We all know one thing that Greece, Cyprus, and Puerto Rico have in common–severe financial problems. There is something else that they have in common–a high proportion of their energy use is from oil. Figure 1 shows the ratio of oil use to energy use for selected European countries in 2006.
Figure 1. Oil as a percentage of total energy consumption in 2006, based on June 2015 Energy Information data. (Inverted order from chart originally shown.)
Greece and Cyprus are at the top of this chart. The other “PIIGS” countries (Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal) are immediately below Greece. Puerto Rico is not European so is not on Figure 1, but it if were shown on this chart, it would appear between Cyprus and Greece–its oil as a percentage of its energy consumption was 98.4% in 2006. The year 2006 was chosen because it was before the big crash of 2008. The percentages are bit lower now, but the relationship is very similar now.
Why would high oil consumption as a percentage of total energy be a problem for countries? The issue, as I see it, is competitiveness (or lack thereof) in the world marketplace. Years ago, say back in the early 1900s, when countries built up their infrastructure, oil price was much lower than today–less than $20 a barrel (even in inflation-adjusted dollars). Between 1985 and 2000 there was another period when prices were below $40 barrel. Back then, the price of oil was not too different from the price of other types of energy, so an energy mix slanted toward oil was not a problem.
Figure 2. Historical World Energy Price in 2014$, from BP Statistical Review of World History 2015.
Oil prices are now in the $60 barrel range. This is still high by historical standards. Furthermore, much of the financial difficulty countries have gotten into has occurred in the recent past, when oil prices were in the $100 per barrel range.
While countries with a large share of oil in their energy mix tend to fare poorly, at least some countries with a preponderance of cheap energy fuels in their energy mix have tended to do very well. For example, China’s economy has grown rapidly in recent years. In 2006, its share of oil in its energy mix was only 23.0%, putting it below Norway but above Poland, if it were included in Figure 1.
Let’s look a little at what it takes for an economy to produce economic growth, and what goes wrong in countries with high energy costs. I should mention that high energy costs can occur for any number of reasons, not just because a country’s energy mix includes a large proportion of oil. Other causes might include a high percentage of high-priced renewables or high-priced liquefied natural gas (LNG) in a country’s energy mix. The reason doesn’t really matter–high price is a problem, whatever its cause.
What Is Needed for an Economy to Grow
The following reflects my view regarding what is needed for an economy to grow:
1. A growing supply of energy products, either internally produced or purchased on the world market, is needed for an economy to grow.
The reason why a growing supply of these energy products is needed is because it takes energy (human energy plus supplemental energy) to make goods and services.
The availability of today’s jobs is also tied to the use of supplemental energy. High-paying jobs such as operating a bull-dozer, producing large quantities of food on a farm using modern equipment, or operating a computer, require supplemental energy in addition to human energy. While jobs can be created that use little supplemental energy to leverage human energy (for example, manual accounting without electricity or computers, growing food without modern equipment, or digging ditches with shovels), these jobs tend to pay very poorly because output per hour worked tends to be low.
To obtain growth in the number of jobs available to workers, a growing supply of energy products to leverage human energy is needed. Looking at the world economy, we can see that historically, growth in energy consumption is highly correlated with economic growth.
Figure 3. World GDP in 2010$ compared (from USDA) compared to World Consumption of Energy (from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014).
In fact, we tend to need an increasing percentage growth in energy supply to produce a given percentage growth of GDP because the y intercept of the fitted line is -17.394, rather than 0.000. Back in 1969, 1.0% growth in the consumption of energy products produced 2.2% GDP growth. The fitted line implies that recently, the amount of GDP growth associated with one percentage growth in energy consumption is only 1.2% of GDP. This poor result is taking place, despite all of our efforts toward increased efficiency. Thus, as time goes on, we need more and more energy growth to produce the same level of GDP growth. This is a rather unfortunate situation that world leaders don’t mention. They tend to focus instead on the fact that the growth in GDP tends to be at least a little higher than the growth in energy use.
2. This growing energy supply must be inexpensive, in order to be able to create goods that are competitive in the world market.
Human energy is by its nature expensive energy. Humans require food, water, clothing, and housing to support their biological needs–we are not adapted to eating entirely uncooked food, or to living in climates that get very cold in winter, unless we have protection from the elements. Thus, wages must be high enough to cover these costs.
Cheap supplemental energy provides a great deal more leveraging power than expensive supplemental energy. If we can leverage human energy with cheap energy such as wood or fossil fuels, it is easy to bring down the average cost of energy. (This calculation is made on a Calorie or Btu basis, for the sum of the energy provided by human labor plus that provided by supplemental energy.) If we are dealing with supplemental energy that is by itself high-cost, it is very difficult to bring down this weighted average cost. This is why high-cost oil, or for that matter high-cost supplemental energy of any kind, is a problem.
If human energy can be leveraged with increasing amounts of cheap energy, it can produce an increasing amount of goods and services, ever more cheaply. In fact, this seems to be where economic growth comes from. These goods and services can be shared with many parts of the economy, including government funding, wages for elite workers, wages for non-elite workers, payback of loans with interest, and dividends to stockholders. If there are enough goods and services produced thanks to this increased leverage, all of the various parts of the economy can get a reasonable share, and all can adequately prosper.
If there is not enough to go around, then there are likely be shortfalls in many parts of the economy at once. It is likely to be hard to find good paying jobs, for ordinary “non-elite” workers. Governments are likely to find it difficult to collect enough taxes. Governments may lower interest rates, or may take other steps to make it easier for businesses to continue their operations. Even with lower interest rates, debt defaults may become a problem. See my post, Why We Have an Oversupply of Almost Everything. The entire economy tends to do poorly.
Ayres and Warr provide an illustration of how an increasingly inexpensive supply of energy can lead to greater consumption of that energy–in this case electricity–in their paper Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Role of Physical Work.
Figure 4. Ayres and Warr Electricity Prices and Electricity Demand, from “Accounting for growth: the role of physical work.”
There is a logical reason why falling energy prices would lead to rising use of an energy product. If a person can afford to buy, say, $100 worth of energy and the cost is $1 per unit, the person can afford to buy 100 units. If the cost is $5 per unit, the person can afford to buy 20 units of energy. If it is the energy itself that aids growth in economic output (by moving a truck farther, or operating a machine longer), then lower energy prices lead to more energy consumed. This higher amount of energy consumed in turn leads to more economic output. This greater economic output is frequently shared with workers in the form of higher wages because of the workers’ “higher productivity” (thanks to the leveraging of cheap supplemental energy).
When it comes to the cost of energy production, there are “tugs” in two different directions. In one direction, there is the savings in costs that technology can provide. In the other, there is the trend toward higher extraction costs because companies tend to extract the cheapest resource of a given type first. As the inexpensive-to-extract resources are exhausted, the cost of resource extraction tends to rise. We can see from Figure 2 that oil prices first began to spike in the 1970s. After some temporary “fixes” (shifting much electrical production away from oil to cheaper fuels, shifting home heating from oil to other fuels, and starting new extraction in Alaska, Mexico, and the North Sea), the problem was more or less solved for a while. The problem came back in the early 2000s, and hasn’t really been solved. Thus, most of the tug now is in the direction of higher costs of production.1
Once oil prices rose, Greece and other countries that continued to use a high percentage of oil in their energy mix were handicapped because their products tended to become too high-priced for customers. Wages of customers did not rise correspondingly. Potential tourists could not afford the high cost of airline tickets and cruise ship tickets, because these prices depended on the price of oil. Even when oil prices dropped recently, airline companies have not reduced airline ticket prices to reflect their savings.
Because of the high-cost energy structure, manufacturing costs have tended to be high as well. With fewer tourism jobs and few possibilities for making goods for exports, the number of good-paying jobs has tended to shrink. Without enough good-paying jobs, Greek demand for fuel products of all kinds dropped rapidly. (Demand reflects the amount of goods a person wants and can afford. Young people without jobs live with their parents, and thus do not buy new homes or cars, lowering consumption.)
Figure 5. Greece’s energy consumption by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2015 data.
Other countries that were positioned to add huge amounts of inexpensive energy were able to continue to grow. The country that did this best was China. It was able to cheaply and rapidly ramp up its coal supply, once it entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. If Greece now adds production of goods, it needs to be able to compete in price with China and other goods-producers.
Figure 6. China’s energy consumption by fuel, based on data of BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015.
3. If the energy supply that a country plans to use is cheap, it doesn’t matter whether the energy supply is locally produced or not.
If the energy supply that a country is locked into using is expensive, then using locally produced high-priced energy is “less bad” than using imported energy, but there is still a problem.
If a growing supply of cheap energy is available, this can be used to leverage local human labor to produce inexpensive goods. This works well, regardless of whether the fuel is imported or not. Because imported energy “works” in such a situation, many island nations (including Cyprus and Puerto Rico) were able to develop their economies using oil as the energy base. These island nations typically did not have natural gas available, unless they imported expensive LNG. Coal and nuclear were also difficult to use, because power plants of these types are built on too a large scale to be suitable for on an island. But oil generally worked well, even if imported.
Greece includes 227 inhabited islands, and thus is faced with many of the problems of an island nation. Back when oil was cheap, oil was an easy solution. It could be used for electricity and for many processes that require heat, such as baking bread, dying cloth, making bricks, and recycling metals.
If a county is using imported oil, once oil becomes high-priced, there is essentially nothing that can be done to fix the problem. Devaluing the currency doesn’t work, because then oil becomes higher-priced in the new devalued currency. As a result, it still is prohibitively expensive to make goods, even after the devaluation. In fact, devaluing the currency also tends to make other imported energy products, such as LNG and solar PV panels, more expensive as well.
With respect to previously purchased renewables, the ongoing cost is typically the debt payments for the devices used to generate this energy. How devaluation will affect these payments depend on the currency the debt is in. If these debt payments are in the country’s own currency, then devaluing the currency will not affect the payments (so devaluation won’t help reduce costs). If debt payments for renewables are in another currency (such as the dollar or Euros), then devaluing the currency will increase the cost, making the loans more difficult to repay.
Even for an oil exporter like Saudi Arabia, high-priced oil is a problem, for a number of reasons:
- If the oil exporter uses some of its oil itself, the revenue that would have been gained by selling this oil abroad is lost. The government may be able to purchase the oil for essentially the cost of extraction, but it loses the extra revenue that it would gain by selling the oil abroad. This revenue could be used to fund government programs and new oil investment.
- The countries that import this high-priced oil tend to find their economies depressed, leading to less use of the oil. Thus, oil exports tend to become depressed.
- The price of oil may fall (and in fact has fallen, and may fall more), because of low demand. With low prices, it becomes difficult for exporters to collect enough revenue for government projects and investment in new supply.
The reason why locally produced high-priced oil is “less bad” than imported oil is because jobs related to producing the oil tend to stay in the country. This is a plus, in itself. If there is a currency devaluation, wage costs and other local costs will be lower, making the energy product less expensive to produce. Unfortunately, production costs (including taxes needed to support government services) may still be above the market price, because of depressed demand.
4. Debt helps increase demand for goods. But to make the debt repayable, these goods need to be made with low-priced energy products.
Ramping up debt for a country helps, but only if, with this debt, the country is able to profitably sell more goods and services in the world marketplace. Greece seems to have added debt, but wasn’t able to use this debt to create goods and services that could be sold cheaply enough that their prices would be competitive in the world market.
China clearly has been willing to add huge amounts of debt to support all of its new industry and new homes it has built with the coal it has been extracting. There is no doubt that the growth in China’s debt has played a major role in extracting growing quantities of coal. Now China’s coal consumption is slowing for a number of reasons including overbuilding of factories, too much pollution, and higher cost of coal production. China’s slowdown in energy consumption is leading to a slow-down in economic growth, and may even lead to a hard crash.
Greece has added a lot of debt in recent years, but it has not been used for ramping up the use of a new cheap supply of energy. Instead, much of Greece’s debt seems to be for purposes such as bailing out banks. This doesn’t really tell us what is/was wrong with the economy to begin with. I would argue that high-priced fuel tends to make it difficult to make any kind of goods or services inexpensively enough to compete in the world market, and this is at least part of the problem. The result of this is that companies, no matter what they invest debt in, have a difficult time being profitable.
The Greek government tries to cover up the country’s problems with programs that are funded by debt. Hidden subsidies may be occurring in several government-owned energy-related firms: Public Power Corporation of Greece (Greece’s largest electric utility), Hellenic Petroleum, DEPA Natural Gas, and ADMIE Grid Operating Company. There have been proposals to privatize these companies because they are poorly run. Whether or not they are poorly run, I expect that it will be very difficult to run them profitably, simply because of the inherent high-cost nature of the products they produce and workers’ lack of disposable income. This problem reflects the high cost of the underlying products they are producing.
There have been some proposals to try to get energy costs down, including a proposal to install a new lignite coal-fired electric power plant. There is also a plan to connect four of the islands to the electric grid, so that the islands won’t have to depend on oil-fired electricity. Even if these changes are made, it is not clear that Greece’s energy costs will be low enough to produce goods that are competitive in the world market. For one thing, airplanes and cruise ships operate using oil, not electricity produced by lignite, so will not be affected by additional inexpensive lignite electricity production.
From everything I can see, Greece’s debt needs to be written off. There is no way that the country can change its system to repay it. Greece can perhaps repay a little new debt, if it is channeled to support low-cost energy production to substitute for current high-cost energy.
Conclusion
Most people don’t understand that our world economy runs on cheap energy. High-priced energy is not an adequate substitute, even if the high-priced energy is “low carbon” or claims to have a reasonably high EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) ratio. Our world economy is sensitive to prices and costs, even if the current “politically correct” discussion ignores these matters.
Economies that are part of our current system can’t get along without energy supplies, either. Humans have used supplemental energy since our hunter-gatherer days, when we learned to control fire. In fact, the use of large amounts of supplemental energy seems to be the way we are now able to support a world population of 7+ billion people.
Given that the world economy runs on “cheap” energy, adding expensive energy production, no matter how “green” it may appear to be, does not solve a country’s financial problems. In fact, it likely tends to make its financial problems worse. There is no way that high-priced energy will produce goods and services that are competitive in the world market. In fact, it is doubtful that high-priced energy will return a high enough “profit” to pay its own way, in terms of having the ability to pay suitable taxes to support required government services, such as schools and roads. High-priced energy is instead likely to need government subsidies, both for initially building the devices and for helping citizens pay the ongoing cost of electricity.
Greece clearly has a lot of problems besides its high-energy cost, including excessive pensions and inefficiently operated state-owned companies. To some extent, I expect that these other problems reflect the difficulty of creating goods that can compete profitably in the world economy. If there is no way businesses can successfully compete in the world economy, I can see why leaders would do whatever they could to keep the system operating. This might mean adding more debt, keeping staffing at government-operated companies at higher levels than needed, and providing overly generous pension programs.
The thing that Greece has going for it is a relatively warm climate and a history of doing well with relatively little supplemental energy. Ancient Greece was known for its philosophy, literature and theatre, music and dance, science and technology, and art and architecture. Northern Europe, because of its cold climate, was not able to do very much until it added peat moss and coal as supplemental energy. Once these cheap supplemental energies were added, Northern Europe was able to industrialize, while Southern Europe lagged behind. If we are running into obstacles now with respect to fossil fuels, perhaps the advantage will again go back to people who live in warm enough climates that they can mostly live without supplemental energy.
Note:
[1] While cost of oil production is rising, oil prices are not necessarily rising to match the cost of production, and in fact, have fallen below the cost of production. This occurs because costs are now too high relative to wages, so oil isn’t affordable. This is an important story in its own right, and is likely to eventually bring down the whole system. See for example my post, Ten Reasons Why a Severe Drop in Oil Prices is a Problem.
Dear edpell and others
A little very quick research on Crete and agriculture. You can search on ‘agritourism Crete’ and get a sales pitch for coming there and spending some time.
Crete was once a very diversified agricultural area. If you rent the movie Zorba the Greek you will see sophisticated mainland Greeks appalled by the old fashioned ways of the Cretans. The impression I get is that they were pretty self-sufficient on their island, and perhaps didn’t exactly welcome the foreigners from the mainland.
Before the EU membership, small grains were grown and harvested using simple tools. However, the EU made plentiful supplies from big, machine harvested fields in northern Europe available, and the small grain plots have vanished. They still do grow crops like olive oil, vegetables, citrus, and potatoes. I do not know if supermarkets have replaced more traditional food distribution outlets, but if they have I would not be at all surprised if any vegetables are now imported from northern Europe, where they may well be grown in natural gas heated greenhouses. The agricultural story is much the same on Puerto Rico and Jamaica. The islanders cannot compete in a combination of cheap fossil fuels and highly mechanized production on the mainland plus industrial scale distribution. As you know from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation work, the biggest food problem the EU has is the vast amount they waste.
In a credit crisis or a transportation crisis, an island has to depend pretty much on itself to feed itself. The same would be true of New York City, and studies have documented just how much food New York City would have to import from far away.
Some people value self-sufficiency or resilience enough to grow small grains even if they could buy them a few percent cheaper from industrial sources. Gene Logsden has been a champion of small grain farming for decades. Will Bonsall has very deliberately constructed his little ‘island’ to be thermodynamically positive by limiting both his imports and his exports and by religiously recycling everything. Will is very careful about not exporting soil or fertility. These are, of course, Nature’s Ways.
From just a cursory look, I expect that if Greece is thrown out of the free trade area of the EU, it can probably restart its self-reliant agricultural system. I would expect that many will be resistant. In my experience working on a small farm, I found far more young people willing to enthusiastically engage in self-reliant food than I have found older people willing to do it.
I don’t know about the erosion or irritation issues in Crete. I do notice what looks like a terraced field of citrus, so they have known about some of the principles for a while.
It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened to Cretan agriculture if Greece had joined the free trade area but NOT the currency union. The currency union let Greece sell way more bonds than they could ever service at very low interest rates (thanks to the cleverness of Goldman Sachs). So the Cretans did not actually have to produce what they consumed…they could just borrow. So agriculture (and perhaps other) methods of production withered. If Greece had not been part of the currency union, they would not have been able to afford all that debt, and would have been forced to maintain more productive capacity. The local farms would never have been as prosperous as the big mechanized farms in the North, but they would have retained the ability to produce diversified food. Jan is fond of quoting Joel Salatin that ‘a farm should produce as much diversity of crops as possible’. Such thinking puts food security on a level that a neoliberal economist cannot possibly comprehend.
Don Stewart
One more thing. I said that a small island farm could never compete with a big mechanized farm on the mainland for commodity crops. That may have changed. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation study gives us many reasons why AgroEcology (or other variants of biological farming) is the right thing to do, right now. But even a narrowly focused study of monetary returns is showing that conventional farming is increasingly unattractive financially. There is no question that a labor intensive small farm can grow more food per acre and get more revenue per acre. A very careful decade long study at Iowa State comparing ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ farming of staple crops showed a small advantage for the ‘traditional’, but the Iowa State study was not using human labor to it maximum effectiveness.
Will Bonsall gives an example of why more labor intensive fields can increase yields. Will plants corn and edamame soybeans together. He gets the same yield as always from the corn, and the soybeans yield at about 40 percent of what they would yield if planted alone. Consequently, his companion planting has increased the yield from the field by 40 percent.
Companion planting requires the farmer to figure out which crops can be productively planted together. For example, a quick maturing crop can be planted along with a slow maturing crop which sprawls out (such as winter squash), which gives a bonus crop rather than a lot of bare ground waiting for the squash to get to it. Since bare ground is an invitation to erosion and compaction from rainfall, the companion plantings are also excellent from a Circle Economy standpoint.
If you think Circle Economies are either impossible or ridiculous, I recommend Bonsall’s book. But I doubt that many who have their minds firmly made up will pay any attention to that suggestion.
Don Stewart
Don,
Don’t know squat about Greece or Greeks personally, but in general, I would say that what happens from here on out for Greeks is based solely on current Greeks buying into the current global/EU mindset or not. But they’d definitely be smart to do so one way or another soon. Their ship’s rapidly “leaving port,” as they say. Whether or not they can they can make a go of it after that is a crap shoot, just as it always is.
James
I became curious about Crete’s electrical system. These are some papers I found, which are sort of in order by date. There are a lot of things that can be and are being done. It is doubtful that they are very cheap, though.
http://www.erec.org/fileadmin/erec_docs/Projcet_Documents/RE_Islands/REislands_Presentation_Crete.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/9215039/The_Autonomous_Electrical_Power_System_of_Crete_Island_-_A_Review
http://www.os.is/gogn/Skyrslur/OS-2010/OS-2010-08.pdf
http://www.oas.gr/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/The-interconnecion-of-the-Crete-Power-System-to-the-Mainland-Grid.pdf
http://users.ntua.gr/pgeorgil/Files/J51.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S097308261500054X
http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2012/Paris/DEEE/DEEE-37.pdf
http://www.store-project.eu/documents/target-country-results/en_GB/energy-storage-needs-in-greece
http://www.icis.com/resources/news/2015/06/11/9893839/greece-considers-taking-crete-power-cable-project-into-own-hands/
Some great points by the Archdruid this morning regarding human intelligence, and the presumed superiority of same:
AD makes some good points but he might do well to read Zarathustra or at least the Prologue for an overview to see how Nietzsche discussed this same stuff.
The last sentence of AD shows two errors: that people can spiritually “grow up” and that the objective is to enjoy the “time that we have left”.
The masses are what they are and they cannot be changed. The idea that we can all spiritually evolve or “grow up” is one of the lingering myths of Christianity. People are what they are and they don’t change. AD also still buys into the old Christian myth that we are the “darlings of the cosmos”, which he tried to oppose; he still thinks that it is all about us.
FN argues that we should evolve into another, a higher species but we are rather becoming a stable species, an end of evolution. It is impossible to appeal to the masses. They have no instinct to evolve, only to live and to die, and to reproduce more like themselves. In any case a species cannot evolve with such a huge and successful population. Evolution requires hard conditions and selective pressures. We acquire new adaptations as a species or race only when those who lack them die.
We can evolve intentionally only with the sort of massive, single-minded and brutal attempt that we saw in central Europe in the middle of the last century – just don’t explain to the masses exactly what the goal is, get them on board, keep them on board and do your thing. There is no way that is still on the cards as things stand. That cat is out of the bag and over the garden fence.
We might now emphasise that humanity sees itself not just as a “darling” (though it certainly is that to itself) but it sees itself as an “end” and a “climax” – not just ahead in evolution but as its final culmination. That is really scary, it implies that humans will never evolve and that they are liable to take down the entire planet with them.
Human evolution now is likely to happen unintentionally through global economic collapse and the end of industrial civilization. We are a “stable” species in so far as we generally lack a will to evolve – but only relatively speaking. This could well end in our own extinction but certainly, natural history looks set to intervene in human evolution, to “bump start” it.
