.
I am not saying it is an easy task to do frequency regulation with intermittant renewables, but frequency regulation itself needs to change. Basically right now it is if the load gets close to max capacity, turn on a peaker plant 30-45 minutes ahead of when you think (best guess) you will hit max capacity. Then let it idle until it might pick up some load.
Solar and intermittents screw up the best guess, which costs them more money because they turned on a huge engine, and it is just idling for 8 hours. You would be ticked if you went to work, and you didn’t turn your car off and it ran all day. .
The reality is they just exposed a huge hole in the electric distribution system that is part of the design. If it is fixed it could save them a ton of money and allow renewables seamlessly to boot.
It was a big part of what happened in Germany.. They have improved their management quite a bit to address the issues, it isn’t all fixed though for sure.
I would like to open up to an other scenario. That is, even if energi input per se is lower, there is still a lot of “fat” to take from. That is we have some ability to make choices. For one. The internet and information flow for sure needs energy, but there is a real possiblity of energy, information conversion.
That is. Looking at developing countiries we can se outlines of this world. A cellphone makes less need of random travels to a market.
Secondly. Information transfer is about learning, this is an disruptive mode, as innovation, social and technical can emerge.
Say, combination of wind and hydrogen (which are possible to use in conventional combustion motor)
So. The fact that we have some infrastructure already in place is also capital. Information networks combined with this can, hopefulle, offset some of the devalueation of fossile and loans.
“Say, combination of wind and hydrogen (which are possible to use in conventional combustion motor)”
The problem is the internal combustion engine is rather inefficient like <30%, and fuel cells technology to store hydrogen is expensive. The commercial process to make hydrogen currently uses natural gas, and precious metal electrodes. Just using the two electrodes like everyone does in science class is only 50% efficient at a conversion from electric to hydrogen. And you have to have a seriously expensive, explosion proof, extremely high pressure compressor to get it to work.
If there is a collapse, it is worthless, in fact worth less then a gas engine, because in order to get hydrogen to work well, you have to change the compression and timing of the engine. Ethanol at least works in a gas engine. You can actually get the same efficiency out of ethanol as you do gas if you modify the compression and alter the timing.
Electric motors are far more efficient 90+%, and don't require as much maintenance. Batteries are a drawback, and really if you are worried about SHTF, you get a whole bunch of Edison batteries, that will last forever, an you can maintain them with not much more then wood ash, and vinegar or something that is very simple.
"So. The fact that we have some infrastructure already in place is also capital. Information networks combined with this can, hopefulle, offset some of the devalueation of fossile and loans."
It is being offset at a slow pace. The costs are dropping, as expansion of renewables continues.
As the costs drop, there is a snowball effect. Over the next 5 years component prices should drop further as India is trying to get to 175GW of solar/wind capacity.
The really big one to watch is the storage sector over the next 5-10 years. As that industry scales, improves costs, and produces better products, it will have a huge ripple effect across multiple industries.
How do you keep the infrastructure maintained without fossil fuels — without factories — without a fully functioning supply chain?
At this point, you don’t. It is a reduction, not a complete elimination. It takes time and effort to solve problems. We still have time, we can put some effort in.
We have a networked system already built. Strange as it may seem, things all depend on each other. We need the people playing games on the Internet, because they pay part of its costs. If researchers were the only ones paying for the Internet, it would be too expensive to use.
The same with the roads. We need a mixture of different kinds of cars and trucks using the roads, and all of them paying some taxes to care for the roads. If only a few elite travelers use the roads, they become too expensive to maintain. Admittedly, so wear and tear drops, but the problem of freezing and thawing still exists.
Cutting back doesn’t work as well as a person might expect. For another things, people’s jobs depends on what might be considered wasteful spending.
“We have a networked system already built. Strange as it may seem, things all depend on each other. ”
Correct. Renewable energy is disruptive. Like the computer to the typewriter or the solid transistor to the vacuum tube. though so the network gets disrupted, and things change.
It happens all the time. The “hot” internet game might only be hot for a few months, then people move on to something else.
“The same with the roads. We need a mixture of different kinds of cars and trucks using the roads, and all of them paying some taxes to care for the roads.”
It depends on how the road is funded. Both the feds and most states collect road taxes from gas sales which gets redistributed, sometimes it doesn’t cover all the expenses and it comes out of the city, or county general budgets.
Solar electricity can work well for daytime water pumping, daytime use of evaporative coolers and daytime ice making.
