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.
We don’t have any shortage of energy!
See this semi truck drag racing as proof:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe6NnHFyoZI
Surely this is a sign we are at or passing the peak of resources.
Yea, someday, all that will be left of human civilization will be a sub-millimetre-thick, black sooty strata in the rock record.
Hopefully, future sentient cetaceans or canids or corvids will take it as a warning sign.
It looks like tremendous fun!
I loved this. The semis with their smoking horns remind me of beasts of burden. There’s a kind of pathos to them.
Ed Abbey vs Fast Eddy
1. “How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”
2. “The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
3. “Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.”
4. “Freedom begins between the ears.”
5. “I’ve never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn’t have written much better myself.”
6. “Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses…”
7. “In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.”
8. “This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.”
9. “I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a ‘surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow’. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”
10. “A world without open country would be universal jail.”
11. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
12. “There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.”
13. “If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies’ territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”
14. “There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
15. “I stand for what I stand on.”
16. “I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that’s patriotism.”
17. “Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”
18. “When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.”
19. “I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.”
20. “High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.”
21. “Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.”
22. “Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”
23. “There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.”
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell
https://adventure-journal.com/2014/03/the-aj-list-the-23-best-ed-abbey-quotes/
Fast eddy save your dime
http://free–booksdownloads.blogspot.com/2013/03/desert-solitaire-downloads.html
You will appreciate the classic read “desert Solitaire”‘ especially the scene with the line
“I’m talking to a madman”
Ah, beautiful! Thank you for those “words to live by,” Michael!
I’ll take a single Ed Abbey over a thousand Doombaya’ers, any day.
Two of these struck me as particularly germane:
and
Take joy in your situation, and abandon all hope. The combination is exceptionally powerful.
Or whine and moan and be “doomed to quick extinction.” Your choice.
Jan,
Thank you for your “Public Service”
Yes you can put on a little Joan Baez and smoke the hopium pipe … if that keeps you from leaping out the window…. I am all for that…
Or you can recognize the end is nigh — that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it — and rather than hunkering down eating pumpkins and old spuds all winter long praying for collapse to come soon ….
You can instead enjoy the last months/years of your life….
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989)
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal, Pages: 43
“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree ”
Then distillers can make gin?
OK (raised eyebrows)
Hey Dude,
eARTH, where on earth will the tonic come from? Oh, the wings of the vulture, perhaps?
P.S. I rather word it this way
EARTH FIRST!
or EAARTH..the new planet we humans created using fossil fuels as Bill McKibben titled book on how we altered the composition of the atmosphere and hence the climate.
Drum roll please:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b2/63/23/b26323ab1e4241a3eaea13693a5857d8.jpg
I am trying to decide — who was more ignorant — Edward Abbey — or Scott Nearing…
I give them the benefit of the doubt and use the word ignorant rather than stupid…. I’d only use the word stupid if, after I had 30 minutes to explain how things work — and they still decided they wanted to bang on their drums and sing Koombaya….
One thing for sure Fast Eddy, you outshine them both together in your convictions of being the “chosen one” regarding hubris. Shine ON until you burn out!
The Latest Sign That Coal Is Getting Killed
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-13/the-latest-sign-that-coal-is-getting-killed
“The chart below shows China’s ever-falling price of wind power (blue) and solar (yellow) vs. the rising cost of coal (dark gray) and natural gas (light gray) over the next 25 years. ” In my opinion that quote discredits the whole article.
Oh, really? IMHO the whole idea of making predictions of energy production to 2040 is BS. I mean those guys, who spew the article are insane without any abstract thinking capabilities.
How are they going to replace all this chinese-junk panels and inverters in 10 years without coal, ha?
The reduction in coal usage in the US via NG replacement has been an ongoing process for decades now, but contrasting that unfortunately has been increasing US coal exports. Coal usage worldwide will undoubtedly peak and decline some day, but up until now it has continued to rise. I’ll get real excited by way of an article someday when it has statistically graphed proof of worldwide coal usage descent.
Here’s a good article on coal use:
http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/uses-of-coal/
Since 2000, global coal consumption has grown faster than any other fuel. The five largest coal users – China, USA, India, Russia and Japan – account for 76% of total global coal use.
The biggest market for coal is Asia, which currently accounts for over 67% of global coal consumption; although China is responsible for a significant proportion of this. Many countries do not have natural energy resources sufficient to cover their energy needs, and therefore need to import energy to help meet their requirements. Japan, Chinese Taipei and Korea, for example, import significant quantities of steam coal for electricity generation and coking coal for steel production.
I reckon the solar power groupies will be banging the drums hard when they said those stats….
The world runs on fossil fuels — so it is good to see that we are using more — because when we start to use less — then we will very soon be using none.
Unfortunately, we have to have coal and other fossil fuels as the backbone on which “renewables” are built. If coal isn’t doing well, it puts huge stress on natural gas. Natural gas production is off this year in the United States. I know worldwide it wasn’t growing much in 2014 either. Coal has to be able to raise debt at a reasonable price, to extract more coal. (Cash flow doesn’t seem to be high enough to self-finance; this is a red flag in and of itself.)
How much is being spent on renewables doesn’t really tell us much about their future contribution either. Story sounds like it was written by a renewables salesperson.
Very profound insight in Ugo Bardi’s latest post:
“In the end, what is the solution to the “food supply problem”? If you ask me, I would try to propose a concept: “in a complex system, there are neither problems, nor solutions. There is only change and adaptation.” As a corollary, I could say that you can solve a problem (or try to) but you can’t solve a change (not even try to). You can only adapt to change, hopefully in a non traumatic manner.”
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk
Monday, July 13, 2015
Wicked problems and wicked solutions: the case of the world’s food supply
Posted by Ugo Bardi
To go local and increase resilience is the right direction, especially -but not only- for food-supply, but will it be enough, considering the mega-trends that keep on adding brittleness to our interdependant global system in dramatic overshoot?
(NB: rhetorical question; we already know each other’s opinion)
“In the end, what is the solution to the “food supply problem”? If you ask me, I would try to propose a concept: “in a complex system, there are neither problems, nor solutions. There is only change and adaptation.” As a corollary, I could say that you can solve a problem (or try to) but you can’t solve a change (not even try to). You can only adapt to change, hopefully in a non traumatic manner.”
IOW, without food and water u DIE!!!!
Nobel worthy, I’m sure.
Another quote:
“That’s more difficult than it seems: system dynamics is not for everyone and teaching it to bureaucrats is like teaching dogs to solve equations: it takes a lot of work and it doesn’t work so well.”
System dynamics work irrespective of the few aware.
Stefeun
Unfortunately for Ugo, his dog conclusion is wrong or at least misleading. Adrian Bejan covers it in his book. The most efficient way to retrieve something which is thrown at an angle in the water is to equalize the time spent on the shore and the time spent in the water. This will entail running up the shore for a certain distance at a fast speed and then swimming a certain distance at a slower speed. Dogs solve that problem easily.
Humans solve that problem easily, also, when they are under stress. If you saw your child drowning, you would instinctively do the right thing.
Is that Systems Science, or just the ability to do calculus? The debate should take place in a pub with cold beer.
Don Stewart
PS Single celled critters can do calculus also.
Don,
Ugo Bardi talks about “teaching”, which is having the “student” to learn some abstract concept through consciousness, with help of theory or/and experimentation.
What you describe is something different: the dog, instead of swimming in straight line, runs on the shore and thus reduces his swimming distance, because swimming is slower and uses more energy than running.
The dog therefore worsens one parameter (increase of the total distance), in order to improve 2 -more important- others: a) speed is increased, and b) total energy spent is reduced. Both a & b are decisive when the target is a prey.
Such behaviour doesn’t seem to require any conscious calculus; the laws of natural selection are sufficient to explain it.
Moreover, the light also behaves the same way, that’s why a stick half immersed in the water looks broken.
You pay the first pint!
Good post. I guess the follow-up question to answer is where the energy Greece imports comes from (South Stream?¿ elsewhere?), which also would point to some Tsipras trips abroad, plus the interest of the US about the Greek situation and the geopolitics/economics at stake
It seems like natural gas is the energy source where specific arrangements are especially necessary. This somewhat out of date IEA document says that with respect to natural gas, there are actually two gas pipeline from Russia (one through Ukraine etc, the other through Turkey), plus LNG import capability from Algeria and Turkey
According to the above document,
“Russia has been the principal source of natural gas imports since Greece began to import gas in November 1996. However, the share of Russian gas in total gas imports has gradually declined from 85% in 2005 to 60% in 2012, because of the increase in imports from Algeria and Turkey which accounted for around 16% and 15% of the total gas imports in 2012, respectively.
The Greek Public Gas Corporation (DEPA) has three long-term contracts for natural gas supply; with Russian Gazexport (2.8 bcm/y until 2015-2016), with Algerian Sonatrach (0.5 bcm/y until 2019) and with Turkish Botas (0.7 bcm/y until 2021). Together they will supply a total volume of about 4.2 bcm per year.
This article is called Will natural gas cooperation with Russia save the Greek economy? The article talks about the potential Turkish Stream Extension and the amount of funds that Greece might earn for letting Russia natural gas transit through Greece. It concluded that while there would be benefits, they aren’t huge benefits–only about 1/100 the size of the bail-out package.
The wheels are starting to come off the jalopy…..
Decline in China New-Car Sales Is Latest Worry for Top Auto Makers
New car sales fall by most in more than two years, as other emerging markets are already bleeding
http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-new-car-sales-post-drop-in-june-1436517587
The Russian auto market has been falling like a rock since the sanctions and oil price drop as well. Interestingly, the biggest fall was recorded among the import crap segment aka shiny pretend-me bourgeoisie cars, while the domestic trusty brands didn’t suffer as much, obviously there is some effect of gov purchases but not main one. Again, great to see effect of “cutiing frivolous consumption” in real action, the first to lay on cutting floor is the avoidable junk..
It seems like world growth in car sales will have to be down as well. What countries do we have moving up? USA, a few others What countries are moving down? Russia, most of Europe, Japan, China, Australia, etc.
Home building has to be similar.
Of course US car sales are moving up because banks are offering auto loans to pretty much anyone with a pulse….
> Home building has to be similar.
But things are booming in London. You can get a studio apartment for only GBP350,000! They’re selling like hot cakes, of course.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jul/13/canary-wharf-flats-maine-tower-overseas-buyers
Wow!
A friend of mine owns multiple small apartments (studios with tiny bathrooms and shelf for a kitchen) in Hong Kong (200sf in size or so) in run down buildings very old — all walk-ups …. maybe 15 minutes walk from the CBD….
We went to have a look at one of them a couple of years ago — you want frugal living — this was indeed that.. he had stopped buying these up because the price tag was approaching USD500,000.
Prices have since then increased significantly
You know there is a massive global bubble when….
Hong Kong is tiny, of course, so living space is restricted. I saw the same when I worked in West Berlin (1979-1980), because the West Berliners couldn’t expand outwards. The vast majority lived in flats, with beds that came out of the wall in their living room.
http://assets.bwbx.io/images/iSPqrHtOnCTA/v1/-1x-1.jpg
http://assets.bwbx.io/images/ii9GIYI0BIn0/v1/-1x-1.jpg
Pretty amazing, really. They managed to extend their overshoot over a decade, and managed to slow and delay collapse for over twenty years.
Japan; nice facade, hollowed out within. ‘Rotting sepulchre’ with fine marble facing…..
Although it seems to be self-perception based survey, it’s interesting to see the managerial upper classes (not the true owner class) in the the black line feeling the punch as well (drop from ~10% to ~5% and stagnation).
Shall we refer to this as an Economic Backfire…
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to power vowing to drag Japan out of deflation and stagnation. His logic was that rising prices would drive higher salaries and increased consumption. More than two years on, prices are rising, but wages adjusted for inflation have sunk to the lowest since at least 1990.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-13/careful-what-you-wish-for-abe-s-inflation-hits-japan-s-households
In any field of thinking, it is usually easy to predict the immediate effect, but much harder to foresee unintended consequences. The world is awash in really misguided thinking. People who are successful have big egos, so if we give all our kids big egos, they will all be successful. Instead of seeing that, by being good at something, a person is successful, and gets a big ego – or high self-esteem, or whatever the term being used at the time is.
Likewise, you have people seeing that there is a relationship with higher wages, or inflation, or something else, and deciding to try to force things to happen by “putting the cart before the horse”.
The amazing thing is, no matter how many other people are recorded as having tried the exact same thing and failed, they still keep trying it.
It seems to be a neoliberal dogma to pretend and make believe that there’s a direct relationship between profit and wages.
In reality, there are a thousand other places where the additional profit can -and does- go, before actually go increase the wages.
Wages are all but a priority, because they’re accounted as a cost. Why would a company choose to increase their costs first, when there are lots of other options that could make their balance-sheet look much better?
The fact that they keep on trying the very same policies that they perfectly know have always failed in the past and everywhere, means that said policies have NOT failed for everybody. Promised increase in wages is the hook, line & sinker they give the people to swallow for the umpteenth time, while the money goes directly on big corporate owners’ accounts.
Same for austerity, etc..
I think that the impact on wages varies depending on where we are in the cycle.
(1) If it is early in the cycle, the wages of the workers may be quite high, to allow the workers to buy the products too, so that more can be sold. This is the Henry Ford theory.
(2) If rising oil prices (or other stresses) lead to lower profits, then wages are the first area to be hit. This can happen through automation, or through outsourcing to a cheaper country, or by closing the least efficient locations.
I would say that wages today form quite minor part of companies expenses. The machines, the equipment, material and energy costs, together with the various auditing and efficiency improving services and information technology constitute the biggest part of the costs. That is the result of solving the problems of rising complexity that grows with the armies of supporting jobs for core business in order to bring down the costs while keeping the quality.
And yes, human resources, unlike machines, can not be turned off after working hours, they need to be fed, clothed, housed etc. This game is called: work more or our company will be closed and you will be fired. Which, in the end, finally comes true…
As cheap energy become more scarce automation becomes more appealing. People require transport to and from work, houses, food, parking spaces, offices, etc. Automation requires none of these.
Kinda hate to ask
but exactly where does the energy for automation come from—cheap or otherwise?
Or am I missing something here?
And then when you’ve magicked energy-less, people-less products into existence—how will job-less people be able to buy them.???
Just curious.
How about producing goods and services ever more cheaply, by leveraging human labor with increasing quantities of very cheap energy? Wouldn’t that work much better? Of course, there is the problem of where the very cheap energy comes from.
And today Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that all youths with purple hair would have to work in the factories on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays with no pay. Those with pink hair and penchants for hello kitty get to be factory slaves Tuesdays Thursdays and Saturdays.
Japanization advances also in the Slovak business media. Look at this, this is not Japan, it is Central Europe. The journalist talking about Greece looks like schoolgirl:
http://tv.hnonline.sk/investicne-preslapy-35703/najvacsie-investicne-preslapy-o-tom-ako-sa-grecko-klamstvom-dostalo-k-euru-841051
As to be expected… news presenters are actors…. well not even actors… they just need to look nice and be able to read a teleprompter:
https://cafeanant.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/melissa-theuriau-2.jpg
An this is the mayor of the central town of the declining brown coal mining center in Slovakia: pure miniaturization
http://www.prievidza.sk/samosprava/primatorka-mesta/
See her photo in the company of children:
http://www.hnkpd.sk/noc-v-kniznici-s-andersenom-2011/noc-v-kniznici-s-andersenom-2011.html?page_id=842#
This is a population issue. And the issue of reality vs. who is behind the scenes. Maybe, behind the actor on your picture from LCI, there are meticulous guys with small bodies, who prepare the texts. The journalist in the video from the Slovak business media shows the next stage: we can beat other commercial media with lower costs when we let the journalist present his or her story alone. The fight between the traditional TV and the former newspapars in the internet arena brings the reality of the population online…
Eddy,
I agree with your statement, but I have to say that the chosen picture is not a very good example.
Melissa (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mélissa_Theuriau) is a real journalist, which is probably why she rather quickly gave up presenting the MSM news, to become chief-editor of an investigative reporting TV-mag.
She’s also an active militant against racism and for women’s rights. She has produced documentary films on both topics.
That being said, it’s a matter of fact that what TV-news want to show us is nice-looking parrots who never question what’s written on the prompters.
Thanks for the clarification …. I think I searched ‘hot tv presenter’ on google images and she came up 🙂
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
Germany and the Neoliberals in general are convinced that austerity will put Greece and southern Europe in general back on its feet. Let’s review a little history, and look at BW Hill’s model, and see what we can see.
‘In 2001, the Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder launched New Labour–esque reforms that cut welfare benefits, lowered taxes for the better off and revamped laws to make hiring and firing easier. Most Germans are convinced that these policies put the country back on its feet and cut unemployment by more than half. So now, Germans say, France and the southern Europeans have to do the same.’
Now let’s look at BW Hill’s model. Go to:
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_022.htm
Take a look at the second chart down. See the cost of production curve sweeping up from the lower left to the upper right. Take a look at the light green ‘maximum consumer price’ curve, which is a sort of parabola exhibiting Seneca Cliff properties.
Calculate the surplus between the maximum affordable price and the cost of production of a barrel of oil in the year 2000: about 145 dollars minus 30 dollars for a surplus of 115 dollars per barrel. Anything you could do in 2000 to promote the use of more petroleum products was likely to work wonders financially.
Now take a look at 2012. In 2012, only 12 years later, the surplus has entirely disappeared. The price is no longer governed by the cost of production, but instead by the maximum consumer price, which is a function of the net energy produced by a barrel of oil. The rising cost of production eats away at the net energy and thus causes the maximum consumer price to fall. By 2020, the maximum consumer price will be 40 dollars or below.
IF you agree that the surplus from oil has disappeared, then what are the consequences of taking on more debt or printing more money? Does this mean that the monetary and fiscal policies which may have worked in the past will simply no longer work?
So…when Germany says that ‘austerity worked for Schroeder, so why shouldn’t it work for Tsipras now?’, do you think they are comparing apples to apples? Do you think that it is possible for Greece and others to ever pay off their debts?
Don Stewart
Don, All, isn’t austerity a way to give Greece a slow decline?
edpell
I don’t know. One way of looking at it is that Germany and a few other countries are just trying to protect their image as ‘reliable governments whose bonds are good deals’. If their debt to GDP ratios start rising as they have to write off debts from southern Europe, then their financial image might suffer. Another way is that they truly believe that what worked in 2000 for them will work in 2015 for everyone else. Varoufakis commented that when he tried to talk economics to the finance ministers, they just shut down. All of them are lawyers. What do lawyers know about the declining returns from a barrel of oil. For that matter, what does Varoufakis know about declining returns from a barrel of oil?
If we really are halfway down a Seneca Cliff, then only a few of us understand it in any deep way.
The Blind Men and the Elephant comes to mind.
Don Stewart
Don, it’s a good thing that Varoufakis latest interview has been linked all over the net these days, it will have an impact. As he points out they (with Tsipras) didn’t have the mandate or experience to pull the Island/Drachma scenario or any other wild scenario, they were crippled to surrender at this point of time, perhaps this will change in next few years as the public face plowing dirt at the bottomless pit will openly ask for autarky outside EU straightjacket.
But going back to your comment about germans motivation, part of the story is true, the Greeks have basically south balkan economy while enjoying much higher benefits and living standards than in comparison to some central european or baltic countries with real productive industries, the west has been proping up Greece for at least one and half centuries for some silly geopolitical concepts. I’m not disputing the fact that most of the accumulated debt has been manufactured by political – banking elites and did not reach the people, that’s another story. However, the time to act profound reform was 1970s or perhaps early 2000s, now any further austerity attempt forced on Greece means ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, they simple can’t rebrand the country on the dime now.
Doesn’t austerity give Greece a fast decline? A lot of out-of-work people default on their mortgages and car loans. Home prices drop. If any low energy jobs are added, they won’t pay well at all.
Maybe serious analysis, modelling and predictions of energy flows could provide more precise ground for possible results and solutions in case of constricted/removed energy flows within the population and the environment:
the distorted energy flows = conflicts, wars
the missing energy flows = implosion, zombification
I know that it sounds like social engineering, but engineering the peaceful road to poverty is to some extent possible. But it means like dropping out mentally from the current growth oriented system and accept the deterioration as the main driving force of the reality. Stop trying to fix that can not be fixed. This “fixing activity” seems to be the main way of wasting the energy in the collapsing world. The world simply collapses because the natural forces prevail over the artificial energy flows created and maintained by the human society.
MG
Roman Empire building first very large walls, then ever smaller fortresses within the old circuit, in order to defend borders that no longer really existed. Driving the peasantry into the ground and slavery in order to pay for it all.
Until, one day, the soldiers from the garrison set off to Rome to see where their pay is, and come back floating down the river, their throats cut (this actually happened, where exactly escapes me at the moment!)
We have a networked system that has to grow to overcome the increasing effects of diminishing returns (increased inefficiency). There are many weak points in the networked systems:
(1) Commodity exporters, including energy exporters, who cannot get enough revenue for their produce.
(2) Owners of depleting resources (oil fields being sucked dry; aquifers losing their water; gold mines losing their gold) lose the funds they used in the past to trade for imported goods.
(3) The tendency of the population to grow, so that the number of would-be farmers overwhelm the amount of farm land. Increasing amounts of supplemental energy are needed so that (a) the land can produce more food, and (b) those not working directly on the land can have reasonable jobs.
(4) High cost energy areas, typically islands, that are forces to use more oil in their energy mix.
A networked economy doesn’t go backward. We couldn’t use horse for transportation in New York City today, even if cars became unavailable. There aren’t the appropriate facilities for horses (food, water, place to “park,” clean up mess in street), or enough horses, either.
It is the lack of adequate growth, and the resulting problems that flow through the financial system, that seem to bring the system down. The lack of adequate growth comes through resources which are increasingly expensive to extract, but increasingly unaffordable for most workers. The result is prices that fall too low, so that supply drops because the affordable price does not keep up with rising costs.
And yet, at the time horses were the norm in New York City, the notion that someday, the streets would be filled with machines would have been met with incredulous stares. “There aren’t appropriate facilities for machines (fuel, places to park, etc.).”
Keep in mind that the first hard-surfaced roads were built for bicycles!
As Gillian Welch said, “Time’s the revelator.” I agree that big cities cannot change overnight. But they will change.
I agree that they will change. But changing “backward” will not be easy. We have to work out the details of a new system. Otherwise, we may fall very far.
The thing is…. it is very difficult if not impossible to rewind the tape.
The reason being — at least as I see it — is that we have been changing (some call it progressing) from the time we harnessed fire.
