Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the “coming apart” process started in 2016, in my opinion we are going to see many more steps in this direction in 2017. Let me explain a few of the things I see.
[1] Many economies have collapsed in the past. The world economy is very close to the turning point where collapse starts in earnest.
Figure 1
The history of previous civilizations rising and eventually collapsing is well documented.(See, for example, Secular Cycles.)
To start a new cycle, a group of people would find a new way of doing things that allowed more food and energy production (for instance, they might add irrigation, or cut down trees for more land for agriculture). For a while, the economy would expand, but eventually a mismatch would arise between resources and population. Either resources would fall too low (perhaps because of erosion or salt deposits in the soil), or population would rise too high relative to resources, or both.
Even as resources per capita began falling, economies would continue to have overhead expenses, such as the need to pay high-level officials and to fund armies. These overhead costs could not easily be reduced, and might, in fact, grow as the government attempted to work around problems. Collapse occurred because, as resources per capita fell (for example, farms shrank in size), the earnings of workers tended to fall. At the same time, the need for taxes to cover what I am calling overhead expenses tended to grow. Tax rates became too high for workers to earn an adequate living, net of taxes. In some cases, workers succumbed to epidemics because of poor diets. Or governments would collapse, from lack of adequate tax revenue to support them.
Our current economy seems to be following a similar pattern. We first used fossil fuels to allow the population to expand, starting about 1800. Things went fairly well until the 1970s, when oil prices started to spike. Several workarounds (globalization, lower interest rates, and more use of debt) allowed the economy to continue to grow. The period since 1970 might be considered a period of “stagflation.” Now the world economy is growing especially slowly. At the same time, we find ourselves with “overhead” that continues to grow (for example, payments to retirees, and repayment of debt with interest). The pattern of past civilizations suggests that our civilization could also collapse.
Historically, economies have taken many years to collapse; I show a range of 20 to 50 years in Figure 1. We really don’t know if collapse would take that long now. Today, we are dependent on an international financial system, an international trade system, electricity, and the availability of oil to make our vehicles operate. It would seem as if this time collapse could come much more quickly.
With the world economy this close to collapse, some individual countries are even closer to collapse. This is why we can expect to see sharp downturns in the fortunes of some countries. If contagion is not too much of a problem, other countries may continue to do fairly well, even as individual small countries fail.
[2] Figures to be released in 2017 and future years are likely to show that the peak in world coal consumption occurred in 2014. This is important, because it means that countries that depend heavily on coal, such as China and India, can expect to see much slower economic growth, and more financial difficulties.
While reports of international coal production for 2016 are not yet available, news articles and individual country data strongly suggest that world coal production is past its peak. The IEA also reports a substantial drop in coal production for 2016.
Figure 2. World coal consumption. Information through 2015 based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy data. Estimates for China, US, and India are based on partial year data and news reports. 2016 amount for “other” estimated based on recent trends.
The reason why coal production is dropping is because of low prices, low profitability for producers, and gluts indicating oversupply. Also, comparisons of coal prices with natural gas prices are inducing switching from coal to natural gas. The problem, as we will see later, is that natural gas prices are also artificially low, compared to the cost of production, So the switch is being made to a different type of fossil fuel, also with an unsustainably low price.
Prices for coal in China have recently risen again, thanks to the closing of a large number of unprofitable coal mines, and a mandatory reduction in hours for other coal mines. Even though prices have risen, production may not rise to match the new prices. One article reports:
. . . coal companies are reportedly reluctant to increase output as a majority of the country’s mines are still losing money and it will take time to recoup losses incurred in recent years.
Also, a person can imagine that it might be difficult to obtain financing, if coal prices have only “sort of” recovered.
I wrote last year about the possibility that coal production was peaking. This is one chart I showed, with data through 2015. Coal is the second most utilized fuel in the world. If its production begins declining, it will be difficult to offset the loss of its use with increased use of other types of fuels.
Figure 3. World per capita energy consumption by fuel, based on BP 2016 SRWE.
[3] If we assume that coal supplies will continue to shrink, and other production will grow moderately, we can expect total energy consumption to be approximately flat in 2017.
Figure 4. World energy consumption forecast, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy data through 2015, and author’s estimates for 2016 and 2017.
In a way, this is an optimistic assessment, because we know that efforts are underway to reduce oil production, in order to prop up prices. We are, in effect, assuming either that (a) oil prices won’t really rise, so that oil consumption will grow at a rate similar to that in the recent past or (b) while oil prices will rise significantly to help producers, consumers won’t cut back on their consumption in response to the higher prices.
[4] Because world population is rising, the forecast in Figure 4 suggests that per capita energy consumption is likely to shrink. Shrinking energy consumption per capita puts the world (or individual countries in the world) at the risk of recession.
Figure 5 shows indicated per capita energy consumption, based on Figure 4. It is clear that energy consumption per capita has already started shrinking, and is expected to shrink further. The last time that happened was in the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Figure 5. World energy consumption per capita based on energy consumption estimates in Figure 4 and UN 2015 Medium Population Growth Forecast.
There tends to be a strong correlation between world economic growth and world energy consumption, because energy is required to transform materials into new forms, and to transport goods from one place to another.
In the recent past, the growth in GDP has tended to be a little higher than the growth in the use of energy products. One reason why GDP growth has been a percentage point or two higher than energy consumption growth is because, as economies become richer, citizens can afford to add more services to the mix of goods and services that they purchase (fancier hair cuts and more piano lessons, for example). Production of services tends to use proportionately less energy than creating goods does; as a result, a shift toward a heavier mix of services tends to lead to GDP growth rates that are somewhat higher than the growth in energy consumption.
A second reason why GDP growth has tended to be a little higher than growth in energy consumption is because devices (such as cars, trucks, air conditioners, furnaces, factory machinery) are becoming more efficient. Growth in efficiency occurs if consumers replace old inefficient devices with new more efficient devices. If consumers become less wealthy, they are likely to replace devices less frequently, leading to slower growth in efficiency. Also, as we will discuss later in this post, recently there has been a tendency for fossil fuel prices to remain artificially low. With low prices, there is little financial incentive to replace an old inefficient device with a new, more efficient device. As a result, new purchases may be bigger, offsetting the benefit of efficiency gains (purchasing an SUV to replace a car, for example).
Thus, we cannot expect that the past pattern of GDP growing a little faster than energy consumption will continue. In fact, it is even possible that the leveraging effect will start working the “wrong” way, as low fossil fuel prices induce more fuel use, not less. Perhaps the safest assumption we can make is that GDP growth and energy consumption growth will be equal. In other words, if world energy consumption growth is 0% (as in Figure 4), world GDP growth will also be 0%. This is not something that world leaders would like at all.
The situation we are encountering today seems to be very similar to the falling resources per capita problem that seemed to push early economies toward collapse in [1]. Figure 5 above suggests that, on average, the paychecks of workers in 2017 will tend to purchase fewer goods and services than they did in 2016 and 2015. If governments need higher taxes to fund rising retiree costs and rising subsidies for “renewables,” the loss in the after-tax purchasing power of workers will be even greater than Figure 5 suggests.
[5] Because many countries are in this precarious position of falling resources per capita, we should expect to see a rise in protectionism, and the addition of new tariffs.
Clearly, governments do not want the problem of falling wages (or rather, falling goods that wages can buy) impacting their countries. So the new game becomes, “Push the problem elsewhere.”
In economic language, the world economy is becoming a “Zero-sum” game. Any gain in the production of goods and services by one country is a loss to another country. Thus, it is in each country’s interest to look out for itself. This is a major change from the shift toward globalization we have experienced in recent years. China, as a major exporter of goods, can expect to be especially affected by this changing view.
[6] China can no longer be expected to pull the world economy forward.
China’s economic growth rate is likely to be lower, for many reasons. One reason is the financial problems of coal mines, and the tendency of coal production to continue to shrink, once it starts shrinking. This happens for many reasons, one of them being the difficulty in obtaining loans for expansion, when prices still seem to be somewhat low, and the outlook for the further increases does not appear to be very good.
Another reason why China’s economic growth rate can be expected to fall is the current overbuilt situation with respect to apartment buildings, shopping malls, factories, and coal mines. As a result, there seems to be little need for new buildings and operations of these types. Another reason for slower economic growth is the growing protectionist stance of trade partners. A fourth reason is the fact that many potential buyers of the goods that China is producing are not doing very well economically (with the US being a major exception). These buyers cannot afford to increase their purchases of imports from China.
With these growing headwinds, it is quite possible that China’s total energy consumption in 2017 will shrink. If this happens, there will be downward pressure on world fossil fuel prices. Oil prices may fall, despite production cuts by OPEC and other countries.
China’s slowing economic growth is likely to make its debt problem harder to solve. We should not be too surprised if debt defaults become a more significant problem, or if the yuan falls relative to other currencies.
India, with its recent recall of high denomination currency, as well as its problems with low coal demand, is not likely to be a great deal of help aiding the world economy to grow, either. India is also a much smaller economy than China.
[7] While Item [2] talked about peak coal, there is a very significant chance that we will be hitting peak oil and peak natural gas in 2017 or 2018, as well.
If we look at historical prices, we see that the prices of oil, coal and natural gas tend to rise and fall together.
Figure 6. Prices of oil, coal and natural gas tend to rise and fall together. Prices based on 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy data.