As long as you buy the high priced specialized equipment that works with solar energy. I know special water pumps are needed. I am not sure about the others.
No, you just can’t use a cheap harbor freight inverter with specific types of motors and expect it to work. That is a known issue since the dawn of the electric grid.
If you want to add that list to the shortcomings of HS education or something, you probably can..
There is a lot in Part 3 of the Collapse Cafe TSHTF Vidcast with Gail’s view on Renewables, as well as Nicole Foss’s views and my own
You can find all 3 Parts we got recorded last Sunday on the Collapse Cafe You Tube Channel,
RE
Well, actually it is labelled Part 4 because we skipped over Part 3 (Climate & Geopolitics) because we were running just a BIT long…lol.
Hopefully we will record the real Part 3 at a later date.
RE
I’ll add Parts 2 and 4 on my Presentations/ Podacasts Page as well. There is no part 3 yet. Also, even if it does appear, I am not in it.
Well done. Thanks!
Gail
Modern industrial expansion has clearly been driven by the key enabling fuel, petroleum. Not all petroleum, however, has the same potential value as the original stuff of the 1950s to 2005. Nevertheless ‘condensate’ (gas condensate derived from expanding NG fields) is included in world ‘total oil’ as if it was.
US geologist Jeffrey Brown, who has specialised in studying the quantities of oil available to economies round the world – particularly amounts available to the larger economies who are net importers, – that includes US, EU, Japan & China, – has a long comment just now on peakoilbarrel (Ron Patterson blog). He includes an interesting apparent statistic concerning condensate. We should note that the amount of ‘real stuff’ to go round the industrial world is probably stalled since 2005. The world generally appears to have a lower-value resource to enable any future expansion. The exlixir of youth is going to be in short supply, it seems.
Jeffrey: “Combining the US and OPEC estimates, the US + OPEC ratio of condensate to C+C production may have increased from about 4.6% in 2005 to about 10% in 2014. If this rate of increase in the global condensate to C+C [crude + condensate] ratio is indicative of total global data, it implies that actual global crude oil production (45 and lower API gravity) was approximately flat from 2005 to 2014, at about 70 MMBPD.”
best
Phil
Yes, the high quality crude has been flattening in supply. I am not sure how important this is in the whole scheme of things, however.
When we look at energy consumption vs GDP on a world basis, the correlation is best with total energy, rather than with just oil. Also, our oil production has been growing at both the long carbon chain end of the spectrum (oil sands, etc.), and the short carbon chain end (Bakken, etc). In some sense, the mix changes tend to offset.
I think it is probably more important that world coal consumption grew at an unusually slow rate in 2014, and perhaps is even shrinking in 2015. China’s consumption is down, and its electricity use seems to be something like flat in 2015. Natural gas consumption worldwide also grew at an unusually low rate in 2015. These are indications of a world-wide slowdown.
We’ve also seen global trade contract by over 2% in the first half of 2015:
http://www.gtreview.com/news/global/global-trade-slumps-in-first-half-of-2015/
And global capex is likewise shrinking:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/global-capex-set-to-shrink-as-commodities-crunch-bites-20150803-giqv80.html
It does seem very much like global growth is peaking, just as your look at global energy demand suggested:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/06/23/bp-data-suggests-we-are-reaching-peak-energy-demand/
The shipping industry offers some clues as well:
LONDON—Major container-shipping lines are slashing sailings on the world’s busiest shipping route between Asia and Europe as lower growth in China and a sluggish eurozone economy hurt container volumes.
The late summer season is normally a peak period for container shipping as retailers stock up for Christmas sales. About 95% of the world’s manufactured goods, ranging from toys and clothing to electronics and household goods, are moved by container ships. But a glut of tonnage in the water, combined with lower demand, is proving to be one the industry’s biggest challenges in recent years.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/shipping-giants-reduce-sailings-on-worlds-busiest-route-1439997480
The “Reduced Sailings” article is still talking about demand for goods being shipped going up by 2% to 3%. This isn’t very high, but at least it is not negative. Or perhaps the authors haven’t really thought through what is happening.
Thanks for the links. Shrinking capital expenditure points to shrinking production of commodities in the future, like oil, coal and natural gas.
Jim & Peter,
The biggest mistake in this ‘economic’ (Greek ‘oikos’ = ‘home’ + ‘namein’ = ‘care-&-nurture’) analysis is to ignore ‘human-energy’.