18th century civilization did not suddenly spring up out of nowhere — it was a natural evolution that occurred in small steps — certain technologies, skills and knowledge were developed over many many generations …. father taught son … mother taught daughter over many many generations
Farming techniques … metal working techniques … spinning yarn …. making clothes by hand…. and so on….
We did not suddenly go from living like savages to riding about on horse drawn carriages.
When BAU collapses it will be somewhat like fast forwarding a savage into the 19th century — he would not have a clue how to survive.
Likewise virtually everyone on this planet who is connected to BAU will not have a clue how to survive if thrown back into a situation with no electricity and the other parts of BAU that we take for granted.
We might think we can — but from the comments here most who believe that believe that some components of BAU will remain viable. There are some who believe we can still have vehicles run on vegetable oils….
And not a single person will take up the Weekend Challenge — turn off the power for 48 hours.
That is to me an admission of fear (and supreme cognitive dissonance)
Yes — we can go back to living in the 19th century …. but only so long as we get to keep a few of our key BAU toys…
Nobody wants to believe that all these wonderful things we take for granted will all be gone.
Because that would mean admitting that this is not Little House on the Prairie that is coming — it is a Holocaust.
At best, life for anyone surviving will be a brutal, grinding existence.
Keep in mind peasants in the 1800’s who had all those skills passed down to them — lived brutal, grinding lives…. (life is not a Tee Vee show! Don’t watch Little House on the Prairie and believe that is what life will be like — Little House is a tee vee show… it is not reality — they left out the bad stuff…)
Oh and of course there is a big difference trying to fast forward the savage and rewinding the modern civilized man….. the savage would not have to face a situation where there are 7.3 billion starving people to deal with … he would not have to manage death machines (spent fuel ponds)
The rewind situation is exponentially more complex….
Feel free to ignore all of the above and pull out the bongo drums now…
Gail
What follows is opinion, but perhaps not wild guessing.
‘We’ will never figure out how to devolve NYC to what it was in 1850. NYC may, in 2100, look more like it did in 1850 than it will look like the NYC of 2015. However, about 90 percent of the change will come from individuals and small groups doing what they think they need to do, or makes sense for them. The other 10 percent may come from what ‘we’ decide, or somebody decides for us.
Which leads us to the theory of Lifeboats. Some of the young people will develop a more self-reliant philosophy of life which is closer to a horticultural society, will find joy in jobs well done, and will find a place in a community of like-minded people. You consistently deny that such efforts are helpful, in fact you see them as destructive because they undercut BAU. BAU is going to self-destruct without their help. What they are doing is no help to BAU…it furthers THEM along the Lifeboat strategy.
SOME people will see what is happening, will figure out that the Titanic is doomed, and will try to emulate them. There are many problems with Lifeboats, and one of them is that it takes a while to get really good at what you are doing.
Consider the mirror image of Al Bartlett’s famous exponential growth fable. One minute before midnight, the world is still only half full…there is plenty of room. The mirror image is that ‘there can’t be a shortage of affordable energy, look at the price of gasoline’. It takes some exceptionally perceptive people to figure out what is really going on with resources.
I think the inevitable conclusion is that many, many people are not going to make it through the bottleneck. Perhaps some Genius can figure out exactly what is going to happen…but Complex Systems Theory argues that it is inherently unpredictable. The few people who have some general idea what is happening need to make sure that they are working in a coherent direction, and don’t get frozen in the headlights.
Don Stewart
Dear Jan Steinman,
“And yet, at the time horses were the norm in New York City, the notion that someday, the streets would be filled with machines would have been met with incredulous stares.”
Yes, also farmers hundred years ago in my region did not believe that the machines can plow and sow fields without animal power. The implosion of the current system is inevitable and the new system will surely mean less human activity and more animal activity. Let us look at the Chernobyl area: although there is only a small number of humans, there are big numbers of animals now.
My guess is that the human race of the future will eat less meat and its numbers will go drastically down. No big scale farming, rather small islands of humans scattered in the wilderness, the destroyed and depleted land. Yes, I would call it the islands of human beings, as many of todays people are either simply zombifying or turning into animal like creatures that eat one another.
“3) The tendency of the population to grow, so that the number of would-be farmers overwhelm the amount of farm land. Increasing amounts of supplemental energy are needed so that (a) the land can produce more food, and (b) those not working directly on the land can have reasonable jobs.”
http://www.dailybattle.pair.com/2012/occupy_target_destroy_ruling_money_fetish.shtml
This (extremely long) article pushed me over the edge. In an indirect way, it reinforces Guy McPherson’s thesis that “were done.” It seems to be consistent with my own theory that Western civilization “is done.” In fact, terminal civilizational crises seem to be mutually reinforcing.
I should be a doomer, but I’m not. I’ve learned to detach myself from expectations. With a poor understanding of both science and the oil economy, I must rely on a hitherto very reliable intuition. But even with good intuition, I now can only see what’s in front of my face.
But I’ll try this. Western civilization–and with it, much that we consider as civilization–is over. That it does not appear to most of us as over is the manifestation of a sort of “after image,” a delusional trance from which most have not been awakened. With the demise (or requirement for transformation) of civilization comes the demise of patriarchy. This is just for those who have eyes to see.
“The tendency of the population to grow”
assumes that women will be kept in abject subjugation forever. It rules out the possibility of harsh measures like infanticide (and would that be of females or males?) It rules out the possibility of self-interest-based altruism. If basic needs are universally met, poor women won’t have children to ensure survival in old age. Yes, you could go on fiddling around with this delusional system which apparently benefits most of us here. Yes, it’s a wonderful system for creating food, comfort and security…if you’re lucky, but the long term costs are unacceptable, and its future is foreclosed. Beside, the benefits of, and potential for, living in alternative ways are not considered (assuming, I suppose, that such dramatic transformation is impossible).
“…so that the number of would-be farmers overwhelm the amount of farm land.”
This supposes that farming must be done on land in a presumed “normal” way, although it should be clear that farming can be done in greenhouses, on rooftops, and all sorts of irregular places, cities included. Farming can also be “biointensive,” using new understanding to grow more food in much smaller spaces. In that scenario, there is no such thing as “farm land.” Farm land is partly an after image like everything else about civilization. Even if outlying rural land were used to produce food for people, it couldn’t depend on chemical inputs and industrial practices in the way it does now. It couldn’t use water or disadvantage wildlife the way it does now. “Supplemental energy” is not indispensable for growing food.
A “job,” is the product of “economics,” which the article I posted analyzes and debunks. Guy McPherson advocates a gift economy, and I have yet to see a more realistic economic system. A “job” is also an after image. It is not based on anything real, natural, ethical or beautiful. It is a sick attribute of civilization, which belongs in the past, despite its ghostly continuation.
But I also realize that it is this lingering ghost of civilization that keeps me alive and happy…and that I have no alternative to it. Anything that could be done to make for a living world would require utopian transformation. Reversing climate change; reversing deforestation; (possibly) reversing population overshoot; reversing ocean acidification; ensuring meeting survival needs of all; safely managing nuclear facilities…
So unless one IS pursuing utopian transformation, I don’t know what we think we would be doing.
My “new understanding” is that the “intensive” part of “biointensive” means lots of imported inputs. Pure biointensive is “veganic,” meaning little or no animal inputs. There are lots of claims of reduced need for inputs, but it seems like alchemy to me — if you take stuff away, you have to put it back.
If people are growing for themselves and using humanure or harvesting off the septic field, they shouldn’t need to add so much stuff. For sure, if you sell crops to other people and it all washes out to sea, there will be a constant need to replenish the lost nutrients.
The move away from septic systems seems ill-conceived to me. Half the water used in urban areas in California is to water lawns. If they had septic fields, they’d need half as much water. If they filtered grey water and used that in the toilets, they could cut their water use in half again.
Oh well, capitalism is great at reacting after a crisis; too bad its not so good for making changes before a crisis.
“Oh well, capitalism is great at reacting after a crisis; too bad its not so good for making changes before a crisis.”
I don’t think any system is great for making changes before a crisis. The coming crisis is too unbelievable.
We’ve known this for a very long time. Aldous Huxley wrote in 1928:
“There are lots of claims of reduced need for inputs, but it seems like alchemy to me — if you take stuff away, you have to put it back.”
John Jeavons of Ecology Action researched this with expert help. The conclusion was that, absent selling food, all the waste generated in the homestead would return to the soil. But they couldn’t get the numbers to add up till they figured out that the human bodies themselves comprised the missing link. Nothing is perfect.
“The move away from septic systems seems ill-conceived to me. Half the water used in urban areas in California is to water lawns. If they had septic fields, they’d need half as much water. ”
I heard of a move to either discourage or prohibit lawns. I wonder if anyone has info on this?
Does this mean that septic systems require leach fields to exist where lawns would otherwise go? Beside (or instead of) that, how do septic tanks save water? The issue has come up in my small community, where a business leader is pushing for a village-wide septic system to replace the household ones.
If I recall the news correctly, Greece state is employing directly ~.8M out of 10.5M population (indirectly even more e.g. standing pensions and benefits for xy% of greek pop), so any new cut will obviously cascade through the system, less income and jobs for other sectors of the economy. Home prices can’t drop momentarily, because these are welded into the global real estate appraisal matrix of today, nobody is going to sell beach villas for pennies, yet. In theory lowest sector of renting accomodation for poor might drop a bit some, however the west is pushing wide scale privatisation schemes for greece, and in past practice that included rents in central europe and baltics in the end rising anyway if I’m not mistaken it has risen very sharply, the previous precedent round of power grab. There is indeed the magic of sourcing blood out of stone possible and it’s the stupidity of people willing to submit to opression for various chimeric visions like “democracy, progress, reform, consumeristic trinkets, ..”
I agree that you have to have the possibility of making something with cheap energy for austerity to work. The year 2000 was near the low price for a barrel of oil. I expect that natural gas was cheap then. Almost any policy would work.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
In answer to someone, I said that BW Hill had not laid out a mathematical description of the path to stripper status. He just posted this over at Peak Oil…Don Stewart
“Saudi Arabia needs an oil price of $105 a barrel to meet planned spending requirements, but the average price for the year is estimated at $58 a barrel, he said.”
If the best oil fields in the world can not continue to operate at today’s price (WTI $53) that does not bode well for the rest of the world’s producers. As we have been stating the oil age ends not for a lack of oil, it ends when producers can no longer make a profit producing it. Simply put, it ends when the economy can no longer afford to pay a price that covers its cost of production.
The industry has only one option; increase debt! Saudi Arabia will liquidate its reserves, EXXON will borrow more money from J.P. Morgan, Greece will run out of food, and medical supplies, and Venezuela will run out of toilet paper. The energy needed to produce petroleum, and its products must come at any expense. The oil will continue to flow regardless of what must be sacrificed.
We have now entered the cannibalization stage. The point where society must now consume its own infrastructure to survive. The price of oil is not high enough to replace reserves, or essential equipment. Fields will be pumped until it is no longer economically viable to work them, and equipment will be used until it can no longer can be repaired.
Depletion is now beginning to take its last victim; the immense wealth that was accumulated from oil’s rampant consumption. It will feed on the carcass of civilization until only the sun bleached bones of a technological miracle remain. The bill for ignoring it is at last coming due; and it will come due with interest!
Don,
good points by BW Hill.
“The industry has only one option; increase debt!”
Seems to be the case everywhere and the only “solution” we have to fix problems, but it works only for a shorter and shorter while…
Kurt Cobb thinks the can can be kicked for longer than expected, maybe… http://resourceinsights.blogspot.fr/2015/07/chinese-stocks-when-mispricing-becomes.html
“We have now entered the cannibalization stage.”
With no more net energy input (in global aggregate) we must steal from others just to stay afloat. Until some vital organ is touched, and then the whole system collapses.
A financier of my acquaintance made the same point recently: cannibalisation. He hopes it will ‘take his lifetime’ before the collapse, 20 years or so. I have my doubts.
Refer to my post bellow, even the cannibalization stage might have its unexpected peaks and plateous. It’s rather impossible to predict near timeframes, and foolish to gamble on uncertain probabilities, but in general overview some trends could be perhaps forseen, such as the resource quasi colonies (Iraq, Lybia) and bumper states/regions taking hit first (Greece, Ukraine, Syria, ..), while the systemic citadels of the old rulers (NY, London, Berlin, Paris, ..) holding till the proverbial very last second.
Therefore it’s very likely most of the western public will be faced with rather abrupt and speedy irreversible phase shift, while the signs of fires approaching will be available, but not to be believed of such immediate concern.
A very accurate and persuasive assessment.
C’mon, Don. Don’t hold back. Tell us how you REALLY feel!
I plan to grind up those “sun bleached bones” and dig them into garden beds. Yum! Potassium and phosphorous! 🙂
Don, thanks for providing the needed focus based on this particular quote.
Now, this is crucial issue, if canibalization stage is upon us, there is very limited space for little people to “front run” the events. This is not replay of 1930s depression or WWII movie.
It basically means, the society would turn inside screws into “everlasting” totalitarian inferno (chiefly at core centers), where freed resources from unavailable frivolous consumerism will be utilized to gorilla tape the security state apparatus for as long as possible.
In practical terms, what to do, it seems to me, the only viable option is to get as far from the core of the system as feasible (perifery and tiny non appealing acreage), obviously at the cost living out there and not available/crumbling infrustructure (healthcare, roads,..). Simply collapse first on the outskirts – avoid the rush, squirling shiny metals or buying quality land and other speculative meassure won’t last very long in such a system, you will be crushed, unless deliberately playing on the same playfield joining the sociopaths.
Dear worldofhanuman
Here is a comment from BC on Ron Patterson’s blog. Not so colorful as BW Hill, but chilling enough. Note that he also blames the cost of production…Don Stewart
‘That is to say, world real GDP per capita is at a permanent post-2007 structural trend rate of less than 1% and eventually 0% to negative for the post-Oil Age epoch hereafter.
Most of us are still missing the reality of the global situation in terms of the decelerating per-capita rate of change of growth of real GDP and oil production and consumption.
The net liquid fossil fuel energy costs of extracting energy to maintain real GDP per capita are now prohibitive.
Therefore, growth per capita is over, therefore, growth of real revenues, profits, debt to wages and GDP, purchasing power of labor, gov’t spending for social goods, and capitalism is over; we just don’t collectively know it yet, and we’re not supposed to know it.’
That is a good comment by BC.
I couldn’t agree more. We are in the gasping for air stage
world,
I disagree. I think the periphery will rapidly become “sacrifice zones” (Hedges), as is already happening, and the the “resource savings” from cutting them off will be diverted to the core, for as long as that can be sustained. While that process continues, it will still be “best” to be in or very near the core to ride it out as long as possible by still having a place within the system, and to stay out of the rapidly crashing, and likely increasingly violent, self-cannibalizing sacrifice zones, where being prepared or having something of value will likely only make you a nice, juicy target. Even within the core, areas will be turned into sacrifice zones for the “true core.” For example, it is easy to see the outlying areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens being sacrificed and left to turn into abject slums for the sake of preserving Manhattan as a protected zone, so you will still have to be in the “right” area of the core. Remember when Rome fell, first people fled the rural areas to the cities, to where the resources were still flowing, and only after the cities became unbearable did the general exodus to the country occur. I think this process will recur, although on a much abridged time line this time because of the fragility of the overall system. When the electric systems start being more unreliable than not and out for most days (with concomitant failures of electric-fed water supply), it will certainly be the time to leave. I know it’s dicey, because “riding it out” in the core as long as possible could leave one without the means to leave when it is more than clearly time to do so. But unless one has enough wealth to create and staff his or her villa retreat while remaining in the core for as long as advisable, it is my current view that it is probably “best” to ride it out in the core for as long as seems reasonably safe. When one does go to the country, my current view is that it will be best to locate in or on the outskirts of an old town that was built pre-automobile as a center of a farming area, with its own water supply. There aren’t that many of those in America. So much is built stretched out along the highway and assumes travel by cars for 15 minutes to get anywhere. In the Northeast U.S., I see the Hudson Valley, the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts and the area around Burlington VT and Lake Champlain as potentially viable locations. Setting aside Fast Eddy’s concerns about the nuke plants, or others’ concerns about catacysmic climate change. If people don’t muster the resources to deal with the nukes, it’s probably all academic.
That can’t happen.
And rather than explain why — I will let Korowitz do that for you:
Trade Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse
http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/
The whole thing is worth reading if you care to understand why what you suggest cannot happen — but you could skip to I think it is page 56 where he details how the world unravels if one key component breaks.
FE, I’ve read the K report, twice. I did not take away that he described an event certain to occur with the predictability of the next solar eclipse. If the supply chains are too long disrupted because a financial crisis disrupts the payment system, it all breaks down. I get that. Please note the use of the word “if” in K’s report. I think it is crazy for anyone to think they know exactly how it is going to play out. The scenario I outlined is my current best guess. I note that “they” have been able to control the implosion thus far, and that the scenario I outlined is ALREADY occurring, more or less reflecting events since 2007. I don’t pledge the length of time it continues. Of course I could be wrong, for any number of reasons. Hell, we could have a nuclear war because the delusional idiots who are “running things,” think we can win it.
RE’s “long campout” is still the best, cheapest hedge I’ve seen. http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/?s=long+campout
When I look at the ferocity of the central bankers’ response to the imploding China stock market last week … that reinforces my conviction that they are desperately trying keep a very nasty beast in its cage…
It will get out at some point — and it will tear up global supply chains — and that’s the end of BAU — everywhere.
When Rome fell, the folks at Byzantium decided to abandon Italy, etc to the Germanic tribes – a wise decision.
Byzantium lasted for 1, 000 years under the Byzantines, and 470+ years under the Turks till Mustafa Kemal decided to move the capital inland to get rid of Ottoman influences, using a Greek invasion as an excuse.
There will be a BAU Byzantium, something like a BAU Galt’s Gulch.
Give me the address of the new Bizantium. GPS coordinates will suffice.
Somewhere around Silicon Valley. The areas near Yosemite is a good bat since it has water.
LOL! And these hordes escaping LA due to lack of water/food/electricity/gas will migrate to which location, you think? Isn’t Northern CALI still a relatively good place to live? You will have to have significant firepower to stop them. Congrats, great location.
“You will have to have significant firepower to stop them. ”
The bigger issue is will. Europe could stop people pouring in from the Middle East and Africa – fleeing partially from the chaos created by interventions – but lacks the will to sink boats full of people.
I would guess Europe will be the collapsed half and North America the surviving empire, since there is quite a bit of all the materials here and a lot less population density.
Probably you’re right. There are many risks for any part of the world. US has it’s own, Europe, China, Japan have others. In the long run though, I definately wouldn’t advise to move to US – too many guns and gangs. Local warlords will rule at some point and it won’t be pretty.
I totally agree. There are way to many heavily armed, racist white men here, we…um they would rather you stay away.
Right. Those militia/white supremacist gangs are just waiting to seize the power. Cities on the other way are rather full of black/latino gangs. Watch LA events 20 years ago and Baltimore/Detroit recently. Race divisions in the US will explode one day.
Europe is no better, though. Look at Breivik et. al.
“Less population density” implies more energy needs to carry on fairly simple commerce.
If “collapse” means electric cars, solar panels, and hydrogen fuel cells, you may be right. But if “collapse” means ox carts, I’d bank on Europe.
““Less population density” implies more energy needs to carry on fairly simple commerce.”
I’d be more worried about the ability to produce sufficient food to maintain social order. As long as the grid stays up and the populace are not burning everything in sight, North America should be able to produce at least a few million barrels of oil per day for many years, and coal for a fair time too.
I am not so sure about Europe holding together and feeding itself, especially once they add a few million more Arab refugees.
Jan,
Europe has it’s own problems, as I wrote previously. Look at forestation ratios, racial divisions and increasing wave of imigratants from Africa and Asia, soil erosion, lack of natural resources, etc.
How about Canada? My son plans to move there after getting a degree.
“After getting a degree” may be too late. Many people are reporting that immigration appears to have slowed to a crawl. I’m trying to import someone under a class that was advertised as taking only four months — it is now sixteen months, and we continue to see delay after delay.
Students are still treated favourably. Tell your son to get his degree in Canada, if that’s where he intends to wind up. Then he can apply for immigration within Canada (Vegreville) instead of to some backwater consulate somewhere.
Thanks for the advice. I will pass the message.
It wasn’t full answer though. I asked about the post-collapse environment in Canada. How do you assess the future in terms of survivability.
No one has a perfect crystal ball.
The current Canadian Government seems hell-bent into following the US down the toilet. They’re cutting social programs and wasting tens of billions on one-engine fighters that cannot even fly a sortie to the far north without refueling.
When I moved here, I saw Canada as being particularly progressive toward the sustainable life-style, including universal, near-free health care, relatively high floor for income tax, and a good environment for cottage industry. (For example, you don’t have to deal with sales tax unless your taxable sales exceeds $30,000, which, if you primarily produce un-taxed food products, is very difficult to reach.)
However, much of land has a harsh climate, and where the climate is not harsh, land prices are very high. On the other hand, in an increasingly-warming world, it may be nice to be further north. On the other hand, we may be headed for a nomadic life-style, since winters will still be cold. On the other hand… as Tevye said in Fiddler On The Roof, “I’m running out of hands!”
No crystal balls. Pick a spot, stick to it, and make the best of it. I do recommend an island, despite the bad press they’re getting. The moat will be nice in a “Mad Max” world, and until ther, the relatively high cost of off-island commerce makes it easier for you to do cottage industry with fellow islanders. (There are no “big box” stores here, and it costs an extra ~$50 to go to a Mall*Wart.)
Military spending all over the world are looking rather declining as a percentage of GDP. Even for Canada they were slowly decreasing from 1.2% to 1.0% of GDP in 4 years (2010-2014). US 4.7% to 3,5% (!?) respectively. From the major countries only Russian Federation significantly increased their military budget. If the military budget is an indicator of major conflict risk, we seem to be fine. Maybe the PTB are already played this at the table somehow?
The previous comment was posted below the wrong post. Sorry for that.
Being on the island you aren’t affraid of warlords/corsair style invasions? MadMax is the most probable scenario for at least parts of North America. Island does not seem to be very safe place, especially the type with lots of food to be plundered.
I find fear to be about the least desirable motivator there is.
Lots of things can happen. I work hard to not lose sleep over them. Que sera. I spend my effort improving probability of success with what I see as most likely scenarios.
For example, I could spend a lot of effort protecting against the unlikely event that I could be struck by a meteor at any… #@$%^*$*#@# TRANSMISSION TERMINATED; HOST UNREACHABLE. HAVE A NICE DAY.
That’s fine, I doubt there will ever be off shore oil rigs in the Arctic to fight over anyways.