The only way that we are going to “grow up” genetically and to evolve is when the entire global system comes crashing down and nearly everyone dies. Those who remain will have to struggle and to adapt, and over many generations, become something more “grown up”. The species, as it is, has to die, or rather replace itself with something higher, which kind of amounts to the same.
Of course I do not “want” everyone to die, but all that is really happening is the evolution of the species, through the struggle of the survival of the fittest, everything else is an illusion. Evolution simply does not work through comfort and security – nor through spiritually “growing up” though it may achieve that objective.
Btw, Nietzsche argues that it is the “misfits”, people who are “dissatisfied” with present humanity, who are the ancestors of the higher species. The folk on this site likely have a better claim than most.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm
Far too many live, and far too long hang they on their branches. Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!
Would that there came preachers of SPEEDY death! Those would be the appropriate storms and agitators of the trees of life! But I hear only slow death preached, and patience with all that is “earthly.”
Ah! ye preach patience with what is earthly? This earthly is it that hath too much patience with you, ye blasphemers!
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
As I have posted at length previously we are no different than bacteria or rats or any other living thing on the planet — our choices are made for us by our DNA i.e. surviving and reproducing dictate them.
My one concession to those who believe we are ‘special’ would be that yes we are special — we are an aberration — a freak show — ‘look at the monkey with the big brain eating with a fork’
And this aberration has possibly allowed us to do what no other species has ever done — both extinct itself and extinct the planet (see spent fuel ponds http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/364/radiological_terrorism.html)
I am not sure about extincting the planet. The planet is pretty resilient.
I agree, Gail,
in 10 million years from now, the Earth should have recovered a decent biodiversity, unless another allegedly intelligent species develops in the meantime.
http://cdn-imgs-mag.aeon.co/images/2015/04/Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.jpg
This graph (and its surprisingly strong trendline going upwards) comes from this article http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-extinction-is-not-the-problem/ in which the author argues that the way we’re looking at the ongoing 6th extinction is not correct.
Instead of purely quantitative indicators (number of species), we should have a much more qualitative approach, mostly taking into account the ecosystems, in order to better fight what he calls the defaunation, and be more efficient wrt biological conservation.
I must say I had a hard time reading the article, because the author is overly optimistic on many points, but I think his main argument is worthwhile.
Dear Stefeun
Since well over 99 percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct, the extinction of a single species clearly isn’t a problem for Mother Nature.
When we start to look at ecosystems, the answers get less clear. For example, humans in North America have exterminated the wild bison and substituted a similar mass of domesticated cows. Cows and bison are close enough that they can interbreed. Have the humans done any damage to the ecosystem? It might be argued that the main damage comes from fences and killing the predators…not the extinction of the bison. If we mimic the behavior of bison with cows, we get very good ecological results. On the other hand, cows can’t exist without humans, while bison did not need us. That might be a systemic risk for the grasslands.
We can get similar results when we look at the microbe ecosystem in the human gut and the microbe based ecosystem we call the soil food web. Talking about ‘extinction’ of a microbe species is probably not helpful Microbes swap genetic material very efficiently. But humans can do grievous damage to both ecosystems. We can also behave such that both ecosystems flourish better than they might in our absence.
Don Stewart
Why wouldn’t cows be able to exist without humans?
An ice sheet covering North America is not so great for the ecosystem either. If we irradiate the planet well enough, it could be quite a while longer for large animals to come about from microbes. However, it is virtually impossible for us to wipe out all the microbes that live miles underground or in volcanic sea vents. As long as there is an atmosphere, day and night, a magnetosphere, liquid water, I’m sure there will be some life on Earth somewhere.
Matthew
Suppose all the humans vanished tomorrow, and all the cows and wolves and coyotes remained. I don’t think the domesticated cows have the smarts to survive in the wild. Bison did have the smarts. So, while cows and bison are both heavy herbivores, and thus fill a similar ecological niche, they don’t have the same ‘survival in the wild’ characteristics.
Might cows evolve into bison like creatures? Or would they become extinct? I don’t know.
Don Stewart
I think it really depends on the breed and location. Longhorns would probably be fine, especially if they are left out on a 25,000 acre ranch. Jerseys and Dexters in a more northern area, with wolves, probably not. I don’t know how much smarts herbivores need; Quail, Grouse and Pheasants seem really unintelligent, and yet they exist. Even wild turkeys don’t seem immensely bright. As long as the cattle stay in a herd, only the weakest will get devoured.
Good points. I’m a longstanding Nietzsche subscriber for the most part too. I think you might be overstating the impossibility of AD’s suggestion in that last sentence. For whole cultures, perhaps. For individuals, certainly.
Said it (or alluded to it) before, and I’ll say it again, the need of humanity right now is to relinquish the ego, both personally and collectively. Whether we “enjoy it” or not is certainly preferable, although definitely not necessary.
Our currently ascendant mentality – “I, me, mine” – is not only killing all of us, it’s killing our entire biosphere, and thus all of the current species’ on earth the ability to survive the plague that is US! Whether or not we humans survive our coming collapse might well be the least of it from a purely “God’s Eye” point of view. Perhaps we’d be better off acting on our purported “God’s Eye” view for once, instead of just imagining it?
Interesting, thanks. I think that it is fair to say that the renunciation of ego is not going to save industrial civilization from collapse, nor is it likely to save many persons from death once the starving millions flood out of the cities and devour all in their path like a plague of locust. Perhaps sometime, somwhere, someone may extract some benefit from it.
It seems fair to say that Nietzsche does not see the renunciation of ego as either a free lifestyle choice or as a progressive tendency. Buddhism for him is a natural condition into which sophisticated and yet exhausted civilizations collapse. It is “passive nihilism”. The race has grown old and weary, disillusioned with its previous goals. Its energy is spent. One might call Buddhism the old people’s home of civilizations. A person or a civilization does not “freely choose” to renounce their ego any more than an old person chooses to become senile, it is something that just naturally happens. It is the natural posture of a shattered constitution.
Nietzsche fears precisely that Europe is headed for a “new European nihilism” and he wrote his books to try to warn us of what was coming. It is a catastrophe for him, a renunciation of life. He preaches rather the assertion of the ego and the embrace of life in all of its energy and possibilities. He would divert us rather into an “active nihilism”, a new aristocratic morality which I fear is quite the opposite to a renunciation of ego. Europe is still very young in comparison with older civilizations, it has its prime yet to come long before it rests in renunciation. One might say that his is a philosophy of hope, of a new if brutal beginning rather than surrender to demise.
I will give some short quotes from the Will to Power. See also TAC, 20-23.
http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_the_will_to_power/index.htm
What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect…
Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. The strength of the spirit may be worn out, exhausted, so that previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration–and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc…
The second Buddhism. The nihilistic catastrophe that finishes Indian culture…
What an affirmative Aryan religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Manu. (The deification of the feeling of power in Brahma: interesting that it arose among the warrior caste and was only transferred to the priests.)
What an affirmative Semitic religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Mohammed, the older parts of the Old Testament. (Mohammedanism, as a religion for men, is deeply contemptuous of the sentimentality and mendaciousness of Christianity–which it feels to be a woman’s religion.)
What a negative Semitic religion, the product of an oppressed class, looks like: the New Testament (–in Indian-Aryan terms: a chandala religion).
What a negative Aryan religion looks like, grown up among the ruling orders: Buddhism.
“We are a “stable” species in so far as we generally lack a will to evolve – but only relatively speaking.”
It is too bad that the wheels are coming off now, right when we are starting to have truly amazing technology. People desire to change, and we are just about at the point of being able to evolve, not over millions of years of random mutation, nor in dozens of generations of selective breeding, but within a single human being, by re-writing parts of a person’s DNA in situ. Surgeries and augmentations enable improvements in addition to what genetics can do.
Another 100 years of BAU, and we’d probably (if it is all possible) have been able to have designer babies, and raise general intelligence to the point that the average lawyer or doctor today would be considered a moron.
Oh well, I guess the survivors will have to adapt to be radiotropic, to thrive on the cesium in their bodies instead of getting cancer.
Technology or progress is exactly the thing that is causing the wheels to come off…
The green revolution is one of the main culprits — because that is why we have 7B mouths on the planet…
Of course things like the iphone are a disaster too — automobiles and aircraft … Air cons… central heating… running water… sewage systems … terrible things that have plowed through the earth’s resources in less than a 100 years…
Then we have the mother of all technologies — nuclear power — that’s given us the spent fuel ponds…
Technology has been wonderful for those of us who got to enjoy it for most of our lives… but there will be a price to pay — probably the ultimate price…
Why do you think that running water and sewage systems are such terrible inventions? The rest of your list I agree with, as they brought very temporary benefits in exchange for long term costs.
I would have thought that was pretty obvious ….
But anyway — sewage systems dramatically reduced death from diseases such as cholera … which lead to an explosion in the human population — which resulted in the accelerated depletion of the earth’s resources…
See Albert Bates on how this works…
On the other hand, lower infant mortality rates leads to lower fertility rates. The more disease people have, the more children they pop out to compensate. Besides, the British Empire arose without proper water and sewage just fine. Even the French did pretty well, wallowing in their filth. Meanwhile, the Italian city-states remained small and weak, even with their water and sewer.
We do think of ourselves as “Made in God’s image,” don’t we? I will have to agree with JMG, though.
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Excellent analysis, as usual. With a slight tightening of style, Gail could bring her prose to the same high standard as her insights, then form and content would be in balance. She often repeats phrases when a pronoun (“it”, “this”) would shorten the sentence and the reading time. Examples:
“While cost of oil production is rising, oil prices are not necessarily rising to match the cost of production, and in fact, have fallen below the cost of production.”
Suggestion:
“The rise in oil prices has not always matched the rise in the cost of production, and in fact has fallen behind it”.
Some more examples:
“There is no way that high-priced energy will produce goods and services that are competitive in the world market. In fact, it is doubtful that high-priced energy will return a high enough “profit” to pay its own way. High-priced energy is instead likely to need government subsidies…”
The final sentence in this paragraph is not really necessary:
“Whether or not they are poorly run, I expect that it will be very difficult to run them profitably, simply because of the inherent high-cost nature of the products they produce and workers’ lack of disposable income. This problem reflects the high cost of the underlying products they are producing.”
Another:
“Greece has added a lot of debt in recent years, but this debt has not been used for ramping up the use of a new cheap supply of energy. Much of Greece’s debt seems to be for purposes such as bailing out banks.”
Suggestion:
“Greece has added a lot of debt in recent years, but it has not been used for ramping up the use of a new cheap supply of energy. Instead, much of it seems to be for purposes such as bailing out banks.”
This is not so much a criticism as a suggestion for improvement. I reckon if Gail would spend only 10 to 15 minutes on tightening the text after writing it, these minor points could be eradicated. At the same time, I recognise the excitement of writing something and wanting to publish it straightaway. I have written leisurely pieces on forums and blogs and then tightened them up and had them published in a magazine, so I know the pleasure of having just a little more room to expand, rather than a set word limit. Am I a professional writer? No. However, we must expect that Gail will one day publish a book (though it would be hard to write one that would contain all her insights), and then such advice may prove useful.
For anyone who enjoys writing, the following may be a bit of fun and also give you some insight into your style:
http://writersdiet.com/?page_id=4
Anyway, please view this as a piece of friendly encouragement from a fan. I certainly can’t match Gail’s profound and original insights into her chosen subject.
Phil, that ranks right up there as one of the most insulting and condescending posts I’ve ever read. Why don’t you try contributing something pertaining to the subject matter.
Agreed. “Well meaning” or not, it certainly came across as patronizing at best, and insulting as worse. Grammar and style is not really the point here.
I wonder what Phil makes of my hops and beeps ….. —— ……. at the end of the day as long as the message gets conveyed isn’t that all that matters?
Posterity?……………../
Peace, my friends, peace. Still the outrage; evidently no harm was meant.
Most great writers have editors … and there is a reason the editors are editors… and not great writer/thinkers… 🙂
Thanks for your suggestions. I think I would need an editor to do the kind of editing you are suggesting. Most regular readers know I have a hard time just trying to get rid of typos.
If you are volunteering to help, let me know.
I volunteer to copy edit. It would be the least I could do for you in gratitude. I teach ESL and edit papers all week. I would be happy to present my credentials.
Thanks! I think I have your e-mail address, if you listed the correct one on this comment.
And here’s Credit Suisse :
When a central bank says “whatever it takes”, we think the market should listen. The US Federal Reserve did so in 2008 and the European Central Bank did so in 2012. Is it the People’s Bank of China’s turn now?
Pretty much as expected — the PBOC ain’t gonna stand by and let that market go into total free-fall …. so they would be fired the big guns to get a 6% bump today…
What we need are the Idiocracy to let greed override panic and have them charge back in to buy buy buy!!!! — and get some nice momentum behind this manipulated market…
I am sensing that is not likely to happen because the Idiocracy has seen that the Emperor has no Clothes — the PBOC will need to remain as the main driver of this if it is to continue…
Well … at least we should make it to the weekend without a blow-out 🙂
All these players from West to East are one and the same. I read all the time that the next 100 years will be the Asian Century. These guys are doing the same exact thing as the crooked Western Banking Cabal and they are no different. Then I read that this is all part of China’s plan to collapse the system so as to institute a gold backed currency. Would anyone trust a Nation who replaced the previous Banking cabal based on similar tactics? Not me nor should anyone else.
In fact this whole BRICS/AIIB is nothing more than to further integrate with the current IMF/WB/ECB/BIS banking system.
http://rt.com/business/261241-brics-bank-institutions-complement/
China it seems is one big roach motel
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Late on Wednesday Beijing implemented a ban on selling shares among company bosses, senior management and investors with large stakes. In recent days it also encouraged buybacks and asked insurers to raise their equity allocations. Reports abounded that short-sellers could be arrested.
As if that weren’t enough, the People’s Bank of China also began lending directly to China Securities Finance Corp to fund purchases of stocks — what’s been aptly dubbed quantitative easing with Chinese characteristics.
So, yes, the Shanghai market had a great day. But it didn’t stage a recovery. A recovery was staged.
http://www.ft.com/home/asia
How does the stock market system go back to “normal” from here?
Right. This is one of those Rubicon moments in history I reckon
http://www.history.com/s3static/video-thumbnails/AETN-History_VMS/1007/586/History_Ask_History_Crossing_the_Rubicon_SF_HD_still_624x352.jpg
“BEIJING (Wednesday 08/7 evening) – As the market continued to nose dive, controlling shareholders and managers who hold more than 5 percent of a company’s shares were ordered to not reduce their holdings in the coming six months.”
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2015-07/09/content_21229200.htm
6 months!!
All these desperate efforts to control their stock market could backfire by making investors disinterested in holding stocks in the future for fear of being told they cannot sell.
Shanghai index staged best recovery since 2009
It took plenty of effort from authorities but the Shanghai Composite just had its best session since 2009. Too bad half the market was frozen.
Another 194 companies suspended their shares from trading on Thursday, bringing the percentage of suspended companies to more than 50. Those companies who halted their shares in the last week missed out on a rout. Those who did so today only missed a rally that extended far and wide, writes Patrick McGee
The Shanghai index rebounded 5.8 per cent, its best session since early 2009. All sectors gained, with utilities rising nearly 9 per cent.
http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/357611/shanghai-stages-best-recovery-since-2009
I wonder how much cash the PBOC threw at this today to move the dial that much….
All of these rule changes affect other decisions. Who wants to buy stock, when the rules may change so that they cannot sell it? It is not a whole lot different than having money in a bank, but not being able to take it out.
… or having your money in a co-op, and not being able to take it out! (At least I get tomatoes out of the deal.)
Thank you Gail for sharing this research with us.
Apart from those countries, Venezuela and Argentina have been also facing hardships for quite some time.
Although Venezuela (as far as I know) they still have cheap oil, or As they say they can operate at a price of 30dls per barrel, posibly liying, nontheless they have two big issues
1 An outdated left government who doesn’t play by the rules of the so called “Imperialist”
2 pissing off their biggest consumers calling them Imperialist.
Arguably Vietnam despite having cheap labor they seem not to be experiencing a fast paced growth just as China or India t least not the common folk.
It would be interesting to compare other countries.
Venezuela has Chinese friends.
Vietnam also has Chinese friends. Quite a bunch of Chi-Viet people, mostly richer merchants and their progeny, also reside in Orange County.
There are other problems besides the high cost of oil imports.
A second problem is an oil exporter collapsing because of low export revenue, related to low price. The prime example of this was the Former Soviet Union. It collapsed in 1991, after oil prices had been low for quite some time in the late 1980s.
I believe low oil prices are a big part of Venezuela’s big problem, but it has a problem with declining oil exports (because its own consumption is rising, and its production is about flat). You can see charts for Venezuela using this recently-updated link, using BP data. http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/ Nigeria is another country mentioned with financial problems related to low oil prices. Russia eventually may run into this problem as well, but it does have a fund to cushion fluctuations. Actually, any oil exporter will be affected by low prices, eventually.
A third problem is the oil supply of an oil exporter decreasing, and because of this, oil export revenue disappearing, so the country collapses. We have a lot of examples of this:
You will recognize these countries because of the civil disorder and other fighting.
Argentina was to some extent an oil exporter. The revenue from oil exports has now gone away, which is part of its problem. Also, for Argentina, natural gas production is down, so Argentina now has to depend on expensive imports. Oil and gas together make up nearly all of Argentina’s energy production/consumption, so it has a problem.
I am sorry, I don’t have time to figure out Viet Nam right now. It takes a lot of debt to do anything. I expect that may be part of Viet Nam’s problem.
Thank you very much! really appreciate it.
I will look to other figures myself and also try to find historical data of energy use in developed societies. Thanks again Gail !
Recent Vidcast on Greece and Europe with Gail, Ugo, Steve and RE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1thDDc1SNDk
Latest Rant on the China market and Oil price crashes:
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2015/07/08/the-perfect-storm-oil-china-in-a-head-on-collision/
RE
Thanks for both the video and the audio, RE.
YW Stef.
RE
I put the video up on my Presentations/ Podcasts page.
World affairs suffer from the disease of terminal excessive complexity. To make matters worse, much of the late-phase complexity operates in the service of accounting fraud of one kind or another.
The world’s banking system is mired in the unreality of so many unmeetable obligations, cooked books, three-card-monte swap gimmicks, interest rate euchres, secret arbitrages, market manipulation monkeyshines, and countless other cons, swindles, and hornswoggles that all the auditors ever born could not produce a coherent record of what has been wreaked in the life of this universe (or several parallel universes). Remember Long Term Capital Management? That’s what the world has become.
What happens in the case of untenable complexity is that it tends to unravel fast and furiously.
That’s exactly why avalanches and earthquakes happen all at once, not stretched out over a six week period.
The global financial scene not so different. It’s just another matrix of linked mutually-supporting relationships that can implode if a few members weaken.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/welcome-to-blackswansville/
Agree – at some point the whole thing snaps can we get a very quick collapse.
Bruce Wilds posted a nice piece on China and why it’s soooooo important to the entire globalized financial system in order for it to function at all. And then he either doesn’t get it or his solution is part of the problem where he says: “This adds credence to the idea that only in the case of systemic risk that threatens financial stability should any government step in and that bailouts be considered only as a last resort during the most dire of times.”
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2015/07/china-merits-our-attention-greece-is-on.html
His solution is the reason why we are in the mess we’re in today. There’s no fear of risk or failure because someone will keep you from falling and not getting up. While the prevailing thought is that a massive implosion on the global financial system would bring us to chaos and misery. If we had let failure be weeded out decades ago we might not even consider Bruce Wilds idea of more bailouts because it just makes things even worse as it has since 2008.
Getting Ridiculous: 70% Of Alcoa’s LTM “Earnings” Are From Restructuring Charges
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/getting-ridiculous-70-alcoas-ltm-earnings-are-restructuring-charges
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-27/who-could-have-possibly-anticipated-caterpillars-disastrous-earnings-and-guidance
Bother are bell weather stocks…. both are in a world of hurt…
The global economy is surely on the precipice based on these numbers…. surely if we had real GDP numbers we would see a global recession… but of course we don’t get the real numbers…
“surely if we had real GDP numbers we would see a global *DEPRESSION*”
There fixed it for you.
If negative GDP numbers are reported for two consecutive quarters it is deemed a recession. So crafty, creative accounting efforts are encouraged to eliminate this from happening because otherwise the consumer might not spend as much and then we’d really be up a creek…Move the decimal, shift a column of numbers, add instead of subtract, change a negative number into a positive number, include estimated drug and human trafficking, whatever, but never admit a recession.
Part of the problem is that all the GDP numbers put out by the Govt are either badly cooked or outright false. That’s why they get revised downward at a later date. According to John Williams from shadowstats.com the real unemployment rate is between 23-26% since 2008. With 1/3 of the US population on Govt assistance and a good portion of the jobs being part time low wage, there is no way to believe the Govts GDP figures.
If the Govt and Fed had not come to the rescue in 2008 there would have global chaos and tanks would have been roaming the streets of the US. That’s according to Hank Paulson. The world in reality has been stuck in a depression since 2008.
Governments cook the books; companies cook the books. Everything looks less bad that way. Maybe if everyone borrows more, and buys back more stock, EPS will rise.
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The world bank has some interesting data on power generation from coal for a lot of countries
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.COAL.ZS
As far as I know there are only 3 coal fired power plants.
Agios Dimitrios Power Plant
Amyntaio Power Plant
Megalopoli Power Plant
Here is world bank on NatGas electricity generation by country.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.NGAS.ZS
It’ll be interesting to see Russia draw Greece to the Eastern shere with NatGas offers via a line through Turkey.
Thanks! That is a good source of information.
Natural gas has been cheap in the United States, but a lot less cheap elsewhere. To some extent, its high price is part of the high-priced energy problem as well. Russia no doubt needs to charge fairly high rates for its natural gas, given the long distances over which the gas is transported and recently, the difficult (and expensive) nature of the extraction. I notice that over the three years shown on the World Bank Exhibit, natural gas use for electricity is down in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and UK.
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The advanced countries can use a much greater efficiency to produce things, and with the middle class collapsing demands won’t be too much so there will be more advancement for the lucky few at the top.
The poorer countries will have to use the energy with less efficiency, while the richer and more advanced countries will use the energy with much more efficiency and less waste.
At there , the competition is already doomed.
I do see that mankind could reach the Type I civ without actually harnessing all of the earth’s energy. With less energy demand, most of the remaining energy resources could be put into space and other very advanced subjects, and those in top could enjoy the Type I civ without having to use all of the earth’s energy.
Perhaps the advanced countries will all have robots to make stuff for them and grow their food.
All will be ok for these top echelon types…. I am certain of that 🙂
I have been a student of history for more than three decades.
Whether you like or not, the best odds for survival is the proximity to the top echelon.
Hardscrabble regions do not really have a higher rate of survival in a crisis – the offspring of those with means do better, as seen in studies by Greg Clark.