The reason that fossil fuel prices tend to rise and fall together is because these prices are tied to “demand” for goods and services in general, such as for new homes, cars, and factories. If wages are rising rapidly, and debt is rising rapidly, it becomes easier for consumers to buy goods such as homes and cars. When this happens, there is more “demand” for the commodities used to make and operate homes and cars. Prices for commodities of many types, including fossil fuels, tend to rise, to enable more production of these items.
Of course, the reverse happens as well. If workers become poorer, or debt levels shrink, it becomes harder to buy homes and cars. In this case, commodity prices, including fossil fuel prices, tend to fall. Thus, the problem we saw above in [2] for coal would be likely to happen for oil and natural gas, as well, because the prices of all of the fossil fuels tend to move together. In fact, we know that current oil prices are too low for oil producers. This is the reason why OPEC and other oil producers have cut back on production. Thus, the problem with overproduction for oil seems to be similar to the overproduction problem for coal, just a bit delayed in timing.
In fact, we also know that US natural gas prices have been very low for several years, suggesting another similar problem. The United States is the single largest producer of natural gas in the world. Its natural gas production hit a peak in mid 2015, and production has since begun to decline. The decline comes as a response to chronically low prices, which make it unprofitable to extract natural gas. This response sounds similar to China’s attempted solution to low coal prices.
Figure 7. US Natural Gas production based on EIA data.
The problem is fundamentally the fact that consumers cannot afford goods made using fossil fuels of any type, if prices actually rise to the level producers need, which tends to be at least five times the 1999 price level. (Note peak price levels compared to 1999 level on Figure 6.) Wages have not risen by a factor of five since 1999, so paying the prices that fossil fuel producers need for profitability and growing production is out of the question. No amount of added debt can hide this problem. (While this reference is to 1999 prices, the issue really goes back much farther, to prices before the price spikes of the 1970s.)
US natural gas producers also have plans to export natural gas to Europe and elsewhere, as liquefied natural gas (LNG). The hope, of course, is that a large amount of exports will raise US natural gas prices. Also, the hope is that Europeans will be able to afford the high-priced natural gas shipped to them. Unless someone can raise the wages of both Europeans and Americans, I would not count on LNG prices actually rising to the level needed for profitability, and staying at such a high level. Instead, they are likely to bounce up, and quickly drop back again.
[8] Unless oil prices rise very substantially, oil exporters will find themselves exhausting their financial reserves in a very short time (perhaps a year or two). Unfortunately, oil importers cannot withstand higher prices, without going into recession.
We have a no win situation, no matter what happens. This is true with all fossil fuels, but especially with oil, because of its high cost and thus necessarily high price. If oil prices stay at the same level or go down, oil exporters cannot get enough tax revenue, and oil companies in general cannot obtain enough funds to finance the development of new wells and payment of dividends to shareholders. If oil prices do rise by a very large amount for very long, we are likely headed into another major recession, with many debt defaults.
[9] US interest rates are likely to rise in the next year or two, whether or not this result is intended by the Federal reserve.
This issue here is somewhat obscure. The issue has to do with whether the United States can find foreign buyers for its debt, often called US Treasuries, and the interest rates that the US needs to pay on this debt. If buyers are very plentiful, the interest rates paid by he US government can be quite low; if few buyers are available, interest rates must be higher.
Back when Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were doing well financially, they often bought US Treasuries, as a way to retain the benefit of their new-found wealth, which they did not want to spend immediately. Similarly, when China was doing well as an exporter, it often bought US Treasuries, as a way retaining the wealth it gained from exports, but didn’t yet need for purchases.
When these countries bought US Treasuries, there were several beneficial results:
- Interest rates on US Treasuries tended to stay artificially low, because there was a ready market for its debt.
- The US could afford to import high-priced oil, because the additional debt needed to buy the oil could easily be sold (to Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations, no less).
- The US dollar tended to stay lower relative to other currencies, making oil more affordable to other countries than it otherwise might be.
- Investment in countries outside the US was encouraged, because debt issued by these other countries tended to bear higher interest rates than US debt. Also, relatively low oil prices in these countries (because of the low level of the dollar) tended to make investment profitable in these countries.
The effect of these changes was somewhat similar to the US having its own special Quantitative Easing (QE) program, paid for by some of the counties with trade surpluses, instead of by its central bank. This QE substitute tended to encourage world economic growth, for the reasons mentioned above.
Once the fortunes of the countries that used to buy US Treasuries changes, the pattern of buying of US Treasuries tends to change to selling of US Treasuries. Even not purchasing the same quantity of US Treasuries as in the past becomes an adverse change, if the US has a need to keep issuing US Treasuries as in the past, or if it wants to keep rates low.
Unfortunately, losing this QE substitute tends to reverse the favorable effects noted above. One effect is that the dollar tends to ride higher relative to other currencies, making the US look richer, and other countries poorer. The “catch” is that as the other countries become poorer, it becomes harder for them to repay the debt that they took out earlier, which was denominated in US dollars.
Another problem, as this strange type of QE disappears, is that the interest rates that the US government needs to pay in order to issue new debt start rising. These higher rates tend to affect other rates as well, such as mortgage rates. These higher interest rates act as a drag on the economy, tending to push it toward recession.
Higher interest rates also tend to decrease the value of assets, such as homes, farms, outstanding bonds, and shares of stock. This occurs because fewer buyers can afford to buy these goods, with the new higher interest rates. As a result, stock prices can be expected to fall. Prices of homes and of commercial buildings can also be expected to fall. The value of bonds held by insurance companies and banks becomes lower, if they choose to sell these securities before maturity.
Of course, as interest rates fell after 1981, we received the benefit of falling interest rates, in the form of rising asset prices. No one ever stopped to think about how much of the gains in share prices and property values came from falling interest rates.
Figure 8. Ten year treasury interest rates, based on St. Louis Fed data.
Now, as interest rates rise, we can expect asset prices of many types to start falling, because of lower affordability when monthly payments are based on higher interest rates. This situation presents another “drag” on the economy.
In Conclusion
The situation is indeed very concerning. Many things could set off a crisis:
- Rising energy prices of any kind (hurting energy importers), or energy prices that don’t rise (leading to financial problems or collapse of exporters)
- Rising interest rates.
- Defaulting debt, indirectly the result of slow/negative economic growth and rising interest rates.
- International organizations with less and less influence, or that fall apart completely.
- Fast changes in relativities of currencies, leading to defaults on derivatives.
- Collapsing banks, as debt defaults rise.
- Falling asset prices (homes, farms, commercial buildings, stocks and bonds) as interest rates rise, leading to many debt defaults.
Things don’t look too bad right now, but the underlying problems are sufficiently severe that we seem to be headed for a crisis far worse than 2008. The timing is not clear. Things could start falling apart badly in 2017, or alternatively, major problems may be delayed until 2018 or 2019. I hope political leaders can find ways to keep problems away as long as possible, perhaps with more rounds of QE. Our fundamental problem is the fact that neither high nor low energy prices are now able to keep the world economy operating as we would like it to operate. Increased debt can’t seem to fix the problem either.
The laws of physics seem to be behind economic growth. From a physics point of view, our economy is a dissipative structure. Such structures form in “open systems.” In such systems, flows of energy allow structures to temporarily self-organize and grow. Other examples of dissipative structures include ecosystems, all plants and animals, stars, and hurricanes. All of these structures constantly “dissipate” energy. They have finite life spans, before they eventually collapse. Often, new dissipative systems form, to replace previous ones that have collapsed.
The one thing that gives me hope is the fact that there seems to be some type of a guiding supernatural force behind the whole system that allows so much growth. Some would say that this supernatural force is “only” the laws of physics (and biology and chemistry). To me, the fact that so many structures can self-organize and grow is miraculous, and perhaps evidence of a guiding force behind the whole universe.
I don’t know precisely what is next, but it seems quite possible that there is a longer-term plan for humans that we are not aware of. Some of the religions of the world may have insights on what this plan might be. It is even possible that there may be divine intervention of some type that allows a change in the path that we seem to be on today.
I don’t believe in a sudden global BAU collapse, it will rather be a “stairway to hell” imo. I have some issues with the sudden collapse scenario.
Financial. There hasn’t been any real growth for ages. So we will have fake growth. The debt numbers are going from million to billions to trillions to zillions, doesn’t matter how high this number is. Money is sort of infinite as long as people believe. There seems to be just too many wizards in the financial industry for this scheme to fail entirely. TBTF companies will be propped up as needed.
Diminishing resources vs rising population. An increasing share of the population gets ever less resources. Eventually there will be enough starvation/sickness/pollution/war to turn population growth negative. There will be a correlation between affordable oil and population numbers here.
I think this can drag on for quite some time, probably 20-50 years (as Gail has in her “secular cycle” graphic) until we get to a platou of either 0 humans or a few millions. Length and shape of the die off will depend heavily on how severe climate change will hit us and how well we can mitigate the nuclear waste problem.
“Money is sort of infinite as long as people believe.”
Do people really have to “believe”? Is not needing to spend money on a daily basis in order to survive enough? It is impossible to live without money.
“Is it possible to live without money” – Yes, if only a few have no money and others have plenty of money and give you stuff to survive. No, if the financial system collapses and no one has access to money.
The problem comes in when you consider we are a global economy of massive scale (and leveraged a lot). Most of the world’s population depends on the industrial output of food, water and shelter. If money disappeared quickly, so to would industry. Then, shortly after that people would begin to die. Then billions would die and chaos would ensue before any replacement policy could be implemented to replace what money does.