Canadian winters are far too long — and far too cold…. that’s why I ditched that option and ended up in New Zealand…. winter days are generally above 10 degrees C (unless you are in the far south)… and winter last less than 10 weeks…
Right. The climate is strong argument. As Gail pointed out many times – home heating will be crucial in some regions.
The oil will continue to flow as long as everything stays together. We don’t know which piece will come apart first–political stability within Saudi Arabia, the ability to borrow in the Bakken, or the Eurozone problems. The wealth is definitely beginning to dissipate, but I am not sure we know exactly how and in what direction. Buyers can no longer afford the price that sellers need.
“The wealth is definitely beginning to dissipate, but I am not sure we know exactly how and in what direction.”
That’s the truth of it. It’s a system in stagnation with contraction forced upon it and how and when that plays out is unknown, partly because it will constantly be in change.
Euro Summit Statement
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/07/pdf/20150712-eurosummit-statement-greece/
“(…) Given the need to rebuild trust with Greece, the Euro Summit welcomes the commitments of the Greek authorities to legislate without delay a first set of measures. These measures, taken in full prior agreement with the Institutions, will include:
(…) by 22 July (…) • the transposition of the BRRD with support from the European Commission.”
That is the “bail-in” procedures.
Why are they so much in a hurry to have the bail-in rules implemented everywhere within this summer?
Thanks for the translation. I wouldn’t have connected “the transposition of the BRRD with support from the European Commission” with the bail-in procedures.
It does sound like a strange request unless they think that BRRD will save the system, even though the depositors can’t be saved.
Sorry I should have spelled: Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive.
In Cyprus it worked. That was on a small scale, and I guess they think it should also work on a slightly bigger scale.
Now, in case of a much bigger default, widespread crash, I don’t know, but the term Directive is very strong and afaik they could use military and police to enforce it, if needed.
Isn’t that akin to pillage, if things really happen as described in this ZH article?
Greece Just Lost Control Of Its Banks, And Why Deposit Haircuts Are Imminent
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-13/greece-just-lost-control-its-banks-and-why-deposit-haircuts-are-still-coming
“… the first decision the ECB will do once it realizes the sorry state of financial affairs in Greece is to do precisely what the government could have done but did not have the guts when it still had control: overnight it will out about 50% of Greek depositors.”
Not so good! At the same time, pensions will be cut. Jobless rates will go up. I hope businesses have enough funds to continue operating even with the haircuts on their accounts.
A peek into the future…. it is very bleak…
Haiti’s Unstoppable Outbreak
The nation has been battling a cholera epidemic since 2010—and it’s still killing people. Why has no one been able to stop the spread of the disease?
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/haiti-cholera-epidemic/398168/
Note: international aid agencies including Doctors without Borders are very active in this country… yet still … we see this endless epidemic…
Post collapse of BAU — there will be nobody to help — no aid agencies — no medicines…
Yeah and I bet you that TPTB solution will be migration to Florida/U.S. And if you don’t allow that you are “racist” or “protectionist” and just want the Haitians to die.
It’s already happening. What a strange world this has become.
“Everybody is dying”
Not according to this graph:
https://www.google.com/search?q=haiti+population&biw=1366&bih=670&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=hqmjVfzWCdfloATuwK2ICA&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAA&dpr=1
We’ve barely begun this collapse. You are right, when this turns just watch how quickly the entire global system unravels, and with it goes the international distribution of food/medicine and then we’ll look back at the present condition and wonder why we even called it an epidemic.
“Post collapse of BAU — there will be nobody to help — no aid agencies — no medicines…”
There will also be a lot less travel. People will be more isolated, so diseases will be more easily contained.
The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
With the crusading, pilgrimages, etc there was an awful lot of travel going on. On the upside, people learned about quarantine and holding cargo in customs houses to contain outbreaks.
Do you think that, in the first 10 years after collapse, there will be masses of people on religious pilgrimages wondering the land, and free trade networks trading goods from China to Spain?
The cholera epidemic in Haiti has is home-grown….
“The cholera epidemic in Haiti has is home-grown….”
Nope. UN soldiers that went there to help people after the earthquake brought the cholera in. The strain is from south east Asia. Possibly troops from Nepal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_cholera_outbreak
From reading that it is not conclusive as to where it came from.
It does not matter if people travel or not — epidemics happen when you have large populations — and lack of sewage treatment.
Cholera bacteria occur naturally in coastal waters, where they attach to tiny crustaceans called copepods. The cholera bacteria travel with their hosts, spreading worldwide as the crustaceans follow their food source — certain types of algae and plankton that grow explosively when water temperatures rise. Algae growth is further fueled by the urea found in sewage and in agricultural runoff. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/cholera/basics/causes/con-20031469
And we are going to have 7.3 billion who will be defecating on the street corners and in their back yards — that is going to get into the water supply — and that is going to result in wide spread disease.
Sure, population will drop quickly initially, and after a few generations, the people will be resistant to their local diseases.
The reason why Europeans stopped using Irish slaves and paid ten times as much for African slaves, was that the Irish are really susceptible to malaria, and the Africans have developed strong resistance.
There are quite a few communicable diseases that we have no resistance to — cholera is one.
The cystic fibrosis genetic mutation in humans has been said to maintain a selective advantage: heterozygous carriers of the mutation (who are thus not affected by cystic fibrosis) are more resistant to V. cholerae infections. – from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera
How to avoid Cholera:
1. Don’t drink poopy water – remember when you said plumbing and sewage systems were a bad thing?
2. If you get it, drink Gatorade or rice milk until it goes away.
You have all the answers Matthew – I am wondering if you are pulling my leg with this or if you are just a total imbecile… hopefully it’s the former…
I suggest you apply for the job of top dog at the Red Cross…
First item on the agenda for Haiti — make sure you only drink clean water — and if you happen to get sick drink plenty of Gatorade…
Problem solved!
You do not seem to understand the situation — there will be no sewage treatment plants post collapse http://cleantechnica.com/files/2010/05/columbia-scientists-measure-sewage-plant-emissions.jpg
People will be defecating in the street — and that will wash into the water table — into rivers — and it gets diluted — so you don’t even know you are drinking someone’s diarrhea…
And unfortunately when you run to the 711 to buy Gatorade…you will find that it has been completely looted.
If you’re too incompetent to purify water or mix salt and sugar with water, you’re definitely going to die without all the smart people looking after you. Are you even capable of boiling water on your own, or do you need hired help to take care of that for you?
But Matthew – what would people use to boil the water? (if you are in a city where would you even get water when the pumps stop pumping?)
You won’t be able to turn on the stove because there will be no electricity or delivery man with a gas canister dropping by….
I suppose you could burn your sofa and dining table and chairs… but then what?
The cholera epidemic will keep on coming as long as people keep dumping in the creek — or their back yards — or the street….
Will you burn trees in the park? Oh darn — it’s not easy to burn trees that have been freshly cut.
For a real world example of what this looks like let’s turn to Haiti — a place that has almost no trees:
https://ekspoze.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/haitidominicanboarder1.jpg
So just as the Haitians have no means to boil water … we will face the exact same problem post collapse.
Let’s familiarize ourselves with what many of us are going to die from:
Cholera is caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated with a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae. Cholera was prevalent in the U.S. in the 1800s, before modern water and sewage treatment systems eliminated its spread by contaminated water. At least 150,000 cases are reported to the World Health Organization each year.
The disease is most common in places with poor sanitation, crowding, war, and famine.
The last sentence is the key…. we will have no sewage treatment plants… massive amounts of people dumping everywhere, famine, no access to clean water … and no means to sterilize water…
This is the Perfect Storm.
1. We’ve already established, for many reasons, that being in a city when BAU ends, especially if it is a rapid, complete collapse, will end badly. Anyone can look at Detroit to get a glimpse.
2. People have had cholera for many thousands of years. Obviously people can survive it.
3.The wiki says malnurished people or people with weakened immune systems have up to a 50% mortality rate. My “bet” is, in a full on collapse, >90% depopulation within 3 years, then leveling out – unless of course we have all the reactors melting down and spent fuel ponds leaking.
4. As a side bonus, they’re now predicting a sun spot-less solar minimum for around 2030; on one hand, that will keep the algae and bacteria down, but frost in summer doesn’t help with growing food at all. This could be the shock that knocks down the house of cards, after all these other shocks – financial, oil, climate, etc.
Matthew — I am not stating that diseases such as cholera are going to exterminate all those who survives the spent fuel pond explosions …. (cancer will eventually get them I suppose if they make it past the radiation poisoning)
What I am establishing with these facts is that the Holocaust will be more likely to resemble the situation in Haiti than Little House on the Prairie.
Actually things will be far worse than Haiti because there will be no way to produce much in the way of food in our dead soils (and no Feed the Children food drops) —- disease — no medicines — plenty of violence…
Picture Haiti on steroids if you will.
Hurrah! Greece is fixed! http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/13/us-eurozone-greece-idUSKBN0P40EO20150713
A toast… to Green Shoots:
http://www.hercampus.com/sites/default/files/2015/05/07/toast_b_1.jpg
a deal? or rather the stinky outcome of a tough 15h long police custody, which I don’t see how the Greek people and parliament could accept.
Such a degree of contemption wasn’t necessary, imo. Those greedy fellows are indeed pushing the whole continent towards unpleasant days… They’re playing with fire, and don’t seem to realize it.
From the Reuters article:
“Tsipras said on arrival in Brussels on Sunday he wanted “another honest compromise” to keep Europe united. Instead, he was subjected to a 15-hour humiliation by leaders furious that he had spurned their previous bailout offer on more favorable terms in June and held a referendum last week to reject it.
…
One diplomat said that was tantamount to turning Greece into a “German protectorate”, stripping it of more sovereignty.
… (and the best:)
One senior EU official calculated the cost to the Greek state of the last two weeks of political and economic turmoil at 25 to 30 billion euros.”
Got to keep the other PIIGS scared shtless
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/thisisacoup-germany-faces-backlash-over-tough-greece-bailout-demands
Pablo Iglesias, the secretary-general of Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos party, joined in tweeting: “All our support to the Greek people and his government against the mobsters #ThisIsACoup”.
Can kicking at its best, just won another day..
For one thing, watching the desperate face expressions of EU figure heads during these last days was quite illustrative about the real situation, which is not about Greece but the very survival of the current managerial level elites (not true system owners class) over invested in the EURzone and European Union. That doesn’t mean it will be over soon, as you can recall when nazis lost north african oil and sky over english channel and the submarine war was already petering out, it was only a question how long will it take to Russia to destroy 2/3+ of the nazi land based warmachine. So in other words it was clear to allied powers the war was lost aprox. 3-4 yrs before the May 1945 (also factions of german elite plotted against as early as late 1942-44), but in the meantime dozens of millions of people were put into meatmincer anyway to make the result happen. Not the best analogy but you can hopefully catch my drift..
Obviously I meant to say the war was lost to Germany by early 1940s..
Oops again, hah, lost by Germany.
What a day!
All of that noise for NOTHING!
How China’s stock-market muddle may spread to wider economy
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Despite China’s troubled stock markets finding a floor last week, do not expect any quick return to normality.
The dramatic stock rout and subsequent heavy-handed interference by authorities will not be easily forgotten. It has not just rattled investor confidence, but also damaged the political credibility of President Xi Jinping.
For China’s legions of retail investors, the heavy losses have been compounded by wholesale stock suspensions — with half of Shenzhen and Shanghai stocks still not trading. This is a likely to fuel anxiety so long as investors are trapped in stock positions with no liquidity.
It is also likely to lead to a sea change in investor mood from only weeks earlier, when some were even selling the roof over their head to buy equities. There may be a nasty surprise when the first post-suspension bid prices come in.
Albert Edwards at Société Générale highlights the experience in 2008, when Pakistan suspended trading on the Karachi Stock Exchange to try to “put a floor” under stocks after a share-price slump. This episode left authorities’ reputation in tatters, and when the market reopened, it quickly lost another 52%.
For foreign investors, many of the bizarre interventions by Beijing last week will have raised a number of other, more fundamental questions about the competence of China’s leadership and the true state of the economy.
More http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-chinas-stock-market-muddle-may-spread-to-wider-economy-2015-07-12
Fear…. it is all about fear….
I would like to focus on the next points
1. Get more time to find solutions
2. find cheap ways of making energy
3. use wisely rare resources while reducing, reusing and improving recycling
4. clean up the fossil fuel era mess
5. making a economy for a finite planet
6 . change human behavior to aim for this goals and prevent previous mistakes.
While I would like to prevent society collapse I would hate to see that we haven’t learn nor change anything from the tangle we have got ourselves into, in other words I certainly want us to survive collapse but definetly do not want to keep BAU either.
1. Get more time to find solutions — agree
2. find cheap ways of making energy — not gonna happen – but imagine if we found an unlimited cheap clean source of energy tomorrow — that would be the end of us because we’d use up the earth’s other key resources even faster (because this new energy source would mean that even more people get to live large)
3. use wisely rare resources while reducing, reusing and improving recycling
Who Will Pay America’s $1.5 Billion Recycling Bill? — another uncomfortable truth:
Why Are Cities Picking Up the Tab on Corporate America’s Waste?
http://nextcity.org/features/view/cost-of-recycling-america-extended-producer-responsibility-cities
4. clean up the fossil fuel era mess — don’t understand what you mean by this.
5. making a economy for a finite planet — hunter gatherer societies work well
6 . change human behavior to aim for this goals and prevent previous mistakes — perhaps we could remove the survival and procreation genes from all humans….
I wish I had good solutions.
The fact that humans and all animals tend to reproduce in greater numbers than needed to replace the parents, and the further fact that humans have been able to circumvent this natural situation through our use of supplemental energy (recently including fossil fuels, but starting with burning biomass) is a huge problem. We essentially behave like a cancer on the face of the earth, unless, somehow, we miraculously figure out a way to stop this pattern. In fact, it would be better if our numbers were brought way down, but there is no good way of doing this.
Recycling looks like it would work, but it does not work nearly as well as a person would hope, because of the amount of energy use required for recycling. Alicia Valero gave an interesting presentation related to this issue. She also has a book by a similar name. She refers to the dispersion of mass as a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
TPTB did not anticipate Hitler. They finally decided to back him, thinking they could control him.
After they realized they couldn’t control him, they put their full support behind the Allies and the Soviet Union and the rest is history. But it was already too late, the damage had been done.
Yes it’s cliche but I’m using it as an example of things going wrong. Nobody has complete control, that is one thing that we all must realize.
I’m personally anticipating some “Hitler like” characters out of the Arab world or maybe China to get this show on the road and finish off the present system.
We’ve already got some mass-murderer types rampaging around the world — they reside in America…. they enjoy torturing… supporting ruthless dictators etc…
All so we can live large. I am so glad the biggest baddest dog is on my side!
Fast Eddy
You mean US Army psychologists? Frightening people!
Of course, if we are talking about real mass murder, I think one would have to nominate the processed food corporations. Their record is astounding! Generals must view them with considerable envy…..
My point is that TPTB in the early 20th century (the British Empire and other European empires and their spheres of influence) did not anticipate a change in their system. They thought it would continue forever.
The current powers that be are the United States and the international organizations centered around it and the big banks and corporations that receive subsidy from it.
They think the system is going to continue forever. Witness even many of the comments here that suggest that everything is under control, that we will face a managed decline into neo feudalism.
What I’m suggesting is that all it takes is one charismatic figure from another part of the world to declare that they are not playing ball, they are going to kick out the United States and its money and corporations, and the system will end. It will break.
What are we going to do, bomb the entire world? If we try that it just gives them even more incentive to never do business with us again. All it takes is the perception that there is nothing to gain, and therefore nothing to lose, from ending the system, and watch how quickly it unravels. Europe, Russia, China, and the Arabs will all realize they can just deal with each other and leave us out, there’s nothing we could do if that happens. They have more than enough energy, people, and industrial production to last a very long time without us.
Say the word tariff and see how flustered the people get. Or talk immigration control. Go ahead, boycott my country, don’t sell me anything or try to visit, all of you. Never happen, the rest of world puts up with our foreign policy foolishness because they need our dollars.
Certain powers are working to emasculate the American white male and they are almost there, can you say Kaitlyn Jenner? Once most of us are soft momma’s boys we wont be dangerous anymore, just useful steers.
… but only because oil is priced in dollars. If that changes, watch the almighty US Dollar go up like a puff of smoke.
I just have to comment on the possible attack on Kiev by the Right Sector. Now Kiev has two civil wars one east and one west. It is kind of like Greece but angrier and with more guns. But same underlying problems and of course with US agitators.
“But same underlying problems and of course with US agitators.”
Ukraine is very different from Greece. They have huge amounts of mostly untapped coal and natural gas, and perhaps a decent chunk of oil. On the other hand, they are at the extreme end of Oligarchy – something like 50% of the country is owned by 50 people. The soldiers are paid, fed, trained and equipped by their local oligarch. On top of all that, they have the misfortune of being between Russia and NATO. If I recall correctly, The Ukraine literally means “The Borderlands”.
Gail
Let me expand just a little on the issue of new debt and Greece.
In my opinion, BW Hill’s two curves showing ability to pay and cost of production and their intersection in 2012, and dramatic narrowing of any positive effect at all since about 2000, signal a sea change in the role of money, and accounts for the very poor results from QE and Bailouts and the like.
Prior to 2000, loaning money out of thin air, which money was subsequently used to produce products and services with oil, coal, and natural gas, was frequently a good bet. The GDP per barrel exceeded the cost per barrel, so if the business plan was good, then the debt could be repaid with interest.
However, after 2000, everything started to change, and is now in the final stages, approaching what BW calls the ‘dead zone’ for oil. While oil isn’t everything, it is important. Using debt to fund the consumption of new oil no longer pays for itself, on average. There may be individual projects which make money, but many will not. For example, currently we might look at some information technology and sensor projects differently than, say, building a new highway or port or steel mill. Consequently, new debt is no longer an answer to the problems that the general economy faces.
In the long run, there is no ‘solution ‘ to the declining returns from fossil fuels. We can adapt to the change by radically reducing our societal dependence on fossil fuels. This would have some favorable short term effects, permitting us to afford more expensive to produce oil, but ultimately we are going to have to live within the thermodynamic possibilities afforded by solar energy. We will be ‘back to Edo’, in my parlance.
Giving Greece more money does not change anything relative to thermodynamics. IF the political powers can figure out how to run Greece with lots less fossil fuels, THEN they may squeeze out another decade. But the politicians would be aiming at a receding target. In my opinion, they might as well operate a cash government. There is no advantage at all to going into long term debt. Perhaps 60 or 90 day notes, but nothing longer.
Don Stewart
Maybe Greece, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and march on Berlin??? Maybe France will join if Le Pen is president?
Don, while much of what the BW Hill’s graphs and information seems like good information, the one graph I really don’t think makes sense, is the one in which they project a barrel of oil to be worth to the world economy is just $18 dollars in 2020. I still don’t get how they got that number.
Stiilgar
As I understand it. There are two basic equations (plus lots of related data collected in the more usual ways). The first equation uses a standard thermodynamic model to estimate the cost of producing, processing, and distributing oil. But the equation is estimated from top down data…not from bottom up, field by field, data. The equation is cross checked with some of the data gathered from more traditional studies, but is not dependent on the more traditional studies.
The second equation takes the BTUs in a barrel of oil, but subtracts the BTUs needed to produce, process, and distribute the oil. as estimated from the first equation. The result is a sort of ‘net oil’. This ‘net oil’ figure is related to GDP from historical data. The result is the GDP which can be produced with the ‘net oil ‘which is available.
Before about the year 2000, the value of the GDP which could be produced was well above the cost of producing the oil. About 2000, the gap began to narrow rather precipitously. The two lines crossed in 2012, which makes the value of the GDP now the limiting factor for price (currently 77 dollars by Hill’s calculations). As the ‘net BTUs’ from a barrel of oil continue to decline, the value in GDP of the net barrels continues to decline. Very soon, by Hill’s calculations, the net value will have fallen to about 20 dollars. At which point he sees only the production of the remaining oil until the water cut gets so high that we cannot afford to lift the oil plus water to the surface. In other words, he just ran the model down to a very low price, but didn’t spend a lot of effort figuring out how the ‘stripper’ process might actually unfold. Needless to say, it won’t be pretty.
Caveat emptor on my explanation. Plus loose use of his language.
Don Stewart
Greece is not making a profit, so it doesn’t make sense to give them more long term debt.
I am not convinced “radically reducing our societal dependence on fossil fuels” will work. We know that in the recent past, Greeks cut down trees in public areas to get wood for heat. This would be the primary kind of change I would see in “radically reducing our social dependence on fossil fuels”. Another might be moving to other countries that are in better shape financially.
As long as there is major infrastructure that needs to be paid for–homes, stores, upkeep on roads, oil pipelines and water pipelines, it is hard to see that the payback on human labor levered with small amounts of fossil fuels will be sufficient to provide the flows to pay for all the necessary costs. The country would end up with a massive increase in debt defaults.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
We have discussed here several times the difficulty of getting from where we are to where we can anticipate we need to be. Albert Bates has an interesting blogpost on the subject here:
http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-evoneers.html
Albert, of course, is a fan of ecovillages…he has lived in one for 40 years, and has long been active in the global movement. I just want to mention another possibility, which is a very localized economy without some of the social trappings we associate with ecovillages.
I would like to comment on a design issue which may strike some of you as Utopian. I recently recommended for your reading an interview with Adrian Bejan, the Professor of Mechanical Engineering who developed the law he calls the Constructal Law. In the interview, he strongly supports the notion that geometry is key to understanding life.,,with ‘life’ including things we normally don’t consider ‘alive’. Bejan, who considers science as a sort of drawing, has many similarities to Jane Hirshfield’s analysis of poetry:
‘Like a chemical reagent, water passing through limestone, or a curious toddler, a good poem reveals, entering and leaving altered whatever it meets.’
Just as Bejan celebrates the unknown and continued evolution, Hirshfield quotes this poem from a Polish poet in her 90’s (who has seen a little evolution and many unknowns in her eventful life):
‘The most beautiful is what is still unfinished
A sky filled with stars uncharted by astronomy
A sketch by Leonardo a song broken off by emotion
A pencil a brush suspended in the air.’
Many of us seek certainty as we see the end of a certain way of thinking and living approaching. I submit that we will be a lot better off if we can instead adopt the stance of Bejan and Hirsch and the Polish poet. Which is also, I think, the stance that Albert is taking.
Which doesn’t mean that we are clueless about what needs to be done. We can examine how previous societies managed without some of the things we hold so dear and have become dependent upon. We can look carefully at what science is telling us…particularly I think about those neurotransmitters and hormones, about the radically different understanding of the genome that comes from Barbara McClintock and others.