William Shakespeare had 8 siblings. 8 of 9, including the Bard himself, have no living descendants – their lines died out in 1 or 2 generations. The only one who still has a living descendant was a sister of his; out of her descendants only one grandson survived , and he emigrated to America where he left descendants. In other words he couldn’t make it in England.
Being close to the top would be even more important as resources get more scarce, since being close to the top means priority to the dwindling resources.
So….. we snapped a water line yesterday afternoon and did not have a joiner to reconnect so we’ve only had a small tank of water to use until the plumbers return later this morning with the repair kit…
And lo and behold when I tried to put water into the coffee machine this morning all I got was a sputter… the tank was empty…
I was hoping to have a shower and brush my teeth …. I guess I could do down to the stream and carry up some buckets of ice cold water and heat them on the top of the wood stove…. but that is rather troublesome … I think I will wait for BAU to come to rescue…
Just another whiff of what is to come….
And while we are on the topic… we have these big fat water tanks going in up the hill… fed by a spring … plenty of trenching going in for pipes … lots of valves… etc etc…
What happens when any of of these things busts or wears out post BAU?
I will be stockpiling some extras because I have a crystal ball — and I have some spare cash from that pension I am waiting to redeem to blow at Wally’s World (of course that is getting hammered because it is stuck in the Hong Kong market until the bloody long winded process of pulling it out completes – and to think for once I actually time the top of a market!)
But what about all the neighbours? What about the other 7B people?
A all you can eat buffet of food for thought.
I don’t know whether my post in early modern Korea could make it thru the moderators, but I happen to know quite a lot about that country which was even more extreme and ‘self sufficient’ than E-D-O.
Korea did remain extremely poor and extremely isolationist because
1 It was hard to get to. To get there one had to cross a long wilderness or a treacherous sea.
2. It had nothing to ‘take’. Easier pickings were legion. Korea was so poor and so resource-less that few countries cared to invade it – in fact the rulers kept it that way , precisely to discourage invaders that attacking Korea was just a waste of time and resources.
Any “Kumbaya” society will be extremely poor. It’s inevitable.
Ah, that’s too bad…really
You ain’t telling us anything we don’t know, kiddo
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Land-Young-Americans-Nature/dp/1566636647/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436398266&sr=1-3&keywords=Back+to+the+land
The difficulties that homesteaders in her book faced include:
* Grinding poverty
* Miserable, dangerous or boring jobs many miles away
* Constant cold
* Transportation costs, thus necessitating an off-farm job
* Strained relationships
* Overwhelming routines
* Constant setbacks and disappointments
* Dangers
* Health problems, and lack of either money or quality government facilities to pay for it
* Lack of community (not enough neighbors close by)
I could add two more things: Finding a good –or any — church, and an over-dependence on the government.
In the end, many of the homesteaders found life somewhere between urban and rural, by growing gardens, working with ecology, helping the poor, etc. The author seemed to feel that contentment was somewhere in the middle between simple homesteading and hard-core urban living.
So what did I take away from this book? What lessons did I learn?
The first thing I learned is that homesteading really is quite difficult. Her book took the shine off it. I had been viewing it, to a degree, with rose-colored glasses. Maybe homesteading is a great way to make it through the coming dark days, but I’d better be sure it’s the right thing for our family before risking their well-being. I’m currently doing a risk assessment to see if that’s best for us.
The second thing I learned is that we shouldn’t try to do a homestead alone. The obstacles that lone homesteaders had to face would likely prove too great for our family. Once you start getting expensive repair or hospital bills, it’s a slippery slope back to working in the city.
I’ve learned enough about farming to know that it’s very difficult, even risky, to do well. We’re going to need some backup. With that in mind, I’m also reading Amazon’s two top-rated books on building and forming community, both by Diana Leafe Christian:
Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities
Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community
That’s not to say that forming community is a picnic. One co-housing founder called it “the longest, most expensive personal development course you’ll ever take.” Nine out of ten (!) intentional communities fail. 90 percent! So we’ve got to go methodically and carefully.
Don’t give up Fast Eddy, reinventing the wheel sounds like a challenge!
Keep in mind the homesteaders you have read about (I have read a couple of books on this topic as well) were probably physically and mentally very tough people.
There were not likely ever coddled. They had skills — and they were surrounded by like minded people.
And yet many of them died of starvation or disease or injury….
We are amateurs by comparison. The shock will come when the electricity goes off — within minutes the reality of what we are facing will kick in.
They also did not have to deal with 7 billion people without anything to eat… who ravaged their gardens and shot their animals and attacked them…
We are comparing apples with chickens here…
Indeed, the lesson of history is that even the toughest and most skilled rural people died in all sorts of horrible ways, by accident and famine. (There is a fine Robert Frost poem about a farm boy losing an arm and dying, to the relief of his family who knew how bad it would be to live ona cripple unable to harvest. )
But I very much doubt they spent their time banging on about how awful it was and demoralising one another.
There are reasons for this.
Think of the Dutch: a whole country more or less claimed from the sea, starting out from little collections of huts sitting on mounds just above the water.
This required immense, steady, labour, skill, and above all community solidarity over a long period of time.
It’s noted that even today the Dutch mostly have very even tempers and a ‘however bad it is let’s get on with it’ approach to life. To some extent, they are perhaps too good at ignoring the worst news, and tend to focus on the immediate task, which can be mentally limiting, but as a way of getting things done it has its merits.
Their historic environment selected for that temperament: the panickers were of no use to anyone, nor ever have been.
They do not contribute, and they demoralise. I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Dutch sent such people out fishing in a leaky boat …….. ?
Contrast that with the average person alive today….
Dear Fast Eddy,
My post link was about folks alive and not back in pioneer days
Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back Paperback – by Eleanor Agnew
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Land-Young-Americans-Nature/dp/1566636647/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436398266&sr=1-3&keywords=Back+to+the+land
These folks were much like you with BAU and a bit of koombya to boot.
Actually, ‘inner resources’ will just as important as outer resourses as you will soon learn from the College of Hard Knocks. The list that was provide was just a short list of degrees given out.
As Jan or Don pointed out books provide little in regard to the value of actually doing it.
Gail was correct that the true test of home grown food production was when there was a crop failure low point.
Don’t despair, I have faith you will be on of the 3% that makes it threw to the other side.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Q9YcOEhgM
Your fav Ship of Fools the Doors
That’s where diversity kicks in. The people who suffer from “crop failure” are those who only have one crop. Keep in mind that Ireland was a net exporter of food while many perished in the potato famine.
(I won’t bother to point out that “Value Diveristy” is one of the twelve Permaculture Principles — Oops! I just did! It just seems like common sense to me.)
So when they went ‘back to nature’ does that mean they were living like Scott Nearing — or the other back to nature types who dip a toe in while remaining completely plugged into BAU?
Unless they completely unplugged then why mention them?
I have been camping many times… I have cooked over a fire … slept in a tent … hiked in my trusty hiking boots … drove to the bush in my truck … (all courtesy of BAU)….
Enough of these faux back to nature hipsters….
You want to know what back to nature really means — then watch this video.
In 1936, a family of Russian Old Believers journeyed deep into Siberia’s vast taiga to escape persecution and protect their way of life.
The Lykovs eventually settled in the Sayan Mountains, 160 miles from any other sign of civilization. In 1944, Agafia Lykov was born into this wilderness.
Today, she is the last surviving Lykov, remaining steadfast in her seclusion. In this episode of Far Out, the VICE crew travels to Agafia to learn about her taiga lifestyle and the encroaching influence of the outside world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
This women puts Scott Nearing and his pickup truck and his electricity and his concrete and his trips to Florida to shame….. I have never been to Maine or Siberia but I suspect winter in the latter is slightly more harsh….
THE END.
@FE
And that woman did not reproduce. Her way of life will die with her.
Wilderness is not exactly a place for one’s line to survive.
No Dude, not so, it is the beginning of the END
The Farm is an intentional community in Lewis County, Tennessee, near the town of Summertown, Tennessee,[1] based on principles of nonviolence, and respect for the Earth. It was founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin, and 320 San Francisco hippies;[2] The Farm is well known amongst hippies and other members of similar subcultures as well as by many vegetarians. The Farm now has approximately 150 residents
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee)
Stephen Gaskin (February 16, 1935 – July 1, 2014) was an American counterculture Hippie icon best known for his presence in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s and for co-founding “The Farm”, a famous spiritual intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee.[1] He was a Green Party presidential primary candidate in 2000 on a platform which included campaign finance reform, universal health care, and decriminalization of marijuana.[2] He was the author of over a dozen books, political activist, a philanthropic organizer and a self-proclaimed professional Hippie.
http://www.thefarmcommunity.com/Stephen_Gaskin_quotes.html
“When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s sometimes hard to remember that you waded in to drain the swamp.”
“Each person creates their own movie .”
“Change is like ripping a band-aid off a hairy leg — the faster you go, the easier it is.”
“The Sudden School of Enlightenment”
“You are your brother’s keeper–and your brother is the entire population of the planet.”
“Enlightenment’s not like ringing a bell or climbing a mountain.”
“Every time you go into a McDonald’s you’re putting your foot on the neck of a third-world person.”
“The thing Christians have going for them is forgiveness.”
“The mills of the gods grind exceedingly fine,” meaning that sometimes the karma is fast and exact (so pay attention if you know what’s good for you).
“If you hate something long enough you become it.”
“Death is always in the rear-view mirror. He may turn his headlights off every once in a while, but he’s always with you. The best thing you can do is, don’t give him jack shit.”
Sailing along….
How amusing … a community that professes non-violence smack in the middle of a country with the biggest war machine in the history of the world … a war machine that makes things safe for that community of pacifists…
Therefore a community that is 100% reliant on extreme violence …
Try setting up a pacifist community in Baghdad…
Fast Eddy, You are easily amused and seemed focused on it. Good luck. you will soon get a College Of Hard Knocks “degree” in that field too, no doubt…
The Ingalls family in the Little House in the Prairie had 5 daughters. 2 of them died at infancy ; 3 survived to adulthood but 1 was deaf and another was sickly so they did not reproduce.
Only one of them reproduced and she had one single daughter.
She did not reproduce (instead of trying to reproduce she spent all of her life spreading libertarianism) and the Ingalls line died out.
Charles Ingalls’ siblings who stayed in the city still have living descendants.
Go figure.
Kulm
But that can be turned on its head: before antibiotics, vaccinations and efficient sanitation, high-density cities had a far higher death-rate than rural areas: statistics from the 18th century in Europe show this very clearly.
The curse that people sought to escape when moving to the city was hard labour ending in a wrecked body.
Also there were more doctors in the cities, often none in rural ares, and they were until recently very much better at killing people with their medicines than curing them.
A friend of mine is a transplant surgeon, and sometimes we have a good laugh over the old medical books which I repair and their prescriptions of poisons: ‘give the one you love mercury’, etc. It’s actually quite frightening to see what physicians used to get away with, and how much in the dark they really were.
Far better then to be in a village and either survive or succumb to an ailment without medical help.
One exception I’d make is bone-setting and so on, as surgeons were quite good at that at an early date.
“The curse that people sought to escape when moving to the city was hard labour ending in a wrecked body.”
The cold hard truth — farming without BAU is brutal — it is back-breaking work.
But of course our minds are powerful things — we can ignore that statement and develop a fantasy farmville in our minds — one where the electricity stays on for certain key uses (fridges, washing machines…) — where we can somehow keep farm machinery and trucks operational … and so on… it allows us to ignore that farming without BAU would break down the body of even a young man….
Our fantasy farmvilles help fight back the fear. The mind quickly rushes in to push the implications of that statement into a dark closet.
Be sure to check out Appendix B in the second book, Can Living in Community Make a Difference in an Age of Peak Oil? which we worked on together.
Also check out Diana’s online newsletter, although she hasn’t had many postings recently.
To my knowledge, it was Diana who coined the phrase, “the longest, most expensive personal development course you’ll ever take.” I can personally attest to that! But there’s something to be said for learning from experience, rather than from books and courses.
From what have seen is the 80%/20% rule as far so-called diversity Jan. 80% of the food density comes from 20% of the ‘crops’, the true test is when that 80% fail and much more likely now with climate change and extreme climate events.
These are incredible insights… banking analysts and MSM financial journalists are amateurs by comparison….
Thanks! Actuaries have a different perspective than economists on how the world works. I think I had my first “Ah-Ha” moment years ago, when I learned that Social Security actuaries look at the future in terms of “retirees per worker” at various points of time, and how the goods and services produced in a given year would be divided up between retirees and workers. This is very different from financial planners saying, “We will invest $xxxxxx at 7.0% interest, and at the end of 30 years we will have $yyyyyyy.”
Someone has to think about how things really work. Models can be partly right, but they can also obscure the real situation.
“Someone has to think about how things really work. Models can be partly right, but they can also obscure the real situation.”
A far larger part of our dilemma is the models that are not acknowledged as models, words and thoughts. Words are models. Each individual word is a model. Its accuracy in terms of a model is not questioned. Then these highly questionable models are combined to form even larger models. questioning models is actively discouraged
Our society worships models. Ironically the work of Einstein who actively communicated that his work came not from logic is presented to us as E=mc2. Largely we are taught what are acceptable models word thought combinations through pack behavior. Pack behavior also reinforces the primary model that logic and thought are what we are. This is reinforced by our uber predator status. Logic must be of the utmost value for are we not the uber predator? All through our lives models are presented in various subcultures and the primary method of establishing them is pack behavior.
Some humans possess qualities that are outside of the realm of models. They usually are not very successful in society. Perception outside of word models thoughts is actively discouraged by pack behavior. Media plays a large role in this in modern society. Most humans associate their sanity with the models words thoughts they have been indoctrinated with and they are very fearful to explore outside that. Many humans experience qualities or experiences outside of the primary model in their life. These experiences are usually quickly discarded instead of being explored. Part of our fundamental flaw is our ability to discard things that do not fit our models. Most humans are very uncomfortable with experiences that lie outside the primary model and will attack anything they associate with those experiences.
Often humans that sense untruth in the primary model engage in self destructive behavior.. They find nothing in this world to nourish them.
I see our possibilities as largely something other than what we are now. Whether this occurs or not remains to be seen. Gail I value your work very much. It is one of the few communications out there that works actively to communicate that despite our uber predator status there are a few little bugaboos with what we are. You are a brave individual and I have the utmost respect for you.
“I see our possibilities as largely something other than what we are now.”
Great White Sharks are predators.
Wolves are predators.
Lions are predators.
Humans are far superior predators to all of these. We are super-predators.
I don’t see the possibility of humans changing any more than I see any of those 3 changing.
We have evolved into exquisite killing machines over many thousands of years. And every year we get better at killing.
http://static3.demotix.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/a_scale_large/900-8/photos/1325091418-defence-and-security-equipment-international-exhibition_983868.jpg
We are more than our model of a human.
A shark is more than our model for a shark.
A lion is more than our model for a lion.
Life is a miracle, words are dead.
We value words and disregard life.
We can value life and disregard words.
We can become sane, if it is our destiny.
If you stand on the brink,
Is it not wise to seek change?
The possibility for change might be small but it exists.
like a small sprout in the concrete it exists.
Are those the words to another song by Joan Baez?
If so I don’t know that song.
I only know this one. I like to watch this one. I like to watch tee vee.
PV
‘No Wealth but Life’. John Ruskin.
Indeed.
I find people get rather distressed if you depart from the model, even if you do not expect them to do so too.
Such a waste of potential and possibilities.
Curious to observe that even those fleeing from BAU themselves conform to a narrow stereotype: the doomsday homestead.
Oh, I think there are many more ways to leave “the unreal world” than by joining the “Doombaya” club.
I agree. And mental detachment is quite as important as physical.
But some do seem to run around the world from one doomstead to another. It’s amusing to observe.
Love it! 🙂 I’ll try to hold onto that attitude…
Or you could interpret that as some are continuing to learn and understand the nature of what is coming and make changes to the plan as required — rather than ramming one’s head against a brick wall ignoring the facts and believing that all will be fine.
It could be interpreted that someone determined that living on an over-populated island amongst another tribe was an unwise move (a move that was made well before the true nature of the situation was evident)
Or that living in Canada would have been total insanity and a death sentence due to the long cold winters (which are hard enough even with BAU support) after having come to the realization that one could be parked next to a hydro plant shivering and starving — and not have access to a single watt of electricity post collapse.
It could be that the property prices in some locations had tripled since 2007…
Or it could just be that one determined that a new adventure was in the cards — and that it was time to move on and satisfy a life-long adventure lust.
Or maybe… the choice was a choice related to what was determined to be best place to die…. (the skiing in Queenstown is marvelous this time of year…)
Dear PV=nRT,
Thanks for writing! I agree with you that our society worships models and doesn’t even realize when it is using one. Words necessarily group things into “classes” that are similar. Someone with a different language will define concepts differently. One of my sisters (Lois Tverberg) wrote a book called “Listening to the Language of the Bible.” Ancient Hebrew had a very much smaller number of words than we have today. As a result, it is almost impossible to give a word for word translation of the Hebrew into modern English, because a word corresponded to several of today’s words. For example, “fear God” has a different (broader) meaning than the common English translation would suggest.
It is not just words that limit our thinking; it is the assumption that the future will be like the past; it is our belief that people with more degrees and more published papers are more likely to be right than those who apply common sense thinking; it is our belief that “of course, our leaders would tell us if there is a problem.”
I was shocked when I figured out that economic models implicitly assume that growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world. This is clearly absurd. Yet, we have nearly all financial planners and actuaries assuming this is the case. To so otherwise presents a view of the world that is too scary for most people to even consider. The future must be almost like the past.
Thanks. Powerful.
Thanks for the book plug, Gail. 🙂
Gail, very interesting graph “Greece Energy Consumption by Fuel” Could you restack so that oil is on top?
You mention taxes. Is there a statistical relationship between oil prices and tax revenue in Greece?
Background information for tax-payments in Greece was given in this WSJ article Feb 2015
Greece Struggles to Get Citizens to Pay Their Taxes
ATHENS—Of all the challenges Greece has faced in recent years, prodding its citizens to pay their taxes has been one of the most difficult.
At the end of 2014, Greeks owed their government about €76 billion ($86 billion) in unpaid taxes accrued over decades, though mostly since 2009. The government says most of that has been lost to insolvency and only €9 billion can be recovered.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-struggles-to-get-citizens-to-pay-their-taxes-1424867495
This also means that the damage of the financial crisis is permanent.
Actually, I thought that the graph was going to stack with Greece on top–that is the way I put the data in. So the short answer is, “No, I don’t have an easy way of fixing the graph to put Greece on top.” I don’t see an easy way to rearrange the bars, other than to plot something else, like “Percentage of Energy from Non-Oil Sources.”
I have heard that the Greeks don’t pay their taxes. I think that the underlying problem is that nearly everyone is living at a standard of living higher than they can really afford. If they paid taxes, besides everything else they pay, the government would not have nearly the debt problem that it has. But to accomplish this change, the standard of living of nearly everyone would have to drop. People would need to move to smaller homes, or more relatives would need to move in together. Few could afford cars or advanced education. Many more would be unemployed than are unemployed today. No one really considers such a change an option–except this is what seems to be ahead.
I finally figured out how to fix it. I changed it at the top of the post, too. Thanks! (<:
Edo is no model. I won’t argue about Edo any more since I already got my messages thru.
More likely model for most of the world is Korea (Choseon dynasty) , 1392-1910 (although effectively ended on 1905 by the Japanese following the Russo-Japanese War). And, until 1876 Korea was completely disconnected from BAU. (It even beat off French and American attempts to open relations on 1866 and 1871)
Korea was even more closed and more ‘self-sufficient’ than Japan, which did trade with the West thru Nagasaki. During the 19th century hundreds of Catholics and their French priests were killed en masse by the Korean govt, and even mentioning Western ideas was forbidden (although the Kings did drink French cognac and coffee in secret).
Korea had no road systems, no navigation, and virtually no large farms or plantations. Korea had no industry, no manufacturing, no nothing. No trade, which means no imports and no exports, except for sporadic transactions with China. In short, it was about twice as repressive as today’s North Korea, probably the most repressive nation on earth now.
Of course when famines, which were frequent but did not merit to be recorded by Wikipedia and not available in any form in English, struck maybe 3 – 4% of the entire pop died any given time but the King and his courtiers were safe as usual. The country was so repressive that when somebody suggested buying grains from China or Japan to alleviate the famine, the King answered he cannot compromise Korea’s dignity by buying grains from ‘barbarians’. And the poor road and naval transport would have negated any good which might come from imported grain.
The secret of Korea’s long survival under such horrible (70%+ of the pop were slaves) condition was that the Korean ruling class just did not allow any opposition. All the literacy and info were all concentrated among the ruling class, which had differences but all intent to close the door against the downtrodden. So no popular uprising had any chance and the king and the courtiers lives just as same as 1875 as they lived in 1375 or hundreds or years ago.
And these repressive people did not get their comeuppance. Although the King’s family is now gone his minions are still in business. Since they were the only literate people and the highest-IQ people (high-IQ people from lower class were often killed for a host of reasons), they quickly adopted BAU customs and sent their kids to Japan and America to study and their descendants still rule Korea.
That’s the way most of the world is coming to.
Fascinating, thank you. What an appalling, static,society, and certainly a possible model. Very different from Dark Age and medieval Europe, where trade was restarted as soon as possible after the Roman collapse and society was extremely mobile – you might not get into the ranks of the nobility until the 18th century, but you could get rich as a lawyer, merchant or priest and live very well indeed. The Church also specialised in taking bright boys from the lower classes and training them up, the best becoming bishops -in effect little princes – or even Popes. And it was in essence international and cosmopolitan.
In our province in Spain the nobility kept their privileges (especially tax) until well into the 19th c, and it required the showing of four noble grandparents in order to be placed on the list of nobles (5% of the population): in an agricultural province, it froze everyone else out of the best jobs and land-holding, all the wealth circulated in a narrow class, all inter-marrying because of the rules.
From my observations, it did not help the general IQ of the noble class, and most of them have done quite badly in the competitive 20th century in areas requiring brains (not always the case in modern Spain!) Naturally, this class did better during famines and war as well.
Dear Xabier and Others
I point to Edo because we understand very well HOW THEY PRODUCED A LIVING without fossil fuels. THAT is the elephant in the room. For example, here is a note from a farmer friend of mine relative to the way that tomato crops here have been improved over the last couple of decades:
‘Mostly I think we all became much better at growing and managing the crop that resulted in earlier maturing fruit. Healthier soils, improved irrigation and trellising techniques, better transplants and pruning, high tunnels for protection and more. Some of it is new varieties that ripen faster and some is certainly climate change with warmer weather in May and June that makes the plants grow vigorously and huge. ‘
Now, a productive thing for farmers here to do, in my opinion, is to analyze all the steps in their tomato production and marketing process and figure out how those have to change when fossil fuels go away. For example, they can still trellis, but likely with bamboo, since metals will be unavailable after the salvage is used up. THAT is what I mean by ‘back to Edo’. I’m not talking about some political system at all.