I’m going to pipe in to repeat something that should be self-evident.
“Slow collapse” or a “stairway to hell” is not collapse.
“Slow collapse” or a “stairway to hell” is DECLINE.
Decline is gradual enough that people can adapt to it.
Detroit, Michigan is undergoing economic decline.
Venezuela is undergoing economic collapse.
Collapse is sudden. Fast. Quick.
Collapse is sudden. Since most people here have never, ever lived through any sort of collapse whatsoever, they assume change will be gradual, and perhaps manageable.
There’s also no such thing as a single collapse that ends everything but given how complex and interconnected and interdependent the various nation-states are in the world, collapse in one place could bring collapse in other places.
Speaking of the near-mid term outlook, meaning next ~3decades, the fracturing/dividing lines between the options of decline, phased collapse, straight collapse would come on many fronts, chiefly:
– resiliency of the public and their subsistence both for urban-city nods and rural areas
(potable water, food, health, animal husbandry, .. )
– skills and resiliency of the govs structure for given geographic area
(incl. performance of NOCs and other key industries to run or can kick a bit more, military, ..)
Based on that, it’s not that impossible to estimate on a napkin scribbling fashion general odds where best to land and watch the spectacle to unravel.. By that I mean to even have a chance to contemplate briefly on the events unfolding, not to be swept immediately by chaos and death. Go figure..
No offense, but that was a whole lot of nonsense…
especially the scribbling on the napkin part.
Are you and Keith scribbling buddies? You two should get together and have scribbling sessions where you map out your plans of how to survive the oncoming extinction event.
What, wait a sec, historic patterns of collapses are now a nonsense over here? chill out, read it again.
There is no word about “surviving oncoming extinction event” only hints how the trajectory and progression of collapse will likely differ as seen/experienced from quite diverse places of the globe, that’s it at least for the near-mid term window, which in my definition here roughly spans next 2-3decades from now, some might get flushed early 2020s others a bit later.
I didn’t put any probabilities list out there, apart from that one trend seems looming now that jettisoning peripheries like Venezuela, Greece, perhaps now shaping up India case, .. won’t mean much from reaching certain deeper threshold. So, if there will be no meaningful plateau to be reached and sit on for several of the top dogs with their sheer consumption, the big guys will sooner or later most likely nuke out each other just on this premise not allowing the others the silly theoretical chance of rebound.
And even that’s likely not the ultimate terminal bottle neck in terms of extinction level, since thermo nuclear armageddon still allows for at least some tiny fraction of current global population pass through short term, but I’m certainly not discussing or planning for that stage or even the preceding one.
Seems, too much people frequenting here with no personal/family history of total war, revolution, expropriation, natural calamity swings. If the overall FW narrative is correct, this will drag on for decades at the minimum.
” not discussing or planning for that stage”
I agree. Chances are not high that anything you can do now will appreciably affect your individual survival. There may be things we can do to keep civilization going, among them to tap solar energy out in space.
The “overall FW narrrative” or should we say ‘Gail’s essential message’ doesn’t seem to be much related to your ‘demographics, demographics, demographics’ fixation.
Demographics would not be a problem if people could/would work every day of their lives. The problem is that back when fossil fuels started becoming abundant was that we promised people “pensions” and “retirement.” These are unsustainable concepts, in a world without rapidly growing energy supplies.
Worldofhanumaotg is right. His observations, based upon human experience, is true.
Idiocracy is alive and well here on FW.
I believe in Santa Claus … and the Tooth Fairy …. I believe that the oil is replenished by muchkins who turn a crank on an oil making machine in the centre of the earth …. i believe that man can live on Mars….. I believe that solar and wind power can keep BAU roaring …. I believe that Elon Musk is amazing and that Tesla is a game changer… I believe that Donald Trump will make america great again
To be consistent — I must also believe that collapse cannot happen …. that we can have no growth yet continue to operate BAU Lite …. that the graph is a gentle slope to zero.
If I believed all of the above — what would that make me?
After trillions it’s quadrillions.
A quad here, a quad there, and pretty soon we’re taking about some real money. — Bob Dole
And what comes after quadrillions?
‘There hasn’t been any real growth for ages’
Define real growth.
Are you saying that there has been no job growth for decades?
Are you saying there has been no growth in commodity consumption for decades?
Are you saying there has been on growth in the consumption of energy for decades?
Are you saying the growth we have seen is fake? If so – please explain.
I believe the blog owner repeatedly says there has been no real wage growth in decades for the 90 %.
If that is true there should not have been growth in jobs, commodity usage or energy, for the 90 %, in US and EU.
Growth means GDP growth — not wage growth. Wage growth for most of the world has not budged for decades —- check out the third world — most people wold be happy to just find a job making enough money to buy a bit of rice and a few scraps of rat meat.
Nothing new here.
GDP has been increasing — if it were not increasing then we would have collapsed by now.
Debt has always been the catalyst for economic growth — the only difference now is the scale of the debt required to create economic growht
The global economy either grows — or it dies.
You will quickly know when growth has stopped — soon after you will lose your job … your pension … your food supply…. your electricity feed…. and finally your life.
I guess China, which was driving world GDP growth, has stepped on the brake pedal. So now we will have collapse?
I don’t think so. People are getting by with less. But the change in each individual life(style) comes in such small decrements so people accept this. You seem hellbent on the idea that we must consume as yesterday or just lie down and die. There is plenty of wiggle-room in between. In modern economics, it’s all about the length of your wand…
I don’t see any 0’s or negative numbers…
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2015/12/blogs/graphic-detail/20160102_wom000_0.png
Stupid is as stupid does.
Kurt, you have to attribute that quote to the proper source: Forrest Gump’s mother.
Dang. I guess I don’t get the box of chocolates.
Run out of turkey jokes have we….???
Despite the political breakdown, you have to remember North America is still the best place to be during this collapse.
It has a large amount of habitable land, resources, it is protected by the oceans from world calamities, and is powerful financially and geopolitically, with the world reserve currency and a global military.
This is what gives people in America their naive, optimistic character. They simply don’t know any better. Of course, this will change, but the rest of the world will be worse.
Mind you, in no way does this mean I’m optimistic on America. If anything, I have been consistently more pessimistic than those here.
Yes and no. In Sweden if everything gives up on you, you may still survive and someone could find you some place to stay. At least it used to be that way. In the future, who knows.
Maybe you should take a cue from your name, dolph, and move to Germany, to take leadership of those fierce, warlike Germans – those Teutonic Knights, those pure Aryans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8suNlLEMFRY
Who was it said that opulence eventually leads to decadence? 🙂
One for you FE…
Caterpillar Posts Record 49 Consecutive Months Of Declining Retail Sales
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2017/01/15/CAT%20dec%202_0.jpg
“But it is on a global blended basis, where the headwinds facing CAT refuse to go away, and after the latest, December, decline in retail sales of -12%, we find that the company has not reported a single monthly uptick in sales for record 49 consecutive months, or just over 4 straight years, a period which is now 2.5x longer than the far more acute 19 month drop observed during the post-financial crisis period.”
This is quite a record! A lot of companies would have folded, or sold themselves out to someone bigger, by this time.
Wonder what their actual sales numbers are right now vs where they were in 2000-2008? Who would buy CAT? You could say the same of shipping companies too. Who would buy them out? If growth is over, it makes no sense to buy any of these insolvent companies.
All that graph does is compare retail sales for different time periods. Even though the graph shows retail sales below the average, they may still be high enough to make a profit and one might easily conclude that because how else does CAT remain viable unless there is sufficient revenue? This is a perfect example of how graphs can be misleading.
Stock market is at all time high! Maybe it will double from here while the bottom falls out of the economy?
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/CAT%20LT%20sales_0.jpg
I would imagine CAT has been designated a too big to fail company — the Fed will keep it alive…
Or perhaps Donald will pour trillions into upgrading US infrastructure …. which would bail CAT out.
I wonder…can you keep a business going by selling spare parts when those big machines break? Usually, the spares cost a lot more than the original parts. Then there’s on-site service, too. CATs are major investments and don’t rely upon fashion changes to sell new products. I would guess companies would want to keep existing inventories working, that against all the wear and tear of construction work.
It makes sense that eventually, with no further growth on a finite planet, their business model would fail, and a good thing in the sense that their products are used to terraform the planet and devour the ecosystem.
Only if you have an Internet to sell your services, and a transportation system to widely distribute the parts.
Happy Austalia Day my fellow finite worlders
And enjoy the record heat!
http://cyberbrahma.com/wp-content/uploads/boiling-frog.jpg
Brutal Heat Waves Crush Eastern Australia
“A hot air mass parked over central Australia is delivering the second brutal heat wave this month. January is quickly approaching a record-breaking month Down Under.”
A record that will definitely fall today, http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/nsw-weather-heatwave-severe-fire-danger-as-students-return-to-school-20170129-gu0xee.html.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-weather-total-fire-ban-declared-across-the-state-20170129-gu0vth.html
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/brisbane-weather-queensland-temperatures-range-from-30s-to-40s/news-story/739527f9e2f31eb1f4d23fc0001d8a05
Perfect conditions for the terrorist and the Bic
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ interesting survival story people were much more hardier then.