I will offer a contrast from this morning’s concert at my food co-op. We gather on the lawn at 11am and have music until 1. Many small children having a wonderful time and are enthusiastic enough to raise the spirits of old people like me. This morning, we had a couple of refugee musicians from Vermont, fleeing the rained out concerts they had scheduled for this summer. So a very eclectic group consisting of the band that was scheduled to play, plus the refugees, made it up as they went along. One of the refugees had written a song for a friend which goes something like…Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony/ Come down now/ Something is lost/ And I need your help. This song went on for a little while and then segued into The Saints Go Marching In, with some excellent trombone work. So here we have this relatively heathen group of musicians and audience and children who just know rhythm when they hear it, enthusiastically doing their thing with ostensibly religious music.
You can see the same behavior, I think, in churches. The way to put people to sleep is to preach a theological sermon. The way to get them involved is with music and movement (and both are geometry, I think Adrian Bejan would claim).
So while a gathering of heathens and a gathering of religious people and a Mechanical Engineer and a Poet and Nate Hagens may seem to have nothing in common, I think that underlying it all is the notion of ‘Making’. We have to get busy and make whatever it is we want to live in. And geometry really is important whenever we start making.
Don Stewart
The West’s mechanistic and secular way of looking at the world hasn’t worked, and won’t work now. By contrast, non-Western peoples have always associated religion/spiritual practice with movement and song. The best (IMO) of the Western tradition–small minorities like the Shakers–used music and movement too. There is also a resurgence of movement and song in some newer evangelical movements in the West, but they are in political and sociological limbo, which I see as a problem. The insistence that the West’s way of thinking (however well informed by science) is normal and universally-appropriate is folly.
—————–
I find, more often than not, the notion in design that “less is more” to be misguided/confusing. At least in the landscapes nearby. Small cottages widely spread out on a vast plain should seem like “less,” but, counterintuitively, they represent “more.” They function like high-visibility interruptions to that plain. By contrast, were they clustered together inside a not-too-rigid geometric cluster (softened by trees) leaving the rest of the plain free of structures, the impact would be “less” disruptive than the status quo.
But even if we leave those scattered cottages where they are and cluster others fairly tightly around them in gently geometric conformations, the visual effect will be of “less.” Maybe that’s because the clusters are in sharp contrast to the open land around them, and the former confusion as to what we are looking at–open land or structures–diminishes.
The same design issues apply in the cities. For instance, consider where the views from city streets are not appreciative of the distant hills and mountains (since these distant hills were neither seen nor considered by the built environment’s designers). That might well be rectified by *adding* structures rather than removing them (which would at least be wasteful). The point to what is added would be to treat the occasional glimpses of the distance as design elements, therefore making them stand out and be more noticeable…
The building paradigm now, however, is to build new structures on virgin land, equally blind to the natural world around them, that escalate economic and environmental costs.
Artleads
A few years ago somebody made a video of some new houses in Utah. The video started with a view out the back door. Some desert leading up to spectacular mountains. The finished project had a solid wall which blocked the view of the mountains.
It leaves you speechless.
Don Stewart
Dear Don
Who needs a view of the mountains, when you can have that little glowing screen? Or enjoy a walk up their slopes when you can move around in a little wheeled box in the posture of an invalid? (sn’t that what driving really is?)
Only a few feel depressed when they see good farmland being dug up: most would think ‘An investment opportunity, great!’
I live in one of the ‘strategic growth regions’ of England, with lots of bio-tech and a famous university: thousand of housing units being built for Chinese graduate students and BAU in full swing.
All the eggs are being put in one energy-intensive basket with no thought of resilience, carrying -capacity, over-shoot, or any of the other concepts with which we on the fringes amuse ourselves.
Marking out a (often dangerous) ‘cycle path’ to a new development is sufficient to qualify it as ‘sustainable. Oh, and planting a few scrubby ‘wildlife hedges’. These concepts have been co-opted and subverted by BAU.
And we know what happened to the little girl who went to market with all her eggs in one basket….
Xabier,
Things are so absurdly screwed that I find it doesn’t matter (one way or another) what you say. So you are free to write a scathing letter to the press, knowing full well it won’t matter. That sort of thing is my main amusement these days. Say things to the sheeple that are extremely off program, and that they’re too mesmerized to seriously contest. It’s comedy of the absurd.
———————
Framing is a geometric concept. What I’m talking about with the distant views from the city is a matter of framing.
Since the urban builders didn’t look at those views, even where they can still be seen from the road, they are not framed. They can be seen if one looks hard, but they are in a sense “invisible.” My theory is that you could remove some of those hard-to-see views by erecting framing structures (other buildings) which simultaneous block out some of the scene while making the remnant scene “visible.” If this theory is founded, it would be demonstration of less being more.
Artleads
You are describing a principle of oriental garden design. One comes around a corner and a vista unfolds. One is required to stoop to go through a gate and a low growing plant is noticed. Etc.
Don Stewart
Or, in Old China, it was customary to build elegant viewing platforms so that old trees and their blossoms, etc, could be contemplated from different angles, not just the ground. Very sophisticated.
Of course, just for the aristocracy.
However, it was noted in the 19thc by travellers that the peasants of Italy, and some other countries, had a far better sense of appreciation of and eye for natural and man-made beauty than the British.
They also had more personal dignity and a better command of their own language: something seems to have gone badly wrong in the Anglo-Saxon world at some stage – early industrialisation and submission to brutal wage-slavery?
Artleads
I was trying to describe the principle of framing as my grandchildren and I were walking through the old sections of Savannah, GA. About every 20 feet a new vista comes into view…a steeple, an outside stairway, the entrance to a carriage house, an alleyway, a magnificent old tree, etc.
Hard to tell if my efforts were productive. They are being raised in the No Child Left Behind culture of multiple choice tests that George Mobus says is driving him out of the education racket.
Don Stewatt
Thanks, Don. Rich insights! I’ve spent lots of time showing people (including young students) beautiful “scenes.” I really think it pays off, and will do so in your case. 🙂
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These links–the second included in the first–present a most exhaustive breakdown of our economic and ecological crisis. They cover much that is discussed on OFW. I’m a slow reader, so I skimmed most of it, taking about 45 minutes to get through. Faster readers will cover more ground.
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/05/resistance-is-the-only-ethical-response-to-near-term-extinction/
http://www.dailybattle.pair.com/2012/occupy_target_destroy_ruling_money_fetish.shtml
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
A few links on Edo Japan and fisheries and whales:
http://www.us-japan.org/edomatsu/tsukuda/frame.html
http://www.us-japan.org/edomatsu/shibaura/frame.html
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/2346/article.html
I’ll call a few things to your attention. When Edo was selected as the capital, the government used market and prestige incentives to prompt the local fishing villages to increase production. The villages used flexible methods ranging from individual enterprise to village wide enterprise in their fishing. I assume that the large nets were owned by the village. The government also used market incentives to persuade fishing villages from the far west of Japan to relocate to Edo. These descriptions may contrast with allegations you have heard on this site that the government ruled by terror alone.
Second, today some of us have an intense interest in how Edo did it without fossil fuels. You will find a couple of paragraphs describing the EROEI of rice farming and fishing. Rice farming was about 15X, while fishing was 10 to 20X.
Here is the paragraph on fishing:
‘The energy efficiency of fishing in the Edo period attained a similar value: the energy value of fish obtained/the energy input (human labor) was 1,000-2,000 per cent. Fishing could be done only in lakes, rivers and the sea not too far offshore since fishing boats could only be operated by human and wind power. By contrast, the energy efficiency in today’s mechanized fishing industry seems to be about 50 per cent.’
The third thing I call to your attention is the question of farming tools. Gail frequently claims that after the Collapse, we will be unable to produce the farming tools that were used in Edo. Does her claim stand up to examination? Here is the relevant paragraph:
‘In the Edo period, almost 100 per cent of farming activity was carried out by human power. The implements used were not mechanical devices, but simple farming tools such as hoe, spade and sickle. The energy value required to produce such tools is negligibly small.
The traditional procedure of iron/steel production, known as “Tatara” used charcoal as the reducing agent. It has been estimated that production of 1 kg of base iron required about 2.3 x 104 kcal, the major portion of which came from charcoal. The modern technology has reduced this energy to about 4 x 103 kcal. That is, the older technique’s energy use was not very efficient. A large amount of wood had to be cut to provide the charcoal for iron production; hence the forest from which the wood was supplied was usually left to re-grow for at least 30 years before it was reused. The property of the iron/steel product from the old technology is known to be far superior to that obtained by the modern technology (Morris-Suzuki, 1994, 45-49; Tatara website).’
Separately, I have pointed out that the Edo people used basically wooden implements with metal tips, which could be recycled for a long time. Thus, although the production of the metal tips was expensive, in the total production cycle it was small.
For Gail to be correct, it would have to be shown that we cannot, in the 21st century, expect to salvage enough metal to make the tips for the simple tools we need to do Edo style agriculture. I have also given a link to Oliver Holmgren making a knife from a recycled truck spring. So I don’t think that Gail has proved her hypothesis. If she claimed that by the 25th century, we would have exhausted all sources of metals, and could no longer farm with even the simple tools of Edo, and would be reduced to stone knives and axes and such, she would be on safer ground.
A separate issue is how many modern people will be able and willing to internalize the very different world-view of Edo and other traditional societies. Probably not a high percentage, which leaves more resources for the flexible and adventurous. We have a selection event.
Don Stewart
How many people have the tools and knowledge to manufacture tools, using either method? Preserving and transferring that knowledge will be a big challenge. Especially if people have a stockpile of tools from now, that last a generation in, and then need new tools. People may need to learn the skill before it is useful or profitable, knowing that one day it will be.
There’s a fair number of them. They’re called “survivors.”
primary industry workers have better chances of survival than secondary and service industry workers that is third world countries then developing and finally advanced countries. some professions could find a niche such as teachers, botanist and off course medics. I would like to take military and police unnecesary but they are likely to be the ones keeping the order and giving directions.
If we could develop a different system before things start falling apart and focus on human development as species rather than the goals our societies currently have. we could have an option of become something… new, surviving with the skills and methods of our ancestors.
That would require to rethink our cities in radical ways to begin
My point is that we will have to make a huge change, most of which we haven’t even figured out. We have a lot more people now for one thing. I am not sure what we would do with 7 billion farmers. It is a whole system that needs to change.
I agreed with you that metal tips on shovels sounded like a reasonable solution to the expensive nature of metal, and suggested that car hoods might work for that purpose.
Gail
And my point is that you are not really thinking systemically. The vast majority of the 7.3 billion won’t make it through a collapse. I don’t think it makes any sense to assume that everything is going to hell, but that population will just continue trucking right on up. Limits to Growth certainly coupled these phenomena, decades ago. My prediction is that those who have looked seriously at the challenges, and have taken the appropriate steps, are more likely to survive.
Consider this description of a class to be offered this fall at the Community College:
‘Students will learn the important design considerations for a little house project. Topics include designing and planning for active and passive solar, rainwater harvesting, and landscape considerations.’
Another class:
‘Students will learn basic home building design for a small house. Course will include safety training, use of power and hand tools, basic design principles, energy star principles, and hands-on construction of a small house.’
Many of the students will be young people in their 20s. If you are certain that this ‘green’ stuff is simply ridiculous, then if you can put together a statement to that effect, I will be glad to forward it to the college.
Don Stewart
I agree that population will drop. Maybe we won’t need as many shovels, but we will still need a lot of other things, like wheelbarrows and carts. It will not be an easy change.
The college courses always “Aim too high” because that is the way we all think. Tomorrow will be like today, but maybe a little smaller, or greener. Students cannot imagine a different scenario, so that is all that they can teach.
Gail
At bottom, the courses are teaching self reliance and frugal living. If you think those are worthless virtues….I feel sorry for you.
Don Stewart
I am not clear as to why frugal living is a virtue.
Who says – and why?
Ah I guess that all goes back to Jesus… once again we see how religion tries to change our nature — and fails… there is no changing an animal’s DNA….
I am not even clear how one would define frugal living.
I am told Scott Nearing was living frugally — as supposedly is Jan and others here — but compared to this woman they are not living frugally at all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
Can someone explain why — provided you live within your means — you should consider dialing back your standard of life.
If you earn 1 million dollars a year is there any point to living on $20,000?
What would be the purpose?
Oh yes of course living on less would slightly decrease the depletion of resources allowing us to kick the can a few months longer… (see Albert Bates on exponential growth….)
But if too many people dialed back like this then there would be no can to kick because we’d get a deflationary collapse because growth would slow or stop.
I don’t really understand this frugal living. It does not compute on any level. There is no logic to it.
You are not saving the world by living like this so why do it? (Unless of course you have no other options)
Fast Eddy
With your money, I can understand why you don’t get it. Try being 23 and in debt for student loans, and the opportunity comes along to build your own very small house, which also offers very frugal living because it uses lots of green features.
Don Stewart
As I have stated… I am in agreement with living within one’s means…. if frugal living is the only option then that makes perfect sense.
Just because one is forced – or chooses – to live frugally — I do not see them as morally superior.
You can theoretically squeeze in a few more people for a while with frugality. Unfortunately, frugality doesn’t make our current system work longer–our problem now is lack of demand. Frugality makes lack of demand worse. But, after the crash, maybe some people would benefit from learning the obvious–you can’t have more than is really available.
Many people believe that living frugally will allow us to save resources for future generations.
Unfortunately it does not work that way
If we someone how changed human DNA with a pill and people lost their desire for more … we’d collapse BAU quickly — and we’d have no means to extract the remaining resources…
We’d leave the next generation picking through garbage dumps for car fenders to make shovels.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/images/2013/4/edcb7d21-05df-4259-a3b7-c00e88966cfbwallpaper1.jpg
Do they have any course on ‘Basic military tactics to protect your small house and farm from attacks from bloodthirsty, hungry, heavily armed marauders’
I can imagine they wouldn’t teach that — as it would be an exercise in futility.
“Do they have any course on ‘Basic military tactics to protect your small house and farm from attacks from bloodthirsty, hungry, heavily armed marauders’”
If you want to learn that, military service is probably a good way to go. Also, some networking opportunities there to go along with the skills. Or you can just join a gang, but it is probably better to have local law enforcement think positively of you when TSHTF.
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The latest in Extinction Controversy, with Geotectonic versus Anthropogenic causation questions.
Extinction & Geotectonics: Of Dinosaurs & Homo Saps
RE
“The other big one often brought up on the Cosmological level is the posibility of an Earth Collision with a Planet killer Size Asteroid.”
Asteroids are so last year.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/589119/Millions-monster-black-holes-gobble-Earth-hidden-across-universe-scientists-solar-system
It is feared that with so many more black holes lurking in space than ever thought, one could come within a billion miles of our solar system.
That would pose a risk to life on Earth, as the gravity from the black hole could knock our orbit around the sun causing us too become far too cold in winter and with frazzling summers of hundreds of degrees celsius, which humans, plants and animals could not tolerate.
And if a mega black hole came even closer the solar system could simply be sucked into the size of a PINHEAD.
The presence of the newly identified black holes at the centre of five different galaxies was given away by powerful X-rays they were giving off.
Black holes should be easily detectable by their gravitational effects. They’re just dead stars that don’t shine anymore – at least, from my understanding of the ones outside of galactic centers. It seems equally or more likely that we would end up closer to another star system. Besides, there is zero value in worrying about things you cannot do anything about.
Forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re saying.
Or maybe they know that COP21 conf in Paris will be talks for the sake of talking…
“Fossil fuel industry must ‘implode’ to avoid climate disaster, says top scientist
‘The age of carbon is over’ and a transition to a greener economy is inevitable, says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, adviser to the German government and Pope Francis”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/fossil-fuel-industry-must-implode-to-avoid-climate-disaster-says-top-scientist?CMP=share_btn_tw
But that’s the conundrum. We’ve chased ourselves into a corner in which growth is required to pay interest on loans, so even stagnation i.e. a flat economy is not an option. But add in the need to stop using FF to slow down Global Warming, (and that’s all it will do because of it’s thermal inertia 30-40 year continued momentum), but if that happens then the world economy completely tanks.
We are in a conundrum; stay on FF and suffer even worse climate change or get off it and suffer complete economic collapse. The choice our species has made is continue burning FF and go into a collective denial about the GW consequences. Maybe all are not in denial, but enough are to keep BAU going as is.
But I agree with their position of needing to immediately get off FF, because we either pay now with economic collapse and it’s associated die-off, or we pay a much higher die-off penalty later by continuing as is.
On the bright side, there could be another solar minimum comparable to the Maunder Minimum, starting around 2030-2040. Maybe the global warming will mitigate the reduced sun activity, and vice versa.
Collapsing the system entirely by completely abandoning fossil fuels would almost certainly result in nuclear incidents. France will need hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars to fully decommission all of its nuclear power. Along with a few decades, and fossil fuels.
“we either pay now with economic collapse and it’s associated die-off, or we pay a much higher die-off penalty later by continuing as is.”
The above statement might be some people’s conjecture, but humans have made it through a variety of climate changes in the past. I see economic collapse and its die-off as a much bigger issue. If the ocean rises, or farmers need to change crops, the resulting change is smaller in comparison, especially if population is much lower population than we have today. We have convinced ourselves that climate is controllable, but it really is not.
You may have seen this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709092955.htm “Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to ‘mini ice age’ levels: Sun driven by double dynamo”
“but humans have made it through a variety of climate changes in the past.”
True but I don’t think human civilizations in the past were this networked and interconnected on a global scale where each piece or every faction needs to operate or the Leonardo stick toy falls apart. Just look at how a small country like Greece affects the global markets. Add a world where the ecosystem is in taters, resource depletion, human overshoot and i’d say this time is different, much different. So for the first time humans are facing an onslaught of potential nightmare scenarios from all sides.
We are going to have to start over, no matter what, as far as I can see. Climate change is one of many problems we have to face. For example, perhaps we hunt and gather different food than we would have with a different climate, or live in a different section of the globe.
Our species did not make a choice, it merely followed the programming. That is the POINT.
Everyone in the village got “pilgrimage fever” and everyone got busy packing up some traveling clothes and food for the road. All except for Nasrudin, who watched them laboring away. Soon, all of the village: the men, women, and children, were heading out to Mecca. They were singing songs and shouting with great excitement about how they were off to find God.
They got about one mile away, when Nasrudin suddenly riding up on his donkey, shouting about some terrible emergency. They caught the donkey and made him tell them what the problem was.
“I’m trying to find my donkey! Where is my donkey?”
“Why, Nasrudin, you’re sitting on top of your donkey,” answered the villagers.
“Oh really. Is that so? And why are you all going on a pilgrimage to find God?”
“Our species did not make a choice, it merely followed the programming. That is the POINT.”
There have been hundreds of thousands of key strokes used to post comments that would not have been necessary if people would just acknowledge the above comment.
We are no different than bacteria that find a wonderful armpit…. the bacteria don’t say to themselves ‘hey guys — if we settle in this wonderful home and procreate we are going to create one hell of a stench’
Nope. They charge in — because their DNA gave them marching orders to do so.
And when your DNA gives marching orders — there are no mutinies…there can be no revolutions.
I see that nobody is responding to my quiz about whether or not the free jet, cars, homes, and cash would be accepted or turned down.
I take that as a silent ‘yes Fast — where do I sign up for that offer’
That’s your DNA saying yes for you….
Well, Fast, in my life I knew some three or four people who would say no to all that riches, considering it a golden jail and a powerful source of stupidity. People like them are certainly rare, but believe me is not everybody’s dream to become a sybarite. There’s maybe something “wrong” with their DNA?
Can you run the test I posted a few days ago by them … if I recall it was…
If someone were to offer you — no strings attached — for the remainder of your life:
– unlimited use of a private jet all expenses covered
– 3 homes around the world worth $5m each — free and clear and all associated expenses paid
– a fleet of luxury cars all expenses paid — with 24 hour driver
– 10 million after tax dollars per year to spend as you see fit
Would you accept or reject this.
Not a single person on this site said they’d reject it — so I assume they’d accept.
Just reading about that offer gets my DNA tingling … he’s licking his chops… he is asking me to ask where we sign up…
Thank you for the new word! It’s the perfect term of insult to someone you don’t want to know has been insulted: “Nice SUV! I see you’ve finally made the sybarite class!” as the new SUV owner beams with pride… 🙂
If someone wants to give me one of these — and pay the insurance and any repairs…
http://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/gallery/2013-naias-bmw-m6-gran-coupe-live-photos_7.jpg
I’ll be happy to affix a bumper sticker: ‘SYBARITE INSIDE’
Sybarites make the world go around… the world go around….
Believe it or not, Fast, there’s people who profess voluntary poverty, in a franciscan way! I knew a person who earned a nice salary (some 5000 €, which is very good for portuguese standards) and lived in poverty, because he gave almost the all of it. There’s also some famous examples. Wittgenstein, for one, belonged to a rich aristocratic family and gave all his heritage to poor artists and to his siblings.So, as I said, not everyone is interested in the big life that you take for granted as an universal wish. Yes is true the materialistic acquisitve american mindset has conquered billions of people in the world, but I doubt that we are genetically engineered to desire always more and more, as you presume. In any case, I admit that the voluntary poors I’m talking about represent a tiny fraction of the world population, and as such they are not fully representative.
I wonder if the free jet might prove too tempting 🙂
Greener economy = economy fueled by perpetual motion machines
Nice if you can accomplish it; silly otherwise.
From Durango, CO, a concept for using coal history to reconnect to the wild.
https://mild2wildrafting.com/durango-train.html?gclid=CI6gia2n1MYCFY4AaQodC7ALeQ
This new anthropology study may interest finite worlders.
The same part of the brain that ‘memorises’ space and time and allows us to function in our spacio-temporal environment also produces a social “map”, based on power (competence, authority) and affiliation, that structures our view of social reality and allows us to navigate within it.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-07/tmsh-hbm062915.php
quote:
The brain region that helps people tell whether an object is near or far may also guide how emotionally close they feel to others and how they rank them socially, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in the journal Neuron. The findings promise to yield new insights into the social deficits that accompany psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression.
The study focused on evidence for the existence of a “social map” in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that remembers locations in physical space and the order in which events occur. While previous studies had suggested that the hippocampus records a 3-dimensional representation of our surroundings when a key set of nerve cells fires, how the hippocampus contributes to social behavior had not been previously described.
“By quantifying the response patterns of people making decisions based on social interactions, we found that the hippocampus tracks relationships, intimacy and hierarchy within a kind of ‘social map’,” says Rita Tavares, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Schiller Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Our data suggests a common mechanism for how the brain codes for physical space, time and for social relationships.”