Edo solved many practical problems:
*How to be reasonably comfortable without trying to heat or cool space
*How to feed lots of people without moving very much food around
*How to cook food without destroying the forests
*How to improve yields without destroying the soil or the forest
*How to build without destroying the forests
*How to control population to fit the resources
*How to maintain and improve nutrient levels in the soil
There are some issues that they could not solve, which we WISH they could have solved:
*How to avoid famines
*How to avoid fires when one builds with wood.
In addition, we don’t like the political system.
My guess is that our grandchildren WILL be subjected to famines and fires. All other creatures on Earth are subjected to famines and fires, and I don’t see how we can avoid them. Our grandchildren may have a more benign political system, if they are lucky.
Don’t let the magicians direct your eyes away from the crucial action.
Don Stewart
Sustaining a low-resource economy without political repression is simply impossible.
All low-resource economies have been very repressive, all the way to today’s Bhutan and North Korea.
There are only a limited amount of resources to be shared with many people, and those who make the rules have the first say about who will get what.
The whole point of the low-resource economy transition is that the resources will be very unevenly divided, and those who lack the means to obtain resources just have to be content that they are not going to starve this month.
The heavy weapons are probably all concentrated in the hands of the ruling class – others can’t simply compete.
If an economy doesn’t have much spare resources, I can imagine that it would give what education would be available to the upper class.
Talking about IQ of the lower class is meaningless to me. They were not given the opportunity for education, so had problems progressing, no matter what.
I am now also in Reddit, and I had read some discussion about reaching Type I (harnessing more energy than what the earth provides).
Some of the opinions were interesting. Someone said why try to use more energy? Just find some way to do things efficiently so fewer amount of energy will be used.
Nowdays, the inefficient ways of doing things are slowly one the way out. With the advance on tracking technology, fewer waste and more efficiency is possible.
The richer countries will use the energy more efficiently, and the poorer countries will use the energy less efficiently , increasing energy costs and making them less competitive.
So, it is possible for Civilization (and BAU) to advance beyond what we might call a Type I civ (space travel and all other goodies) without actually reaching Type 1 civ.
The collapse of middle class and the mass-consumption society will put more resources on the hands of those who could harness more energy for their venture.
I am afraid I don’t see space travel, no matter what.
Gail, I agree. Along those lines there was a Sci-Fi movie we watched last evening, called Infini. At the beginning it describes a future in the year 2300 in which 95% of the population is poor and barely getting by, yet they are somehow capable of mining on other celestial bodies. They transport workers there by something they call ‘Streamlining’, in which the person is scrambled into a data stream then instantly transported to anywhere in the Universe, which of course ignores the constraints of travelling no faster than the speed of light. I mean if they had come up with a different way to travel, like wormholes or something but anyway, the question that struck me was; “How does a future society of so many poor people afford to do so much out in space?” Obviously it would be highly unlikely.
Spoiler: The movie is quite violent but kind of interesting as some alien species tests the workers on some planet by infecting them in a way that causes them to become violent against each other. They do this as a way to determine the alpha. But once challenged by the last person who is dying to do something more interesting, they end the experiment by covering each of them with a transparent gel that brings them back to life and clears out the virus. Then they all go home via streamlining to their families. Isn’t it amazing how Hollywood can take a very dismal plot line and end it in a happy way? LOL!
“So, it is possible for Civilization (and BAU) to advance beyond what we might call a Type I civ (space travel and all other goodies) without actually reaching Type 1 civ.”
http://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-697813-stock-footage-looping-emoticon-animation-thumbs-down.html
“The collapse of middle class and the mass-consumption society will put more resources in the hands of those who could harness more energy by way of their venture.”
Wouldn’t that dynamic be the opposite — The more the overall world economy contracts the less available for said energy venture? As more people are disenfranchised from their assets and jobs, an even greater allocation of government funds will need to be allocated to help support a those people or risk further economic damage via chaos.
And here we see the impact of China no longer building Ghost Cities and circling the gutter:
Iron ore hit by historic collapse
Iron ore has endured one of its worst sessions on record, with a fresh 11 per cent plunge taking its price to a 10-year low.
At the end of the latest session, benchmark iron ore for immediate delivery to the port of Tianjin in China was trading at $US44.10 a tonne, down 11.3 per cent from its prior close of $US49.70 a tonne.
Over the past five sessions unprecedented losses of 5.3, 3, 3.9, 4.4 and 11.3 per cent have been recorded, leading it down 25 per cent from $US58.90 a tonne through this period.
Chief among the current concerns is the health of China’s markets and broader economy, given its dominant position as the world’s largest consumer of iron ore.
China’s benchmark Shanghai stock index closed down 5.9 per cent yesterday, taking it to a three-month low after losing around a third of its value since a high was hit in mid-June.
“China’s stock market rout is now spreading to other financial markets, creating a sweeping sense of panic and liquidity crunch,” Zheng Ge, an analyst at Wanda Futures, said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/latest/iron-ore-hit-by-historic-collapse/story-e6frg90f-1227434407225
The massive over capacity in the Chinese steel industry rarely gets mentioned in the MSM as in cement,shipbuilding just to mention a few.The collapse of China will be on an scale Eddy.
Iron is a basic building material. This is worrisome.
As long as ‘growth’ within any country is measured by the money that’s passed hand to hand (ie taking in each other’s washing) you’re never going to convince any government that solvency has to be based on the amount of energy related products that a country can actually produce over and above its consumption of those same products
In today’s world, all kinds of financial services count as GDP, as do legal services. I presume the sales of annuities count as GDP. More medical care (even if it does not increase life expectancy) counts as GDP. The more expensive the medical care the better. Same for education!
The push is to have essentially all GDP come from ephemeral sources.
Unfortunately, this push misses the very real need for goods. These goods need energy to be manufactured, and energy products are the most basic of these goods.
But even here, measurement becomes a problem. Are more workers, extracting the same amount of oil, better? Is having a lot of wind turbine repair people the way to grow the economy?
Reblogged this on Strategic Business Advisor.
There is no reason to believe the economic system nor the political system will provide food for all people. There was wide spread starvation in the U.S. in the 1870s and 1930s. It will come again.
A Greek island would be a lovely place to live after the die off to sustainable population levels.
Although the winters are pretty miserable…
It is really hard to get a system that will provide food for all of the people, and not overshoot the living area quickly terms of population.
Businesses have no motivation to provide enough jobs for everyone. Without enough jobs for everyone, it is hard to have a good way of distributing food to everyone.
As I’ve written many times, China, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets are suffering through secular bear markets that will last years. Since Chinese stocks represent more than 20% of some emerging-markets ETFs, the pain will likely continue well into this decade
When highly unsophisticated investors run into trouble, they panic quickly and try to get out at any price. The same inexperienced bettors who drove Shanghai up to 5,000 will take it way down, maybe to the last bear-market low above 1,700 — or maybe even lower, to 1,500, before it finds a long-term bottom.
That was a clear sign that the government had taken its best shot and failed. Which means that the most likely direction for Shanghai, Shenzhen and other mainland exchanges is down, down, down When Shanghai was peaking at 5,000 in June, I gave you five words of advice: Get. The. Hell. Out. Now.
To which I’ll add five more: And. Stay. The. Hell. Out
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-stock-market-crash-is-just-beginning-2015-07-08
In 1929 taxi cab drivers and waitresses were invested in the US stock market. When I heard people at low level jobs were jumping in on China’s stock market, I didn’t figure it would be long before it caved. The time to jump into stocks is when everybody else has run for the hills and the time to sell is when everybody and their brother has jumped in.
2007 I was living in Shanghai — my ayi (part time helper) was putting every cent she had into the market — and urging me to do the same — that ended badly for her…
Funny how greed (survival) can drive people into such a frenzy….
The big guys own fear. They own greed. As long as the market moves they make money. For that matter a iron condor option spread is not a bad way to go when fear or greed is high, as long as a trading program doesn’t see flaws in your spread.
This time is different though….. there is reason to have fear.
In fact terror is what anyone who truly understands this situation should have in their heart.
The big guys will be eating bark and grass when this flips over
That sounds like very good advice.
Great article, Gail and very current as it relates directly to the problems of Greece and other countries highly dependent on high energy costs, E.G. oil.
Now that oil is back down to a lower price, it seems as though the world economy including Greece will begin to do better, at least until oil price rises again. The tale of the tape will be what happens to the world economy when oil supply drops and oil price rises, but does not rise high enough to support new exploration. In the past, the dynamic was always as supply dropped capex increased and new supply came online as a result. But the problem now may be we are so far down the net energy ladder, that the dynamic has been cut off at the knees so to speak and reinforcing feedbacks will simply force supply and economic activity lower until collapse becomes more widespread.
Yeah, I agree. Diminishing returns with respect to oil production will make collapse spread across the globalized economy. The big question is how fast.
Yes Greg, how fast? First the current supply will have to reduce to a level in which a higher oil price gets consumer tested (whenever that occurs). Gail at one time used $80. and Kunstler uses $90. a barrel as the break even, inflection point for consumers. Let’s split the difference and say below $85 a barrel and the economy can grow a bit and above causes demand destruction, forcing oil price to retreat. But also the cost of a new barrel of oil keeps creeping up effectively reducing it’s net available energy.
I’m thinking we are past the inflection point now and the only way to incentivize new exploration that will be sufficient to meet future oil needs will be to substantially subsidize exploration. The trouble with that is it’s like a snake eating it’s tail energy wise. There’s not enough profit left over to float above stagnation.
But your question of timing remains an open question.
One would hope that the drop in the price of oil would generate some sort of rebound…
But we’ve been well down for months now… and we’re not seeing any sort of bounce…
Perhaps the cancer is too far along… the patient is not responding and just wants the misery to end…
Part of the lack of rebound I think, Fast Eddy is once most products, utilities, tolls etc. go up they don’t go back down. For example I buy rolls of bubble wrap for one of our businesses and it had gone up due to higher oil price but did not go down later when oil price dropped.
So if the only product going down appreciably in price is the cost at the pumps then maybe it’s not having the huge effect it was thought to have. Also, I think it’s not talked about much but millions of people are just trying to keep their heads above water so any savings just helps them to avoid default, repossessions, late payments, etc.
Like you put it, “the cancer is too far along”
The other issue at play I reckon is that a huge number of people are barely getting by…
Even a family meal of slop at McDonalds is beyond the reach of many families….
Also people are carrying massive amounts of debt…. so the drop in the price of oil is not resulting in more consumption because people are just plain tapped out….
Oh but Jeb Bush has the answer: Americans should work longer hours.
Even when oil prices have dropped, airlines have not reduced their fares, so that benefit of lower oil prices has not flowed through to Greece in that way.
There are other ways that governments and businesses try to get more than their fair share of the savings. Governments have tended to raise tax levels and reduce subsidies, so that they get more than their share, leaving less for vacation spending. Oil companies have been able to increase their refining margins, so as to partly offset their loss on oil revenue. All of these things act as obstacles to lower prices really “fixing” the problem.
I agree that the usual dynamic of higher prices leading to increased capes and new supply has been broken. Instead, we are likely headed toward smaller oil supply, severe financial problems, and eventual collapse.
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Gail, excellent article. Glad someone sees the resource link in the Greek story.
I will state the obvious just for completeness. All of that oil is imported oil. These countries have zero indigenous oil. When cheap energy was a low class export this was not an issue. Now that energy is King it is a fatal position to be in.
Ed, thanks for pointing out something that might be obvious to more sophisticated readers, but probably is not to quite a few others. It is hard to know what level of understanding to assume.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
Gail’s post about the decline of Greece and other island countries heavily dependent on oil raises a number of interesting issues concerning the broader subject of collapse.
For the sake of clarity, I will assume that oil is currently following roughly the trajectory laid out by BW Hill, and that several decades from now most everyone on Earth will be living much like the peasants and artisans described in Azby Brown’s book on Edo, Japan. Knowing the end points may not tell us some interesting things about the path that humans will take to get from here to there.
I’ll exclude from consideration catastrophes such as meteor strikes, global nuclear war, and deadly radiation from untended nuclear power plant waste. Not because they are impossible, but because I can’t think of anything useful to say about them.
We are currently in an interesting situation where clear headed people can perceive that much of our GDP is essentially waste. Some of the waste is very difficult to avoid, such as BW Hill’s estimates of the thermodynamic costs of producing, processing, and distributing petroleum products. Other sources of waste such as the heavy use of private automobiles in the industrialized countries are more subject to influence by changes in laws and customs and economic conditions. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation report on the auto-centric society shows clearly that only a very small percentage of the energy which is in the petroleum product in the tank ever ends up turning the wheels of a private automobile. If we combine the increasingly thermodynamically inefficient production of petroleum products, with the highly inefficient use of the products to power private automobiles, we soon get the impression that the day of the private automobile is strictly numbered. If that conclusion is correct, then a vast reorganization of economic and social life will be necessary for survival. Preserving the status quo is not a realistic option, and there is not much use in crying over the spilled milk.
On the other hand, we are also experiencing the very rapid development of sensing and communications technologies. The cost comparisons between using sensing and communications versus traditional methods which involve moving lots of mass or humans is like comparing the cost of orbiting an astronaut versus using a satellite with instruments. Only delusional politicians would consider orbiting humans to take scientific measurements of the Earth from orbit.
Sensing and communications technologies have the capability of disrupting many existing businesses, from the transportation of humans to health care.
Exactly how these differing trajectories will play out must involve considerable guesswork. But here is my guess:
*Some populations of humans will revert back to Edo very quickly. The island nations may go first.
*The sensing and communications companies think in terms of predation (disrupting markets). They may quickly cannibalize those sectors which currently use lots of petroleum products, spawning billionaires by the bushel.
*If the sensing and communications companies succeed rapidly, there will be lots of bankruptcies and GDP will fall. The fall in GDP will depress consumption, which will slow the cost increases in petroleum. The fall in consumption will keep petroleum prices below the cost of production, enabling the sensing and communications companies to thrive in a declining market.
*The demise of the traditional businesses which rely heavily on petroleum, coupled with the inability of the total economy to grow GDP, will result in more people falling out of the economy. These people may be maintained with welfare, or they may revert back to Edo, or they may engage in dysfunctional behavior and die early.
*Traditional insurance will fail. Social security will be cut or eliminated. Annuities will not be paid. Private pensions will be bankrupt.
In the past, when I have used Edo as an example, many people have become livid and objected that Edo is no model. These criticisms are missing the elephant in the room. Here is a quote from Capra and Luisi (page 353):
‘Of course, there are many differences between ecosystems and human communities. There is no self-awareness in ecosystems, no language, no consciousness, and no culture, and therefore no justice or democracy; but also no greed or dishonesty. We cannot learn anything about those human values and shortcomings from ecosystems. But what we CAN and MUST learn from them is how to live sustainably.’
We should look back at Edo because they did, in fact, live sustainably…in the same way that the soil food web or the populations of foxes and rabbits is sustainable. It isn’t what we would wish to be true if all our dreams were granted, but it did endure. Therefore, it provides food for thought as we contemplate a return to something closer to Edo conditions.
Don Stewart
PS I don’t expect politicians in those places, such as island nations, to embrace ‘going back to Edo’. Richard Heinberg was invited to Puerto Rico a year or two ago to talk about their financial problems. As I understand it, he laid out a sort of self-reliant agrarian scenario. But the Governor down there says he needs to default in order to ‘get growth started again’.
“If we combine the increasingly thermodynamically inefficient production of petroleum products, with the highly inefficient use of the products to power private automobiles, we soon get the impression that the day of the private automobile is strictly numbered. If that conclusion is correct, then a vast reorganization of economic and social life will be necessary for survival.”
Santa Fe is an extraordinary example of missing all its numerous opportunities to do pedestrian oriented (mixed use) development that would make cars less necessary.
The Dutch faced this crisis for the first time in the 1970s hence their love for bicycles I guess. And yes Y know bikes tires, chains and the whole bike needs oil based products it is just another fossil fuel extender. Do not need anyone to point that out thanks.
There’s no question that bicycles are nor ff independent. They’re much less so than cars, however. Picture Chinese cities 30 years ago. But I’m not a bike proponent. I find that walking is the only “civilized” way to get around. I see transportation machines (automobiles, bikes, etc.) are tools for the community to meet immediately insurmountable needs. I don’t see them as means for individual(istic) travel. Other than that, I’ll take any incremental improvement (like bikes for those who are stuck on them) that can be had.
Steel can be made with charcoal and tires from plant latex. Velocipedes predate major oil production. Compared to walking, a bicycle enables a person to travel ~3 times as fast while consuming half of the food calories – the most expensive form of energy. A person can move hundreds of pounds with a trailer, that would be difficult on foot. It really is one of the few inventions of Man that really improves on nature.
I can’t imagine that the bicycles made before the age of fossil fuels were of much use — because it seems people were generally riding horses…. or walking….
Try going to the dump and picking up some raw materials — then get some wood — and try making this (or trying making the hammer that you will use to forge the metal to make this — actually let’s just start with trying to make a single spoke for the wheel)
http://www.thewallpapers.org/photo/26590/cyl60324-9.jpg
It all sounds so wonderful — when the collapse comes we will go back to the simple ways of doing things… but when you think things through ….
Or you can just not think things through and assume it will somehow all work out…
“I can’t imagine that the bicycles made before the age of fossil fuels were of much use — because it seems people were generally riding horses…. or walking….”
Before oil, not coal. So they probably still used coal to make the steel, although charcoal could work.
The whole reason velocipedes became a branch of technology with many competing designs, was that the Year Without A Summer caused massive oat shortages, and probably people ate a lot of their horses, what with all the crop failures. The cost of using a horse to pull you around on a carriage increased something like 10-fold within about a year. It also helped lead to research into fertilizers, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
The Penny Farthing design became dominant, then someone invented the Safety Bicycle, which was so superior, we now just call that design the bicycle.
Once again, skilled blacksmiths will be in high demand if and when we lose BAU.
One of the main reasons for the deforestation in the middle ages was the use of trees in forges….
The people wanted to clear more land, to grow more food, to make more people. They certainly could have replanted trees and harvested wood lots sustainably; seems more of a culture problem than a fundamental problem with the technology.
I don’t think that increasing populations is a cultural problem….
To some extent, it is. The Japanese population grew 10-fold over 400 years, while the Arab populations grew 10-fold in ~70 years. Maybe being more violent and xenophobic are the right values, to constantly have wars and keep population under control. Maybe peace and love are evil. Would be interesting to see the population of Sparta, to see how well their eugenics worked at keeping down population. I wonder if they sterilized all their slaves.
A person still needs some kind of path suitable for riding the bicycle on. Making and maintaining such a path requires energy as well.
“A person still needs some kind of path suitable for riding the bicycle on. Making and maintaining such a path requires energy as well.”
Nothing in this world is free. Are you expecting a zero-energy future? A six-inch wide strip of packed dirt takes a heck of a lot less energy to build and maintain then an 8 foot wide strip of asphalt.
I don’t expect a zero energy future — I do expect a zero fossil fuel generated energy future — other than the burning of trees.
We’ll still have energy — human labour — probably a lot of slave labour — animals….
We won’t have bicycles because you cannot make a decent bicycle by using a hammer and anvil…
And in any event even if we could why would we waste our previous wood resources making such pointless contraptions when we need it for making tools to grow food?
There is a reason why the Pony Express was not the Bicycle Express….
“And in any event even if we could why would we waste our previous wood resources making such pointless contraptions when we need it for making tools to grow food?”
If there is surpluses, for transport and trade. As I mentioned, half the energy for triple the speed of walking. When hauling water, can save hours per day and hundreds of calories for other tasks.
“There is a reason why the Pony Express was not the Bicycle Express….”
America was rich in oats and grasses and had a low population. Before Cede & Co, there were many bicycle messengers delivering stocks in New York up into the 1970s. Not pony messengers.
The United States had Bicycle Regiments at one time – again, much faster than walking, and trucks and APCs won’t be an option. Feeding hundreds of thousands of horses in a military is a huge undertaking on its own.
Getting from here to there–a new system from a current system–seems awfully difficult.
We tend to take too many things for granted. It is hard for us to imagine that something as simple as shovels will not be available when we need them, unless we figure out a way to make enough heat energy to either recycle some existing metal into shovels, or mine some ore and make new shovels. Parts of existing system have a way of breaking at inconvenient times, whether we are prepared for a new way of doing things or not.
Gail
If someone looks at the systemic issues, I think there are roughly two choices. The first choice is to be largely self-sufficient as an extended family. The second choice is to be largely self-sufficient as part of an intentional community or a closely knit neighborhood economy. Will Bonsall exemplifies the first choice. I won’t try to pick an example of the second choice.
Whichever choice one makes, there is an enormous amount to learn and to unlearn. Now is an excellent time to get started.
Realistically, the farther we go into the future, the fewer of our fellow humans will be competing for the available resources. It is entirely possible that most of our surviving descendents will be pursuing strategies very much like the Aborigines in Australia: carry everything you have on your back; have encyclopedic knowledge; trust your small group and be suspicious of others; and use fire.
My guess is that we can survive for some decades in a horticultural society using what we have. The population will be shrinking, as many people simply won’t be able to do horticulture, for reasons both hard and soft. Then we devolve to something like the Native American or Aborigine models, with quite low population densities.
Don Stewart
I do have a hard time envisioning a sudden, complete break with industrial processes.
Steel predated the widespread use of fossil fuel by some 4,000 years — surely, some part of that is still attainable? A shovel is a relatively simple device, as far as metal use goes. I could make one tomorrow out of an abandoned car, using relatively little added energy. (Indeed, that may soon be the best and most common use of cars!)
The “you can’t go back” argument generally rests on the fact that there are billions more people around now than there was then, quickly followed by murmurs of “die off” — you can’t have it both ways!
As dissipative structures, I think humans will find a way to do a stepwise regression. This is not out of some fondness for hairless monkeys, but simply that a fast, complete crash will leave too much energy behind that must be dissipated.
Jan
check out picture of Oliver Holmgren
http://holmgren.com.au/permaculture-pocket-knives/
Don Stewart
OMG, he’s a young man! When I studied under David, Oliver was just a kid!
Remind me not to travel there! My pocket knife is with me always, along with a Gerber multi-tool. That’s saved me many trips to the workshop over the years!
I’ve carried the Chicago Cutlery 4″ folding-back for nearly 40 years, and I expect someone will carry it for many more when I’m gone. The only maintenance it needs is to be rubbed on a rock now and then, although the wood handle could probably use a bit of beeswax or even vegoil.
Alrighty… let’s try this out real time.
Go down to the junk yard — grab a car fender — head back home — start a fire with some logs — and make a shovel.
You obviously aren’t going to have a shovel, post collapse!
I’d use a cold chisel, peen hammer, rolling mandrel, and anvil — all in the workshop. The only need for fire would be tempering after cold-working.
Anyone who plans to survive who isn’t assembling a good collection of hand tools isn’t going to survive.