Were people hardier then? Absolutely. Just look how people responded to Katrina, falling down from exhaustion, passing out, heart palpatations, heart attacks etc. That same Russian family caught up in Katrina would walk through the floodwaters and probably not even complain.
that russian family story was interesting
but its important to remember that they, and others link them were living under conditions we would see as harsh privation before—so they were only moving gradually into someting slightly harshe on their terms
so on that basis i dont think you can compare them to our current survival situayion
She hates the city. Pure human.
“people were much hardier then.”
A couple of weeks ago I got my car stuck in a muddy field at a caravan site. After a few minutes looking around for something to put under the wheels, I decided it was too cold (around 2C) and my feet were soaked so I decided it was better to wait an hour in the car for the field owner to come pull me out with his tractor.
Contrast that with this guy who survived 52 hours down a well at -20C.
Who is more likely to survive collapse? There are some tough people still around, but pampered westerners such as myself are not included.
+2C and wet is worse than -2c 🙂
I think i’ve found Fast Eddy! He’s really John Michael Greer in disguise. 🙂
Here’s what he wrote in his latest post:
“This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos—meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion—meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.
It’s about environmental chaos—meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2017/01/how-great-fall-can-be.html
Maybe JMG has been reading OFW.
FE isnt old enough to have grown a beard that long
though it would explain his absence over Christmas
His latest post sounds more like an Easter Island scenario although if you read the whole thing he kinda says it doesn’t mean the end for humans but it’s an ugly, ugly scenario and deviates from his previous writings that we would be looking at a gradual collapse (slow burn scenario) and more towards Fast Eddy’s world.
What I meant to say was he’s gone from a semi optimist view that eventually we’ll work things out to a more dire tone which gives us a Mad Max world.
John Michael Greer? Yes, his writing has become more fatalistic lately. But who can blame him?
Does anyone else pick up on the contradictions uses to justify his ‘staircase collapse’ view? (He regards ‘fast collapse’ as the fetish of an ideologically aberrant doomerism)
The way he has to tie himself in knots to defend this view can be seen in this recent post:
rule of law disappears YET local government remains
bandits will steal everything of value YET somehow you are still feeding yourself
the diseases that ‘might’ kill you are exotic microbes YET it’s more likely that dysentery, cholera and severe malnutrition will accompany an ‘economic implosion’
everything associated with civil society will disappear YET if you read his hopes for the near future civil societies created on state secessions will persist.
I’ve taken a few cheap shots at someone i consider to be an accomplished counter-culturalist but his erudite musings on what’s wrong with modernity do not necessarily give him authority on collapse scenarios.
I
I couldn’t agree more. The echo chamber that he has created through draconic site administration let him get away with deluding himself. Hopefully, the latest post indicates that he has begun to rethink his unreasonable ideas.
Great points. Thank you.
i’ve often used the summary word “blowhard” to describe the writings of JMG. he does have a nice beard. there, i said something positive about him.
I agree.
The Druid thing is embarrassing.
He is a talented writer, but science is not his education, writing is.
Generally I agree, and not trying to defend JMG here, lets acknowledge that “collapses” as unfolding processes with their bubbling social, economic, historic plains, which are complex issues, so often times you can have one set of emerging trends and other set of dying trends rolling together, both cohabiting the same time space.
I guess some years ago I re-posted here the ~historical accounts from the Western Roman end days (actually more like span of decades). It was full of rather anecdotal stories, even like good one “invading hoards” no longer pillaging around, but more interested in grouping along with the old roman apparatus remnants to setup some basic law and order at specific geographic(nodes) space, hence origins of proto – feudal order etc.
As often mentioned at OFW, due to the energy leverage of our time, we can assume some(most) collapse processes will take shape of expedient action globally. But obviously, that’s another dogmatic position in itself, we have to leave some (tiny?) space allowing for regional condition adaptations, of what longevity and substance that’s another matter.
So, it’s not that simple to proclaim “end of debate – staircase position” is invalid, because I simply said so – believe so, or because I limited the debate into a specific sandbox and conditions.
Stupidity on an epic scale…. plenty of that on display from about 5 regular ‘contributors’ to Finite World as well. Without naming names.
I stopped reading him years ago…at first when you’re discovering about the mess we are in, you like what he has to say…but then as you go deeper into the rabbit hole, and you read Norman’s book, follow this site, read David Korowicz Trade-Off and so on….you realize his stupid catabolic collapse scenario is…stupid…add to that his know-it-all attitude (very annoying) you just stop following JMG and his little delusional commenters who have quit their jobs and are trying to live off the land (his “collapse now and avoid the rush”)
There are a number of people on FW who subscribe to the theory that there will be no sudden collapse… that there will just be a gentle slope downwards ending in a global ‘Scott Nearing’ like scenario.
Yes I agree — it makes no sense.
There is no point in reading any of the other doomsday blogs — the authors either do not get it — or they get it — and but they feel the need to create a happy ending so as to increase readership — and sell something.
Not naming names?…..Fast Eddy seems you or. whatever name you hide with didn’t last too long away…too bad…that challenge of yours didn’t last too long…maybe you went on one of your bucket list trips….because you won’t last too long with that 20 foot container…
LOL…Just Saying…
Jeremy, about FE/TM/.. yes it’s always a bit rich when someone daily preaching consistency of thought in the realm of collapsnik studies/FW issues is demonstrably acting as a child on a public forum.
The only possible thing to his credit is the revealing of the supposedly true personal story, how one prematurely acting doomer relocated to NZ, where he suddenly realized it’s all badly timed and futile prep anyway. We should be honest with ourselves, namely for example in my case I fell into the “second gen” resource/PO doomerism roughly emerging since the late 1990s again (first being the Limits to Growths folks), the restated message of the late 1990s was clearly very much not correct analysis for the western world by decades. From that time we learned much about system dynamics, inertia, demographics, triage and so on..
The historical record is clear the collapse is not spatially uniform process, that being said, there seems to be little advantage in remaining, positioning in one of the likely pockets of slower variety (delayed phases) of collapse by the means of forcing-pushing it beyond already set conditions (nationality, race, real skillz background, ..). For instance, how many generational NYorkers or suburbanites would fit as replants on the Russian countryside let say around 2025-40, most likely it would be good opportunity only for few outliers out of sheer millions.
Understandably there will be pockets of stretching it for some time on lower complexity around the globe, even such pockets emerging deep inside North America. One just has to come to realistic terms of the possible continuum of such change, for some ~15-17th century like conditions in many respects might be seen as god send positive outcome to rest and sort of plateauing on for some time, for others and today’s majority this would present not appealing hell on the earth to begin with.
World…as far as FE is concerned, it ain’t about what you posted at all…just ATTITUDE!
Capisce…what goes around, comes around. FE has a little following here that is entertained by it…putz.👐
Yap… Yap….Yap
Anyone reminded of one of those little jumped up dogs that does nothing but nip at your ankles?
A mentally retarded jumped up dog….. crossed with an exceptionally stupid donkey….
Keeps things moving along…NEXT
There are a number of people on FW who subscribe to the theory that there will be no sudden collapse… that there will just be a gentle slope downwards ending in a global ‘Scott Nearing’ like scenario.
That would be a dream come true for my kids…
Living the Good Life…psile….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8pZfsgHd_30
It don’t happen just writing poetry and sunning on the beach
Peaks Cheap Safe Water
The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.
Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or industrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning.
To identify these locations, Reuters examined neighborhood-level blood testing results, most of which have not been previously disclosed. The data, obtained from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracks poisoning rates among children tested in each location.
A variety of pressures ranging from climate change, to sanitation and water quality, to infrastructure upgrades, are placing increasing strain on water prices. Estimates of the cost to replace aging infrastructure in the United States alone project over $1 trillion dollars are needed in the next 25 years to replace systems built circa World War II, which could triple the cost of household water bills…
Over the next few decades, water prices are anticipated to increase to four times current levels. Prices could go higher if cities look to private providers for water services, who have a tendency to charge higher rates than public providers. These pressures on water systems, combined with the fact that water is a vital necessity to sustain life, place this issue at the forefront of 21st century infrastructure challenges. While studies have found that Americans are willing to pay more to maintain and ensure access to water resources, this willingness to pay may conflict with their fundamental ability to pay for water.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-25/americas-water-wars-conflict-coming
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/01/23/20170125_water1_0.png
Poor people cannot afford purified bottled water …. which means they end up with lower IQs from drinking lead…. ensuring they remain poor.
Overheard at a high flying dinner party in Manhattan …. ‘quelle problem? I see no problem. Let them drink lead’
This is a little curious for a Monsanto lover.
Have you had a change of heart?
Not at all. Whatever it takes to feed 7.5 billion people we must do. Grow or collapse and die.
I prefer to take my collapse later — and in the meantime as a good mate of mine put it ‘Whole Foods has got this problem covered for me’ — essentially too bad for those who have to eat this shit — I don’t
As for the poisoned water — the point I am making is that the end of cheap energy is not the only problem we are facing —- who knows — perhaps continued drought in California triggers global collapse….
The system is ultra fragile — a puff of wind from any direction could topple BAU over the cliff….
“When you have close to 1.2 million miles of lead pipes for water delivery in America — pipes that only have a lifespan of about 75 years and many are reaching that age — you have a recipe for disaster that experts warn will cost close to $1 trillion to fix.” – This is insane. You can never “fix” the problem. In 75 years all the pipes will need replacing yet again. What a mess technology has gotten us in to. It was good at first when technology was making our lives easier. Now, we are working harder and harder to maintain the technology. We seem to be shifting into reverse.