Previous social psychology studies and theory had identified two main factors that define social relationships: power (competence, dominance, hierarchy) and affiliation (intimacy, trustworthiness, love). In the new study, Mount Sinai researchers gauged participants’ sense of affiliation and power using a social space model: in a role-playing game, healthy subjects were tasked with finding a new home and job through power and affiliation interactions with virtual cartoon characters.
To quantify social interactions, study investigators used power and affiliation as the x and y axes of a two-dimensional graph where they recorded the social coordinates of each interaction. Each time the participant interacted with a character during the game, that character’s coordinates moved along a trajectory of greater or lesser intimacy or power. The researchers designed a mathematical analysis where they asked whether the brain activity being measured in the functional neuroimaging (fMRI) scanner tracked those changing social coordinates. The research team found a correlation between hippocampal activity and movement through the abstract social “space.” […]
— end quote
It is interesting that Nietzsche often uses the word “distance” about our social construction of reality. It is as if he intuited the connection between spacio-temporal and social perception – and he got the bit about power and affiliation. Eg.,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
257. EVERY elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance—that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man,” to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. [his emphasis]
— end quote —
It may be that science is beginning to flesh out a deterministic interpretation of human choices. Our brains do the work unconsciously, here on the basis of power and affiliation. We do not try to walk through walls or to drop miles down and maybe our social behaviour is analogous, we navigate according to what the “map” tells us. Then, stimulae change and our response can change, but our response to the sequence of stimulae is determined.
At the least, the study appears to suggest that the way that humans experience social reality is neurologically predetermined in its structure: “power and affiliation”. Social hierarchy, and social “distance”, is then a neurological or “transcendental” fact. We are neurologically predetermined to experience, and to navigate, society in hierarchical terms.
Notions of equality and “universal love” may simply be contrary to how healthy humans brains experience reality. Perhaps one day we will construct a “religion” or a philosophy in harmony with a scientific understanding of how human brains, and societies, actually function. Perhaps Nietzsche already did?
Pretty cool last paragraph, eARTH. My thought on it is whatever gets learned in what is about to occur via peak oil, will get passed down and possibly with a much different attitude towards the planet in the future, a higher thought level could potentially be reached. But of course not before this coming collapse. We can see there is no flexibility to adjust our way of thinking. It’s still pedal to the metal, full acceleration towards a very hard lesson. Essentially we still don’t grasp the notion of WE. Instead it is ME and my family. I think that is part of what Cameron was trying to get across in Avatar, was the sense of interconnection.
We’re slowly re-learning to see the world at all levels as a combination of networks, relationships, interconnectedness, instead of a list of separate entitites.
For the better (better understanding), and for the worst (too late, we’re screwed!).
Stefeun
Indeed. It’s worth observing perhaps that the understanding of networks is precisely what is presented in the often complex and highly-involved collections of tales from ancient times, such as ‘1001 Nights’, and the ‘Tales of the Dervishes’, the ‘Mulla Nasrudin’ corpus, etc.
All the ghouls, princesses, heroes, demons, peasants, magical birds, kingdoms, wicked sorcerers, etc are representations of inner and outer complexity; reading or in the past listening to the tales, sensitised the mind to these patterns. Complex stuff, but vivid and simple enough to appeal to a child at the superficial level of a colourful story.
It is for this reason that many of the tales have no happy ending as such. This restores mental flexibility and disappoints simplistic expectations.
They are the opposite of the false and simplified narratives (BAU, Green Salvation, Neo-liberalism, Socalism, Fascism, Islamism) which our culture,and above all our political and economic culture presents us with.
It is noteworthy that in many ancient tales, the Golden Age is often destroyed: for instance, in the old Norse myths, Wisdom was once freely accessible on earth to all men, but a calamity meant that the guardian of Wisdom, the goddess Freya, retreated to Hel (ie ‘the invisible place’, not a place of suffering and torture) and could only be regained through the sacrifice and bravery of a hero, and through entering into ‘death’.
Higher forms of thinking are accessible, but with difficulty and disagreeable experiences, and are not for all men and never will be. BAU, tantalising and stimulating in the most primitive way, – hence the global appeal – will always seem more attractive than modifying one’s conceptions and behaviour to a finite world.
A test for 7 billion people…
If someone were to offer you – no strings attached the following:
– a private jet with all expenses paid until you die
– a fleet of 3 luxury cars with round the clock driver paid until you die
– 3 houses in locations of your choice — each worth 5 million dollars – free and clear in your name with all expenses related to upkeep covered until you die
– an annual allowance after taxes of 10 million dollars per year
Would you accept?
What percentage of all people on the planet do you think would accept?
Yes FE, I fear that some people don’t get the bit about that people do what they do because that is what people do. The best that we can try to do is not to “change” people but to structure society in a rational and sustainable manner that works with how people naturally think and behave.
It is easy to co-opt words like “interconnected” for an egalitarian, supposedly “egoless” agenda but how many people get the bit that selfishness per se is not the problem, the problem is that industrial capitalism has bred a massive urban lower class that the planet cannot support indefinitely. If any “values” are the problem it would be those that aim to keep the masses alive and comfortable.
I suspect that when people (not saying Stilgar, I think that she is likely more sophisticated than that) say “we not me”, what they really mean is “me and everyone else.” Egalitarianism is not egoless at all, it is how the ego of some people seeks its own best interests, in a mass herd mentality. “We not me” can also be taken to mean “maybe not them, indeed not most, but some.” “We” then would not necessarily include “me” or “them”.
The best outcome now is some kind of aristocratic feudalism where a natural elite exploits the rest of the population for its own benefit and toward its own cultural refinement, while the lower classes are ruthlessly exploited and their numbers are kept down. That would work with how people naturally are, it would respect the “interconnectedness” of nature and of society and it would give the planet some kind of future.
It is “sad” but true that the planet simply cannot support the unfettered desires of “we” understood as the mass of humanity. And there is no point pretending that people can “change”. Any rational solution has to be honest about that. Society will have to be hard in its implementation of limits and there is no point trying to pussyfoot about that or to try to dress it up as what it is not. It needs to be clear and implemented harshly. That would be “we not me”.
“What percentage of all people on the planet do you think would accept?”
Honestly? …
“The best that we can try to do is not to “change” people but to structure society in a rational and sustainable manner that works with how people naturally think and behave.”
But is such restructuring consistent with “how people naturally think and behave?”
> But is such restructuring consistent with “how people naturally think and behave?” <
Art, it seems that societies are naturally hierarchical and that people naturally want more. One only has to take a glimpse at the world. The recent neurological study suggests that the healthy hippocampus, which constructs the spacio-temporal matrix, also constructs the power-affiliation matrix by which we experience, understand, "map" and navigate social reality.
It is then not an "accident" that human societies are hierarchical and affiliated; political statements can be "true" only if they fit with what is necessary and univeral, indeed transcendental to the structure of social reality. A full "critique of social reason" may even be possible that would bring its main contours and its import into clearer focus.
We are bound to have a naturally dominant caste that will reorientate to post-capitalist economic horizons. They will naturally seek their own wealth and prerogative and they will keep society in order, as is their instinct and as is in their own interest. The population and its use of resources will, in return, naturally be managed.
Wealth and culture will not be possible to all after the collapse, just as they were not before industrialism. The dominant elite will naturaly enjoy its monopoly of taste and opportunity, then as ever, just as it will monopolise power and affiliation.
Industrialism has allowed for a partial "expansion" of social prerogative to the masses and it will naturally contract back to where it was, once mass production is gone. So I foresee a reversion to something akin to the aristocratic warlords of old – unless the collapse is even worse than that. The reversion would be natural and rational.
Funny, I took that study (as reported in Science News) to mean exactly the opposite: that we construct a mind-map of the network of influential people, rather than a hierarchy.
As a means of optimizing command and control, a hierarchy minimizes the number of connections needed for employment, whereas a network maximizes the number of connections one has.
Consider that, in a hierarchy, you know that your day-to-day activities, job satisfaction, and pay raises come essentially from one person: your boss. You may be aware of your boss’s boss, and perhaps the CEO, but in general, your interactions with people outside your immediate node of hierarchy are both minimal and inconsequential. You can diss a peer in another branch of the hierarchy with little impact, for example.
Now consider the network that is implied by the brain employing two-dimensional logic to navigate social situations: a map of different people with different roles, power, and ability to impact one’s self. That seems to me to be the basis of a tribal, clan, or small village life, where you have to determine the complex power relationships between your parents, your children, the medicine man, the various elders, the constable, the baker, etc.
So my take-away from that study is that the brain is wired for a much older way of being that is not based on hierarchy.
“So I foresee a reversion to something akin to the aristocratic warlords of old – unless the collapse is even worse than that.”
Agree – look at Afghanistan post Soviet invasion — hell on earth — the reason the Taliban was welcomed in was because they were actually a better option than what they replaced — so imagine how bad things must have been!
I have read about how just going to the shop to buy some food was an odyssey of corruption — at every road one would have to pay off different gangs to pass….
Thanks Xabier for your great exposition of my tersely expressed idea.
Interesting! I don’t believe I’ve read any of those stories, but hope to at some point.
Interesting!
Fast, I have started a gene engineering project. Goats that produce oil just like milk.
Ed, you just need to scale up now.
It can’t be that hard!
From silk to 35 API oil. “Ok, we need 3.4 billion goats. Let’s see we can put them out to wild pasture and call them back with insect drones that will sting the goats back in the right direction to be oiled, sorry, milked of oil. Of course the drones stress them out so they don’t produce as much oil as if we just fed them in an enclosure, but then the EROEI drops to 1/1 and we’ve got an energy problem again.”
We are right about at the peak this year according to Ron Patterson from his website. I’m still not sure. My best guess is 2017. Then the question is how fast does it descend? Slow and painful for the disenfranchised or fast and furious?
Instead of the spider-silk gene, maybe they should try with this diesel-producing E-coli bacterium:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130422154911.htm
I’m so eager for such a bright future!
Maybe I can get a couple of these goats and breed them with solar panels… the sheep project is not panning out for me 🙁
Here’s what happens when China tries to ‘normalize’ their stock market by removing the only thing that is keeping it alive:
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user92183/imageroot/2015/06/MarginSHCOMPVol.png
More http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-11/chinas-margin-mania-context-striking-comparison-us-and-japan
Fast Eddy,
Get with the program….
All it is a little help from their friends…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7MrwldawY
Michael Mann: (FWIW)
“Last year we saw global economic growth without an increase in carbon emissions, which suggests it’s possible to “decouple” oil and economic growth. And social change can happen very fast—look at gay marriage.
But he knows that gay marriage had no huge economic downside, and the most powerful companies in the world are fighting to stop any change in the fossil-fuel economy. So yes, he struggles with doubt. And he admits that some of his colleagues are very depressed, convinced there’s no way the international community will rise to the challenge. ”
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/
So, listening to NPR on the latest research from the Arctic region. To get to the point appears Positive Feedback may already be in place as carbon release is concerned
Alaska’s climate hell: Record heat, wildfires and melting glaciers signal a scary new normal
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/19/alaskas_climate_hell_record_heat_wildfires_and_melting_glaciers_signal_a_scary_new_normal/
About those wildfires, by the way: Alaska’s been seeing more and more of them lately. According to a recent study, total acreage burned in the state has increased fivefold since 1943, an increase attributed to human activity like logging and development, but also to the broader shift in climate. And there’s reason to believe that those fires, by speeding up the thawing of the permafrost and thus releasing trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, will end up contributing to more climate change. Experts call that a “positive feedback loop.” It’s best understood, though, as a disaster in the making.
Need more?
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/27515/20150707/climate-change-arctic-tundra-cause-large-warming-impact-shrubs.htm
Studies of tundra shrubs show that they grow more when temperatures are warmer. Increased shrub growth, driven by recent and future warming in the Arctic, could cause more warming in tundra ecosystems and for the planet as a whole
So much for surviving the bottleneck!
Thanks Artleads,
that’s a rather good (and long) article, “When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job – Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.”,
exploring a whole set of climatologists’ mindstates/attitudes/feelings/emotions/beliefs/hopes (and all that sort of things), ranging from “near term extinction” doomsayers to “BAU needs only few adjustments” cretins.
Personally I don’t see the point about worrying or trying to fix a problem that’s mostly baked into the cake (especially if its deep connection with BAU isn’t acknowledged), while we are facing a bundle of other intractable problems. Maybe we could try to mitigate the consequences, focus on resilience instead of looking for “solutions”, but that doesn’t seem to be where policies are oriented. It’ll be (it already is, in many places) run-for-your-life as usual.
“Maybe we could try to mitigate the consequences, focus on resilience instead of looking for “solutions”, but that doesn’t seem to be where policies are oriented. It’ll be (it already is, in many places) run-for-your-life as usual.”
The only part of this I think I can see is that the sooner we face the hardships–to some it’s a fun adventure and a challenge–the better. I’m for leveraging dwindling resources to where they benefit the long term, even if we have to dress in sackcloth and ashes NOW in order to afford it.
Once we lose our ability to get the dwindling resources out, they are gone forever. The amount we leave in the ground is locked up in the ground, regardless of how soon the lock up comes. They are of no benefit for the long term. We end up going back to current flows and simple recycling of current metals, if we can find the heat energy to do the metals recycling.
“Last year we saw global economic growth without an increase in carbon emissions, which suggests it’s possible to “decouple” oil and economic growth.”
I don’t agree. I think it suggests instead that our measures of global economic grown are badly distorted by governments that don’t want us to know how bad things are.
Yes — this should be taken as evidence that the PTB are lying.
You cannot have economic growth without a corresponding growth in energy usage.
Not possible
All right, we’ve got two distinctly different plans below tossed up for consideration by Germany’s Shauble. The link below then the two proposals.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/germany-pitches-five-year-grexit-in-leaked-document-1.2282058
“The first would see Greece, with parliamentary support, hand over assets worth €50 billion to a trustee fund which would sell them and set off the proceeds against Greek debt.
The second Berlin proposal involves the EU agreeing a temporary Grexit of at least five years to allow Athens restructure its debts.
The country would remain a full EU member and would be given technical and financial support for measures to boost growth and address humanitarian needs.”
I’m not sure I understand how there could be a temporary Grexit from the EU, yet still remain a member. In any case, the first scenario you know Greece is not going to do, i.e. hand over 50 billion Euros worth of assets (if they have that much), because humans always want their cake and eat it too. That’s how most of humanity got into debt trouble in the first place, by ignoring limits to growth.
What Greece would probably like is enough to pay off their debt (without any repayment being required) have a big party (like AIG did with the US bailout) and give bonuses to the most corrupt politicians that bilked the country of the most money so far. Then all Greeks would be happy and that’s really what it’s all about until BAU descends at a steep arc.
Nomi Prins gave a good explanation on the situation. All the debt that Greece owes is essentially worthless and was printed literally out of thin air. The ones who benefited the most from the Greek ongoing bailouts were the big central banks.
Greece needs to do the right thing and just default and print their own currency. They can rebuild, it’ll just take time but it’s better than being in the EU.
I agree, Rodster, and I thought that was essentially what the people’s no vote was about.
Just to remind the origins of the Greek financial problem, in Charles Hugh Smith’s words:
“Consider what happened in Greece beneath the surface theatrics.
1. Goldman Sachs conspired with Greece’s corrupt kleptocracy to conjure up an illusion of solvency and fiscal prudence so Greece could join the Eurozone.
2. Vested interests and insiders gorged on the credit being offered by German and French banks, enriching themselves to the tune of tens of billions of euros, which were transferred to private accounts in Switzerland at the first whiff of trouble. When informed of this, Greek authorities took no action; after all, why track down your cronies and force them to pay taxes when tax evasion is the status quo for financial elites?”
http://oftwominds.bmobilized.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oftwominds.com%2Fblogjuly15%2Fillusion-of-stability7-15.html (I don’t quote more of it because I’m not sure about the possibilities of recovery evoked by CHS, check by yourself).
Anyhow, a matter of fact is that a 2010 €110B debt owed to private banks has been shifted onto the backs of European taxpayers and now amounts to €300B+ and counting. What a nice “solution” they found!
And now they plan to privatize the harbors, airports, etc.. all their public assets, so that any recovery becomes definitely out of reach. Another nice solution.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
Here is a little Higher Learning to stimulate your brain if you are trying to predict what lies in our future. This is a link to an interview with Adrian Bejan, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, the author of many books, and the formulator of the Constructal Law:
For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed (global) currents that flow through it.
My note: by ‘imposed currents’ he means something that is driven through the system. For example, if fossil fuels are used to drive an agricultural system, then that system will evolve in certain ways. If fossil fuels become unavailable, then the agricultural system will evolve (or devolve) to become quite different. Both the fossil fuel driven system and the purely solar system will exhibit optimizing behavior, but they will have many differences in terms of specific features.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzan-mazur/adrian-bejan-interview-gr_b_7089302.html
I don’t claim to completely understand everything in this interview. The interviewer is coming from the perspective of just having written a book on the origin of life. Bejan says late in the interview that he doesn’t follow all of those debates closely. But I think you will find some provocative statements.
I’ll also pose the question: what are the ‘imposed currents’ that drive human behavior, and can we look at those and make any deductions about a future which will give us less fossil fuel energy? Can we look at efforts like BW Hill’s model, showing a 30 percent decline in the work from a barrel of oil since 2000, and correlate how the reduction in work available is interacting with the ‘imposed currents’ to give us the behavior we currently observe? Also please note Bejan’s observation that four hands are better than one if you are trying to move something, which is one reason cooperative behavior is ‘driven’ through our social systems.
I’d suggest looking first at Richard Feynman’s quote:
‘Physics is like sex. Sex does have some practical products, but that’s not why we do it.’
Compare Feynman’s observation with that of Nate Hagens about our attempts to move neurotransmitters and hormones by making stuff using fossil fuels. Also think about Maslow’s hierarchy and similar attempts to get to the bottom of what drives humans.
A few quotes:
I don’t see any difference between art and science. They’re both about images in motion. The inner pleasure is the same in making a fantastic piece of art that inspires the viewer as coming up with a scientific idea that triggers explosions of images in the mind of the same viewer. Scientists and artists are specimens of the same species.
(I find myself drawn to images. I am attracted to BW Hill’s elegant models…perhaps neglecting some healthy skepticism. Beauty and elegance might really be Truth, as the poet said. Many people have noted that mathematics is inexplicably prophetic in terms of understanding how the world works.)
My parents were my heroes, role models. Self-made. They came from the village. They were the first generation to make it out of the village to become somebody in the city.
(My question. Does the internet change things?)
Big is not necessarily the answer. The answer is that it is easiest to moving stuff on the landscape in the social, animate realm by a special combination of few large and many small. The combination is predictable based on the constructal law in every domain we’ve looked at. This is how flow proceeds easiest in the available space.
(My note. Compare Edo with 85 percent of the population being self-reliant farmers, with a small number of people in the big cities, to the current notion that most of the people on the planet are going to end up in the Mega-Cities.)
The constructal design of the whole volume is quite different. It’s about facilitating the flow of oxygen from one point, in this case from the mouth throughout the entire finite volume, which means to an infinite number of points, to the entire tissue that inhabits the volume. How is this done? It is done when the time for the oxygen to flow along the airways matches the time the same oxygen needs to diffuse across the tissue that separates the air in the air sac and the blood in the capillaries that vascularize the tissue of the same sac.
(Bejan uses very similar thinking to deduce when water will stop flowing through the soil and emerge into a rivulet. Are there similar principles which might help us predict the shape of an agrarian society?)
I agree with Branscomb to the extent that for anything to move, anything to flow, it must be driven. This is the reason why in my statement of the constructal law I used the word “imposed.” That word imposed means driven, dictated, pushed, pulled.
So the flow entails power that is being spent on making the flow happen. The power, again with the constructal law, I’ve shown that it comes from the design called climate. The Earth is a heat engine that produces all the power that is then dissipated in order to drive all the flows from the water in the river basin to the food from my hand to my mouth.
(I don’t know if Bejan would agree that making a distinction between fossil fuels and the energy from the climate is important.)
Don Stewart
Living on an island, I began to get a bit concerned, but we’re more fortunate. Our electric power comes from the mainland via undersea cables. This might not be very impressive for a wee island, but we are a “bridge” in the cables that then go on to supply Vancouver Island, with some 300,000 inhabitants and the provincial capital, Victoria. So I suspect they will go to great lengths to keep the lights on here!
Another factor is that our electricity comes from hydropower. (In fact, Canadians in general refer to electricity simply as “hydro.”)
Yes, I am well aware that the guys who were trimming vegetation† from around the lines today use diesel, but at least the fossil fuel consumed in maintenance is a tiny fraction of what islands use when they generate electricity from diesel. Again, barring having no diesel whatsoever, I suspect The Powers That Be will go to great lengths to leverage a small amount of diesel into a huge amount of hydropower.
†A big truck full of free wood chips is coming soon! (Well, I bribed the crew boss with farm products in exchange.)
There are definitely different situations for different islands. Being on the electric grid with lots of hydro power is a good situation.
Yeah, we are coming to live with you Jan.
You know where to find me! Better make it soon, though. I see a slow, steady, “boiling frog” decline in progress. If you ain’t where you wanna be, it’s only going to be more and more difficult to get there…
We need two sorts of people: 1) people with skills and strong backs, and 2) people with money.
The two seldom happen together, and we get a lot of people show up who have zero skills and zero money… 🙁
Oh, I forgot to mention, in addition to one (or both) of those, we need people who get along well, who are willing to compromise and work with others. THAT seems to REALLY be mutually exclusive with #1 or #2! Generally, people arrive and want to start driving the bus! Well, there’s a lot of people on the bus already, and they mostly like the way it’s being driven.
1) people with skills and strong backs
More frustrating to me is that young people are not learning applicable skills. I know some very intelligent beautiful young people. What are there interests. art. musical instruments. writing. Nor is there any interest in hard physical labor. Nothing will create a exit quicker than bringing a pick and shovel into the room.
And you have just summarized why we are where we are… fossil fuel powered BAU offered a way out of back-breaking labour….
And of course our DNA readily accepted it… as expected
There’s a reason why these were invented …. it would seem we have company in not liking harsh work:
http://s143.photobucket.com/user/rhettswhips/media/IMG_2616.jpg.html
Millennials afraid of hard work, sounds like you are talking about my 24 year old son. Good thing he’s smart, now if he can just finish college. I can get him to do physical work at home but it’s accompanied with a lot of whining.
It’s easy to generalize. I think some of this is generational bias: at some point, we move from playing on the neighbour’s law to shouting, “You kids get off my lawn!”
I see as much variety now as I did when young. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get off the farm and head for the big city lights! But I’ve come to appreciate my rural roots.