Send me $55, and I’ll do a half-day workshop on improvised tools. Airfaire, lodging, and meals are extra. 🙂
Actually …. I have about 2 dozen sturdy BAU shovels stockpiled in the garage….
I prefer those as I reckon they will last a fair bit longer than anything I — or anyone else — were to try to make out an old fender…
Here’s some guys making a sword using 1000-year old techniques. If this is the video I saw previously, they take the sword to ArcelorMittal and they were impressed with the quality, considering the production methods. Of course, they have years of experience, and you need an anvil, bellows, and other equipment. The people with these kind of skills will be extremely valuable:
Clearly, we will continue to have the shovels we have today, until they wear out. The question is how good a system we can put in place for making new ones, even from recycled materials. Even recycling metals is very energy intensive. There weren’t enough shovels and other metal implements for common people until fossil fuels came along, as far as I can tell. This is part of the reason that farming was as inefficient as it was.
I wonder how strong the sheet metal of car would be for digging in soil around here–lots of rocks.
The moral of the story is —- watch for the shovel sale at Wally’s World and stock up …. because you really don’t want to be digging using a car fender nailed to a stick …
What one really needs is to apply for a Wally’s World franchise to have a proper stockpile of gear… but then that would make you a target for those who need shovels and other gear post collapse…
The prepper stuff is all so complicated
Gail
Regarding shovels. Edo Japan used farming implements made of wood which had metal tips. They made very efficient use of the metals.
Don Stewart
I can believe that. Metals would have to be used very sparingly. Maybe we make shovels out of metal, and use a piece of a hood of a car for the tip.
“Getting from here to there–a new system from a current system–seems awfully difficult.”
“We tend to take too many things for granted.”
I agree. So whatever I see as the prospect for the future is what I work on most of the time now. If it’s going to work in the future, it has to begin gradually working now.
Like talking up the free shuttle bus to and from the city that has recently (a couple years) been serving our community. And looking into ways to make for better county planning, with the dream of having some affordable, minimalist way to get around. If the nearby city became more compact and pedestrian oriented, public transportation would be more in demand (instead of cars), and more people would get behind ways to make it happen. It takes lots of people working continuously *at the present time.* These “lots of people” can get involved if the issue is one that really grabs them. The subtler, more systemic issues they tend not to see. So one tries to find the key to rousing them. That’s almost a full time job *right now,* not some time in the future.
There’s a local program now where somebody drives into the city and picks up donated food, giving it to needy locals the following day. If average people couldn’t drive to the city themselves, that program would need to continue and be expanded. Other things would have to be sacrificed. It’s a question of priorities.
My neighbor gets exceptional mileage out of his old truck, which he rarely drives–he will walk all around the village rather than drive an inch. When he drives, he coasts down all the grades, even slight ones. He fixes his old truck himself–easier to do with old vehicles. ..
Buses and Bikes
Vested interests know how to subvert everything: in Britain, ‘sustainable’ communications, ie buses, cycle paths, are used as the Trojan horse for building developments – ‘We can build around this now, it’s green and sustainable!’
Only a vanishingly small % of the new residents will cycle or take the bus (only the poorest and oldest, with a few younger fit types cycling – the latter always highly educated I’ve noted). As soon as the kids can do so, they ditch their bikes and get a car. And this town is the so-called ‘Bicycle Capital’ of the UK.
Exactly what are these sensing and communications companies you are talking about and how do they keep the infrastructure they need to function going without fossil fuels and what are they providing that anyone else will be able to afford? When much of the population is back to just trying to survive day to day I don’t think they will have much use for facebook.
Scott
First, none of us have perfect foresight. But suppose that collapse happens first with distress in the heavy energy use corporations, with the light energy use corporations continuing on for some time.
During the Depression of the 1930s, the Hollywood studios never had a problem. Their business boomed right through the depression. So it is entirely possible for some segments to continue to grow while the general economy is declining.
If you listened to the link I gave to Jeffrey Bland talk, you heard him identify the information and sensing companies. They are the ones that met will Barack Obama…which did not include any of the traditional medical powerhouses such as hospitals and doctors. These are the same companies involved in driverless cars, and will likely be involved in car rental if that paradigm replaces the paradigm of private ownership.
And, yes, most people can be having a very hard time of it, and these companies can still flourish. See the note about Hollywood above.
Don Stewart
That’s why I’m building a distillery. People will always find the means to escape (movies) or drown (booze) their sorrows.
“That’s why I’m building a distillery”Booze? EEEEW. Isnt pot legal in BC?. Myself I dont do either but id rather be around a pothead than a drunk. Pot doesnt waste precious food calories Besides the prolific liberty cap mushroom will provide all the “escape” needed.
“Pot doesnt waste precious food calories”
Obviously you’ve never seen people with the munchies suddenly feasting on an excess of food. Besides, the calories in beer are not wasted; they still go into your body the same as if you ate a few slices of bread.
Mushrooms, Peyote and LSD are probably fine in small doses on occasion, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for people to use them on a regular basis for escapism.
“Besides, the calories in beer are not wasted; they still go into your body the same as if you ate a few slices of bread.”
Surely your position is not that the calories that are in alcohol are the nutritional equivalent to the calories from the grains from which that alcohol uses in its production?
“Mushrooms, Peyote and LSD are probably fine in small doses on occasion, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for people to use them on a regular basis for escapism.”
Against my better judgment I agree with you. I actually would not say that that they are “fine in small doses”. I think the negative outweighs the positive with all these substances just some more than others. Perhaps I didn’t express myself well. My point is that Jan’s alcohol production will have competition from a prolific and powerful drug that is ubiquitous and requires no energy input.
Here in Washington state where marijuana has been legalized the outcome is clear it is a much less harmful drug than alcohol. It is still a addictive drug with harmful effects both to the individual and society, just much less harmful than alcohol. Ask any honest cop he will tell you.
I stick with my original statement” Booze ewww”. From honest goat farmer to booze peddler. My the fall from grace is a long drop. 🙂 Jan would you give that crap to your goats?
Sure! They love eating fermented fruit, just as elephants do!
I didn’t have my first drink until I was 30, nothing. A half a bottle of wine only makes feel like I’m wearing three overcoats. None for me thanks, I’m immune.
You mention something about moving people and things around. Cars and trucks driverless or otherwise will still need the current industrial paradigm to be constructed, deployed and maintained and any roads they will use. The vehicles will probably need the current paradigm even more because of the complicated systems used to be driverless. I suspect it is very unlikely that the GPS satellite systems will remain functional. As for the Great Depression and Hollywood and any other industries that continued to operate, that was a financial meltdown while the infrastructure and abundant, cheap, high quality energy sources were available for use to climb out of it. This time around that will not be the case. I do agree with Jan that making booze will always be possible and will always be in demand.
Scott
The devil is always in the details.
Starting from the baseline described in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report. Privately owned petroleum powered cars and the road infrastructure which supports them are a tremendously inefficient way to move human bodies, particularly in urban settings where congestion is an issue. So we begin with the notion that we cannot continue to do what we are doing now. Which means that a very large industry needs an overhaul, along with the government expenditures which support that industry.
You and I can probably agree on that statement, but few politicians or members of the general public would agree.
So…what to do if we cannot continue as we are currently behaving? The ‘progressives’ seem to be coalescing around a program of electrically driven transport. Some of it traditional mass transit (busses and trains) and some of it driverless electric cars which are rented rather than owned. All facilitated by an information system which is significantly redesigned to make operation as frictionless as possible. That is the sort of program suggested in the MacArthur paper.
My own suspicion is that building such a system requires far more coherence of vision that we as a society are likely to have. But, then, I never thought New York City would get as far as it has with its bicycle infrastructure. So I might underestimate society’s ability to accomplish it.
What I think most likely to happen is a radical relocalization of transport. Mostly, we will get where we need to be by walking. Edo Japan walked.
But I might be wrong. If all of the MacArthur recommendations were implemented, then we would experience a sharp reduction in the use of fossil fuels, and most particularly oil. In addition, the opportunity to greatly reduce the burden of chronic disease is now before us. So it is conceivable that we may be able to afford to spend more to get expensive to produce oil…because we have eliminated lots of waste. There is no shortage of expensive to produce oil.
We would go from being a ‘consumption economy’ back to being a ‘production economy’. Petroleum products would be used much less for driving luxury cars, which leaves some for production uses such as making plastic greenhouses and moving food from the country to the city.
I am skeptical about the next several decades, as I tend to buy in to the BW Hill scenario where oil is quickly becoming thermodynamically unaffordable…approaching the ‘dead state’. And I don’t see any other source of energy which we can use to go after that expensive to produce oil.
There are many possibilities and I think some humility is appropriate. My skepticism springs from two basic sources. The first is about getting people to actually agree on a reasonable program. The second is the loss of oil as an energy source, as in BW Hill’s equations.
I tend toward ‘prepare for the worst and hope for something better’.
Don Stewart
“I am skeptical about the next several decades, as I tend to buy in to the BW Hill scenario where oil is quickly becoming thermodynamically unaffordable…approaching the ‘dead state’. And I don’t see any other source of energy which we can use to go after that expensive to produce oil.”
Is BW Hill’s calculations for the average barrel, or the marginal one? Might we get 50x return on the bottom half of the oil production? It may simply be that total available oil must go down, to only extracting the truly energy profitable oil. Of course, that means financial collapse and the emergence of a new system.
Matthew Krajcik
‘is the oil average or marginal?’
I asked that question the last time Hill posted here. Got no answer.
From the way he talks, I think it is sort of like a marginal barrel, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a new well or a new field. For example, he says that the water cut is very important. He says that with the current water cut in Ghawar, it means that the field is 90 percent depleted of all the oil it will ever produce. So, in theory, there are things that the Saudis could do to get more oil out of the field, but if they require more energy input than the oil recovered would yield, then the field is ‘dead’ as a source of energy.
If it required burning coal to get the additional energy, then the Saudis might burn the coal to get the oil because oil has more energy density than coal and is thus more valuable. But by that time the world would be moving rapidly down the energy curve.
At any given time, the oil companies have many options to get a barrel of oil: shale oil, oil shale, find another conventional field somewhere, infill drilling, enhanced recovery, deep water, arctic, etc. I think that the way he has constructed his model, he is estimating the cost of a new barrel of oil from any source. But since the data is based on the mix of sources which have been used until now, a big shift in sources to something like oil shale would clearly shift the curve…probably in a higher cost direction.
Besides the ‘cost’ equation, he has the ‘ability to pay’ equation, which is related to the net work delivered by the oil. That is, it takes work to get the oil, which then can be used to do work in the general economy. Up until 2000, there was quite a large surplus of work. Since 2000, the net has been falling rapidly. In 2012, his lines crossed and now the limit is not the cost of producing the oil, but the ability of the economy to produce GDP to pay for the oil. He thinks that the current upper limit on price is 77 dollars a barrel, while the cost is much higher than that. Which leads him to make statements about Shell’s Alaska drilling as ‘Shell hasn’t figured out that they can no longer make money in the oil business’.
Don Stewart
Computer glitches galore today:
United Airline grounded worldwide due to computer glitch:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/companies/united-flights-grounded-computer/
NYSE trading halted due to computer glitch:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/investing/nyse-suspends-trading/index.html?iid=TL_Popular
Wall Street Journal website was offline:
http://deadline.com/2015/07/nyse-trading-halted-wsj-freezes-1201472133/
Possibly Cyber Warfare, not “glitches”:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/what-first-world-cyber-war-looks-global-real-time-cyber-attack-map
Thanks! It is strange that these glitches seem to happen with there are worrisome things happening. Strange coincidence!
The Chinese government needs to have a few more glitches on their stock exchanges…. kinda like a time out ….
Thanks!
Thanks Gail for another excellent post, very clear about CHEAP energy.
WRT Greek “excessive pensions and inefficiently operated state-owned companies” you mention, I’d like to argue that, at least, those pensions and wages remain in the country and are spent in the real economy, which is not necessarily the case with profits and dividends of private owned companies. It isn’t “lost” money.
Moreover, the austerity has already resulted in big cuts in both wages and pensions, and, because of increasing unemployment, these incomes have become necessary for the subsistence of many Greek families.
Stefeun –
You write “…at least, those pensions and wages remain in the country and are spent in the real economy, which is not necessarily the case with profits and dividends of private owned companies. It isn’t “lost” money.”
Government make-work and unsustainable pension promises that primarily exist/continue to keep a thieving economic system (any fiat currency) going – not so good, and surely mis-allocation of currency value in terms of need to the society on the whole. Well paid .gov “workers” buying a new car does not help the homeless, not even indirectly as you seem to be implying. The value of the currency paid is lost to any citizens in need.
I think you do make an excellent argument for a quick end to the current debt-based, fiat system.
Thanks as always for your insights, Gail!
JC,
when you have only one not-so-big income to support a whole family, you don’t buy cars, you buy just food.
I don’t get your point about homeless people. IMO, what they need is a job, not charity.
However, I don’t see any possible long-term improvement in such countries that must import almost everything. If they can’t generate genuine surpluses, their only solution is to kick the can with rising debt. We’re seeing where it leads. A preview for the rest of us.
The pension promises in Europe (and the UK) are of course unsustainable but in Italy, Spain, Portugal (France too?) it is at this moment pensions which are keeping many younger people fed, housed and clothed.
In Spain, and I have no doubt elsewhere, employers are also failing to pay their workers properly, in full or on time, in some cases accumulating large arrears, (and the government is likewise not paying bills, ) and the workers do not dare complain as they fear unemployment too much. So they have to go to their parents for subsidies even if they don’t actually move back in.
The top strata of society in Spain have, on the other hand, done pretty well since 2008, great divisions are opening up again in S. European society. Very different from pre-2008 when a kid could leave school, walk onto a building site and get a mortgage for a house and pool and a BMW with ease.
Those are good points.
Along the same like of reasoning, when I visited China, I saw a lot of concern for maintaining employment, even if oil prices seemed to be too low to support the current level of oil company activity. Again, the concern was getting the money back into the real economy. Laying off a large share of workers would leave the government with a different problem to deal with. Thus, they continue to pump oil, whether or not it seemed profitable to do so, hoping that prices will rise again in the not too distant future.
Gail
Art Berman points out that the shale companies went more deeply into the red in the first quarter of 2015. That did not stop them from getting additional investments from the public. Many eople and companies and governments will continue to do what they have become accustomed to do, hoping that things will go back to what they think is ‘normal’. Thus, the US government will come up with some infrastructure spending program which relies on more roads, even if the Ellen MacArthur Foundation analysis shows that roads are a terrible way to use the energy in oil to move people. And investors will grasp at the high yield straws offered by shale, hoping that the hype is true.
Smart people will try their hand at gardening and build a drinking water system and study how former civilizations managed without heating or cooling space.
Don Stewart
Thank you for your analysis of what is happening in Greece, etc. I always read what you write.
Im sorry Im so ignorant. What percentage of energy from oil does the USA use , where would they be on the chart if included?
In 2006, the USA was at 37.9% oil. That would put the USA between Sweden and France, about a third of the way down in the chart.
Our oil percent of total energy for 2014 (calculated from EIA “Energy Monthly”data, available for USA only) was 35.3%. That would probably leave us in the same relative relationship.
Hi Gail, do you know where Malta would shoehorn into the Fig. 1 chart? It’s EU, and I take students there in alternate years to explore sustainability issues, so I know that Malta imports almost all of its energy. I’ve been told that their oil/diesel comes from Libya – maybe not a viable source long-term? – and that there is a plan to hook into the European grid via an “extension cord” that will be linked to Sicily. Seems like Malta has a lot in common with Cyprus and Puerto Rico especially.
Thanks!
The numbers for Malta jump all over, so I wasn’t sure how reliable they were. In 2006, supposedly 100% of their energy was from oil, but the percentage had been as low as 69.4% in the years preceding that, so I didn’t know whether the numbers were computed in a reasonable manner.
This link talked about electricity generation in Malta. http://www.enemalta.com.mt/index.aspx?cat=2&art=5 It says,
“Electrical energy required in the Maltese Islands is provided through three different sources. Electricity is locally-generated at the Delimara Power Station and through several other small-scale domestic and industrial renewable energy installations. It is also imported through the Malta-Italy Interconnector.”
So you are right, it is connected to the EU electric grid, as of April 15, 2015.
There also is some natural gas generation and are adding more, according to the link. The link says,
“A new gas-fired power plant and related LNG storage and regasification facilities are currently being developed within the Delimara Power Station by Electrogas Malta. Upon completion of this project, Enemalta will be able to stop using its older oil-fired plants at Delimara, whilst the 2012 plant will be converted to run on natural gas. ”
This is another link I found. http://www.naturalgaseurope.com/enemalta-gas-and-electricity-agreement-malta
So Malta is working on getting its electricity costs down, but they have been very high.
Thank you for yet another interesting informative slant on how particular energy sources impact the economy and it is certainly interesting that high dependent oil use is correlated with the countries at greatest risk. I have not previously seen this correlation reported anywhere else.
I can’t claim that I am the first to figure out the PIIGS reliance at oil. I first learned about it through this 2010 Oil Drum post: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/7001
I made my own exhibit, using current data, and labelled it with words, not two letter abbreviations.
Before that, I had been very much aware of the problem that islands had with their dependence on oil. This is an article I wrote about the Big Island of Hawaii, and its dependence on oil.http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4192 Fortunately, it has other resources in addition, including geothermal and water power. I recently wrote an article about Cuba, and its dependence on oil. http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/05/26/cuba-figuring-out-pieces-of-the-puzzle-full-text/
Gail your energy cost analysis are always spot on and well researched. I only question your last paragraph/points about what Greece has going for it. Although ultimately correct in regards to the traditional climate, as I understand it Greece’s agriculture has been decimated by EURO regulations and trade subsidies. As another point for cheap energy v. human labor, small farms, like Greece traditionally relied on, just cannot compete and so were mostly pressured out of existence there. Doesn’t bode well for them to pull out gracefully once the Greeks embrace the lack of cheap energy and lowering living standards.
Greece has a real soil erosion issue. Don, others, is Greece making any effort to build up soils?
edpell
Don Stewart has no inside knowledge of Greece soil building, or lack thereof. I did read a story several years ago by a local guy who went to Crete and spent some quality time on small farms. His description was rather idyllic…laid back and not working too hard and content with what they had.
Don Stewart
One of the great problems in Greece is the mass urbanisation (as well as population growth) of recent years; I think a Greek told me that 60% of the population lives in Athens, and rural and farming roots have been cut. From service industries to farming life will be too big a step for most. So much lost in a few decades. Just like our region of Span which only industrialised (ie environmental degradation,urbanisation and loss of farming tradition) in the late 1960’s: it will be hard there, too.
You may very well be right about EURO regulations and trade subsidies hurting Greece. But if Greece leaves, they will no longer be hampered by these.
Small farms cannot compete because we have a model of everyone trade with everyone, and lowest cost wins. If Greece could somehow work on taking care if itself, without trying to have the lowest cost in the world, then Greece might have a better chance of taking care of at least part of its population. We are so interdependent now that trying to go back to this model is almost impossible.
And yet, more and more people are seeing through that fallacy.
We do a variety of “artisanal,” hand-crafted, value-added farm goods. And guess what? There are people who would rather buy our raw-milk, chemical-free, never-touched-plastic, graze-fed goat feta for $5.75 per 100 grams than pasteurized, industrially-produced, grain-fed cow feta in grocery stores.
Small farmers need niches. We’ve researched a number of products that, for whatever reason, you simply cannot get in stores.
For example, our seckle pears go from ripe to mush in three days, but are sweet as honey and relatively free of the stone cells that make pears gritty. You’ll never see seckle pears in your grocer, because they simply do not ship — the store would end up with rotten pear pureé in boxes when they arrive!
The crap that passes for produce in stores — even the organic stuff — has been selected for one trait only: the ability to withstand 2,000 kilometres of shipping and not look like crap. They’ve given up many other qualities for this one trait, including nutrition and flavour.
Small farmers can deliver the flavour and nutrition you can’t find in even an all-organic grocery store, because the Wall*Martization of “organic” has resulted in the same tasteless, nutritionally-void products that are non-organic, except they didn’t get sprayed with fertilizer and pesticide.
You got it once the transportation costs go up locally grown items become viable once again and so do small farms. I have seen a vast improvement in the bottom line of my farm over the last 6 years and have even managed to show some black numbers during years where I didn’t over spend on improvements.
What get’s me is how much food we actually waste. I see so many people claim that without transportation and the current modern infrastructure we would all starve. In many areas they are correct but I don’t think these people realize just how much local food is wasted because it isn’t currently economically viable to harvest it. Most of this would be locally grown fruit and nuts but there is a lot more out there to feed people then what is actually utilized. I know I have several Walnut trees on my property that go to waste because it isn’t economically viable for me to pick up the nuts but they still produce truck loads of walnuts every year. The same goes for many cover crops or natural occurring volunteer stands of Buckwheat and such, no one ever bothers to harvest it.
I agree that you can fill a niche, and that your produce is often better. The unfortunate thing is that many people cannot afford such high priced products. With their minimum wage jobs, they have a hard time making ends meet.
People like Joel Salatin have carved out a niche selling high quality food to people with the money to pay for it.
I recall him bragging about how he was getting something like $500 per acre for what he sold vs the normal $100 (my numbers are not correct but you get the idea)…
Making it sound as if all farmers were stupid and if they’d just swap to his methods they could realize these yields…
I thought that made sense at the time — but then I thought about it and realized that there is a limit to how many people can pay for high quality food…
Joel would best stay quiet on this …. otherwise he will lose his niche as competitors flood in 🙂
Gail
Regarding:
‘Small farms cannot compete because we have a model of everyone trade with everyone, and lowest cost wins. ‘
There are many signs that it is the large industrial farm model that is no longer competitive. And if you believe anything at all from what BW Hill and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation are saying about transport, the problems with the current industrial model are only going to get worse.
I’m not claiming that Greece can necessarily feed itself. It may be that they have allowed poor agricultural practices to so destroy their soil that the country simply cannot produce adequate food. But in that case, the only short term choice they have is vast emigration to somewhere else. And good luck with that!
Don Stewart
At what price point large industrial farms and long range transport of produce becomes less than economically viable hasn’t really been figured out yet that I have seen. I imagine because there are so many other variables that cannot really be measured. However the large scale farming we have today is totally dependent on oil and would take some serious infrastructure and equipment upgrading to get it away from oil and I am not enough of an expert to even admit it is possible to actually do it anyway. I imagine it would take too much land for inputs into alternatives to actually make the switch.
Small scale farming is certainly going to be the only type of farming once again. The only question is how long before that happens.
Pioneer Preppy
The big industrial farms could be broken up today and divided among people willing to farm them with far fewer industrial inputs and more human inputs. The barriers are pretty obvious. First, the US doesn’t have a history of seizing land and redistributing it. Second, there are not enough small farmers who know what to do. Joel Salatin and others have addressed this with phrases such as ’50 million farmers’ and ‘fields of farmers’. So, clearly, we are talking about a transition over some period of time. If collapse just happens one Black Friday, then there will just be a lot of starvation. The ones who will likely survive will be those who are small farmers doing intelligent farming today, who will then get their pick of the depopulated land.