Red (lead) Queen Effect. You just have to stop those hungry getto kids from eating the old leaded paint chips. As for lead plumbing, I’m not so sure it’s all that harmful. Most of the leaded pipes were and are used for the drains, not for the water feeds. Those are usually made of copper or steel alloy. Copper usually lasts much longer than steel. Lead is like almost forever. BTW, copper is also toxic at high concentrations. It’s used as a marine anitfoulant.
The richer Romans ate off leaded plates and drank acidic wine from leaded gobbets. Archeologists have noted the rise and fall of Roman lead posioning by analyzing the lead in their bones. Some have suggested that this poisoning may have contributed to the fall of the empire, as the leader class became lower in IQ over time.
Apparently Donald is going to replace all these trillions of dollars of infrastructure that were built when energy was cheap….
They should remain poor. It is the way which was intended.
The Great War killed too many valuable people and replaced them with American cornhuskers, which led the world to this direction.
Norman Borlaug, son of Danish immigrants in Iowa, would have continued farming maize instead of becoming a scholar if the Great War ended in 1915.
Here is a very recent article in the “New Yorker” entitled, “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich.” Lots about missile silos turned into condos and hedge fund managers buying farms in New Zealand. The wealthy, educated elite of America are starting to figure out that things are not going so well. Here’s the link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
The New Zealand reaction is that these rich nobs are sneakily buying their way into paradise and that we should start marketing ourselves that way to goose certain property markets.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/88768571/editorial-is-new-zealand-citizenship-for-sale
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/88705064/super-rich-americans-buying-land-in-new-zealand-as-bolthole-from-apocalypse
Of course N.Z ‘s ability to ride out systemic collapse is exaggerated BUT with 650 kilograms of meat person currently sitting on four legs, 80% electricity from hydropower and oil reserves available for domestic consumption there is some potential to battle on through the first year or two of depression. I’m especially happy with my choice of location as it is a city used to hardship and relies on a good store of artesian water that doesn’t need treatment before distribution.
Note: I do recognise the potential for absolute chaos and the end of global supply chains yada yada …
I was speaking to a friend the other day … he was in banking for years and converted to tech entrepreneur ….
I am sure he thought of me as chicken little when I warned that collapse was coming…
He has changed tune — and is no looking for a bolt hole in Canada.
What he – and these other people who have enough cash to have options do not realize is that their luxury bolt holes will be useless (actually all bolt holes will be pretty much useless)
They seem to believe the collapse that is coming is financial in nature – they do not understand that the cause is the end of cheap to produce energy….
They seem to believe after the financial calamity -which they intend to ride out in New Zealand — there will be a reset….
They are in for a very big surprise.
Thiel;s house in Queenstown
https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/dam/images/1/g/u/9/4/x/image.related.StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.620×349.1gu4zi.png/1485324752774.jpg
Somewhere recently I saw a blog about suitable places to escape to when the SHTF time comes. New Zealand did not figure very highly in the pecking order. I cannot recall the link now, but I do recall that bit. Some of the world’s “first peoples” may survive because they still have knowledge of living their basic lives in known environments. But even they will be stressed as climate change will inflict changes they will have to adapt to and there won’t be much in the way of low hanging fruit around either.
Totally agree.
Spent fuel ponds aside… the best places to be would be those that are completely unplugged from BAU — where people have no electricity — no modern tools — where everything they eat they provide for themselves.
They are already living the Fast Eddy Challenge.
I have been to two such places – the Amazon — and Irian Jaya…. I stayed in a nice hotel in the tree tops in the Amazon so had only fleeting contact with the natives — and did not get anywhere near natives who do not have contact with tourists…
But in IJ — I went to the heart of darkness — not even a plastic bottle was to be had… trekkers almost never make it to such places…
Historically these tribes have engaged in frequent and intense wars — as to be expected when there are few resources available….. they have been known to eat each other…
These remote places are — needless to say — not ideal bolt holes for outsiders… the tribes will not welcome Peter Thiel post BAU —- well — they might welcome him …. with garlands of garlic and other spices — then put him in a pot…..
If anyone is to survive the apocalypse — spent fuel aside— it would be tribes that are completely cut off from the world
that always allows me much hilarity here
when londoners say they’ll head for wales
“They seem to believe after the financial calamity -which they intend to ride out in New Zealand — there will be a reset….”
There have always been resets throughout history after disasters. The only difference this time is the collapse will be global, the reset/s localized and the level of tech afterwards will be far less. But of course those making it through the bottleneck will come together here and there to begin anew. It will be a harsh life compared to this peak oil tech extravaganza, but nonetheless life goes on for those that can endure.
There will be no energy post BAU — because BAU is collapsing for the lack of cheap energy.
Therefore there will be no food — and there will be no way to stop spent fuel ponds from poisoning the world
There will be no reset. A reset requires energy
I would imagine the hydro plants and grid will not last very long due to spare parts being unavailable…. also the hydro plants are in remote areas which will be difficult to get to to service without petrol for cars and helicopters.
I came in very easily under the skilled worker option — I had to demonstrate in front of a gov’t panel my ability to heft large objects held by my teeth — and I had to demonstrate that I could find employment in a circus for at least a year…. the PTB were very impressed – to say the least.
As for selling citizenship I have no problem with that — so long as it is not sold to gangsters — if someone with loads of money like Thiel are willing to slap many millions of dollars on the table for a NZ passport —- in the belief that they have purchased a slice of heaven — I am all for it.
The more the merrier — because that will help ensure that NZ remains prosperous — till the last moment.
Hopefully Thiel does not find FW — it would be bad for NZ if he were to discover the spent fuel problem
FE – can’t agree more re the NZ situation – as i said – we MAY battle through a year or two of depression IF depression continues in the global economy before the ….CRACK.
However that’s not a recipe for lasting success or a solution to the Korowicz style collapse we see coming.
I will split hairs with you (again) and reiterate that given preventative maintenance programs and the very fact that hydro plants don’t now routinely stop operation due to waiting for a valve from Japan – that their operation could continue for months post a global supply chain failure.
The distinction I’m attempting to make here is that we may see things grind down bit by bit and we may see major elements of the global trade be disrupted for a period and THEN see the complete HALT. You’ve seemed to maintain that we see ‘normality’ in trade and finance until an overnight crisis. That’s is a very reasonable position to take. I’m of the same mind. However, would it be equally reasonable to assume that a period of desperation and serious recession could precede the crisis point?
Why the sudden animosity to gangsters?
Dear Fast Eddy;
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
First, an analysis from Sandia Laboratories
“These results should be considered in context with the fact that according to current practice, decay times as short as 30 days in reactor-sited pools and 11 year in away-from-reactor pools are possible.”
So, a significant proportion of the spent fuel rods have been used as much as possible in the reactor, and then have been stored safely for many years. The fuel that has been stored for more than five years can be dry casked. It doesn’t need water cooling at all. Since it can be stored in a dry cask, it can also be stored in the racks in the pool without overheating. Stated another way, that fuel is safe regardless of the existence of water in the pool. From the book:
“For most of the cases considered, a 3-year decay period is sufficient to keep the clad temperatures within safe limits even when there is no ventilation at all.”
The cases where fuel that has been stored for 3 years, and is unsafe, are due to tighter placement of the fuel, and smaller holes that restrict air circulation. The 3 year number is for spent fuel from a Pressurized water reactor (PWR) for fuel that was used in a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) the time required is less. (There are more PWR reactors than BWR reactors.)
“… the amount of heatup occurring in the unventilated or underventilated away-from- reactor storage pool is considerably lower when the pool is filled with BWR fuel than when it is filled with PWR fuel.”
For spent fuel stored outside, or in a room with an open door and roof vent the study concluded that:
“1. Considering a complete pool drainage, the minimum allowable decay time for PWR spent fuel in a well-ventilated room varies from a best value of about 5 days, for open-frame storage configurations, to a worst value of about 700 days, for high-density closed-frame configurations with wall-to-wall spent fuel placement. Other storage configurations fall between these limits. The minimum allowable decay time is defined as the lower limit of safe decay times, such that shorter decay times would produce local clad failures due to rupture or melting.”
“2. The minimum allowable decay time for BWR spent fuel in a well-ventilated room varies from a best value of 5 days to a worst value of 150 days for the cases considered. A high-density storage rack design for BWRs would result in a somewhat higher value of the allowable decay time than presented here, but not as high as for PWR spent fuel.”
That is ALL fuel that has been stored for 700 days after BAU would be safe. Some fuel stored only 5 days would be safe. Interestingly, the author goes on to say that by making a few modifications to the racks, that 700 day number could be reduced to 80 days at no expense to the utility.
If the fuel is stored in a closed room with no ventilation, the spent fuel would need to be stored as long as 4 years before it was safe.
The author calculated that it would likely not be wise under any circumstances to stand at the edge of the pool after the water was gone. Just as obvious, the idea that all of the spent fuel known to exist would – as a matter of course – burn, melt, go critical and scatter radiation over vast areas is simply ridiculous, as I stated several days ago.