Humans as collective creatures who can live only through mutual-aid, must have individual opportunities fostered culturally. When brute force hierarchy takes control as it has of the earth progressively over the last 7,000 years since the cutting of Babylon’s Polyculture Orchards, then Semite (Aramaic, Arab & Hebrew including Christian & Islam) spread of colonial invasion terror, human’s have lost collective ‘indigenous’ (Latin ‘self-generating’) peace, intelligence, memory, love, biosphere & life. Humans intelligently collaborating together with ownership of their means of production, their specialized labours grouped together with affiliated trades in harmony with the biosphere. It is only when spaceship earth’s crew work in harmony with earth’s life-support & climate-control systems that biosphere abundance is achieved. Like most economists, this author doesn’t have a clue. The only reasons humans are presently slaves to fossil fuels is because we are a colonial society which does not know how to intelligently collaborate as stewards of abundant biosphere resources.
The analysis of renewables is completely off the mark as though all energy infrastructure doesn’t require resources. Big hydro, oil, coal, nuclear, gas & other central generating stations have huge biosphere infrastructure-collapse-costs & resource draws in addition to their climate-change depreciation. Hydro has caused massive loss of precipitation in all dammed areas, oil = war, nuclear has never been an economic choice (Amory-Lovins), Gas is very limited & all central generation loses well over 50% of generated electricity to transmission infrastructure, EMF, transformer, right-of-way & other costs. Centrals lose 80% of electricity produced when all externalities or planetary life cost are calculated. None of the extractive exploitive stolen ‘big-energy’ producers are sustainable in any way. Renewables if complementary to earth’s forces are immaculately renewable. Typical centralized energy distant generating complexes lose 50% of energy generated to transmission loss at 5% per 100 miles when one calculates infrastructure depreciation, biosphere loss on right of ways, energy loss, maintenance, staffing etc. Tapping the built-environment’s concentrated energy restores urban areas to clean liveable balance. There are many other presently unharnessed energy concentrations in urban environments such as: concentrated wind on building & infrastructure windward shear surfaces normally damaging buildings & human enjoyment, Unharvested solar which damages buildings & other infrastructure, kinetic water flows on bridge pylons, wind concentrations in river & lake valleys on bridge pylons, fecal, urine, kitchen cuttings, unused thrown post-use material concentrations which are more easily harvested than exploitive energies relying on never accounting for nature’s limited resources. Find out about how Complementary Energy harnesses these enormous presently damaging concentrated built-environment energies & converts them into 150% of present energy needs. Every city can be an energy exporter. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/design/9-complementary-energy
This analysis makes no mention of the slavery which western unequal forced trade coercion imposes upon the vast majority of the world’s people. No mention of multiple perpetual wars which western oligarchs impose upon oil nations who decide not to trade oil in USDollar. No mention of the 1000s of person-years now required every year across the planet to monitor & continually construct new containment around (human consumption, greed & war-related) nuclear wastes, which will last for over a million years.
Yes some of the indicators given in Gail Tverberg’s Deflationary Collapse Ahead? scenario are interesting but its choice of significant factors to calculate are way off-base. Douglas Jack http://www.indigenecommunity.info
Douglas,
You are babbling. I’m not sure where to start. This type of loose thinking is dangerous.
“Like most economists, this author doesn’t have a clue.”
Technically, Gail is not an economist but a retired actuary. Her articles are all well-thought out and continue to promote a generally consistent and logical view point that we live in an energy and debt-driven economy. Her analysis is empirical and often backed up by many charts. Personally, I think she is one of the wisest thinkers of our time. Certainly more accurate in perceiving the effect of higher energy costs on the economy.
I’d recommend you split your mega paragraph into bite sized chunks… people will be more inclined to read it
Gail
Yes; total energy has kept the world growing – there was some scope for economic growth still in the total system, even after the financial crash.
China was the big engine it seems and has much more than doubled its coal consumption since 2000 (when China entered WTO) and coal has thereby enabled an accelerated 2 decade crash-program of electrification. Almost all of this was achieved by massive new domestic coal production. This seems like a ‘one-off’, however, with implications I guess for future ‘growth’, China’s electricity consumption in the next year or so could be worth watching.
Interestingly, China’s coal consumption flattened somewhat after 2009/2012; but production has probably declined since 2012 although supplementation with imported coal has contined to a small degree, at least till 2014. Coal consumption has been slightly up over the last 3 years. http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/
Also, interestingly, China’s oil consumption (which increasingly needed imports) has kept growing at roughly the same rate for 2 decades and has nearly doubled since 2000.
best
Phil