Part of human development is to pursue independence as a young adult. This often means travel, dabbling in the arts, etc. But I’d rather have a thirty-something who has gotten all that “out of their system” than someone who was still longing for (or stuck in) that life-style.
We meet a lot of young people who are hard-working and motivated and willing to get dirty. What I perceive lacking is a sense of commitment: most young people don’t see flitting about as a luxury of the zeitgeist, but rather as a form of “freedom” that they fail to see is directly resulting from being energy-fat.
Or they continue their dream of independence, seeing a communal situation as a mere stepping stone to their own “five acres and a mule.” That is perhaps an artifact of the youthful perception of immortality: it’s hard to think about how you’ll survive without pension when you’re twenty-something.
There are immediate benefits to collaborative agriculture that we remind them of. Some have (or want to have) children; who’s gonna watch those kids while you’re toiling in the field? Neil Donald Walsch (Conversations With God) says grandparents, rather than parents, should raise children — but today’s grandparents are in Bermuda, living it up on their 401(k) plans. So these nouveau-farmer kids need childcare from those who have some trouble spending fourteen hours a day with a hoe.
Perhaps all these things will change soon, as physics force us back to a simpler time.
Fast Eddy and Others
Regarding the supposed high price of food from small farms, and various related topics. I wrote a lot about this several years ago, but perhaps now is a good time to re-examine the issues.
First, we should pay attention to the conversation between Nomi Prins and Chris Martenson, which unfortunately is part of his premium content. At any rate, at one point Chris asks Nomi ‘what would happen if the ECB simply bought the Greek bonds and then wrote them off?’ And the answer is, ‘Nothing’. It cost nothing to create the ‘money’ which was loaned, and it will cost nothing to the ECB to write them off. The history is that some big banks created money out of thin air and loaned it to Greece in the anticipation of not only getting the money back, but also getting interest and possibly management fees of various kinds. The banks have already spent the management fees they got, and they dumped the bonds and interest obligations on the taxpayers of the EU countries. Now, it is apparent to everyone that the EU taxpayers will never get paid. So if it is the ECB which never gets paid, so what? Nothing has changed except that the chairs have been rearranged. Nobody worked hard to make the money which was initially loaned, and nobody will be put out of work if the ECB buries them at sea. The real damage is done when the EU countries and the IMF and the ECB try to force the Greek people to come up with money they don’t have.
What that tells us is that money is a poor measure of fundamentals. It is more like a mirage than anything else. So we need to look elsewhere when we try to evaluate a human food system.
One very good place to start is with energy, and particularly we want to pay attention to renewable energy vs. non-renewable energy. In the renewable energy sector, we want to pay close attention to how much human work is required to manage the renewable energy so that it produces usable work. We also want to pay close attention to externalities. We want the food system to encourage a wide diversity of biological life, build fertile soil, store water and sequester carbon, look beautiful, etc.
Looking at energy first, I long ago came to the conclusion that gardening is the main key to energy sustainability. Will Bonsall is my current poster child. He explains how his property produces plenty of energy for his families’ consumption, including things like cooking and washing clothing and heating. Will consumes what he grows, and gives some away. He does not sell any appreciable amount of what he grows. Thus, he is unlike Joel Salatin who sells through trucks which deliver directly to consumers, and market gardeners who sell at farmer’s markets, and wholesale gardeners who sell to restaurants and grocery stores. My experience is that once you start selling to others, the transportation and storage expenses quickly add up. And restaurants and grocery stores themselves are energy hogs.
Will cooks with wood from his own property. The people of Edo cooked with scavenged wood from the forests, but they were not allowed to cut down trees. Not coincidentally, the people of Edo continually innovated with more efficient cooking methods. Both Will and the people of Edo used food preservation methods which are not energy hogs. Lately, Will has gotten some electricity and now has a refrigerator. I don’t begrudge him that so long as he remembers how to do things without electricity.
What about tradespeople such as blacksmiths and cobblers? In Edo, they were restricted by law to a tiny part of the city. Consequently, they had no room for gardening. (The Samurai did garden extensively…the garden was a valuable part of their household budget.) The tradespeople in Edo mostly bought food already prepared from stalls. This is the most energy and raw material efficient way to prepare food if the population is dense. In the US, I would expect suburbs to be a mix of kitchen gardens (replacing lawns) and perhaps some food stalls in town centers. I would expect cities to be dominated by food stalls.
Gardening can be quite energy and resource efficient, IF it is done skillfully. We know that not a lot of purchased inputs are necessary. Will Bonsall has lived without purchased inputs for decades. Elaine Ingham explains how farmers and gardeners can solve their nutrient and mineral problems by husbanding microbes, which is analogous to ‘growing health’ by paying attention to the gut microbes.
There are thousands of gardening books published every year. But if people are interested in a frugal way to garden, I recommend these as a place to start:
David Kennedy…Eat Your Greens, for the kitchen gardener
Will Bonsall…Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, for those with acreage.
Don Stewart
I agree with Don the European Central Bank can buy all the PIIGS bonds and place them in a small box stored at the back of the presidents desk. Zero real costs.
This solves only half the problems. The PIIGS need to consume 50% less and the Germans need to maintain full employment with 70% fewer exports to their PIIGS customers. You can not fill a 10 pound sack with 5 pounds of sugar. It will take a 50% hair cut (of income) for pensioners and employees which will in turn drive the economy down.
What can they do? Exterminate Libya and steal its oil. Exterminate KSA and steal its oil. Too ate to exterminate Iran it has Chinese and Russian friends..
So would this mean everyone could afford to buy non-GMO organic produce at Whole Foods?
Fast Eddy
Whole Foods is an energy inefficient way to get food to consumers. I do not see how it, and others like it, can survive a serious crash in energy availability. Kitchen gardens are the energy efficient way to put food on the table. In dense cities, food stalls are the energy efficient way…but very dispersed across all the neighborhoods…not big box stores.
Don Stewart
Strangely enough this is exactly how Manhattan works with regard to food.
I read on the book “how civilizations choose to collapse” of what I think is an example of gardening in wich missmaintaining a forest caused Montana’s worst bush fires after decades of controling them succesfully (I have never been to Montana by the way). What happened is that people disrrupted the natural burning cycles of the forest caused by lightning in their attempt to prevent them and make the forest look burstling with plants for possible wealthy real state buyers and also to prtoect existing farms and properties, later it was determined that forest should be maintained to reestablish the balance or let it burn, while maintining the forest by hand was economically impossible a good leason was taught to some people changing their perspectives on how our interaction with forests should be. Gardening in a forest would be a milestone while preserving it’s natural balance, also understanding how to react in the presence of plagues without resorting to the use of pesticides for instance and knowing when is a time to move on and leave it alone for some time.
urbangdl
In Edo, there were professional foresters who ‘knew every tree by name’, and controlled what could be harvested and what would be planted and so forth. Japan is not subject to the forest fires that Montana is naturally subject, but the way the forests in Edo were managed had a great deal to do with the successful regeneration of the forests, while also providing firewood and building materials.
Don Stewart
I think this story is from the Whole Earth Catalog. An entomologist was dinning in an Oxford College dinning hall. He noticed the massive oak rafters. He decided to go see what bugs they had. He found they were infested and unsound. The college was sad that it would loose the beautiful but replaceable oak rafters. Just on a chance they went to ask the university forester if there were any possible replacements. The forester responded “We were wondering when you would come and ask. The replacements were planted 500 years ago when the dinning hall was built. They are ready.”
make that dining
Ed
Good tale. Sadly, no-one has ever been that far-sighted, at least in Britain (although I can make a book that would last 4 to 500 years at least…..)
I think the cycle was something like this:
Pre-Modern Age: large-scale deforestation to get wood for building houses, ships, forges and domestic heat leading to shortages by 16th century that were one of the main impulses behind the colonisation of North America – abundant timber, cheaper life for all, in theory.
Late 17th-early 18th centuries: Britain grew rich with trade and empire, and the wealthy wanted to spend spend spend – luxuries in town, huge new country houses on their estates full of marble, art, silks, etc. They also, for the above reasons, got very heavily into debt: these debts were paid and money raised for other projects by the large-scale felling of the old forests- timber values were extremely high by then – where their ancestors had hunted deer. That is when the truly ancient trees, that had been carefully preserved by the medieval owners, finally went in most places.
Short-termism all the way: as it was so it is and ever shall be Amen.
As I write, the local government here is approving a road plan (undoubtedly to be followed by housing) which will eliminate some of the best well-drained farmland here, and further contribute to the pollution sickness already evident in the old woods. Senseless, except if you are trying to keep the BAU wheels spinning: pursuit of spurious growth without fore-sight.
The development that they’re after should go over those sprawling malls nearby–live work, intensive building activity–in the CITY. Who else opposes this? It might be fun to throw a fire bomb at it (figuratively speaking), then duck and run for cover.
“Pre-Modern Age: large-scale deforestation to get wood for building houses, ships, forges and domestic heat leading to shortages by 16th century that were one of the main impulses behind the colonisation of North America – abundant timber, cheaper life for all, in theory.”
What was driving this pop[ulation spike and deforestation?
Human DNA — the built-in drive that urges us to survive and procreate.
The only difference between us and other animals is that we are able to use our big brains to invent ways to overcome the natural die-backs that occur to cull herds of other large animals so that they don’t overshoot and extinct themselves.
“What was driving this population spike and deforestation?”
Warmer weather. The last Ice Age was ~20,000 years ago, so humans have been pretty much multiplying and expanding as the ice melted and the temperatures rose. A set back here and there for Europe – a volcano causing a cold few years here and there, the occasional epidemic wiping out up to half the population. All long, growing, inventing, adapting, desiring to consume more energy and enjoy ever wider ranges of goods and services.
quite interesting, didn’t know about it. Maybe that regeneration concept didn’t apply to fisheremen and whale hunting.
“Maybe that regeneration concept didn’t apply to fisheremen and whale hunting.”
17th century Japanese probably did not deplete the fish and whales. Looks like around 1850 that the world whale populations started to really dive.
Thanks, Matthew. I was looking for that kind of energy-related explanation.
Salatin’s model is also quite dependent on continuos influx of external energy in the form of composting/bedding material (in tonnage!) he is sourcing outside the farm(s). To be fair he acknowledges the fact itself, but on the other hand mostly – exclusively talks about the closed-loop system he created by mutli species pasture and forest management..
worldofhanuman
I applaud anyone who is doing anything constructive, and Joel has done many constructive things.
But if we are looking seriously at a world with very little in the way of fossil fuels, I don’t think Joel’s current practice is the answer. What he has is more the answer to ‘surviving in the current system while doing many good things’.
Don Stewart
“Salatin’s model is also quite dependent on continuos influx of external energy ”
If you are exporting soil nutrients by selling food to others, you will need to import something to compensate, or else deplete your soil. It will just be much more labour intensive, hauling in material from outside. I think if there is any semblance of order post-BAU, that most people will produce the low value stuff themselves – lettuce, etc, and farms will be for higher value stuff – cheese, steaks, wines, etc.
Isn’t part of the problem that Greece needs more debt? Just forgiving the debt doesn’t fix the situation. They need more and more and more, because the situation is as if they are in a leaky boat. They don’t stay afloat without a constant supply of new debt.
The previous debt may have been spent, and thus was part of what kept oil prices up in the past. If no new debt is forthcoming, Greece’s share of oil demand will be missing, and this will help depress oil prices. There are others in similar shape to Greece (perhaps not quite at bad). But if Greece is bailed out, they will expect to be bailed out as well.
But Greece’s debt does not go away — is it not transferred onto the taxpayers of the countries offering the forgiveness?
Which will allow the Greeks to start running up more debt keeping the hamster running…
That worked post 2008 when Greece got a haircut… but of course they just keep running back up against the wall — even if they get something done now they’ll be back for more in a few years….
In the meantime these other countries that are absorbing Greek debt are running into their own problems — France is in a world of hurt… and they’ll be asking for a haircut soon enough
Gail
Does Greece need more debt?
From my perspective, absolutely not. Greece needs to shrink to what it can afford to spend. If that means it becomes simply a tourist destination, then so be it. Nobody expects Bimini to manufacture lots of stuff and have an expensive government and fund retirement programs.
Under that scenario, we might expect the following:
*Promises to pay are all simply voided
*The government essentially goes out of business, except for a police force which is funded by a tax on tourism
*Water, electricity, etc. are turned over to the tourism companies. The employees essentiality live in company towns, like those who work on the tourist boats on the Yangtze.
*Whatever the governments of Germany and others were expecting to get from Greece will have to be written off. Perhaps a few government officials will swing from lampposts, because taking on those notes from the banks was simply stupid. This will just add to the unfunded liabilities.
*Emigration for many
What I am trying to describe is thermodynamic reality. Fancy maneuvers with money can conceal a situation for a little while, and perhaps pull consumption forward, but money does not create any wealth when the thermodynamic surplus is simply not there. Think about the difference in BW Hill’s graphs between the affordable price and the cost of production. When the affordable price falls below the cost of production, there is no thermodynamic surplus to be spent. No amount of financial shenanigans can change that. No amount of hand-wringing and saying ‘but we really need it’ is going to do any good.
The only ameliorative action is to radically reduce the thermodynamic cost of operating Greece. (Notice I didn’t say ‘solution’.)
Don Stewart
Don, I agree with you there is no solution. It drives me nuts to listen to the talking heads about solutions.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
Somebody just asked me for an explanation of how BW Hill’s model treats oil recovery costs. This is from a post at Ron Patterson’s site. It shows some of the issues involved in getting the last drops out of the reservoir, and dealing with heavy oil. I also recommend clicking through to get the download from the solar company…the glass house surrounding the solar panels is interesting.
Don Stewart
Anyway, just today an update on GlassPoint Solar
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/GlassPoint-is-Building-the-Worlds-Largest-Solar-Project-in-an-Omani-Oilfie
” Concentrated solar power is alive and well, but instead of producing electricity, it’s being used for the production of steam at gigawatt scale to raise heavy oil from depleted wells.
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the largest producer of oil and gas in Oman, and VC-funded GlassPoint just announced a $600 million deal for the largest solar plant on the planet. The 1,021-megawatt “Miraah” project is a turnkey system that will be owned and operated by PDO, generating 6,000 tons of steam per day to coax viscous oil from Oman’s Amal oil field.”
http://www.glasspoint.com
Their presentation on the challenges of deserts, lots of nice pictures, recommended to all:
http://www.glasspoint.com/download/6236/
More details on building their pilot plant in Oman:
http://www.glasspoint.com/download/3375/
They say that 14% of all natural gas used in California is for steam injection EOR.
http://www.glasspoint.com/markets/california/
20% of gas in Oman is used for EOR, and Kuwait has to import LNG for EOR !!!
For heavy oil, they say 18-35% of a produced barrel’s energy is required for thermal EOR.
Yikes, EROEI of 5:1 to 3:1.
Great for Canadian tar sand washing, for urban greenhouses, greenhouses in general, district heating, etc…
Not to mention Venezuelan heavy oil production.
Harvesting arctic methane by heating a whole block of permafrost.
Don, thanks for the link.
So, it’s apparent the infamous “can kicking” clan won again, as predicted, hah.
I guess yet another gloomy day for early/near term peakers.
This preassurized and robotic cleaned glasshouse concept could be obviously applied to most of the ME + southern Russia/CIS, other parts of Asia, not sure about solar insolation/cloud coverage in northern Venezuela, ..
I figure at the minimum this could prolong the “waiting for the worst of PE/PO Godot” about 2-4decades. However, we should not forget that this approach makes the previously needed natgas suddenly available for other “frivolous” consumption elsewhere (e.g. natgas powered transportation, cogen heating/electricity, ..). So, in overall effect it will just help kick the can for a while, making the final peak that much more abrupt and destructive..
Also Mexico, US south west.
No cut on carbon emissions then…
GlassPoints idea can be applied to PV. The PV can be rolled out on the ground directly with not need of support structures and no need of cover glass. Just a bit of sand stabilization from spray to prepare the site.
GlassPoint comes up with this company, which looks like glass greenhouses and glass mirrors:
http://www.glasspoint.com/technology/
They fill the first several Google search results. Are you thinking of a different company?
Glasspoint describes its product as one for the oil and gas industry, to save them from having to burn natural gas for fuel for enhanced oil recovery. Intermittency is not an issue, since natural gas can be used if the sun is not available. This use doesn’t even need subsidies (assuming that the price of oil is high enough to cover its cost–I could be wrong on this one, at current prices). If the price is high enough to support its cost (without subsidies), it is a sign that it is worthwhile, in energy terms.
I think we need a new metric the “decline index”. It would be the ration of current per capita energy consumption to 2005 per capita energy consumption for a given nation.
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
Somebody challenged me to name some information and sensing companies. Here is a story which illustrates the way sensing and information and communications are changing markets:
http://fortune.com/2015/07/10/automakers-data-business/
Don Stewart
Very Interesting. Thanks for sharing
Dear Gail,
I am very relieved that you acknowledge that money is just a meter of energy. If we bear that in mind it would maybe also be possible to find the net energy (oil) available to the world. We know the development of oil extraction over years. But it only shows the gross value.
In order to find the net value you have to deduct the prices over years from the gross value.
Will such curve already have reached its peak? I find that extremely important to know. It is not the sheer volume that matters – but what is left for consumption!
I very much hope that you can make this diagram too, Gail.
We have a lot of different kinds of energy that keep our whole system working–human energy, some animal energy (oxen used for plowing in some parts of the world), photosynthesis energy (of which we capture some for food and fuels), fossil fuel energy, nuclear electric, hydroelectric, etc. Value of this energy exists because it is part of our current integrated system. It changes over time. Part of oil’s value comes from the pharmaceutical products it makes; part of its value comes from the distance it makes cars and trucks run; part of its value comes from the fact that it lubricates engines of various sorts; and so on. As cars become more fuel efficient, there is greater value in a gallon of gasoline.
We don’t really know this gross value.
What we do know is what people pay for oil, and until recently, this was rising. It generally was high enough to cover its costs. Right now, it is not high enough to cover its costs. It looks like we are reaching a point where the money value that can be collected for the oil is below its extraction cost.
There is a whole lot of “stuff” written about EROEI. It compares the (quantity of energy generated from oil) to the (quantity of fossil fuel energy of various types) used in extracting this oil, “at the wellhead”. This energy is primarily coal and natural gas, both of which are a lot cheaper than oil, and calls the resulting difference “net energy”. I don’t agree that it is a meaningful amount, at least the way it is calculated.
So the answer to your question is “No,” I don’t think you are asking the right question.
Published on 8 Jul 2015
Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. is an authority in bridging science and spirit and a leading voice in new biology. A cell biologist by training, he taught at the Univ. of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine, and later performed studies at Stanford Univ. He discussed his belief that if we use the 50 trillion cells that live harmoniously in every healthy human body as a model, we can create a new “super organism” called humanity that can heal our planet, as well as how cellular studies point to such concepts as immortality, spirituality, and mind over genes
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/science-can-learn-wiring-monkey-brains-together/
They have discovered that more than one monkey brain can solve things one cannot.
Stilgar
I can contribute a half. Wire me up!
Did he get that PHD from the University of Somalia?
Are you arguing with one of your alter egos? Or is the Kumbaya Kid just trolling you?
“Or is the Kumbaya Kid just trolling you?”
I thought it was you. 🙂
More American optimistic BS.
I hate American optimists. They are destroying the world. It was they that spread industrial agriculture throughout the world leading to rapid population growth, and it is they that do not accept the concept of limits.
To infinity and beyond! My rear end.
But without American optimism civilization cannot advance.
This is an example of why the MSM resembles soggy lettuce…
This is fine stuff — chock full of sarcasm and bluster…. yet deadly accurate…
By now it is clear to everyone, even the most hardened neoliberals, that what is going on in China is nothing short of the complete collapse of a centrally-planned market into sheer chaos, a bubble which while punctuated by the occasional dead cat bounce, is now finished and it is only a matter of time before all the “nouveau riche” farmers and grandparents see all their paper profits wiped out and hopefully go silently into that good night without starting mass riots or a revolution.
Since by some counts there are anywhere between 20 and 40 million of them, it could be a close call, one which the Politburo would dread to see to its fruition and as such the Chinese government together with the People’s Bank of China have engaged in the most desperate and unprecedented series of market bailouts, one which puts good ‘ole plain vanilla QE in the “quaint” category.
But most curiously, it wasn’t until China literally threatened short (or any other for that matter) sellers with arrest last night, that the market finally staged a furious rebound.
Will that rebound hold, or like every other dead cat bounce in history, fade quickly if not quietly into memory, we shall see over the next several days.
In the meantime, for those curious what it looks like when a centrally-planned market devolves into complete chaotic hell despite the relentless intervention of the local authorities and central planners, look no further than the chart below…
And while it may seem that China has literally thrown the kitchen sink at its “maliciously” crashing stock market (odd how there were no complaints about malicious buying on the way up…), the reality is that China still has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, starting with a plain vanilla rate cut, proceeding to expanded stock buybacks, a complete short-selling bank, and finally culminating with that inevitably Hail Mary of every central bank: “outright share purchasing.”
The good news is that what China is doing should be a lesson to all other global markets, which to a lesser or greater extent, are all as manipulated, rigged and centrally-planned as China’s. Seen in this light, China is merely a harbinger of what is coming to a banana market near you…
More http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/chinas-annotated-collapse-centrally-planned-market-hell
And it will be coming a lot quicker than anyone thinks if China cannot hold this two day reversal… (however I suspect they can because they are very obviously willing to buy up the entire market — or close it down — in order to delay the collapse)
And yet we’ve been told repeatedly that China knows what they’re doing. That they are next in line to usurp the global financial hegemony from the West and lead us all into the promise land. They will also save us from fiat based currencies by backing the Yuan with gold and show us all the light and the way forward.
IMO, China learned and modeled it’s financial/banking and economic systems from the West. They know, no other way and that includes the Russians and everyone else within the BRICS. If pollution, resource depletion and lack of clean drinkable water doesn’t bring China down, then this massive self created toxic bubble with 1.4 billion pissed off citizens could just do the trick.
China is good at copying things. They are not so good at innovative thinking. This is all uncharted territory both for the Chinese and the rest of the world.
If it is only 40 million people in a country of ~1.6 billion, that seems like a pretty insignificant population. They have 40 million people living in caves – nice, dry potash caves that have been inhabited for thousands of years, and require no heating or cooling. I’m sure they can find some people to run them over with tanks if they try to riot.
“They have 40 million people living in caves – nice, dry potash caves that have been inhabited for thousands of years, and require no heating or cooling. ”
Thats fine. As long as they come up with their protection money to keep the grid up. Otherwise tanks it is.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/18/world/la-fg-china-caves-20120318
That is a really nice article about cave living. I had heard caves mentioned, but had no idea how extensive or fancy the caves were.