Don Stewart
I have to jump in here somewhere. At any one time the US has several years of commodities in storage, not counting growing crops. Ranchers have 90 million cows, 65 million pigs plus hundreds of millions of chickens and turkeys. There will be plenty of food for years. At half rations most American will just be getting into shape after a year. There will be no more food exports but we have to look out for our country. Food distribution and transportation will be a problem but if most people are out of work and staying home there will be plenty of fuel for critical functions.
Keeping people in order could be carried out by our legions of militarized police and militias formed by our millions of 2nd Amendment advocates. We are already well armed thank you very much. People could be resettled on farmland and begin to provide for themselves. Most of the high priced farmland has a mortgage on it and besides the high value is for government subsidized crops. That goes away and the land will be almost free for the taking.
Will politicians be able to rein in rogue generals? Will Wall Street balk at being rendered irrelevant? Will certain urban populations riot when the welfare stops and the busing to the plantations begins? What about foreign agitators? Tune in later to find out.
Daddio7
Agreed…Don Stewart
“Ranchers have 90 million cows, 65 million pigs plus hundreds of millions of chickens and turkeys.”
And what pray tell will these animals be fed? The soil will not grow anything without continued petrochemical inputs….
And even if you could feed them 300,000,000 would go through all those animals in a few months.
No oil = no food.
There is no way around that.
Actually I would list the BIG barriers a little differently than you although I agree with your overall analysis of the situation if it is a sudden collapse. Understand though that I feel as slow as things are going we will adapt more as things progress so may avert the complete sudden collapse scenario.
The real problem would not be getting people to the farm-able land, nor really being able to train them in rudimentary skills to allow them to grow food. It would be that the land available would more than likely not produce due to the need for fertilizer.
I have a little real life experience in switching land over from large scale farming practices to organic small scale and it takes a few years and a lot of organic inputs to accomplish. The usual three crop rotations with spraying done in most of the US these days would not be feasible as subsistence emergency crops either, yet the ground would be, if not toxic, then inhospitable to the type of crops surviving humans would need to grow. Not to mention do we even have enough of a stock pile of those types of seeds anywhere to distribute them? I doubt it.
There are alternatives and the land available at least in my neck of the woods would naturally feed a much higher number of people per acre without farming than most people would imagine. BUT. That would require 99% of those people to be very uncomfortable for a long time, eat and harvest stuff they do not like and work really hard while listening to what those who know tell them.
I am not sure how many would be able to do it.
Many of the chemicals used destroy the “living soil” for a long time.
Soil microbiota are responsible for unlocking nutrients and making them bio-available. You can’t simply put elemental NPK down!
We just had a big “oops.” Someone broadcasted carrot seed in a greenhouse bed. Don’t know where they got it; it was a plain envelope with “carrot” written on it. Only problem is, the seed was bright, almost fluorescent green! I googled, and didn’t find anything about that. Normal carrot seed would be brown. It wasn’t “pelletized,” which is an innocuous process by which tiny seed are glued together in clay to make handling easier. I’m guessing fungicide, which I don’t want in our beds. So our volunteer got to remove an inch of topsoil and put it in the driveway, where it won’t kill anything.
In Mycelium Running, Paul Stamets talks of fungus as the “Internet of the soil.” You really don’t want to kill it.
Thanks for this….
Of course almost all agricultural land on the planet is sowed using these sorts of chemicals… it will grow nothing without continued application of these chemicals… it cannot be repaired without years of intensive organic inputs…
7 billion people — no food.
That is an absolute certainty.
That seems like hyperbole to me.
Land treated with herbicides and fungicides will grow something. It just won’t be as productive as land not treated with those things.
But I thought you guys were just discussing how this sort of stuff killed all the soil biota…. and that it needed to be treated almost like toxic waste?
I have posted detailed scientific research on the impacts of industrial farming in the past on here — you cannot grow anything in soil farmed with this.
If you want to call this hype — then the onus is on you to provide research that indicates food can be grown in soil that has been polluted in this manner – without years of intensive repairs….
I don’t get around much, the only farm land I know about is the north Florida sand that made up my farm. We harvest our potatoes in May and if nothing is done to field after that it is soon covered with impenetrable head high vegetation. In September it takes a powerful tractor and a heavy harrow several passes to cut up all that organic matter. In the past with only mules or small tractors farmers used lister plows to bury the weed mass so they get some loose dirt to work with. Maybe the 50 inches of rain fall we get every year washes the toxins away?
A couple of photos from in front of my house. The mass of green is sesbania, a African legume import that farmers used to plant to shade the ground and add nitrogen. It self seeds and will come up annually. Hidden within this mass is the sorghum-suden grass green chop the farmer planted. No fertilizing or cultivation was done. By September this growth will be three times as thick.
The grassy lane to the left is 6 rows of Carolina Reaper hot peppers the farmers wife was trying to grow. As you can see the jungle overwhelmed them.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/134661671@N07/shares/43dH2D
Also note — we are not talking only of pesticides and fungicides — we are talking about the use of chemical based fertilizers – particularly urea…. that is the real killer….
And it is used far and wide…
That sounds like the hard part – removing the poisons from the soil. Especially once it has leeched in deep after a few years of saturation. Maybe better to make new raised beds with new soil, instead of using heavily contaminated soil.
If the soil didn’t have the toxins in it, couldn’t you just seed it with the microbes by putting a small amount of soil from a “good” field or a forest meadow into the “dead” soil at regular intervals, rather than waiting for it to repopulate naturally?
I’d go with ruminant manures, from animals grazed on the “good” fields. That should bring it back within a year of the inaction of the fungicide.
Of course, no one is really telling us how long those things last. Monsatan claims glyphosate is broken down within a year.
Sorry to throw a wrench in here…. but wouldn’t starving people (who can grow no food in the ruined soil) eat the manure-making machines?
“wouldn’t starving people eat the manure making machines?”
Not if you shoot them.
But there will be far more of them than you …. and they will have guns…
And you and your animals will a sitting target on your little farm …. with no real protection (unless of course you build a castle with high walls and a moat and a drawbridge and soldiers)…
Check your history for what happened to farmers…
Better to block a couple key bridges; fewer people will travel several miles through the woods, especially when they are starving. A community of a few hundred could probably do pretty good, as long as the starving people aren’t well organized. Most people don’t want to die, they may choose slavery over a gun fight.
I am sure that was what farmers hoped for 1000 years ago before the barbarians rolled in …. killed or enslaved the men… and raped the women… and seized the lands…
I am not sure why you think things will be any different this time.
There are no barbarians this time, no experienced mercenaries that are going to roll through. The softer urban people will be coming into the country, not the other way around. Plus guns make a huge difference. If everyone has knives, it is hard to take on 10 times as many people and win. With guns, knowing the local topography gives a huge advantage to the locals. The Barbarians were not starving masses; Ghengis Khan didn’t ride on bony mares, the horses and men were well fed.
Really… so the stereotypical American is a frumpy soft type who stands around thumping a drum and singing koombaya?
I must be thinking of the wrong place then…. because my perception of America was that it was chock full of a whole lot of extremely violent types with hundreds of millions of guns …
I also was thinking that America has by far the highest incarceration rates in the world … which indicates there are plenty of non-drum thumpers on the streets who are only kept under control by the threat or use of extreme force by the police….
But those would not be my biggest concern if I had my little pumpkin patch out back… my concern would be my formerly cordial neighbours — who have no pumpkin patch …
(are all your neighbours growing enough food to feed their families when Wally’s World closes?)
They probably have guns in the house… they might ask me to share my pumpkins.. but when I told them I didn’t have enough to share … I could imagine them stealing them in the night … or just killing me and taking them…
Watcha gonna do — stay up 24 hours a day guarding the pumpkins?
Should be quite the challenge going into the patch to harvest or plant crops — and someone is taking pot shots at you with a rifle…
You’re changing your story. In the first case, no, I don’t think urban Americans from Detroit and Baltimore are going to pour out and take over the countryside. The majority – around 70% – of US military recruits come from rural areas:
http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/1994D0DD50370B1B9E71C8F2DE708B48.gif
Again, you keep jumping back to pacifism and Last Man On Earth Straw Men. Gangs, feudalism, tribalism, clans. That is likely what will be successful if there is a full, rapid collapse. Nobody here has suggested living in suburbia and going it alone will be a successful strategy, at least that I’ve noticed.
“The majority – around 70% – of US military recruits come from rural areas”
Yes of course — and they will not defend you in some sort of Koombaya post collapse democracy —- rather they will be your new masters….
A strong, violent man will assume the leadership of such men and if you are lucky you get to work the fields for your new overlord … but there will be other overlords… and they will want your fields… and if they beat your overlord you become a slave…
At least that’s how things have gone down throughout history.
Either way — you get to be a peasant — and as the research I posted a few articles back — a peasant in the pre-industrial world lived a life roughly equivalent to a current day peasant in Bangladesh.
Enjoy!
Without oil, there are no super powers, the military does not have better weapons than peasants. The age of the gun, where the bullet is the most powerful weapon. The ultimate age of equality, where a small woman or 10 year old boy can be as powerful and deadly as the king’s bodyguard. All that is needed is the will to use deadly force.
I’m sure a women or child would be a challenge for people like this:
http://the-levant.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/PMCExperience-1.png
Then of course there will be the militarized police who will be the new bosses in the neighbourhood:
http://media.salon.com/2014/06/riot_police-620×4121.jpg
Think of me when a rifle but to the back of the head shatters your koombaya dream — and you are sent into the fields to grow food for your new masters
I read these posts new to old. If you look at the photos from in front of my house that field was double cropped with potatoes and corn for the last ten years. The grower used herbicides that left only potatoes and bare ground or corn and bare ground. Without cultivation and more herbicides the suppressed weeds run riot. Trying to grow anything on that the problem will be too much fertility, not too little. You will have to spend much of your time fighting everything else that is trying to grow. Miss a couple of days of weeding and you wont be able to find your crop.
Presumably your neighbour is machine-harvesting his crops, which is why herbicides etc make sense; half-measures are not so great. If you are going to go with industrial agriculture, might as well go all in.
Using manual-labour intensive practices, the Aboriginals / First Nations / Indians / whatever they prefer to be called at this present moment, had some interesting techniques. Growing groups of crops together – like using squash with the corn to provide ground cover to suppress weeds, legumes to add nitrogen and flowers to attract pollinators. No quick machine harvest, but no herbicides, fertilizers, and oil dependency either.
“poisoned the soil’….. Yes exactly — these chemicals poison the soil — and nothing will grow without years of repairs….
Pioneer Preppy
‘I am not sure how many would be able to do it.’
That’s where I come out also. That’s why I get frustrated when people talk about ‘we have to feed 9 billion;’ The 9 billion won’t do what they need to do to survive. Perhaps a billion or two? Those are the numbers that Toby Hemenway used at Duke about 7 years ago. I could see a die off to a billion happening relatively slowly, then a slowly growing population as people got better at doing what they need to do.
I don’t subscribe to the Black Friday and It’s Collapse Day. I think it unlikely. For one thing, we know that Obama has been signing secret executive orders recently. Do you suppose they might involve martial law? But I use the sudden collapse scenario as a shock to the system to try to get people to understand that they need to get busy. Being frozen in the headlights is not a good place to be.
Don Stewart
““Ranchers have 90 million cows, 65 million pigs plus hundreds of millions of chickens and turkeys.”
And what pray tell will these animals be fed? The soil will not grow anything without continued petrochemical inputs….”
My guess is that they will be fed stockpiled grain. Right up to when the grain is gone.
grainypicture
I think I was responding to someone who said that a Black Friday collapse is quite unlikely. We have a large stock of stuff which would take some time to use up. I agree with that statement.
As for the claims that soil has been irredeemably poisoned, I just don’t believe it. Elaine Ingham, the soil scientist, gives a figure of one year to restore soil biology. Now that doesn’t mean that everything that you might want to fix can be fixed in a year. The ten feet of topsoil that Iowa used to have won’t return in a year. However, we do know how to make topsoil quite rapidly, so that things get better from year to year. The important thing, to my mind, is to get started building fertility, rather than continuing to destroy it.
Don Stewart
Another example of gold medal wishful thinking … as in I am sure we have years of food stored away… I am sure we can find the compost to fix the soil …. I am sure nobody will kill all the animals while they wait for crops to grow in the repaired soil … I am sure everything will be orderly without chaos… I am sure there can be no Black Friday event ..
I have nothing to back any of this up …. it’s just what I think …. because to think otherwise is unthinkable….
Assuming the grain stockpiles are located where all the animals are (they are not — that is why rail roads and trucks exist…) how would you get the animals to where the people are?
I guess they could all walk to where the animals are…. but what would they eat along the way?
When the electricity goes off — the grocery stores will be quickly emptied — and nobody is going to feed you.
The government will soon collapse and it will be every man for himself.
It amazes me how people fail to recognize the implications of what collapse means — it seams we think it is like going on a boy scout expedition….
Again – turn you power off for a weekend and burn no petrol — that will give you a bit of an idea of what is coming…
Of course nobody will take me up on that —- because that would burst the little bubbles that people are living in …. and you’d need to pull out the extra strength Xanax to deal with the resulting anxiety.
“how would you get the animals to where the people are?”
Why would you want to do that? In an intermediate collapse, between dictatorship and radiological armeggedon, the smartest thing for the midwest to do would be to cut off the coasts. People on islands would do well to sever connection to mainland cities. At least for the first couple years, until the dust settles.
The Scandinavian countries will probably be alright, except Denmark, since it is connected to continental Europe. Central Africa will probably keep going the same as ever.
No sense starving to keep more people alive on a 1000 calories a day; better to let the population collapse quickly, and keep 3000+ calories per day that is needed for hard manual labour.
We have fun talking about what if and what could be done. I’m sure Hitler though Russia would fall apart when faced with adversity. The US military spends trillions of dollars and there are millions of federal employees. I can only hope some of those people are spending some of that money planing and preparing to keep Americans fed and order maintained. I also have my own stockpile of food and ammunition, that’s all any one man can do.
If they are planning anything (I don’t think they are) I guarantee the plan does not involve you … the elites would be looking after themselves….
In case you hadn’t noticed — the US government (and most others for that matter) doesn’t give a shit about its citizens.
“In case you hadn’t noticed — the US government (and most others for that matter) doesn’t give a shit about its citizens.”
What, exactly, could they do to protect 350 million people from the collapse of BAU? I’m not saying they do care, but whether they do or not, there is not much that can be done on that kind of scale. Especially if sudden changes cause a panic or even just economic decline.
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Improvements in solar energy and energy storage are occurring at increasing rates. At some point in the future (20 years perhaps) solar could be the solution to the expensive energy problem. I suggest that after a somewhat difficult period of adjustment we will be talking about the solar age and not the oil age.
Perhaps if solar panels could be naturally occurring in nature like oil, coal and natural gas! Then, they wouldn’t require so much energy, resources and infrastructure to produce, maintain and replace them.
Greg, those naturally occurring solar panels are called “trees.” But we can’t have enought of them to support 7+ billion people, and it requires restraint and husbandry to keep them “renewable.”
I tried growing them in our orchard here …. but that failed…
As many are aware, I am now trying to breed sheep with solar panels here in NZ… so far no luck…. I am thinking that maybe if I involved a pair of gum boots I might have more success 🙂
But you are correct — solar is a total waste of time — when batteries are involved (and they MUST be involved) there is no nett return of energy …. basically you barely get out what you put in to making the system….
You would be better off buying 10,000 camels and having them walk round and round turning a generator…. (I forget where I was — might have been Yemen — and I saw this poor camel hooked up to some sort of grinding stone with blinkers on going round and round and round…. jeez… perhaps when we return to mass slavery post collapse we’ll see humans performing these tasks)
Anyway…. no matter what the world cannot run on coal so forget about ever running on solar…
We need oil. Cheap oil. And we need it NOW!
Let’s all chant together (because the mind is a powerful thing — imagine what 7B minds could do if focused on the same thing!):
WE WANT CHEAP OIL WE WANT CHEAP OIL WE WANT CHEAP OIL….
I know someone who owns a grocery store in California and with their latest electric bill from SCE which was over $19,000 for one month, they decided to try and lower their cost of electric by installing a large solar panel system. The system will cost them over $1.5 million. This system has to run refrigeration, heating plus lighting and other small appliances. Do you think this plan will actually save them much money? I don’t know – just asking the question. It would be interesting to see what other more informed people have to say.
If it saves them $15,000 per month, it will take 100 months – around 8 years, around which time they would need to replace batteries – if they use them and that is still a concern.
If it saves them $7500 per month, it will take them 17 years to pay off, but they will have needed to replace batteries once or twice by then (if they use them) so it will actually take 20+ years to pay itself off.
Thanks Matthew. That’s interesting. Maybe saves them some money depending on the cost of replacement batteries. I do not know if they will be using batteries, or whether it is required for the system to work. Another cost not mentioned by most people is the cost in time & cash to pay someone to clean the panels on a regular basis to optimize their performance, i mean for a commercial operation like this grocery store i am talking about. The panels will be located in a dusty area of the desert, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Thanks again for responding to my question.
There are a bunch of subsidies built into the system. With these subsidies, it will look like they are saving money.
Part of where the savings comes from is shortchanging the electric companies/grid providers with the funding they receive, relative to the changes that will be needed as more solar is added.
I presume debt of close to $1.5 million will be added. This helps pump up our current system–helps keep prices of coal high enough to make it profitable to extract it, to make the solar PV.
Thanks Gail for your comment. I am skeptical about this solar panel project. But i do not know very much about the subject to make any meaningful evaluation.
I seriously DOUBT that the global e-CON-omy has a 20 year life span. What’s happening in Greece and the Chinese stock market meltdown should be an eye opener to anyone that industrial civilization is in collapse mode. The same industrial civilization that produces solar energy and storage.
I’m reminded what the German finance minister recently told the Greeks if they defaulted. He said their supermarkets would be laid waste, their electricity would stop, their banks would close and their Nation would come to a complete halt.
That’s what the world is headed for but i’ll let Fast Eddy fill you in on the other details.
Thats why bankrupt countries (which is all) should be figuring out how trade will continue once this sham stops. They will wait till after the war I suppose.
I agree. We need energy now, not in 20 years. We need energy that will directly replace mostly oil at the moment and natural gas and coal as well before we reach the 20 year goal. This is just to keep the system going not to mention we need growing supplies every year as well to manage the debt.
And the new energy supply needs to be cheap in both dollar terms and in terms of energy costs to produce.
I’ll be happy if we get to the end of the month … China markets open down again ….
The German finance minister is quoting me almost verbatim… I have nothing to add 🙂
Oh — we got the water connected… how nice to have a shower and a coffee…
BAU you are my darling …. I will miss you so …
http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/smooch-620×620.jpg
China threatens to arrest malicious short sellers, market surges 5.9%. Next stop, arrest people for failing to buy stocks, problem solved.
It’s all rather surreal … isn’t it!
“At some point in the future (20 years perhaps) solar could be the solution to the expensive energy problem. I suggest that after a somewhat difficult period of adjustment we will be talking about the solar age and not the oil age.”
Your suggestion does not have roots in reality. All of the combustion engines on the planet were made with cheap oil energy. All of the existing solar energy (pV, passive, active passive?) devices and infrastructure were manufactured with cheap oil energy. All of the batterys on the planet were made with cheap oil energy. Not a single battery has ever been made from solar energy.
I will assume you are talking about photovoltaic because while it falls woefully short of the uses of oil it can be used for electric motors and thus the mistaken belief exists that it is a substitute for oil.
The means by which the electric grid was manufactured is oil. The means by which it is maintained is oil. All materials come from oil either directly or by the energy it yields. All materials. Not a single material on the planet would exist without oil. Polypropylene, steel, aluminum, copper, rubber. Not one.
The cheap energy to produce the PV devices needed to replicate some semblance of industrial civilization does not exist on the planet. Even if it existed it would not be used to do so ( and rightly so). Even if it existed it would not create the materials used by industrial civilization.
Even if it existed the cheap energy to maintain to maintain the imaginary PV infrastructure also does not exist on the planet.
PV also will not produce petrochemical based fertilizers which currently are the means by which 7 billion people eat.
I am a big fan of the sun. I endorse every effort to create passive solar heated structures. Unfortunately this requires glass. Glass is a extremely high embodied energy product. Glass is also quite fragile.
This is the crux of the issue right here:
“All materials come from oil either directly or by the energy it yields. All materials. Not a single material on the planet would exist without oil. Polypropylene, steel, aluminum, copper, rubber. Not one.”
It shoudl be very sobering for people to hear this and understand what it means for the future availability of all the crucial resources we use.
I forget the source — but something I recently read suggested the 3 most important ingredients in the creation of the industrial revolution were iron, oil and rubber….
Rubber because without it you cannot seal and lubricate the moving parts of industry…
Coal had to be up there as well. Oil mostly came later.
I could perhaps find a few things that don’t depend on oil–sticks that fall from a tree don’t depend on oil, for example, and water that I dip in my hands out of a lake. But in term of the things we use every day, it is hard to find much of anything that isn’t today made using oil somewhere in the process. Oil is used for lubrication or for transport, even if it isn’t burned directly.
Back in 2011, I wrote a post called How is an oil shortage like a missing cup of flour? I pointed out that if there isn’t enough flour for a full batch of cookie, a baker needs to make a smaller batch. The same thing happens if there is not enough oil to support the economy. The economy has to pull back, if there is not enough oil. As a result, a pull back looks like a recession that affects all energy products pretty much similarly–not like simply a shortage of oil.
A partial list of products made from Petroleum (144 of 6000 items)
One 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline.
The rest (over half) is used to make things like:
http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
Back in 2011, I wrote a post called How is an oil shortage like a missing cup of flour? I pointed out that if there isn’t enough flour for a full batch of cookie, a baker needs to make a smaller batch. The same thing happens if there is not enough oil to support the economy. The economy has to pull back, if there is not enough oil. As a result, a pull back looks like a recession that affects all energy products pretty much similarly–not like simply a shortage of oil.
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
I read a report on resource use in PV panels. The major item was the cover glass. It has to be thick and strong to not break when hit by hailstones. As you say glass takes lots of energy to make.
Book review of “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”, by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall. 2013. Springer.
Finally, the first and only book to use massive amounts of real data, not models
This is the only estimate of Energy Returned on Invested (EROI) study of solar Photovoltaics (PV) based on real data. Other studies use models, or very limited data further hampered by missing figures about lifespan, performance, and so on that are often unavailable due to the private, proprietary nature of solar PV companies.