The second study from Brookhaven National Laboratory was charged with determining the damage that would be caused by the spent fuel that did overheat per the study at Sandia. In the “Consequence Evaluation” section of the Brookhaven study one finds:
“Because of several features in the health physics modeling in the CRAC2 code, the population dose results are not very sensitive to the estimated fission product release. A more sensitive measure of the accident severity appears to be the interdiction area (contaminated land area) which in the worst cases was about two hundred square miles. While the long-term health effects (i.e., person-rem) are potentially large, it is important to note that no “prompt fatalities” were predicted and the risk of injury was also negligible.”
In the later portions of the text, the author notes that the reason that there are no prompt fatalities, and the risk of injury was small is that the model used assumes what I would call BAU mitigation. So, yes their would be major health effects in the 200 square mile area if the fire happened post BAU.
Regarding their review and update of the Sandia work:
“Based on the previous results we have concluded that the modified SFUEL code (SFUELIW2) gives a reasonable estimate of the potential for propagation of self-sustaining clad oxidation from high power spent fuel to low power spent fuel. Under some conditions, propagation is predicted to occur for spent fuel that has been stored as long as 2 years. The investigation of the effect of insufficient ventilation in the fuel building indicated that oxygen depletion is a competing factor with heating of the building atmosphere and propagation is not predicted to occur for spent fuel that has been cooled for more than three years even without ventilation.”
Recall that under the worst conditions possible, the Sandia study found that spent fuel stored only 3 years might cause a large issue. The Brookhaven folks showed that fuel stored only 3 years might overheat, but would not create the worst fire possible.
Yup. The spent fuel will not be moved, it will not all be dry casked, it will be radioactive for centuries and dangerous for decades. It is entirely possible that every nuclear reactor that is in operation today will have a fire in the spent fuel pool(s) and it is entirely possible that the fire will be the worst possible. Assuming the worst happens at every facility, there will be roughly 1000 areas with a 15 mile radius that will be unsafe for the foreseeable future. If the population density in those 200 square mile area is high, millions will die or wish for death. Millions.
Spent fuel pools cannot:
1. Explode
2. Spread radiation uphill more that 20 – 30 miles
3. cause human extinction
Spent fuel pools will:
1. Contaminate surface and groundwater including the oceans
2. Make a terrible mess in the immediate area
Tell your tribe where the nukes are, and make sure the young ones know that it is crucial that their decedents never forget where those unsafe areas are. Do not live anywhere near one. No hysteria or histrionics are necessary, but FE lives for histrionics and hysteria, so please FE ignore the facts again. I will post this later.
Glowingly Yours,
Pintada
U.S. Government; Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (2011-03-16). 2011 Nuclear Power Plant Sourcebook: Spent Nuclear Fuel and the Risks of Heatup After the Loss of Water – NRC Reports – Crisis at Japan’s TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant (~200 pages). Progressive Management. Kindle Edition.
I think you have posted this before.
Dear Ms Tverberg;
Yes, I have posted it before. Here’s the thing. Fast Eddy (or whatever) has the time and is obsessed enough to post – with ever creative new phraseology – that “the spent fuel ponds will kill everyone post BAU”. His obsession with that obvious absurdity allows him to spend a crazy amount of time spreading the lie, while I, being sane, have very limited time for debunking the lie. So yes, I post the same truth over and over without changing it.
Thank you for letting me debunk the silliness, every time he posts the lie.
Sincerely,
Pintada
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released.
The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
As I have been saying — Sandia recommendations were not followed through on — spent fuel is stored in dense pack formation.
Based on your continuous posting of the Sandia rubbish…. it is clear that you and the spent fuel ponds have a descriptor in common….
dense
dɛns/Submit
adjective
1.
closely compacted in substance.
“as the storm cleared, a dense fog came down”
synonyms: thick, heavy, opaque, soupy, murky, smoggy, impenetrable; More
2.
informal
(of a person) stupid.
“Am I being dense? I don’t quite understand”
Pintada,
Excellent work and thank you. The situation is dire enough without histrionics. The combined sum of all of the forces acting against our survival are serious enough that we needn’t go looking for other sources of disaster. Well said.
Thanks, Pintada for your efforts to present evidence on the subject.
I’m not sure that you can claim as strongly as you do that the spent fuel problem is as ‘negligible’ as those two studies claim (there have been studies making contrary claims after all). Neither do I believe that FE should be as convinced as to their extinction level threat. As this point in time I don’t believe there has been enough research done to come down firmly for either assumption. However I commend you for presenting what evidence is available to those of us who have not yet seen it – even if it has been posted before.
The thing is….
I have not seen a single piece of information that demonstrates that spent fuels can be managed without BAU —- and I have not seen a shred of evidence that when all spent fuel ponds are left to their own devices — will not catch fire and release epic amounts of radiation.
Not a single shred. Nothing. Nadda.
Yes we have at least three schools of thought on the spent nuclear fuel rods post BAU.
1) we all die
2) local damage not too bad
3) even local damage can be mitigated by spreading the fuel rods out to low density
As this is not a nuclear engineering site I am more interested which countries/regions are going down now and which are next and when do we go down?
I’d say several countries in Africa are post collapse, Yemen, Cuba, areas of Indonesia never rose up they just stayed per-industrial.
There is only one school of thought on the spent fuel issue — they other ‘schools’ are for the severely mentally retarded individuals who would have trouble tying their shoe laces.
Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/spent-fuel-fire-us-soil-could-dwarf-impact-fukushima
A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event.
A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.
….the national academies’s report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. After fuel is removed from a reactor core, the radioactive fission products continue to decay, generating heat. All nuclear power plants store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 4 years while it slowly cools.
To keep it safe, the academies report recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. The panel also says plants should be ready to tighten security after a disaster.
At most U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel is densely packed in pools, heightening the fire risk. NRC has estimated that a major fire at the spent fuel pool at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania would displace an estimated 3.46 million people from 31,000 square kilometers of contaminated land, an area larger than New Jersey. But Von Hippel and Schoeppner think that NRC has grossly underestimated the scale and societal costs of such a fire.
Multiply this by 4000….
Look at Mr Pintada … the star pupil of the School for the Mentally Challenged… nice effort but if you could only read you would stop posting the same rubbish over and over…
The Sandia solution requires that the fuel rods NOT be packed in dense formation …. unfortunately their recommendations were ignored because it is much more cost-effective to store spent fuel in dense packed formations:
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool.
Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released.
The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Repeating the same lie over and over again is a sign of severe mental impairment. Ignoring the facts must be construed as a form of extreme psychosis.
Have you considered checking yourself in?
http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Depardon-Manicomio10.jpg
There are medications available that can assist you with escaping your make-believe world.
In the meantime, I highly recommend you stay well away from knives, hammers, loaded weapons and cliff tops.
“For most of the cases considered, a 3-year decay period is sufficient to keep the clad temperatures within safe limits even when there is no ventilation at all.”
Pintada,
Does this mean the fuel rods at Fukushima Daiichi can be considered safe now, as even the newest ones have been kept cool now for six years come March 11?
I am basing my expectations on a few things:
– CTG and the gal in Ontario (name escapes me) have explained the JIT supply chain — virtually nothing is stockpiled
– after Lehman global trade completely stopped for a few days — due to no trust between the banks of the suppliers and customers – if the central banks did not agree to back stop the entire global economy would have collapsed soon after
The metaphor I prefer is fingers in the dam….. the men in charge stick fingers in holes as fast as they can — at some point the holes overwhelm them — and the dam bursts…
My expectation is that it will happen that quickly …. up until that moment things will no doubt get progressively worse — with some places degrading faster than others – more join Greece and Venezuela and Libya and Syria — but at some point a breaking point is reached.
I continue to struggle to work out what the trigger will be.
“CTG and the gal in Ontario (name escapes me) have explained the JIT supply chain — virtually nothing is stockpiled”
Are you talking about Nicole Foss from The Automatic Earth?
Definitely not her heheheh — the last time I saw something from Nicole Foss I think she was advising one of her kids to learn a percussion instrument ‘because entertainers will always be needed in a post BAU world’
I hear that she enrolled her in a Bang a Drum Dance Around the Fire crash course http://www.BADDATFC.com
My suggestion would be to sign up for a course that offers training in hand to hand combat with knives… small arms training and ambush tactics… I’d strongly recommend a specialist course in how to attack a static target like say … an organic farm…
http://www.killthemofooker.com
TM,
She posts as SymbolikGirl.
Thanks for recognising the idea that we could be (and are) seeing a period of disintegration in some locales (for a year or two?) before the actual ‘Lehman-type’ trigger.
However i still think the ‘overnight crisis’ scenario while the major economies ‘pretend and extend BAu is the more likely scenario. I would agree with you that a long-lasting depression preceding the crisis point is the less likely scenario given what we understand about global interconnectedness, the lack or resilience in the system and the ways in which global finance is currently goosing the system. However a period of depression here in NZ – my particular selfish concern – i don’t rule out entirely. it’s still not a pretty picture. Either chaos descends quickly or misery for a while then chaos.
Reading all these comments got me wondering: how unique is our situation in the universe?
If technological civilization is a common outcome of evolution then there should be evidence of it elsewhere in the universe. So, I started poking around and from the following link I found an interesting observation:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/
“After examining some 100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological civilizations. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, it is by far the largest of study of its kind to date—earlier research had only cursorily investigated about a hundred galaxies.”