I stayed in a cave once… in cappadocia turkey … pretty cool things
http://www.turkeycappadociatour.com/images/201mdc.JPG
Whats the big deal? This nothing compared to what Japan has done. China has just joined the crowd of USA Europe and Japan in instituting plunge protection.
China has gone well beyond what Japan and the US are doing … they are threatening short sellers with criminal charges and they have stopped trading on over half the companies listed.
This is an excellent piece by Michael Pento which describes the tectonic problems in China and the rest of the world going forward.
http://kingworldnews.com/as-global-asset-bubbles-implode-synthetic-economies-to-enter-monstrous-worldwide-depression/
Thanks Rodster. Perversity in the extreme. I liked this especially:
“The Chinese are communists masquerading as capitalists. They have no idea what a free market is; instead they have layered an artificial equity bubble on top of a manufactured real estate bubble. Now they are busily trying to command both bubbles to magically and perpetually float.”
“These Potemkin central banks will be able to erect only hollow economies built with counterfeit money. So you must employ a strategy that will profit from the inevitable fate of these economies, which is intractable inflation and a protracted depression … at least until governments embrace free markets again.”
China is facing their 1929 moment — and instead of letting it happen they throw gasoline in the fire ….
Now why would they do that?
Why would the US be doing something similar? And Japan and most other countries?
The author is not getting it — it is not about getting back to free markets …. it is about fending off the Holocaust….
There are no ways to play this … no investment strategies to hedge the collapse…
Perhaps I should register an investment fund — we can call it the Shovel Fund…. we’ll float 500,000 shares at $100 each … and we’ll use that money to place massive orders at this factory in China http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/high-quality-shovel-heads-factory-in_60276276369.html?spm=a2700.7724857.35.1.gj1S66 and store them in containers out back… and these will be the new currency in the post collapse world…. and we will be the new PTB!
“Perhaps I should register an investment fund — we can call it the Shovel Fund…. we’ll float 500,000 shares at $100 each … and we’ll use that money to place massive orders at this factory in China http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/high-quality-shovel-heads-factory-in_60276276369.html?spm=a2700.7724857.35.1.gj1S66 and store them in containers out back… and these will be the new currency in the post collapse world…. and we will be the new PTB!”
Thats a great idea! But you better contribute to some political funds for when its discovered there are only four shovel heads and some burger king whopper wrappers in the containers.
Pento = niche market doomster selling doomster wall street paper. Now I like what the guy has to say he seems genuine and bright but he is hawking wall street doomster paper. Ever seen a mirror in a mirror? Thats what the KWN interviews are like. Go back through the endless interviews crisis no crisis they are all the same. They are entertaining , thought provoking but there is always, always a agenda. Is Pento making shovels out of car bumpers? No he is selling his fund. Just like hes sold his fund with his doomster spiel for the last ten years month after month after month interview after interview. Soon miraculously Greece will be solved (53rd time). China problems will not be spoke of. Some zippy catchphrase will be invented and the pundits will be roaring buy buy buy as they sell sell sell.
Pentos portrayal of China as unsophisticated is another sales ploy playing to western superiority complexes. China plays for keeps. The technology they have gotten out of the deal is real. Real technology and worlds foremost manufacturer in trade for walmart junk. Who is unsophisticated?
Yes China has bit on the bankster bait. Whether they swallow it remains to be seen.
I’ve always viewed China as the Eastern version of the Global Banking Ponzi Scheme. When you create your wealth by out doing the other crooks which includes $30 trillion worth of liquidity, and larger shadow banking system than the West, ghost cities and factories. That doesn’t project those guys are on the up and up.
” Despite the recent carnage, Shanghai shares are trading at 57 times earnings. That’s down from the June price-to-earnings ratio of over 100, but it’s still three times higher than the price-earnings ratio of the S&P 500.”
That pretty much explains the problem.
Fast Eddy
I agree about the wars, they were often constant, but they are made by culture as much as by necessity, and human nature is very complex.
Also, don’t forget, ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good’: my family were at war constantly from at least the 11th century, as professional soldiers (they had little land) – speciality castle governors and border defence – and it served them very well as a living for all that time, although the cost in lives was very high, as a profession it regularly harvested the males. War, killing, ‘security’ is a trade as we can see all too well today, the US MIC has grown fat on it.
What I do agree with is that we may well be facing a unprecedented, global disaster in which case, all bets based on reasoning from history and human nature, rather than physics, are off.
The destruction of easy-access natural resources and obvious ecosystem collapse, in my opinion, probably changes everything this time. Only here and there will humans survive, and who can say what cultures they will develop?
However, even having said that, I just don’t think it is helpful to go into the night full of self-hatred as human beings, or with fear.
I don’t think we need to self-hate any more than a dog should hate a dog that ripped his ear off in a battle over a bone…
We are only doing what we were programmed to do — survive….
Taking the dog analogy further — if you dumped a truck full of 5000 bones into a cage that held two hungry dogs … I don’t think there would be any fighting….. until they got down to the last bone….
China…Peal Oil Year 2015
Gail will find this interesting, as well, as everyone with China in the news
http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/china-peak-oil-2015-is-the-year/
China’s crude oil output has stagnated for the past two years despite intense drilling activity on land and offshore. In late 2014, CNPC essentially threw in the towel on its workhorse field, Daqing, announcing that it would allow the field to essentially enter a phase of managed decline over the next five years. Under this new approach, the field’s oil production will fall from 800,000 barrels per day (kbd) in 2014 to 640 kbd by 2020: a 20 percent decrease. To highlight the importance of PetroChina’s decision, consider that Daqing currently accounts for approximately one in every five barrels of oil currently pumped in China – on par with the role Alaska’s massive Prudhoe Bay field has played in U.S. oil production.
I can believe that 2015 will be peak year for the United States, Russia, and China. With oil prices down, this reduces the incentive to invest in new production. If prices were $150 per barrel, I expect that production would continue to rise.
There is a city called Daqing which was started to house all of the people working in Daqing oil field. (Over 1 million people). I understand property values are already quite low in Daqing. Who is going to move in, if the main business of the city is falling in size? It actually has been in decline a long time, but it sounds like the new decline will be worse.
China Stock Sellers Frozen Out of 71% of Market
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/china-trade-halts-hit-2-2-trillion-as-state-intervention-fails
The market is up big time http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/10/us-china-markets-idUSKCN0PK09B20150710
To be expected if you ban selling – threaten short sellers with jail — and give cash to funds on the condition they buy and hold equities.
What I am wondering is — how can the market be up ONLY 5% with all of this?
Oh – and how does the PBOC ever roll back any of this without an implosion?
Or can they just maintain these policies forever with consequences?
Amazing. Relaxing margin and collateral rules to boost the market. Fix it today, but make it several times worse in the near future. So much for the Chinese being brilliant strategists, playing Go while America plays Checkers. They aren’t even looking two moves ahead.
The thing is … they are running out of moves… the end of cheap oil will check mate them…
This is getting crazy. I just can’t help but feel economic disaster isn’t very far off. As in by the end of this year. October seems like as good time as any.
Are we frogs slowly boiling?
If someone 20 years ago said that the second biggest economy on the planet was shutting down most of its market — threatening shorts with jail — and handing billions to funds to buy and hold stocks to prop the market up….
If they told you the biggest market was 100% reliant on money printing to prop the market up via zero interest loans and buy-backs….
What would the reaction have been?
Wonder what the Chinese government is so afraid of? Stocks rise and fall all the time. Sometimes they rise and fall dramatically. Why is this fall so different than any other fall in the market? Why such drastic unprecedented measures to buoy as stock market? Do the people in positions of power have some data (that others do not have) that indicate a crashing market will threaten (possibly end) the Chinese government and bankrupt those in power? Apparently so! Perhaps the NYSE shutdown was no computer glitch either. Things are unraveling before our eyes.
Good point Greg — they must be absolutely terrified of something to be taking these draconian measures to prevent the crash.
It appears that they will do anything to stop it — I can imagine them using printed cash to buy the entire market — or stopping all trading…. the question I have is if they took these measures what would be the consequences?
Surely one cannot shut down the stock market of an entire major economy for long without dire results?
“Do the people in positions of power have some data (that others do not have) that indicate a crashing market will threaten (possibly end) the Chinese government and bankrupt those in power?”
Didn’t Hank Paulson have a similar fear back in 2008 that if the US Govt and the Federal Reserve had not stepped in to stop the Lehman Brothers collapse that it would have triggered a “global economic collapse” and we would have had martial law in the US with tanks roaming the streets?
Doesn’t sound good.
One thing I’m not quite sure about – In Europe, don’t all countries have the equivalent of a 100% dependence on oil imports – i.e. every barrel has to be bought. It doesn’t matter whether a country such a Germany produces x barrels of oil, every barrel still has to be bought by the power companies, citizens, etc..
Whether these barrels are bought from Saudi or bought from Germany’s own indigenous oil company doesn’t matter. Which leads to the question; why does import dependency matter at all?
Patrick,
the main difference I see is that importing countries must tax the consumption, while producers get their money from exported oil. When internationally traded volumes decrease, both sides are in trouble, tax-wise.
I think that it is cost of oil that is the big issue–it is not the importing per se. If it is possible to import oil very cheaply, then the goods that can be made from the oil can be sold at a big enough profit that there is no problem.
The are several reasons that an exporter is different from an importer. For one, an oil exporter gets wages for its workers by selling expensive oil. The spending of these workers helps offset the high priced nature of the oil. Also, taxes are an important part of the oil price. An exporter normally is able to earn a lot of tax revenue on exported oil. The exporter typically charges is own people a lower price for oil–one that has not been surcharged for high taxes. The IEA would describe this price as “subsidized.” Thus, the citizens of the exporting country don’t generally feel the high cost of oil products.
Gail
If you believe BW Hill’s curves, the ability of oil to subsidize anything else has been rapidly declining on a global basis since 2000. The only way an exporter can still subsidize anything with their oil is through political means. And political means will be a win/lose proposition. E.g., the Saudis win and Europe loses.
The strategy obviously has a ‘sell by’ date.
Don Stewart
I would agree that the world’s ability to subsidize anything has been rapidly declining since 2000.
Seems like as good a time as any to insert my periodic admonition that perhaps it’s not if we collapse, so much as how we collapse that matters. I think Gail has very admirably and completely made the point that some sort of western industrial societal collapse is indeed in the cards, to which all of our collective experiences are for the most part in congruence.
The most ominous and overriding question being of course, what does this mean to each of us and ours individually? How do we deal with this personally/locally and where do we go from here? And further, what does our “making it” or not imply about those who do or don’t? Are we “better?” Are they “less?” In what sense, if it was human conscious decision making that made the choice?
Personally, like most people I’m sure, I’m much less interested in how humanity survives our current predicament, than how me and mine might make out. That said, that line of thinking does seem to have led us here in the first place, doesn’t it?
Hmm…
Likewise — I am not overly interested in what the world might look like decades or centuries after the collapse — because I will not be around for that…
More focused on the near term situation i.e. what happens to me and my family when collapse comes. I am not optimistic.
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DENVER POST
Page 13A
IREA SUBMITS LOW-DEMAND CHARGE – Electricity
The Tariff Would Affect Customers Who Use Less
by Mark Jaffe
The board of Intermountain Rural Electric Assn., Colorado’s biggest electric cooperative, is proposing a new — and potentially groundbreaking — tariff to deal with the growth of rooftop solar in its service area. The board agreed Tuesday to present the plan, which involves adding a charge for systems that do not use IREA service very much, to its members. An earlier attempt to add a so-called demand charge met with protests from customers and was scrapped. Under the new proposal, a ratio of monthly use to peak demand would be calculated and any customer falling below about 10% would be charged $4 a kilowatt for peak demand, according to Patrick Mooney, the association’s general manager. The charge — which for now would affect only new customer hook-ups where a demand meter will be installed — would most affect low-electricity users, such as a weekend cabin or a home with a large solar installation. “It is really only affecting customers who, because of our local characteristics, are causing us to lose money,” Mooney said. John Farrell, director of energy programs at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, called the IREA approach “a new one.” “It’s clearly meant to target the ‘fixed costs’ issue with folks connected to the grid but who use very little electricity,” Farrell, who is an expert on solar energy, said in an e-mail. He said it is “more targeted than the typical fee.” The problem with the low-use customers is that IREA is not covering costs for maintaining the grid and the connections, Mooney said. IREA territory stretches from mountain communities such as Fairplay to towns on the Eastern Plains, such as Strasburg. It also includes the fast-growing south metro cities of Parker and Castle Rock. The initial IREA proposal had been a demand charge based on the highest 15-minute peak at $7 a kilowatt. “The new plan affects many fewer customers,” Mooney said. IREA calculated the charge would add $9.40 to a residential bill; some homeowners argued it could be 4 times as much. “We are just dipping a toe in the water to see if this works,” Mooney said. The plan is limited to new hookups because an extra meter has to be installed, and the association can’t install those meters for all 140,000 customers, Mooney said. “A demand charge is a powerful tool for load management, but only if it distinguishes between periods of peak energy use and ‘off-peak’ use,” Farrell said. “In other words, rather than just charging more for customers who use less energy, can we drive them to use less during peak periods.” San Mateo, Calif.-based SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, was critical of IREA’s initial demand-charge proposal. SolarCity spokesman Nate Waters said the company is reviewing the new plan. The proposal will be open to customer comment and a public hearing if customers request one, Mooney said. If adopted the charge would go into effect at the end of December.
Mining sites are now grist for a strange new brand of tourism: “Dark Tourism”
http://www.darktourism.net/v1/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_tourism
The issue of how to pay for the electric grid is an important one. Anyone who is connected to the grid should have to pay a fair share of grid costs–this is one of the things I was referring to in an earlier comment, about whether a business buying solar was making a wise investment.
Someone was telling me here in NZ that the power companies recently changed the deal for those off grid who were selling excess power generated by solar into the grid paying them far less.
So important to note — the utility companies can change the formula at any time….
“Anyone who is connected to the grid should have to pay a fair share of grid costs”
And as its stands anyone not connected to the grid pays their unfair share of the grid costs because the grid is civilization. Participation is mandatory.
It is hard for very many humans to live without civilization, however.
A funny letter in the Denver Post:
Page 21A – Letter To Editor
A SURCHARGE FOR USING LESS?
RE: “IREA submits low-demand charge: The tariff would affect customers who use less,” July 9 business news story
What a sweet deal for an electiric utility company: charging their customers for not using electricity. Unemployment would be 0% and company revenues would go through the roof if other businesses were to adopt a similar business model. Comcast could charge customers who don’t have cable, or for failing to watch “Duck Dynasty,” if it’s still on. Twitter could charge members for not tweeting or re-tweeting the latest wisdom from whichever Kardashian is trending, and Facebook could charge members for not “liking” often enough. The Denver Post could charge subscribers for not reading the longer versions of the columns on the denverpost.com/opinion webpage. The opportunities seem endless.
John DeBiase, Westminster
Dear Gail and Finite Worlders
This article lays out a story about why it is so hard to fill job openings:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/why-janet-lost-her-favorite-charts-show-jolting-disconnects
I just want to point out that it is consistent with the notion that I described a few weeks ago, where the job simply doesn’t pay enough to justify the high cost of the automobile transportation required to get to the job site. This relates to the gross inefficiency of the auto-centric economy and society (as quantified in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report), and the declining thermodynamic returns from a barrel of oil (as quantified by BW Hill). If we can’t do anything significant about the thermodynamic returns of producing, processing, and distributing oil, the only thing left is to try to reimagine and rebuild the economy and society. Whether that can be done successfully is up in the air.
Don Stewart
Good point Don, and one that often goes unappreciated by American east coast academic and political elites. Here in the American west especially, but in many other undeveloped parts of the world as well, commutes for meaningful employment are almost always long and expensive, even before considering the utter stupidity of living large in an environment so ill-suited to human habitation in the first place. Mass transit and other similar ideas are, likewise, always marginal contributors at best, even considering that they’re almost always government funded/subsidized in an era of universally shrinking government budgets.
But once again, the basic and inescapable ill is that the 7B of us thus enabled to live only by the luxuries attainable from a former surplus of cheap concentrated energy – the replacement for which is nowhere in sight – are now faced with a growing deficit. “Reimagining” our economy in that light may well be the only option left to us, but any such imagination must include the premise that it will support only a fraction of our current numbers, or it simply isn’t realistic.
Therefore, what those numbers might be, how we might get there, and most importantly, how we might retain whatever it is we consider to be “our humanity” in the process is, in my view, of the utmost importance.
But you’re definitely right, all of that is definitely up in the air at this point. Suffice it to say, given the choices we’ve made that have led us to this point, I’m not an optimist.
No country for old men indeed!
James
James
Agreed! I have previously remarked that neither my wife’s father nor my father ever drove a vehicle to work in their lives. If you look at The Wizard of Oz, the farm hands lived on the farm. The cowboys in the West lived in a bunkhouse. There were line shacks on fence lines. We have forgotten how to live that way.
Don Stewart
Alas, even my midwestern relatives still on the farm (in western Nebraska no less!) have grown fat off the government dole they decry every day and the remains of the Ogallala Aquifer they deplete freely. It will indeed be a “tough row to hoe” for both them and all of us on the way down.
And then, there’s those of us who live that way in order to make ends meet: we have to rent two rooms in our house to pay the mortgage in the winter.
Jan
When I worked on the farm, I was tying up peppers one day with the farmer. He got a call on his cell phone. He got very agitated.
What had happened was that he was letting a homeless man sleep in a former chicken coop in the back yard. The homeless man would go out early each morning to look for work, and return to the chicken coop around sundown and bed down for the night The man had lived in the town for a number of years before he lost his job and house, and there were no complaints about him and no arrest record. One of the neighbors saw him coming out of the coop one morning and called the cops. The cops told him to leave town.
It never ceases to amaze me how inhuman the comfortable can be.
Don Stewart
Unfortunately, in our case, it’s usually the other way ’round: several times now, we’ve called the cops to run off vagrants who were unwilling to either work or leave.
The rule around here is that everyone contributes what they can. It doesn’t have to be much. But if someone is unwilling to pay money or dig garden beds, they have to go.
And some of them really don’t understand that. One couple had taken up in a trailer that we use for storage. When I told them they had to work or leave, the woman stomped the ground and shouted, “Do you know who owns this land? DO YOU KNOW WHO OWNS THIS LAND!”
Taken aback, I thought she was going to get into a peculiarity of Commonwealth where the Queen owns everything, and our titles are merely permission to use, but she shouted, “THE GREAT SPIRIT OWN THIS LAND!”
“Well, does the Great Spirit own that stuff in that trailer?” I asked as I put a padlock on the door, “Because no one but the Great Spirit is gonna get it until you agree to leave.”
They finally left, with her screaming obscenities at me as they went down the road.
Thanks for sharing Don. I “feel ya!”
One of the overriding features on the new American “National Security State” is both its basic INsecurity and its paranoid suspicion of all fellow humans. Any sane society would have recognized this for the insanity it was long ago.
James
I respectfully differ.
For some 200,000 years, humans have been tribal and clannish. Outsiders were suspicious.
My thesis is that it has only been cheap energy that has made “friendliness” the norm, and we’ll see a return of insular separateness during decline.
As I pointed out in another posting, many people who come through here are only interested in what they can get. We’re still energy-fat enough that we can afford to be friendly to many, but I could imagine the world taking a turn the other way.
And for good reason! The tribe will eventually have to protect itself, and after the bullets are gone (which I think will happen fairly quickly), it will come down to being suspicious of strangers until they’ve proven their worth. (Very few people have been able to prove their worth here. In Daniel Quinn’s terms, most are “takers,” rather than “leavers.”)
My thesis is that it has only been cheap energy that has made “friendliness” the norm
I agree – oil means enough to go around in most places in the world – therefore we can afford to be friendly
Good stuff, Jan!
We are very good at being inhumane.
Don
Disgraceful story. Perhaps the root of the inhumanity lies in wishing to banish any evidence of a possible alternative future – homelessness and poverty – for themselves?
The old habit of aggression towards the poor is re-surfacing here in Britain, too, sponsored by the government; it is deeply disturbing.
Of course, it is the corollary of the ‘great recovery’ we are told to believe in: if there is A Recovery and you are poor or without work, it is your fault isn’t it?!
I’ve observed the very subtle corrupting influence of great wealth even on the characters of quite good-natured, decent friends (not towards me, but in their attitude to society as a whole.) I know one person who is becoming irrationally aggressive at even the sight of ordinary people in the street, their existence seems to upset him somehow. This is a new development and disturbing to observe.
It is truly a poison in its action on most natures: once I saw that, I lost all envy for good.
Why envy the sick at heart and the fearful (above all fear, of somehow losing it)?
“The tribe will eventually have to protect itself, and after the bullets are gone (which I think will happen fairly quickly),”
Executive order in the USA stopped the import of the high quality inexpensive Chines ammo. Not so in Canada. Four decades of shipping container after shipping container streaming into the ports.
When writing about such things, replace “ammo” or “bullets” with “food” and then assert the conclusion that we will never run out of food.
Those who hope to maintain control with force will have to use bullets every day. They won’t last long. All the conflicts in all the history of warfare have depended on a steady stream of new armaments.
Or, some semblance of order will prevail, so that the capability to produce arms is intact — but they won’t get used. You can’t have it both ways!
“When writing about such things, replace “ammo” or “bullets” with “food” and then assert the conclusion that we will never run out of food.
Those who hope to maintain control with force will have to use bullets every day. They won’t last long. All the conflicts in all the history of warfare have depended on a steady stream of new armaments.”
Take a equal amount of ammunition and food. Equal in any way volume, price whatever. Your argument is that these are identical in nature. Ammo has a shelf life of 100 to 150 years. Misfires of some of it and lowered energy rendering some auto-loaders single shots but 150 years. Of those equal quantities the food will obviously run out or go bad first. I expect once it is realized that there is not a source for more ammo (like everything) operators will be careful in its use. Ideas like suppressive fire will go away. If there is 100 rounds of ammo and someone is using it for defense or offense and the people it is being used upon are similarly armed, say ten rounds expended then someone is dead. The ammo doesn’t go away now it belongs to the victor. If the ammunition is being used against unarmed people the result is the same dead people except now its one dead person for each bullet.Your example of military force logistics in war expending ammo against each other is not applicable to a post collapse scenario. In a war scenario the ammunition must be used at very high rates in order to win. The side that stops using it at high rates loses. I don’t see that same dynamic post collapse. You are correct though if post collapse ammunition use is not conserved it is possible it could be consumed.