Models often limit their life cycle or EROI analysis to just the solar panels themselves, which represents only a third of the overall energy embodied in solar PV plants. These studies left out dozens of energy inputs, leading to overestimates of energy such as payback time of 1-2 years (Fthenakis), EROI 8.3 (Bankier), and EROI of 5.9 to 11.8 (Raugei et al).
Prieto and Hall used government data from Spain, the sunniest European country, with accurate measures of generated energy from over 50,000 installations using several years of real-life data from optimized, efficient, multi-megawatt and well-oriented facilities. These large installations are far less expensive and more efficient than rooftop solar-PV.
Prieto and Hall added dozens of energy inputs missing from past solar PV analyses. Perhaps previous studies missed these inputs because their authors weren’t overseeing several large photovoltaic projects and signing every purchase order like author Pedro Prieto. Charles A. S. Hall is one of the foremost experts in the world on the calculation of EROI. Together they’re a formidable team with data, methodology, and expertise that will be hard to refute.
Prieto and Hall conclude that the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain’s ideal sunny climate. Germany’s EROI is probably 20 to 33% less (1.6 to 2), due to less sunlight and less efficient rooftop installations.
Spain saw much good coming from promoting solar power. There’d be long-term research and development, a Spanish solar industry, and many high-tech jobs created, since the components for the solar plants would be manufactured locally. Spain imports 90% of its fossil fuels, more than any other European nation, so this would lower expensive oil imports as well.
To kick start the solar revolution, the Spanish government promised massive subsidies to solar PV providers at 5.75 times the cost of fossil fuel generated electricity for 25 years (about a 20% profit), and 4.6 times as much after that. Eventually it was hoped that solar power would be as cheap as power generated by fossil fuels.
Financial Fiasco
The gold rush to get the subsidy of 47 Euro cents per kWh began. Because the subsidy was so high, far too many solar PV plants were built quickly — more than the government could afford. This might not have happened if global banks hadn’t got involved and handed out credit like candy.
Even before the financial crash of 2008 the Spanish government began to balk at paying the full subsidies, and after the 2008 crash (which was partly brought on by this over-investment in solar PV), the government began issuing dozens of decrees lowering the subsidies and allowed profit margins. In addition, utilities were allowed to raise their electric rates by up to 20%.
The end result was a massive transfer of public wealth to private solar PV investors of about $2.33 billion euros per year, and businesses that depended on cheap electricity threatened to leave Spain.
Despite these measures, the government is still spending about $10.5 billion a year on renewable energy subsidies, and the Spanish government has had many lawsuits brought against them for lowering subsidies and profit margins.
Solar companies went bankrupt after the financial crash, including the Chinese company Suntech, which sold 40% of its product to Spain. About 44,000 of the nation’s 57,900 PV installations are almost bankrupt, and companies continue to fail (Cel Celis), or lay off many employees (Spanish photovoltaic module manufacturer T-Solar).
Nor were new jobs, research, and development created, since most of the equipment and solar panels were bought from China. But unlike China, where the government insisted PV manufacturing be supported by massive research and development (and cybertheft of intellectual property from the United States and other nations), the only “innovations” capitalists in Spain sought were the numerous financial instruments they “invented” to make money, such as “solar mutual funds”. Far more money went into promoting and selling solar investments than research and development.
Prieto and Hall believe this fiasco could have been avoided if the Spanish government had invited energy and financial analysts to flow-chart the many costs and energy inputs to have had a more realistic understanding of what the costs would be versus the extremely small amount of electricity added to Spain’s electric supply.
More http://energyskeptic.com/2015/tilting-at-windmills-spains-solar-pv/
This is kind of like saying railroads don’t work, since when the US Government provided a $10,000 / mile subsidy, people built windy railroads to maximize distance, built in winter and then the tracks came apart on thaw, built using poplar, and other ways to make a quick buck. Afterwards, most of them went bankrupt.
If it was a good idea, private companies would do it without subsidy. I guess a part of the problem is that governments paint themselves into a corner; they cannot raise rates and apply more fees on fossil fuel products.
Not the same.
The railways actually did work (with a few glitches to be ironed out).
These projects are complete failures — these are not glitches rather they are fundamental problems with the science.
How many hundreds of billions — probably trillions – have been throw at creating workable solar technology? And yet we have nothing … nodda…. they simply do not work…
http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bernstein-energy-supply.jpg
There are some things that can be done:
– railways can be made to operate in harsh conditions
– fire can make electricity
– petroleum can be used to grow food
There are some things that cannot be done:
– we cannot grow food in snow
– we cannot live forever
– we cannot make solar energy work
That’s just the way it is.
The axiom that humans can solve anything if we try hard enough — well that is just plain bullshit. The list of things we cannot solve is infinite.
And even this analysis does not include the tax revenue that would be required by Spain, so that solar PV could pay its fair share of road maintenance. It also didn’t consider grid upgrades that might be needed, or additional back-up requirements to keep the grid stable, or additional wear and tear on fossil fuel powered plants if they are required to ramp up and down more, to support the addition of Solar PV.
The way the calculation is done, amounts paid as wages are not considered to have any energy component, even though wages normally are used to buy food and fuel, both of which have an energy component. There is clearly labor used in making and installing solar PV.
Because of these (and other) shortfalls in what the calculation measures, the situation is even worse than what the EROEI calculation suggests.
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
Well done — you have just eviscerated the Green Groupies with that post — but as you will see they will continue to post that solar energy will save us — they will completely ignore the facts you have posted and bang the Koombaya drum to drown out the negative seeds that your post plants in their minds…
Because facts do no matter.
Facts destroy the buzz that the hopium pipe delivers.
Those clapping hands are getting really tiresome.
Then we’ll need a thumbs up or thumbs down option here won’t we.
I don’t think we have 20 years to solve our problem. We also don’t have funds to change our many devices that use oil to using electricity (long haul truck, earth movers, railroads, etc.) except over a very long period, as the existing ones wear out. My concern is finding energy products that are available now, that work in today’s devices, and that are very cheap to produce and not polluting.
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Dear Ms Tverberg,
Many points in commun between your analysis and those developed here in France, in particular by my comrade Jean-Marc Jancovici (notably your fig. 3, world GDP / World Consumption of Energy see here this paper he did a couple of years ago : http://www.manicore.com/documentation/transition_energie.html – y and R2 slightly different).
You will certainly be happy to hear that we have a excellent economist here, Gaël (not Gail) Giraud,
who may have discovered ground breaking proofs, within the classical econometric framework, of the very intimate like between energy input and economic growth.
For a presentation of this results (excuse my French) see here :
http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2014/04/19/gael-giraud-du-cnrs-le-vrai-role-de-lenergie-va-obliger-les-economistes-a-changer-de-dogme/
and here (working paper in English, now under peer review for publication in “Energy Economics” :
http://www.slideshare.net/PaulineTSP/lien-entre-le-pib-et-lnergie-par-gal-giraud-ads-20140306
I’m sure you’ll like this one too (once more ‘scuse my French) :
presentation of the mindblowing “Thermodynamics of evolution, from the Big Band to the Internet”, by French astrophysist François Roddier
-> http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/10/30/francois-roddier-par-dela-leffet-de-la-reine-rouge/
-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lNz5vmKEFA
Good to see similar and complementary ideas unfolding in different parts of the world.
I’m notably extremely interested in reading the development of your hypothesis of a low demand / low prices scenario taking place, as we approach the limits to growth.
All the best,
Matthieu Auzanneau, blogger for “Le Monde” and former occasional contributor to TheOilDrum)
Mattieu,
Thanks very much for commenting. I am honored to have you read my blog.
I am familiar with at least some of the writings of Gaël Giraud and François Roddier, thanks at least in part to Stefeun who comments on this blog. I have corresponded to some extent with François Roddier.
I have been talking about Demand and Affordability for quite a while. This is an article from April 2013.
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/04/11/peak-oil-demand-is-already-a-huge-problem/
I am sure you found http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/06/23/bp-data-suggests-we-are-reaching-peak-energy-demand/
This post is very closely related. http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/05/06/why-we-have-an-oversupply-of-almost-everything-oil-labor-capital-etc/
Thanks Gail.
For those interested, Jean-Marc Jancovici has translated most of his important articles into English.
See for example: http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/energy.html
Unfortunately, to read Matthieu Auzanneau in English is much more difficult, as auto-translation doesn’t work very well with the blog OilMan..
I recumbent the Manicore website. It is well done.
“everything that rises must converge”
In March, I published “Or Noir” (“Black Gold”), an history of oil that is (partly) a sort of an an anti-Yergin’s “The Prize” :
http://www.amazon.fr/noir-Matthieu-AUZANNEAU/dp/2707167010/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436465132&sr=1-1
We have a Chinese translator already, but I very much hope we’ll manage to have it translated into English ; it’s complicated because it’s a long book, translations are coslty, and few foreign books get published in the US or in the UK.
Any idea will be helpful and appreciated.
Best,
Matthieu:)
(don’t know how I managed to get loggin in as someone else, this is very strange…)
No one by that name has ever logged in here before. It seems to have associated you with a WordPress blog garandet5.wordpress.com. It is in French.
Mattieu,
I see your book has very good ratings in France, and quite a lot of them (suggesting that it has sold well). Those features might make a US publisher more willing to publish your book.
Book publishers are not doing well financially, though, which makes them less willing to take on new titles. If you don’t find a publisher, quite a few books are self-published. That may not work very well, though, for someone who cannot publicize his book in the United States well himself.
Maybe someone else has a good idea or contacts.
@matthieu – “I’m notably extremely interested in reading the development of your hypothesis of a low demand / low prices scenario taking place, as we approach the limits to growth.”
I’m open to correction, but I would question the “low demand” hypothesis. There is ample evidence of market failures in the direction of capital to the development of natural resources. The various QE programs provide risk-free profits (subsidies) to banks, hence they are not in competition for, especially, investments in oil and gas.
Similarly, if governments do not run (large) deficts, the savings-investment identity becomes relevant, and it is left to households to save sufficiently to provide needed investment to the business sector. When there is a glut of everything except jobs, commodities in general suffer deflation, but where there is scarcity, price inflation takes root and eventually spreads to the rest of the economy unless profits can be made from increased output.
In other words, demand will not increase until debts are reduced.
“In other words, demand will not increase until debts are reduced.”
Whether or not they have debts, how will unemployed people purchase anything?
http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/34916
“Not only has Saudi Arabia issued its first bond issue of $4 billion to cover budget deficits, other countries may follow in the region.”
“Since May, Saudi Arabia’s foreign assets have entered crash mode. In May, foreign asset holdings fell over $672 billion. Saudi Arabia sold assets drawing down its reserves to cover the budget deficit.”
It is best to keep the locals fully onside, even if you have to borrow to fund the freebies, especially if you have ISIL and Al-Quaeda on the other side of your fences. So, unemployment will be held at the unavoidable minimum.
Without distorting economic subsidies, CHEAP ENERGY has to be produced from HIGH EROEI energy sources.
Ultimately, for subsidies to be allocated, economic surpluses first need to be accumulated from the use of high EROEI energy sources. Subsidies coming from debt accumulation are not sustainable.
If EROEI matched up with monetary costs, as it was intended to do, I would agree with you.
EROEI doesn’t match up with monetary costs, so it mostly doesn’t do what you would think it should. Instead, it gives sellers of high-cost energy products a chance to ask for subsidies. Also, the cutoffs for EROEI’s were set way too low. New energy sources need to have an EREOI in the 50+ range, as far as I can see.
I agree that subsidies from debt accumulation are not sustainable. Instead, any subsidies need to come from very low cost fuels. If those aren’t present, we have a major problem.
If EROEI measured what people thinks it does, I would agree with you. EROEI has to be very high–I would think 50+ for new energy resources, because the calculation leaves out so much. We are not in a position now where fossil fuels can subsidize new energy types that are not really cheap.
I agree that new energy fossil fuel sources must have an EROEI in the 50+ range at “well head” to take into account the expense in energy that is effectively needed to bring them to the market user.
And, except in very few cases, this is not likely to happen in the future for large hydrocarbon energy sources.
Hence, unless another type of very high (100+) EROEI energy source is somehow rapidly developed and massively brought on line, the average EROEI of human civilization energy sources is going to continue its downward slide and it will eventually hit a trigger transition point that will bring down the current complex edifice of high tech civilization. It will happen just like the fall of a house of cards: you will take out just one too many from the edifice.
The above mentioned new energy sources must not be sources of intermittent energy, such as solar or wind, unless an appropriate storage methodology exists. Moreover, the average EROEI of the entire system, including the storage device, must be very high. As a result, this will disquality most, if not all, currently existing solar and wind energy systems.
In my humble opinion, only controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fusion remains as a potential very high EROEI energy source. Theoretically, relatively compact fusion reactors could simply replace the fosssil fuel thermal plants that currently produce electricity for the grid. In that scenario most transport systems would need to be switchedd to electricity, in particular, car,s trucks, buses and trains. The remaining oil and gas would need to be saved for boat and plane fuel and for the production of chemicals indispensible to sustain human civilization (such as plastics, fertilizers and pesticides). This “transition process” would be hugely expensive and strategic resource depleting. I do not think that the current economic system can “afford” it. A special “emergency crash program war type rationing arrangement” might be able to implement that massive transition. Such a program would however need to include some population control “arrangements”.
However, industrially produced controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fusion reactors do not exist today. Even more, experimental controlled aneutronic thermonuclear fusion reactors do not officially exist today. Some may have been developed within “black budget” programs. The key problem with this type of reactor is a critical nuclear proliferation issue as their technology may provide the capability to manufacture small fusion explosive devices without the need for a fission trigger. For those who know somethhing about fusion: the experimental ITER reactor currently being built in the south of France will never work … and it is not an “aneutronic” type of reactor. Hence, it will produce a significant amount of radiation. “Aneutronic” fusion reactions that produce very few neutrons are called “aneutronic”. Hence they require only compact relatively inexpensive shielding in the reactor design.
Hence, if for technical and security reasons a relatively cheap and compact type of industrial fusion reactor cannot be rapidly brought on line to replace our vast collection of existing fossil fuel thermal plants feeding the electric grid, the average EROEI of human civilization energy sources is going to continue to slide down relatively fast and the “House of Cards” will go down.
One may write as many “economic type” dissertations as one wants, it will not change anything about the underlying fundamental physical energy realities.
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
I agree with you. I am not expecting cheap fusion tomorrow. It still would not replace oil either.
“I am not expecting cheap fusion tomorrow. It still would not replace oil either.”
If it provided abundant electricity at $0.01 per KwH, gasoline, diesel, and polymers could probably be synthesized economically. However, it is not certain that fusion generating net energy is possible, and if it is, quite unlikely to mature sufficiently in time to avoid the financial collapse.
Finally, a rational response to what is happening in Greece. Thank you Gail. Unfortunately it won’t be easy reading for those who want a nice easy scapegoat.
Glad you liked the article!
Greece is self-sufficient in coal, so I think that final paragraph is a bit wrong.
Whether or not it is self-sufficient in coal, it is not self-sufficient in a lot of other things, including oil. It cannot switch to a 100% coal system that will support its population. To do so, it would need to figure out a huge amount of goods and services that it could sell using coal, at prices that would undercut China’s prices. I don’t see that happening. It would also need to obtain debt funding to ramp up its coal production, new electricity generation using coal, and new factories using the coal. This can’t happen because of timing, if nothing else.
Poverty is often just a state of mind. Few of you would feel comfortable living in my mobile home, driving 18 year old trucks and living on $1800 a month. I’m quite happy sitting at my kitchen table seeing the world over the internet. When people see others living large and they can’t they go into debt to make themselves feel better. Live small, be happy.
“Living small” means living a lot less comfortably than you describe — living in a mobile home, driving an 18-year old truck, and living on $1,800 per month. Not very many of the world’s population could live at this level–it certainly isn’t sustainable for 7 billion people. There are many things that are implied by this living standard, including a government that has funds to provide roads, companies that make spare parts for trucks, water and food that are available for purchase, and an electric grid system that provides electricity, not to mention the Internet.
“There are many things that are implied by this living standard, including a government that has funds to provide roads, companies that make spare parts for trucks, water and food that are available for purchase, and an electric grid system that provides electricity, not to mention the Internet.”
I believe those in charge have a term for that. Oh I know they are referred to as ‘useless eaters’ !
Valid points Gail. But how many of those implied living standards you mention are really almost mandatory services imposed on us by the current overall structure? Do vehicles really improve our living standards that much or are they a necessity now because of the loss of rural small stores and train tracks? Same for many of the roads that allow us to travel 20 miles now to purchase groceries in the same time we used to only need to travel 5 miles on a dirt track. Have regulations pushed drilling costs and excavation fees to the point that hooking up to the county water is preferable to private wells or sewer systems? Has the current infrastructure not promoted large regional businesses over smaller local ones and thereby lowered the living standards for some while raising it for others?
Someone living like Daddio describes would be able to adapt to a more comfortable “small living” life than others I believe and it doesn’t have to be as uncomfortable as you paint it.
I think what Gail is trying to say is that people need to spend and invest into the system in order for the system to work. If everyone decided to simplify then the system could not support it’s obligations and it would collapse.
Comparing what we as a society are forced to invest into the system as the only option for comfortable living standards is just as delusional as denying cheap energy has anything to do with economics. Also comparing temperate region necessities to tropical conditions as living standards is also misleading. Too often people try to point out that someone living simply in America is so far ahead of “The rest of the world” in living standards. While true in many ways it is misleading in the fact that some resources in the North are more abundant than in the South and many things like housing etc. are a necessity this far North and there are tradeoffs to get them. Much less free time, more effort put towards food production, alternative fuel gathering etc. Many of those endeavors are ignored when speaking of living standards.
The problem boils down to the Central Planners and the infrastructures they have created. You have the obligations that need to be paid in order for the system to function. Add all the complexities to the system as well as bureaucracies that the Gov’t needs those funds by those paying into the system to keep it from collapsing.
Where oil plays a part is that most economies sell their oil on the market at a higher cost to fund all those Govt liabilities and it needs to be cheap enough to extract so that they can easily sell it to others at a markup. Those profits go back into the system.
But it all boils down to people spending especially so in a consumer based economy in order for it to maintain it’s projected level of growth. If an economy flatlines or goes into reverse then you have problems.
I agree, Rodster. Living small sounds great, but a lot of other people’s jobs depend on supporting our current large lifestyle. Once all of these people are out of jobs, we have a different problem to contend with.
Gail
You cannot avoid the problems by ‘living large’, you just make them worse.
Capra and Luisi have a section on how Nature uses cycles of die-backs to achieve balance. We have consoled ourselves that those rules do not apply to humans. We are about to learn that Nature’s Laws have not been repealed.
Don Stewart
Worse?
I don’t see how things can be made any worse. We have 7 billion people who will not be fed — no matter what.
If Larry Ellison buys another yacht will that matter? If you buy a new car or build a new house will that make a difference?
Absolutely not.
We have what we have now — and everything the follows is a holocaust (I have upgraded my terminology — Apocalypse and Nightmare to be replaced by Holocaust going forward)
I am 100% with Gail and the central bankers on this —-we must do absolutely everything to keep the hamster running — and that means increasing not decreasing consumption.
There seems to be no talking sense to people on this issue — like Bernanke said … when you see why he did what he did — you will thank him.
So I guess you’ll just have to wait and see what collapse brings.
I guarantee you — you will be longing for the days of BAU when this hits…
Think of me when the electricity goes off…
And you are huddled in the dark — the cold is grabbing hold of you —- the cupboard is emptying out and you are looking at your dog hungrily — you are collecting water from the ditch — going to the bathroom in a corner of your backyard — the neighbours are tearing up the garden and banging on your door demanding you share your cans of beans….
Remember that Fast Eddy told you so….
“Once all of these people are out of jobs, we have a different problem to contend with.”
Those who can, will have tremendous amounts of physical labour jobs available. Those who cannot, will probably have to provide services at a big discount to labourers.
Women will be at a physical disadvantage in physical labor jobs. The role of women will again change.
“Women will be at a physical disadvantage in physical labor jobs.”
Being larger doesn’t help much with growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables. If anything, being smaller means you need less calories to do the same work. It is only things like lumber, mining, masonry, carpentry, etc that really benefit someone being larger. Someone was doing a study on colonizing Mars, and it turns out 90 pound Filipino women would be far better suited than 180 pound Caucasian men.
That is interesting! I suppose for dragging a big deer back home, a 180 pound man would be better.
80 years ago in north Florida people settled close to the train tracks. Whistle stops were located about 6 miles apart. My brother owns what used to be Roy, Florida. I live half way between the Yelvington and East Palatka stops. At most you had a three mile walk to the stop. The tracks were taken up in the early 70’s
Basically the same where I live. Had stops about 10 miles apart which are now long gone and the little towns dried up. Now 99% of the local population commutes 20 miles to work but that time spent commuting or working for others is not counted against the so called living standard.
Yes. I keep suggesting that nothing old be destroyed.
I am sure maintenance costs something. The newer trains may be “fussier” about the kind of tracks they need as well–I don’t know. It is hard to imagine a high-speed train being content with the same tracks as a low speed train from years ago used.
I’m thinking along the lines of those well-built old things from when energy was cheap. Like the West Side elevated, that, instead of being torn down, became a world class linear park and a magnet of NYC tourism. As to maintenance…the oldest continually occupied building in the US is the Taos Pueblo in NM. 1000 years and going. It is made of humble mud and is ritually repaired by the community every year.
High speed trains give me the creeps! 🙂
I don’t that was Gail’s point there… my understanding of the comment is that no matter how simply we live — even if we try to follow the relatively simple life of someone like Scott Nearing…. we are still living large… we are still plugged directly into BAU…
So ultimately it does not matter if one lives like Larry Ellison or Nearing — we are still part of the problem…
“So ultimately it does not matter if one lives like Larry Ellison or Nearing — we are still part of the problem…”
It doesn’t matter if you consume 20 BOE per year or 20,000? If the West consumed 1/10th as much energy per capita it would make no difference?
No it does not.
We must grow — or we will go from consuming whatever it is we consume — to consuming nothing.
And to grow we must increase consumption at a rate that keeps us from stall speed. I am not sure what that number would be but I suspect we’d need global GDP to expand at at least a 3% clip per year.
And we are struggling to do that — even with so many people living large.
I would urge Larry Ellison and his peers to consume more —- they need to do their part — more jets more yachts — they have the means….
Because if we don’t grow — we collapse.
How does everyone feel about The Great Depression? Do you think you would have enjoyed living through that?
I thought not.
Ever spoken to someone who lived through that period — ever notice how they tend to be pack rats — they throw NOTHING out…. they watch every penny…. its almost as if they live in a state of permanent fear — they will do anything not to have to revisit those times…
Well when this collapse come it will make The Great Depression look like a short recession …. and the kicker is — there will be no recovery — because the cheap energy that was still available to get us out of the Great Depression…
Well that is all gone….
So please go to Walmart today and buy some ‘stuff’ — if you’ve not got the cash put it on your card.
Do your part. Keep the hamster running
As Ed Abbey would write
I am talking to a madman.