So, out of 100,000 galaxies each with about 200 billion stars, there is not another technologically advanced civilization. This is a very very stark reality. It seems to me that either one of two things is going on: either technological civilizations are very short lived (and we can’t detect them) or, we are the only one in 20 quadrillion stars (if my math is correct). Either way folks we are a big time oasis in a very vast desert. It gives The Earth Battery Paper a whole new perspective. If you havn’t seen it here is the link: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511.abstract
That’s some interesting observations there Greg. Thanks for bringing it up and expanding upon Gail’s questions about the “miraculousness of system complexity”. If one reads George Mobus one might take the view that the arc of evolution (or complexity) can only be explained by a teleological assumption . i.e. that there is a goal ‘we’ are being driven towards.
For my money the evolution of consciousness is something beyond linearity. Consciousness created the means to create itself. We – as godheads of consciousness – play a part in the creation of the ‘interstitial fabric’ which binds time and space into coherence. This is not a idealist proposition. We do not simply wish the universe into by our awareness of it. Rather the universe needs consciousness to reach it’s terminus so that it can be at it’s beginning. This is tied to the idea that at the other end of a black hole is a big bang. The sense of time that consciousness allows is the sand, the grit that gives the space-time flux it’s coarsity. Without consciousness there is no ‘gap’ between the instance of big bang and black hole singularity.
As to the “lack of life out there” are a couple of books on the subject I’ve read I can recommend – the basic argument is: our planet’s particular path of becoming and remaining a planet that can sustain complex life within what is not necessarily a common type of solar system is highly improbable to have ever been achieved elsewhere.
Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe
Ward, Peter Douglas,
If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens Where Is Everybody?
Seventy-five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life
Webb, Stephen
Are you suggesting that consciousness exists within the singularity (in which the universe exists in all of its states “all at once”) and that consciousness gives time its linearity in which consciousness “comes to be” within the linear progression?
Temporal linearity may exist only within the mind that exists within the singularity? The mind has a linear temporal structure in which it perceives the singularity as the “history” in which itself comes to be? I am not sure that the singularity would itself need to cease to be singular and to become linear just because the mind within the singularity perceives it as linear.
It seems to come down to the question of Schopenhaur’s interpretation of Kant, the noumena retains its singularity, linearity is a transcendental structure that gives structure to our perception (phenomena) not to the noumena. But the noumena is here conceived not as the Will but as the universe itself in its singularity.
Of course it leaves the question of “where” the singularity “came from” or “how” it “got there” or whatever. The same can be said of God, who created him? The point is likely that those concepts dont apply to the noumena, only to phenomena.
I have my doubts that anything could be “proven” about noumena, even that it exists. Proof likely applies only to phenomena, the extra-mental is radically beyond comprehension.
I find FSA’s view very interesting, but I’m not sure about yours. I don’t see much difference between singularities and noumena
The point is whether the singularity ceases to exist as a singularity, as FSA seemed to imply, once consciousness gives time its linearity. That is one reason why I equated the singularity with noumena so that question could be discussed and expanded upon.
By the way, do you think that your good manners may have slipped in that comment? lol Sorry but I found that quite funny. Thanks for your input.
For further clarity, FSA *seems* (one has to try to interpet) to take a monist view that the singularity contains the consciousness that ontologically gives linear form to the singularity itself and makes the universe itself linear. I was questioning whether a singularity that contains consciousness could not rather remain in its singularity while it appears linear to consciousness. The former is more akin to the monist telological ontology of Hegel and it is not really noumenal, the latter is more dualist.
Excuse me, my english is too rough
I see your point now. I’ve always preferred the Kantian way, but it’s true teleologism is also attractive. But the later should not necesarily be related to an Earthian monism: perhaps we only get a part of the telos
Thank you JST!
Are you seeking to claim as Ayer did that ‘metaphysics is non-sense? I’ve rejected that claim (temporarily?) myself. If our awareness is the mechanism by which the “stuff” of phenomenon are given form then does it not follow that the awareness has agency? If this agency is the prescriptor of phenomenon how can it also be relied on as an accurate verifier of what is or what is not? In the process of constant creation is there an ability to judge that creation in the same moment? Can we look inwards and outwards simultaneously? I’m reminded of T.S Elliot – “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where”
To answer your questions which I understand are these: Should we consider that consciousness creates an ‘actual’ linearity or just a perceived one? Is the singularity transformed into parts by consciousness or is consciousness a state experiencing temporality just for itself?
My shorthand answer is found in my first stated proposition: the evolution of consciousness is beyond linearity. Consciousness has the properties which we ascribe to the singularity – it is a point in which all states exist. It is not a ‘container’ in which a segmented temporality is created. It is an agent in the same way we view space and time as agents. We could consider space and time and consciousness as ‘the three illusions of the interstitial’. It is only by the confluence of these three agents that the gaps between beginning and end take shape.
The expansion of this argument, if we would like to interrogate it further, will likely take a deist course…. to prove the gods are dead we may just have to invent a G-o-d….
“we may just have to invent a G-o-d….”
Or as some people say, “There are no gods–yet.”
Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean that they are not there. I think the idea that they have to consume massive amounts of energy is wrong. Probably they are just highly advanced AI with infinite life spans that roam around their galaxies. They would be undetectable. Kind of like brilliant birds that fly around in space. Increasing population and using lots of energy is very much a biological thing.
“very much a biological thing.”
I am aware of the people who spend a lot of effort on this. To the best of my knowledge they are as baffled as the rest of us. The working assumption is that technological life would have a range of behaviors. It would take only one of them that stuck with biology and spread out to make a visible splash. Take travel for example. One of the more obvious ways to travel between stars is to use stars to power a big lasers and ride the beams with light sails (Forward’s method). The light spill from such a transport system would be visible as obviously unnatural far across the universe.
“The mediocrity principle suggests, given the existence of life on Earth, that life typically exists on Earth-like planets throughout the universe.[4]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle
So far, we have conflicting information. I don’t have a solution.
The question being – are there really any Earth-like planets? The term gets bandied around too loosely. E.G. Do they have a Van Allen belt? Are they protected from constant bombardment by the unique gravitational patterns that exist in our not-so common solar system arrangement? Do they approximate our various rhythms – circadian, tidal, seasonal and orbital? At the moment anything just exhibiting ‘rocks’ and ‘water is termed earth-like, a far-cry from Earth if the other multitude of factors are not determined also.
“obvious signs”
I know Jason Wright through email. He is one sharp guy and deeply involved in the Tabby’s star research. He cites my work on anisotropic (directional, out of our line of sight) IR radiation from thermal power satellites. He isn’t the first one to look at a mess of galaxies, Eric Drexler of nanotech fame did the same after he understood that nanotechnology would let us reshape the visible universe. What Drexler was looking for was an expanding civilization that was englobing stars and shifting their visible light to IR. This would show up as a galaxy that looked like Cookie Monster had taken a bite out of it. Drexler didn’t find anything either.
This is inordinately bad news for us if technological life is common. If it is, then something eats every one of them before they can make a visible mark on the universe. I have speculated that humans might upload and speed up, making the stars recede (in travel time) beyond reason. https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
It’s a major mystery. What makes Tabby’s star so interesting is that we could be looking at aliens who have installed low temperature heat radiators a substantial fraction of the size of their star.
It just seems wrong that every single technological life form would take a route where their works were not visible, but that’s what we seem to have.
Assuming, that is, that we are not the first. I hope we are not because if we are it puts a crushing burden on humanity.
I wouldn’t be concerned. In say another 200 million years the planet will have recharged and can afford another attack of intelligent life forms. Rinse and repeat until the sun gets old.
How in the world do you think that the planet recharges? More oil, coal and natural gas in suitable locations? We would need to repeat the climactic conditions that allowed the first accumulation of fossil fuels.
More mineral deposits that are easy to extract as well? How do you think we are going to get those? The tendency is toward more and more dispersal, as complexity gives rise to uses that use greater and greater mixtures of materials. It would take huge energy amounts, to attempt to put minerals back together in the form needed.
You are asking for an awfully lot.
I would have thought 200 million years was adequate time for the planet to recover the losses we caused. Continental drift, mountain building and erosion, etc will bring new mineral supplies to the surface and taken away the exhausted rocks. It is still a finite world but given time it will recover a loy of resources. There will be time for new coal beds and oil supplies to form. Anyway if 200 million years is not enough make it 400 my[?] The point is another intelligent species can have its turn.
Our supply of fossil fuels takes an extremely unusual combination of circumstances.
Someone on another blog suggested that we don’t quite have a billion years before the sun gobbles up earth, and things start getting untenable for life in half that time. And it’s not that I follow Guy McPherson too much these days, but he probably would put the prospect of earth being a lifeless zone in a much, much shorter time span than that. Which is to suggest that we think more about the present and less about the fantasy of life in 200 mil years hence.
Techno Narcissists are often extremely scientific illiterate, on most levels, but specialists on a micro level.
I used to attend Long Now events, and was horrified with the delusion.
ejhr2015 is asking for an awful lot in terms of our current scientific theories. But how often have our scientific theories been overturned, so that a respectable theory became pseudo-science, and what was considered pseudo-science became respectable? How exactly did all these metals and minerals and elements from, and are all our theories about them correct? Nobody knows what the Earth will be like in 200 millions years – which is an awfully long time, after all.