When food gets consumed there are no dead people.
When ammo gets used there are dead people.
Now I would consider this to put ammunition in a different category than food for many reasons but in terms of our discussion about ammunition prevalence the point is this. The ammunition will not be used up because as it is used up there are less people to use it up and consumption goes down not up. People die the ammunition is still there. If some form authoritarian street gang takes control and people are controlled through fear the ammo still doesn’t get used up.
There are only two outcomes. The ammo gets used and everyone is dead and the ammunition is still there or the ammunition doesn’t get used and its still there.
Now a lot of the billions of rounds of ammo that has been imported into Canada and sold for retail prices ranging from $100 to $250 per thousand rounds over the last 40 years has been consumed for recreational and training purposes. How much is stockpiled? My answer is a lot. Many multiples more of rounds of ammunition than people. It seems obvious to me that ammunition will be around as long as its shelf life. If half of the ammunition gets consumed then most everyone is dead. The other half of the ammunition is still there. If the ammunition doesn’t get used its still there. Either way the ammunition is there until the end of its shelf life.
“I expect once it is realized that there is not a source for more ammo”
Blackpowder is remarkably easy to make. There are probably a fair number of people with loaders. Casings can be reused – at what rate and how many times, I don’t know. Unless there is a massive loss of knowledge and specialization, or the radioactive doomsday scenario, I doubt there will be a human-populated world without guns any time soon.
“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”
Vladimir Lenin
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Mao Zedong
tinybubbles
You are not responding to my words, but someone else’s comments on something I had said.
Don Stewart
Happily, in my country (Portugal) as in the most of european countries, the access to fire guns is strictly controled, so the situation american people take for granted doesn’t apply here, where only the military and the police have autmatic guns. It’s true there is many hunters, but they shot with little toys like this
http://casaguimaraes.pt/img/c/8-category_default.jpg
So, we’ll have to deal “only” with rogues armed with knifes, forks or sticks.
Won’t you have to deal with the armed police and military post-collapse? I’d assume they’d have access to large stockpiles of ammunition
That might be tough if you only have knives, forks and sticks….
“Won’t you have to deal with the armed police and military post-collapse? I’d assume they’d have access to large stockpiles of ammunition”
I suppose so, too, particularly the army, but please don’t confound the mighty usa army with our toy army. In any case, I think you are probably right in your views, although the Big Mess can develop in many different ways, depending on local circunstances. And people armed with mere blades can wreck havock, as we saw in Rwanda…
By the same token Jan, everything after our “hunter-gatherer” stage has been considered overshoot from the ideal Daniel Quinn point of view. Not that that’s necessarily wrong.
And from Daniel Quinn’s POV, we are ALL takers of course, too.
Saying that human beings are necessarily and inevitably at one another’s throats without cheap fossil fuels is perhaps something of an exaggeration. It is like saying they will always exploit when given the opportunity and the power.
In resource-scarce societies of tribal warriors, suspicion necessarily rules and dark things happen. Pre-emptive killing (or flight) is in fact often the wisest course. Jared Diamond’s ‘World Before Yesterday’ has lots of good things on Stone-Age violence,clan-thinking and justice, also trade and treachery (and customary killing of the elderly and useless), a good quick read for non-anthropologists.
But culture always counts for much: in medieval Wales for instance – one can’t imagine any place more resource-scarce and grim – any stranger could present themselves and be entertained for 5 days. It was considered ill-mannered to ask their identity and reason for travelling, as that would indicate a lack of trust and hospitality. Medieval Wales was extremely violent too, constant little wars for prestige.
Cultural defintions of ‘human’ matter: if you believe only your clan is ‘human’, (and this is very common – other tribes are ‘insects’, ‘animals’, etc (thinking which re-emerged in Europe with the Nazisin respect of Jews and Slaves ) – then it is always correct to kill or run, as the stranger might think that way too!
If someone is recognised as human without being a clan member, and religious concepts are important here, and taboos on killing in certain circumstances, peaceful relations are theoretically possible whatever the resource level.
Xabier – I am listening to this http://www.audible.com/pd/History/The-History-of-the-Ancient-World-Audiobook/B00CYNMAIG
I will get through it but don’t recommend it because it is basically 26 hours of detailed descriptions of war after war after war after war….enslavement….and horrific acts of torture and other violence
So I disagree.
We have had to compete for very scarce resources and war is the natural outcome of that….
Fossil fuels have provided some respite from this…
When fossil fuels are no longer available post collapse — and we have infinitely more people than every before competing for far fewer resources than were available pre-industrial revolution….
Well…. those types of behaviour are going to be unleashed with a vengeance….
I was just reading yesterday, Molars Say Cooking is Almost 2 Million Years Old. Another article said that even if humans ate scavenged meat, they would have had to have cooked it to kill the germs in it. So cooking seems to have predated eating scavenged meat.
Once we had learned to use supplemental energy to gain an advantage over other animals, we started the path toward overshoot. It took us quite a while to get very far. But once we got to farming and to fossil fuels, we could do quite well.
Don
I recall reading somewhere that farm hands in England stopped living in with the farmer and his family sometime in the early 19th century, when the farmers got richer and wanted to start living in a finer style with only the domestic servant living in. So then all the farm hands were pushed out to rented cottages and rooms.
On the peasant farms of Europe, your brothers and sisters were the farm hands, never marrying. In our province in Spain, the independent peasants without a family farm lived in awful places, and even caves, the villages are far from pretty!
I believe that aristocrats stopped having their servants sleep in the same room as them sometime in the 17th century: before that they slept at the foot of the bed, and in the case of maids in the bed with the lady.
Individual beds for patients in hospitals came in very late, well into the 19th century. But hospitals were of course for the poor, anyone with money died at home as befitted their status.
Xabier
I read a history of the 5 story houses in Paris. Originally the upper floors housed the servants. But the invention of elevators made those upper floors more attractive to the owners. So most of the servants were kicked out. The ‘poor part of town’ was originally the 5th floor, spread all over Paris. Later, pieces of geography became ‘the poor part of town’.
Don Stewart
Dear Don
Yes, it was a very civilised way of living. In London for some time people have paid huge sums to live in the old stable blocks in the old better parts of town, where the carriages and so on were kept. Life never ceases to amuse. ….
The life before fossil fuels in my region looked like this around 1860:
the wooden houses with wooden fences, not regulated stream winding freely through the valley:
http://ender.mtak.hu/ender/kep/03/0310.jpg
http://ender.mtak.hu/ender/kep/03/0309.jpg
The source: http://ender.mtak.hu/ender/index_e1.html
The streams/rivers were the most important one-way transport routes of the main energy resource and construction material: the wood.
You didn’t ship coal far (except by boat) with that kind of infrastructure.
Nice images.
Unfortunately most pristine lands like those would be rendered useless through the use of industrial farming chemicals…
No going back
another site that confirms it, in this case taking China for example, although we know this forecast will never happen right?
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights18
Excellent article, thanks for the link. I like the last part which begs the question: “We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality?”
The answer is NO, it won’t happen because of the central banks running the economies and Govt’s around the world as well as the International Corporations. It eats into their business. You think MonSatan will allow a new economy that doesn’t rely on them? Guess again !
“The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality?”
And a little Koombaya at the end …
Paul, are you going to finally quit with the apocalyptic collapse mantra? Or, are you like the Black night (“it’s only a flesh wound”), and that no many how many times you’re proven wrong, you won’t admit it? LOL
Seriously, for a guy who gets “it”, you’ve got some hang up about how the end-game plays out. Once more, printing and inflation are the way out. Of course it’s not a solution in the sense of producing some kind of net aggregate benefit for the governed, but it does provide a pathway towards graduated no-feudalism.
Gail, the indebted country doesn’t devalue – the creditor does. In other words, the first stage was standard Keynes, where the CBs dutifully added sovereign debt as assets to their ledgers for bookkeeping purposes. Since it will never be re-paid and interest is of course held at -0- (actually negative in some case) as a result of NIRP, then it’s effectively printing money anyway.
However, the way China, Greece, ECB, Japan and the Fed will handle the next stage when even more inflation is required will be straight up money printing. Act II will be similar in many ways to how continentals were issued during the Revolutionary war, or green backs during the Civil war. Of course, since the CBs will need to keep the books in balance, some kind of goodwill be debited (in lieu of notes) as recognition of going concern value. You know, stuff like the institutional value of civilization, etc. LOL – shit, I could write the script for them.
The net-net is when inflation is truly underway, the PTB will need to impose wage/price controls, rationing, travel limitations and of course their old favorites, restrictions on speech & assembly. The tools are already in place with electronic payment systems, registration and GPS tracking/monitoring, so all it really takes is the event to precipitate the mandates.
Trust me, this stuff is actually quite easy if you understand history, psychology and the will to power.
BK9K, I am in your camp….hyperinflation….
“Trust me, this stuff is actually quite easy if you understand history, psychology and the will to power.”
That’s one of the main symptoms one looks for when diagnosing hubris.
Paul, one of these days you will finally cease and desist with the collapse porn. It’s inevitable that you’ll eventually grow out of it, primarily because it’s the only logical path of awareness. Since you’re a bright guy and can see the big picture, it’s merely a function of admitting you’re wrong and getting on with it, even it takes (yet another) name change.
We are going to have inflation no matter what. The alternative is for banks, which are leveraged somewhere north of infinity:1, to have their capital bases wiped from the merest dip in collateral values. You really think that’s gonna happen? Where would the MIC get the money to engage in another war? Where will the promotions come within the military if there isn’t another conflict?
This isn’t just about the banks; it’s about kings as well. Where did bankers go after getting booted from Spain in 1492? Amsterdam. And what happened next? Why, a miraculous increase in the amount of “money” in which to finance in a fleet to control Indonesia. (See how the money comes first in which to invest in military technology that then controls important physical resources?)
A little while later, who accompanies (actually, financed) the landing of William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution? And then of course practically overnight established the Bank of England? And what an investment that was, wasn’t it? A global empire that lasted 350+ years.
So you see, there’s all sorts of parties involved that reap the benefits. To believe these actors would collectively let chaos reign without first burning every possible bridge before capitulation is sheer juvenile nonsense.
The end path is clear: managed inflation (aka devaluation). And the only way to really torque the shit out the price mechanism in order to achieve their objective of reducing the debt overhang is through wage/price controls, rationing, etc. And the only way that works is through solidarity & unity of effort, which requires an existential threat (real or imagined) to whip the people into obedience.
In all ares of life, the one traditional, nay ancient, area is governance. These techniques haven’t changed in 10, 20, perhaps 50,000 years.
B9 — you continue to reference history for models of what is coming. Babylon – Rome etc…
If the Romans were confronted by thousands of these:
http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/spent-fuel-pond.jpg
And informed that they need to manage them for decades (with computers and pumps and other high tech gear) otherwise they would blow up releasing enormous amounts of invisible death for many decades wiping out all life on earth…
I wonder what they would say/do…
In terms of collapse — based on Gail’s comments I believe that we are in the same camp … the financial system will break … and chaos will follow ….
And that preparing for this is pretty much futile – no matter how rich and powerful you are you face the same outcome…. no matter how much food you grow or stockpile that will not be a hedge…
I have absolutely no doubt about this.
Your mistake is that you believe history is a guide — it is not.
This time is totally different — we have 7 billion people on this planet — who rely on oil and gas to be fed…. we have a complex interconnected global supply and banking system ….
This is all going to be wiped out.
There is no historical precedent for the Holocaust that is imminent.
Your normalcy bias is clouding your judgment.
There hasn’t been a crisis like this one before I agree, that is why looking into the history doesn’t show the answers, but maybe for the first time we are able to picture the whole situation as species, by looking to previous collapse in civilizations we have an even bigger picture. this isn’t calling for hope this is a fact, looking into the future, this crisis is like discovering fire for the first time, we only have our intelect to develop what we can do with it. We can decide to try to use it or even if we don’t know how to.
Gail says she is doing nothing to prepare for collapse.
Neither apparently are the PTB.
These are probably good indications of the prospects for survival….
“Neither apparently are the PTB.”
Depends which PTB. Ted Turner has a million acres and an aquifer. The Bush family has a big ranch in Peru, along with a bunch of other wealthy families. There are several large bunkers out there. Russia has been building an underground city in the Urals since at least the 1970s. China can probably fit millions in its underground cities, plus they have the 40 million already living in caves.
None of these people are the PTB — they are handful of rich men who have bought large properties (for the most part many years ago)
If the likes of Ellison and Zuckerberg — who have bought islands — did so because they see the future…. then that is about as relevant as referencing what I have done….
I like them — am grasping desperately for a life line by moving to a remote place… the only difference is one of scale.
The real players in the world as far as I am aware are spending their time focused on keeping the hamster running…. because they would know that there is no future..
Until someone can demonstrate that it is possible to manage spent fuel ponds then I am operating under the assumption (backed by facts) that the PTB know this will not be possible — and have determined that extinction is what comes when the oil stops.
Hence the desperate measures we are seeing.
Hyperinflation can only work for a limited time, and it’s at work as we speak. The Fed (credit where credit’s due, it’s pretty damn ingenious!) has simply found a way to target it all at the stock and related derivatives markets. But it won’t last forever. In the end, it’s just another bubble like all the rest.
The end game is neo-feudalism, or perhaps Roman-Greco style slavery, or maybe even truly brutal Egyptian/Babylonian slavery.
Nothing ever lasts’ forever; the idea is for power to accrue for those now living to enjoy today. Louis XIV said it best “after me, the deluge”. He was long dead by the time his grandson got the guillotine.
This whole perspective that there is some kind of solution (or not) and that society as a whole should/could/would be working cooperatively to resolve “the important issues of the day” misses the point entirely: it’s a game of winner take all; if some kind of net benefit is derived by the masses, that’s only a lucky happenstance, a by-product that is most assuredly unintentional.
I guess everyone has their own levels of denial, of bargaining with the truth. Once you’re ok with this is how it works, and this is how it’s gonna go down, then it’s pretty trivial to insert yourself in order to slice off some margin. Everyone here is pretty much clued in, there just seems to be some residual resistance to the concept that there really isn’t any fairness.
B9 — let me pretend that the spent nuclear fuel ponds don’t exist for a moment (because a low tech ‘civilization’ will not be able to manage them…) …
I very much agree the future could resemble what you describe — when we don’t have oil as our slave why would we not quickly revert to putting each other in chains…. that was par for the course throughout history….
Where I differ is how we get from A to B…. I see no gradual transition — I simply cannot see how that can be possible.
The fact of the matter is there is no growth occurring because there are no cheap fossil fuels being found — we are papering that over but cannot do that for much longer…
Cheap oil is everything. All else takes a back seat to cheap oil.
So this is what I see (again pretending the fuel ponds don’t exist):
A > HOLOCAUST >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> B
There is no way in hell I am going to see B …. because it will be decades before we get to that point (and possibly centuries)
Okay, in the scenario where no major radiological incidents occur.
Why do you think it will take many decades for the die-off to finish? As I see it, either we end up living probably more like DPRK, with a >90% drop in energy per capita. Oil is available for elites / officials and military but not common people. Population grinds down slowly; the system as a whole is kept relatively intact – grid, Internet, coal oil and gas, manufacturing – of course, with steadily declining outputs.
Or option B: Mass starvation. Within the first 3 years, over 90% of the population is gone. After that, the violence and starvation is pretty much over, and the remaining people slowly start building city-states. In this scenario, I am sure there must be at least some reactor meltdowns / spent fuel pond leaks; I don’t see how there can be civil unrest and mass die-offs, and still expect all the waste to be handled safely with no incidents.
I recall 20 years or so ago Canada banned on fishing on the Grand Banks …. I visited the East coast a few years ago and the fisherman informed me that in spite of the ban the fish populations did not recover…
Nobody seems to know why…
Since there will be almost no food post collapse — crops will not grow — hordes will kill and eat everything that moves including your veg garden and cow — that is a certainty…
When the main concern for anyone who survives is getting enough food to eat what I see is extreme savagery and chaos as these survivors compete over very scarce resources…
This is not a situation that is going to change quickly. It is not as if we go from no food to a bounty… even if billions die…
Ancient civilizations did not happen overnight…. they developed over many many years… and they did not have the disadvantage of starting out in a period of utter chaos and famine….
I see the food issue as a game changer — an extinction event — not quite as big a problem as the fuel ponds… but right up there…
It does not matter where you are — there will not be enough food.
The irony here is that if you ask someone who is intelligent yet who believes BAU will go on forever to play let’s pretend that we hit peak oil and have no alternatives…. what they think would happen….
I have done this on many occasions — I have asked lawyers – MBA’s — PHD’s — and various other learned people — and every single one of them says essentially — oh… if that happens we are dead….
And that’s probably why their bright minds deploy cognitive dissonance with regard to this issue — because they fully understand the implications…
And that’s probably why quite a few people here are relatively unconcerned with regard this issue — because they do not fully understand the implications….
There could be a lot of problems with the Grand Banks. The Allies dumped huge amounts of German chemical weapons just over the shelf there after the war, as a cheap way of getting rid of it. The French may have dumped nuclear waste off the shelf too.
Once people are down to ~1000 calories a day, they aren’t going to have the energy to do much. Prepared groups of armed people in rural areas will probably be alright if they make it past the first month, if there is total collapse.
Chaos is not a pit. Chaos is a ladder.
NSFW:
https://youtu.be/PxlIraEV8n4?t=1m47s
It is amazing what the human mind can accomplish when survival is at stake… the minds that are focused on this problem over at the Fed and their think tanks would dwarf the Manhattan Project…
Who would have thought they could keep this going for 7 years!
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
http://blackville.nbed.nb.ca/sites/blackville.nbed.nb.ca/files/bravo.gif
Boy, resorting to giving yourself “like” thumbs up!
What’s next…I know…a Fast Eddy sock puppet.
Paul, your “Black Knight” persona is becoming a sad self-parody. No matter how many times you get excited that the end is night, and flood this board with posts about markets crashing, demand dropping, disaster looming, it never seems to pan out now, does it?
Now, a normal person somewhat aware of the impression they were making would either alter their behavior, or perhaps quiet down the more foolish proclamations in order to let the dust settle. But no, just like the Black Knight, you’re right back up there again challenging the truth.
For example, all this chatter about spent nuclear rods is really quite tiresome. (Ironically, I think I’m one of the those who brought the issue up in a first place – LOL.) What part of wage/price controls, including defined work and prioritized spending don’t you get – or refuse to acknowledge? Do you know how many millions of dummies with sub-100 IQs would (gladly/resigned) devote their energies to this project if properly (positively/negatively) motivated?
I really think you should consider the idea of taking a break. Your repetitive retorts are only effective in your own head. Everyone else can see the logical process by which major resources will be devoted towards addressing problems dealing with the biggest threats eg spent fuel rods.
Screeching about end times is more appropriate for other “believers”. The slow grind isn’t sexy, but the muddle through is how it always goes down.
Actually — the nuclear issue was first raised by Dimitry Orlov on his blog a few years ago — well before I was on this site….
I took that further with the spent fuel ponds digging for hours trying to work out the implications of these in a collapsed world without fossil fuels — I finally found the definitive research on this out of Harvard indicating that they are far more of a problem than active nuclear plants…
“posts about markets crashing, demand dropping, disaster looming, it never seems to pan out now, does it”
What cannot continue will stop. I guarantee that.
Meanwhile you blunder on believing that a devaluation will save the day — that nobody understands ‘the strength of the American DNA’
That’s your rebuttal to my arguments – seriously?
I file that kinda stuff under K… along with renewable energy and organic farming….
True, James, hyperinflation takes a “life” of its own and once it is set in motion can not be easily restrained and gets out of control. That is why I laugh when I hear the Federal Reserve has a goal of 2% inflation rate per annum. Wishful policy at best.
“Paul, are you going to finally quit with the apocalyptic collapse mantra?”
He probably will when you stop your 10-1 currency devaluation mantra. 🙂
“Once more, printing and inflation are the way out. Of course it’s not a solution in the sense of producing some kind of net aggregate benefit for the governed, but it does provide a pathway towards graduated no-feudalism.”
Currency devaluation and price controls are the death of a financial system. They prolong the life of a financial system by days not months. The reason why is that price relationships actually reflect physical energy relationships. You cant arbitrarily change those relationships and expect the system to still function. We are already seeing this. Abandonment “multiple of earnings” of price of housing. It is dysfunctional not a catastrophic end like a exponential 10 -1 distortion but dysfunctional none the less. Nor will the exporters of oil cooperate with price controls. In the absence of ability to price control the primary commodity the system will rapidly self destruct if you attempt to completely remove the real life energy pricing mechanisms/relationships just as a engine blows up if you attempt to change any of the design parameters by a factor of ten. This can be seen as we speak in Argentina. The real life pricing mechanisms always assert themselves via black market and scarcity. The system of trade using the currency that no longer fits natural energy relationships ends.
Within a country, a country would certainly like inflation on the goods it sells, so that the debt (which doesn’t change) becomes less and less valuable in comparison to the goods currently being sold.
But when we are talking about a country defaulting on its debt, the value of its new currency falls. For instance, this is what CNBC talks about. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/08/euro-drachma-bitcoin-greeces-currency-options.html
When the value of the currency falls, then imported goods are more expensive, so there is indeed inflation. This inflation includes higher price of oil. The good side of the situation is that the goods of the country with the falling currency become cheaper for other countries to buy, so that there is some possibility of getting out of the mess. (This doesn’t work well, if mostly imported goods are used in making new goods.)
Tourism Industry came to my mind as a mean of selling goods and services that will be consumed and which are produced within the destination country, even better when the investors are local.
– immigrants sending money (consignments) back home on a timely basis.
-Maybe corrupt politicians taking money to small countries as some claim happened in Ireland.
What is the actual source for the data in figure 1?
“Figure 1. Oil as a percentage of total energy consumption in 2006, based on June 2015 Energy Information data.”
I tried to find “June 2015 Energy Information data” with this data but failed. Some values for some countries seem a little strange when you compare to other sources…
I downloaded two files from the “International Energy Statistics” part of the EIA website (under “Geography” at the top of the page).
1. Under “Total Energy”, I chose “Total Primary Energy Consumption.” http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=44&pid=44&aid=2&cid=regions&syid=1980&eyid=2012&unit=QBTU The units on this is Quadrillion Btu.
2. Petroleum consumption is from Petroleum -Consumption – Annual – with BTU chosen as Units. http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=2&cid=regions&syid=1980&eyid=2014&unit=QBTU
Then all a person does is divide the appropriate columns.
You can’t get small countries from BP data, for one thing. EIA is late in coming out, but it is more complete, and perhaps a little more “official”. There may be differences in how Biofuels are treated from one source to another.