You mean this fool? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey who doesn’t seem to understand there is no magical Koombaya World — where we can operate an even remotely modern civilization without continuing to burn to record amounts of fossil fuels year after year after year…
I am amazed at the thickness of the skulls of some people — you can hit them in the head with a sledge hammer of facts 1000x over … and you just cannot break through…
They can look at the graph Gail has posted showing that growth is 1:1 correlated with the burning of fossil fuels — they can look at her research on the futility of ‘renewable’ energy…
And they still cannot get it.
A 6 year old could get it.
Most of the time, I can just ignore you, Paul, but them’s fighin’ words.
I’m amazed that you are so shallow as to call the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang a “fool.” At least Ed lived his philosophy, and walked the talk, instead of flitting around to different continents, hiring locals to grow your food and spending way too much time complaining about others who put way more effort into creating a better life than you do.
A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Fits you to a “T,” Paul.
But Jan – you are missing the point — if everyone attempted to follow this fellow then we’d quickly be living like savages — he’s just one more deluded man who believes we can have our cake and eat it too— i.e. that we can pick and choose which parts of BAU are acceptable — and which are travesties
He fails to understand that the situation is one of absolutes — you either have all of BAU with the stuff you agree with and stuff you disagree with —- or you collapse into The Holocaust.
There is no in between world — no Koombaya World — you either have continuous growth — more yachts – more houses – more jets — more more more more — or you have disease, famine, suffering – forever….
I understand that you do no agree with that — but that is the way it is — we grow or we at best return to a primitive existence — with none of the conveniences that we take for granted.
And I mean absolutely none.
But there are those here who believe we can still have electricity and that they can maintain jalopies with vegetable oil. … that we can manage spent fuel ponds by dropping garden hoses into them.. these are delusions. They are failures to understand the dire situation we are facing.
The people we need to emulate are not the Scott Nearings or the Edward Abbeys of the world — we need to emulate the John Galt … because we have no choice but to burn out the planet faster …. we burn or we die … (of course we end up in the same place either way — but I prefer to delay my funeral)
I might add that what all these people are doing — including yourself — is utterly futile.
Think of it this way — put 100 rats in a barn in the middle of the ocean on an island and fill it with grain. The rats will not think hey – we’ve got only this much grain — we need to ration it — no they will gorge and shag each other and eat all the grain and then they will die…
Because there DNA rules them.
Sure a few silly outliers who might go against the flow and say ‘but guys if we eat all the grain then we’ll die’
And be totally ignored by the rest who are driven by their DNA to survive and procreate (they are programmed to think about the here and now — not the future)
And the few who don’t join the party get left on the sidelines bitter… and hungry … and frustrated..and critical…
We are no different
You wonder why nobody wants to join your outfit out there on the island… there are plenty of people with plenty of money who could buy in … but they don’t …
Because we are like the rats — we are driven by our DNA — and our DNA says f&^% this … I need to party … I am not going to sit on the sidelines in making a futile gesture while the other 99.99999999999% gorge on the grain.
What you —and these heroes of the Green Groupie Movement have in common is that they are wanting to override our nature.
It will never work — it is like the rats trying to convince the other rats not to eat the grain in the barn…
Best of luck.
Finally! Something we agree on!
With that, it’s back in the auto-kill file for you. Wish I could say it’s been a pleasure, but I cannot.
Yes … auto-kill… that’s what the Koombaya Krowd does when faced with uncomfortable truths…
(either that or bang the drums louder to drown out anyone who points out the utter ridiculousness of the Koombaya positions)
Ironically I used to be on a few of the same pages as many in the current Koombaya Krowd… just look at the naivety of my posts a couple of years ago….
“And then I realized–like I was shot…like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead” http://www.whysanity.net/monos/apoc.htm
I offer the Koombaya Krowd a way out — but you can lead a horse to water but you can’t of course you can’t make it drink….
There is nothing you can say to “Doombaya Downers” that will do the least bit of good. They are beyond influence. It’s best to just ignore them.
“Run to the light, not away from the dark,” is the way I prefer to live.
Fear.
That’s what all of this comes down to doesn’t it. Koombaya is all about battling fear.
How else can one explain why intelligent educated people — whose lives are normally dictated by facts — are able to throw all reason out the window — are able to completely reject facts.
Acknowledging the facts would allow fear to win. And for most that would result in some very bad mental health issues.
Therefore better to retreat into the various flavours of Koombaya.
Fast Eddy has, of course, the truth of it….if we speak of a national or global level.
If, however, you look at the individual level, things may not be so black and white. If you consider the collapse to be only a couple of years into the future, then reducing your energy consumption as well as increasing your preparations might increase your survival chances considerably.
However, the longer it takes to cross the valley of tears aka the collapse, the more you are reliant on a tight-knit community of approximately 30-80 like-minded people with a diversity of skills. You also need a remote and fertile location to protect you from the starving hordes, warbands, catastrophic harvests, illnesses, accidents and a breakdown of tools.
If you do not manage to achieve that, then your or your family’s survival becomes a lottery with very small odds. In my opinion, choosing a low energy lifestyle is a way of keeping the hope alive and to soothe your own conscience. Its effectiveness, however, is doubtful and only available to a tiny sliver of the population who has the funds and the acreage of land to give it a try.
“Do vehicles really improve our living standards that much or are they a necessity now because of the loss of rural small stores and train tracks?”
It is not the automobile or the road or the box store that made the small stores go away; it was the consumer, who chose to drive 20 miles to pay a few dollars less.
“It is not the automobile or the road or the box store that made the small stores go away; it was the consumer, who chose to drive 20 miles to pay a few dollars less.”
And it is building developers, banks that fund them, and government policies that make the auto dependent lifestyle possible/necessary. I wouldn’t pin this on the consumer. 🙂
You don’t think consumers are responsible for choosing to live in a suburb, instead of a rural or urban area? It sounds like you are saying that addicts are not responsible for their habit, it is all the drug dealer’s fault.
“You don’t think consumers are responsible for choosing to live in a suburb, instead of a rural or urban area? It sounds like you are saying that addicts are not responsible for their habit, it is all the drug dealer’s fault.”
I find that people are malleable. We follow fashion. We seek status. We do the easiest thing. Without a strong alternative narrative, we drift with the one that prevails.
I am afraid what you are describing may also reflect the laws of physics, and the tendency to “spend” any energy that is available on a slightly improved lifestyle. This is what a dissipative structure does. Lower prices mean we can buy more of something else.
I think it was Pivot TV where I saw a video about repurposed abandoned infrastructure. Dupont Circle terminus (or underground train turnaround) was one of them.
http://www.dupontunderground.org/index.php/about/
http://www.belowthecapital.org/dctrans/
I really don’t think anyone will be walking into any place called Terminus.
I haven’t looked at these enough to know if some of these things are really useful.
I know that in Atlanta, we have an “Underground” where visitors can buy T-shirts and a few other things. Other than being a hoped-for tourist magnet, it is hard to see much use for the project. We also have a renovated street car project. The times I hear about it is when my son says that his express bus home is late, because some car ran into a street car and blocked traffic. The street car is to remain free through 2015. http://www.ajc.com/news/news/atlanta-streetcar-to-remain-free-for-2015/nkjLk/
According to an article about it:
There is an underground train that my son sometimes takes to get to the express bus when it is raining. Otherwise he walks. The distance isn’t all that great.
“Many have criticized the streetcar, which circulates a one-way 2.7 mile track in downtown Atlanta, as inadequate for meeting local residents’ transit needs and potentially a financial burden. City leaders, however, defend the project as a boon to economic development and tourism.”
Looks like they need to think this through some more. I wish them luck. Worthy effort, but maybe minibuses (like in parts of the third world) would actually work better. But how would that be paid for?
There is already a subway and regular bus system. Distances aren’t all that great, and there is not a huge amount to see, other than hotels and a few “attractions.” There is no shopping to speak of downtown.
Gail
I lived in Atlanta decades ago. They have a long and frustrating history trying to create some kind of life to lure the conventioneers out of their hotels. Time was when it was just scary to go out the front door of the hotel. I don’t know if the streets look safer now. Underground was a brief candle which flickered and died just before I lived there. They were always talking about resurrecting it. the idea of a trolley is to ferry the conventioneers around so that they don’t have to drive. I was always skeptical that attracting conventions had very much to do with a thriving center of commerce…about on the level of attracting a political convention with bales of cash.
I don’t follow the convention business, but I imagine it is still pretty grim.
Don Stewart
I have been outside the Underground recently. The area has a large number of panhandlers. It is not a place I would want to go as a conventioneer. World of Coca Cola used to be nearby, but it has moved away, leaving nothing of interest nearby. Adding Street Trolleys probably looks good on the advertising for convention space, but I am not sure it does much else.
Daddio — if an Ethiopian saw your rig he’d be thinking ‘man that dude is living in style’ 🙂
But I get your point… how much is enough… for most people that word does not exist…
Have you read Sarah Susanka’s bestseller “The Not So Big House”? Those living in one of her houses definitely live much better lives than those living in disconnected suburban mansions. Of course, this house should be part of a pocket neighborhood: http://pocket-neighborhoods.net/
David Holmgren’s first ecovillage, Chrystal Waters Ecovillage in Australia, is made up of lot of pocket neighborhoods. Now he’s working on transforming Australia’s suburbs into pocket neighborhoods, probably with inspiration from Chapin’s book. And he has a remarkable success on this!
Here is what living small is.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/?no-ist
Thanks for this — this is a fair example of what people who survive the coming Holocaust will be living like.
It will be a brutal grinding life of poverty and deprivation.
Take the rose-coloured glasses off people ….
Thanks! I think I remember reading something about the family before. Impressive what they could do!
Good for you daddio! Im the same. I would phrase it differently however I would say “poverty is relative”. Compared to the life of a textile worker in Bangladesh you are a king. Im afraid Gail is right soon the ability to live in the manner you and I do will become unattainable.
Daddio7, sounds good to me. I am working on moving to a warmer location before I start.
You got that right! A mobile home is terribly inefficient. I hope you live somewhere with mild winters!
Mine’s 24 years old. Just got a new U-joint for the rear driveshaft.
I live on $666/month.
You got that right!
The question is, will those of us who are used to “living small” be able to continue when everyone is forced to do the same? I’m already seeing higher prices and lack of selection in thrift stores, compared to just a few years ago.
Luckily, even as the market value of land goes down, it still produces the same amount of food. We should never have gotten a mortgage, although I’m thinking that if defaults shoot through the roof, the banks may cut deals to avoid ending up with too much inventory.
I wouldn’t be overly concerned about the mortgage…. there will be nobody left to collect from when you have literally billions dying (so hundreds of millions of mortgages in default) … and no functioning financial system…
Jan, how does Canada work? Do you get free medical, prescriptions, eyeglasses, dental?
Provinces control their social medicine system.
In BC, if your income is below a certain threshold (I think it is $18k), your basic health care is free. Otherwise, it is quite modest, on the order of ~$60/month for a single person.
I don’t have any prescriptions, so I’m not sure how they work. I think there’s a subsidy at some level, but on the rare occasion I need one, I just pay for it. Likewise eyewear. I buy reading glasses at the dollar store.
No socialized dental care. This is a matter of considerable debate, but I don’t expect it to change any time soon, until Happy Days Are Here Again.
Another “gotcha:” mental health care is atrocious in BC. It’s treated strictly as a physical ailment. Psychiatry (and the pills they push) is free, but “talk” psychology has no subsidy whatsoever. Non-profits do a good job of filling the gap for “normal” people who just need a bit of counselling now and then, but they can’t handle the madding crowd with chronic mental problems.
All in all, the health care system suits me (and those like me) very well. I don’t use many services, and when I do, they’re free. I can get a certain number of specialized services a year, such as massage therapy, etc. IF they are prescribed by my primary care physician. Your back is covered for life-threatening stuff, like cancer or accident trauma, but there are delays for less-than-life-threatening stuff like hip replacements, chronic pain treatment, etc.
The nice thing about state-sponsored socialized medicine is that it truly is a “health care” system. You can get free counselling and treatment for things like smoking cessation and pre-diabetic control. You can get a certain amount of alternative treatments, like acupuncture, massage therapy, etc.
And lest anyone think they’ll take their existing problems north, immigration includes a physical exam, to ensure immigrants don’t put an “undue burden” on the health care system.
“In fact, it is doubtful that high-priced energy will return a high enough “profit” to pay its own way”
This problem is amplified with the “globalized workforce/labor pool” where companies look for the cheapest labor costs possible. China at one time during it’s expansion was the first stop in the globalized labor pool. As time marches forward, other Nations are bidding for their services at a much lower cost such as Vietnam, India and even Africa. This formula only works if energy is “CHEAP and AFFORDABLE”. If it isn’t then those economies lose out to lift their Nations out of poverty.
I agree that we keep moving to lower and lower cost labor pools. The people live in warm climates and receive few “benefits.” Pollution controls are likely lax.
And you are right that this formula only works it the energy is cheap and affordable. It seems like it also needs to produce a large enough quantity of products as well, to keep the whole system going. Somehow enough workers need to be earning enough money to actually afford the products they are producing. With low prices, this isn’t really possible.
“Somehow enough workers need to be earning enough money to actually afford the products they are producing.”
The Henry Ford business model but ironic that you mentioned that because for sometime now we have been led to believe that the Chinese labor force were becoming rich by working at Foxconn and they would be able to buy those expensive iApple devices. What we are now learning is that the average low wage worker had copied the US eTrader idea back in the 90’s.
Now that their Stock Market is crashing or worse case collapsing they will be out all that money they thought they had to spend on consumer goods and services. Which is what the Chinese Gov’t has been hoping for to move China away from a manufacturing based economy to a consumption based economy like in the US.
So the Ponzi scheme has gone according to plan from West to East. 😉
All the new buldings in China and the construction boom financed by the EU ine Greece, Spain etc. have one thing in common: lack of cheap oil for the operation of these systems. The massive construction boom in Eastern and Central Europe during the Soviet era was the same case.
You need cheap energy for operating the man-made ecosystems, i.e. keep the bubble inflated. Otherwise, when you have only costly energy, you can only repair buildings, but you lack energy for operation and maintenance of costly human resources. This energy must be cheap, because the human organisms need constant flows of clothing, heat, food etc. to supply and waste to remove. And other services like healthcare, too. The lifespan of a building and its maintenance costs are negligible in comparison withe the needs of a human body…
Good points!
Apparently what we are seeing in China is what happens when you try to switch from an export to a consumer driven economy — using a Ponzi scheme to fund the consumption 🙂
(actually consumption as a % of GDP has dropped in recent years…)
I understand the new place to go is Africa. So then the direction is West to East to South.
It all started in Africa, so when the direction is back to the lower stages of the development of the human species, then yes. The circle will close itself.
Yes, view figure 3. Energy consumption and World GPD go hand i hand – because money is just a meter of energy.
Right! Money is just a meter of energy.
We don’t need to go around computing a new “metric” like EROEI, and use that to “prove” than an energy type is a suitable solution. What happens is that such a metric just gives high-cost energy products a back-door to claiming that they need subsidies, because they are such a good idea. As I understand it, EROEI was developed as a shorthand way of estimating costs of producing energy products. If it worked as intended, it would match up with monetary indications. It doesn’t work as intended, unfortunately. It also is easy for those who want a particular result to manipulate the calculated results.
The dollar costs of energy sources are not all-inclusive, however. The costs of decommissioning a nuclear power plant and storing the fuel for 10,000 years is not included in the electricity rates. The risk of a hydro dam bursting during an earthquake and killing millions of people is not included in the electricity rates. The radiation and other pollution in coal is not priced into its electricity rates.
If other energy sources were priced to include negative externalities, renewables would be more competitive. If all countries had more expensive energy, they would all be more equally competitive. Although, I’m not sure globalization is the optimal system. At least if countries have their own currencies, they can devalue and be poorer but more competitive.
Cyprus, Greece and Puerto Rico have that in common as well; they do not have their own currency, but use the currency from a larger economy that doesn’t match theirs well.
First, thanks Gail, great insight, as always.
Subsidies:
If you think that the petroleum industries are not subsidised, I have a bridge you may want to buy. Similarly for the Coal industry, whether it be by direct subsidy, or by building inefficient end use that is too costly for other fuels. There are other costs too, where too much reliance is placed on one fuel, and those costs tend to move to less favoured alternatives.
Taking nuclear generated electricity specifically, the business model in the UK suffered severe problems when the “dash for gas” happened. That resulted in excess capacity, and nuclear was at one time selling around US$0.015 per KWh – well below its costs. Part of the problem was that CCGT stations have more of their costs tied to fuel, hence can reduce their output and bus less fuel, more easily. Also, if oil prices rise, consumers see these costs rising and are more sympathetic to this than say, the nuclear industry saying that prices have to rise because new regulations have proportionately increased their costs of generation.
That’s not to say that I am in favour of subsidies, it is simply that once these are in place, they are very difficult to remove even if the original reason is no longer there.
Another related matter is energy pricing, and I see some other posts have addressed this. I’d add that it makes sense to have some solar pv generation because this tends to provide some load balancing where peak demand tends to occur at the hottest times of the day. In these cases there is much less need for energy storage, and the costs savings should logically accrue to the solar pv provider, rather than the fossil fuel industry. I suspect that the monetary values of various forms of energy are driven more by infrastructure and other costs, than their utility might suggest. It may be that price is just as fickle as ERoEI.
Finally, I note the decline in energy consumed in Greece, and wonder where that is in all our futures.
None of these things are simple. All of the types of energy have very high fixed expenses of one kind or another. They can’t easily change. It becomes a problem to figure out how to allocate costs appropriately to all players. Adding new energy sources adds new costs, and new indirect costs that are not easily measured in the first analysis of costs.
Electricity is terrible for high fixed costs. As such, it cannot shrink back well. If there is a savings on kWh’s sold, there may need to be a rate hike. (Just like if people save water–the fixed costs of water distribution are still there.)
With respect to savings from Solar PV, the value of savings from its generation “depends”. The big issue is whether there is a savings in peak annual demand, because of Solar PV, and and because of this, less fossil fuel electric generation capacity needs to be added. There are four cases
(1) If demand is already down as it is many places, preventing the addition of new fossil fuel generation may be irrelevant–fossil fuel capacity is already plenty high.
(2) In the North, where the peak demand comes with heating in winter, peak annual demand is irrelevant as well.
(3) Little islands, in the middle of the Caribbean or Mediterranean, where there is currently not enough capacity using oil-generation. Here, there is a definite benefit in saving fuel on a daily basis, because less oil needs to be used for generation, and less oil fired generation needs to be added in the future. Here, Solar PV is definitely a plus.
(4) Other situations, where generation capacity looks low–perhaps California and other places that nuclear is being taken off line, for example. Here, savings in the annual peak may be a factor.
If there are a lot of fixed costs, and there is no savings on adding new thermal generation, the savings to the utility from adding intermittent generation very often drops down to the amount of fuel savings resulting from the intermittent generation. Usually, the stations offering electric generation will need to remain in place for backup. They still need employees. If they cycle on and off more, their maintenance expenses may be higher. The grid needs to be a big as before, but maybe with more long distance connectors that are used only part of the time, adding additional expense. Also more sophisticated controls to prevent overloads.
Once we have paid the fixed expenses of one system, and in fact, have to maintain the existing system, regardless of how much intermittent renewables are added (because the intermittent renewables can never be a stand alone system), there becomes a real issue regarding how we value the new generation:
(1) Is it equal to the savings of the current system, if the intermittent electricity is added?
(2) Is it some other amount, ignoring our problem with fixed expenses?
I would argue it is (1). Out on an island, the value of the intermittent generation can be quite high, but as often as not, in other locations savings are quite modest. It is not fair to electric providers to reduce their fees, without considering the fixed expense problem.
I’ll pick up a couple of the points you made. I will send a couple of images separately –
European Insolation and Fig 14 from 2006 IEA European Policy by Pflueger et al.
The figure shows declining costs of Solar PV electricity for four values of insolation to the same scale and years as rising costs of household electricity for Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden. The X Axis is 2005-2020.
The Fig14 requires some interpretation. Most of Spain and Sicily and some Greek islands have the highest values of insolation (circa 1400), and Sicily had the highest electricity costs in Europe, last time I checked. Italy and Greece might have an average insolation 1200. The curves suggest that many areas in Europe will find solar pv competitive in 2016, for at least retail consumption.
I did some calculations a while back and confirmed that the methodology seemed sound. I have not yet seen an updated version hence I conclude that much of the assumptions remain valid.
Separately, I’ll note that real GDP in Greece has fallen in line with the reduction in energy use.
I have yet to find an updated version of this data h
There are huge fixed costs of our current electric grid. We have to have the fossil fuel part of it, partly because there is no way renewables can function on their own. Because of this, I consider the comparison implied by the chart to be inappropriate. The real question is “If we add a given quantity of renewables to the electric grid, what is the savings (if any) to the grid in terms of
(1) New annual fossil fuel capacity that will have to be added to the grid,
(2) Fossil fuel consumption
Offsetting these will be whatever other costs are added–more long distance transmission, more controls to see that all electricity added to the grid is of the right type, etc.
It doesn’t make sense to compare the cost of intermittent renewables to the retail cost of electric power. Instead, it only makes sense to compare the the cost of intermittent electricity to the benefit it provides to the grid. On some islands with inadequate oil generation and no other electricity source, this benefit will be high. But very often the savings will be only the fuel saved, which is likely to be in the 3 cents or 4 cents per kWh range.
“It doesn’t make sense to compare the cost of intermittent renewables to the retail cost of electric power. ”
This cost comparison happens all the time. Everytime a solar pv installation produces more electricity than the site consumes, a Feed-in Tariff (FIT) gets paid. Sometimes the FIT is set at a value to encourage solar pv installations. Sometimes the FIT is set at a value of the Utility’s fuel cost, typically in the range US$0.04-0.06 per unit.
The solar pv producer then has a range of alternatives: battery or other forms of storage; and consumption, perhaps by producing cryptocurrency. These only make sense if the value added is greater than the utility’s fuel costs *at that moment in time*.
The problem distils into forecasting market values at specific points in the network for many years into the future. The referenced charts suggest probabilities, not certainties, for viable alternatives to utility based supplies at particular points in time. When that happens, the question changes to “How much am I prepared to pay for a continuous connection to a Utility and for any energy consumed?”
If we had to pay for externalities, all of us would be buying a whole lot less of everything. World population would be a whole lot lower.
Unfortunately, trying to price in externalities now makes the economy contract.
You are right, getting stuck with another currency doesn’t help anyone either. Cuba is another island nation that isn’t doing well. It has its own currency, but that still doesn’t help. I wrote about it recently. http://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/05/26/cuba-figuring-out-pieces-of-the-puzzle-full-text/
Hi Gail, nice article and comments
Just this:
“Unfortunately, trying to price in externalities now makes the economy contract”
Not in the case of waste management, which is an important business