Just look at the things that are still argued about: the Giza pyramid was supposedly constructed in 20 years – just how did the ancient Egyptians manage the logistics of that? When you work out how many tons would have had to be moved and worked every hour for 20 years, quite apart from feeding and providing living space for the workers, it beggars belief. And how did the mega-dinosaurs support their weight? Scientists and engineers cannot prove how they did it – it ought to be impossible. You can google the controversies. Some think the Earth had to have been only 55% of its current size, and that the planet is expanding. After all, how do we know what exactly is happening at the very centre of the core of the Earth? We don’t have people there monitoring it.
We don’t even understand ourselves. There is no agreement on what consciousness is or even how memories are stored. One man gets a nasty bump on the head and discovers he can speak fluent Italian – a language of which he previously had no knowledge. Another such man, after another such accident, discovers he can play the piano – but only without using his little fingers. As Gail points out, most experts work with blinkers on and cannot even link the disparate factors of our human economy together. So I think a little modesty is in order. Admittedly, we will not be around in 200 million years’ time, so we need not worry about it. But will there be divine intervention meantime, to put us back on track, as Gail appears to hope? I don’t know. I can’t rule it in or out. If it did happen, the atheists who believe we are in the Matrix would just say it proved their theory, and the arguments would continue anew.
would you like to buy a season ticket to Jurassic park—just to check how things are progressing?
Will you be around to sell tickets?
Norm – I suggest you package that ticket with one way tickets to the new Mars colony. That would be a winner
I don’t think I can even think on time scales of 200 million years. It is futile to predict anything that far out.
Well it has to be a guess. But “they” can forecast what the land masses will look like in x hundred million years. It’s not too far fetched to reckon the planet still has a lot of life sustaining ability in the 4 billion years it has before the sun turns into a red giant. My main point was that there’s oodles of time for other “civilizations” like ours to rise and fall. Our demise is not the end of intelligent life even on this little blue marble.
“oodles of time”
Not really. Complex life might take about 750 million years to evolve following the predicted climate cataclysm.
The series of events that led to the laying down of fossil fuels are not necessarily repeating themselves in the same manner again either. If there is but one significant difference in climate variables or mass extinctions you could be looking at 2 billion years for some sort of resources base and intelligent life around to harness it.
These developments will also have to take place with a completely different ‘environment’ – a less efficient Van Allens belt or almost non-existent tidal flows given that the moon will be significantly further away, and the sun’s radiation will be of a different magnitude within even a billion years.
Your assumptions are ‘cute’ but need examining.
The Sun is already old. It’s brightening and getting hotter. The Moon is moving away. The Earths ability to recharge the atmosphere is waning. Intelligent life was a one shot affair, evolution will be severely hampered by time and conditions. Diversity and time was evolutions’ mainstay, both are severely curtailed.
Within about 600 more likely 400 million years the Earth will be uninhabitable for much more than the most basic forms of life.
More than likely we have blown our chance to exist for even a fraction of the time that the dinosaurs held sway.
By then we will have learned to turn Mars green and we can just move back to Earth and do same sarc
Your guess is as good as mine no doubt. I haven’t seen any recent evidence to not support the theory we are half way through the planets life cycle, which means 600 million years will still be in the viable zone. Anything can happen of course, as has done. It was only 250 mya that the Permian extinction occurred, with a 95% loss of life. There’s bound to be more of those big events. I dunno about the “old ” sun. It’s also at its halfway point as far as what I have understood is concerned. ‘I’m not resiling from what I said.
You don’t know enough. The Sun is a common variable star. It does not get born, stay constant and fade away after ten billion years. There is much on our planet and within the Solar System that has made up and supports the conditions for life as we know it. I’ll list you some books to read if you like.
I did have a 24 volume encyclopaedia on Astronomy, but I gave it away when I downsized to fit into a flat. I read it all but you may be more up to date, as the science does change all the time. I get updates on Science Daily but I’ve not seen anything against that idea that the sun is halfway through it’s current cycle, before it exhausts its hydrogen.
Like beating my head against a wall…..half way through its cycle does not mean the Earth has been habitable for the first half and will remain habitable through the second half.
Good points!
Keiths comment there got me thinking about Apex predators..
In general predators are often more intelligent than their prey. It’s harder to hunt another thinking animal than it is to hunt grass. Think of lions versus antelopes. But like most biological trends there are significant and important exceptions, like elephants, parrots, etc.
A strong selective force for intelligence is sociality, stronger it seems than the force exerted by predation. Many predators are solitary. But most social predators are probably going to be higher up in the intelligence ranks than most of their prey (wolves, dolphins, orcas, humans).
Therefore intelligent life on other planets would most certainly be social predators. But.. how do you restrain predators from their prey/resources. That simply isn’t possible.. predators kill, multiply, harvest resources untill all resources are dead, killed, used. Predators are killers, even the social predators. An intelligent social predator species would therefore necessarily cause its own demise by overshoot and collapse. Dead planets are plentifull. Maybe all the dead planets we see are the traces of the ancient ones that came before us..
Keiths comment got the silly idea in my head that the only possibility of having a intergalactic civilization would be that there are some Super- Apex predators harvesting resources from the social predators (permanent nobility vs. plebs dynamic). Otherwise its always the same overshoot and collapse story again and again. And through generations of genetic manipulation the Super-Apex predators would have become really really nasty manipulative, psychopatic superkillers.
So if we are to meet visitors from another world, by all likelyhood they are despotic, tyrannical, elitistical, Super-Apex predators coming to enslave you and take all your resources from you. That would be the only kind that could keep the planets original social predator species from going towards their overshoot and collapse cycle..
But.. if there isn’t any Super-Apex predators out there.. (to ‘save’ us), and all is in the hands of our own silly little species.. then we must evolve in to a species with a Super-Apex predator group inside our own species, or we collapse and die.
Any manipulative- tyrannical- psychopatic- super killer volunteers here to take the job of global slave master ??
Somewhat on line with your apex predator topic comes this video about Tropic Cascade effects..
There are two videos on the topic here. One is about wolves the other about whales.
http://www.flixxy.com/how-wolves-changed-an-entire-ecosystem.htm
I don’t like this*
Van Kent,
Thanks for your amusing and mostly true comment. I say “mostly” because I disagree from the moment you introduce this species of Super-Apex Intergalactic Predators.
Even if they’re able to enslave us and “garden” planet Earth (and likely other ones) for their own profit, what tells you that they’re a united species, or that they didn’t have to fight internally amongst themselves before deciding to cooperate and assault their neighbors? Also assume they still must have enough resource (matter + energy) in order to withstand the continuity of their BAU and at the same time the transition towards the new way of life;
Maybe the perspective of a big and rapid increase of their Carrying Capacity Line, thanks to those extra-inputs from outspace? Note these extras would be only temporary, because they’d quickly adjust their population, and other needs to this new line (just as we did with FF). I can’t see how this could prevent any collapse, neither here nor there.
IMHO, the only way to delay (not even prevent) the deadly cycles of overshoots & collapses is to have a Carrying Capacity as stable as possible, together with an as-bigger-as-possible reactivity from ourselves (that never happens, see r, K strategies, we always fall into the normalcy bias that makes us think nothing will ever change).
Not to mention all of the entropy issues…
Secondly, don’t we already have something very similar on Earth?
I won’t describe this class of ruling super-predators, I think everyone has lots of images coming to mind.
NB: I say “class” because it isn’t a sub-species yet. Anyway, most of the selection today happens on the socio-cultural level, which is much faster than the biological one (don’t forget we’re in a race!).
Why do we always tend to rely on “somebody from outside” when we aren’t able to stop fighting each other? Because we need to maintain some level of inequality to have the whole circus go ahead, or…? Well, this wasn’t supposed to be a bitter rant, thanks again Van Kent.
Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/spent-fuel-fire-us-soil-could-dwarf-impact-fukushima
A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event.
A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.
….the national academies’s report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. After fuel is removed from a reactor core, the radioactive fission products continue to decay, generating heat. All nuclear power plants store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 4 years while it slowly cools. To keep it safe, the academies report recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. The panel also says plants should be ready to tighten security after a disaster.
At most U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel is densely packed in pools, heightening the fire risk. NRC has estimated that a major fire at the spent fuel pool at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania would displace an estimated 3.46 million people from 31,000 square kilometers of contaminated land, an area larger than New Jersey. But Von Hippel and Schoeppner think that NRC has grossly underestimated the scale and societal costs of such a fire.
But life will find a way….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA
Hi, has anyone read Paolo Bacigalupi?
FYI:
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Has-US-Gasoline-Demand-Peaked.html
The point that the author (Nick Cunningham) makes is that if prices go up, demand will drop. That is exactly the point I keep making. Of course, then prices will drop as well. In fact, we are likely to head into recession.
Cyclical, and either trend doesn’t work, it seems.
This is exactly my point. We should use the accessible energy left to preserve the civilization as long, as it can last. Even in small scale habitat. We become humans, when we preserve culture and knowledge. Without it we are animals again.
We will soon start moving backwards in cultural and scientific evolution. Instead of complexification we should use appropriate ‘de-complexification’ designs.
Durability and low cost of maintenance of infrastructure is crucial for the coming events.
It was a comment to Gail’s post about ageing infrastructure.
Blogspot is doing these things… sorry.
“We should use the accessible energy left to preserve the civilization as long, as it can last” – It takes a massive amount of energy to maintain what we already have. To make matters even worse, the economy requires growth to remain solvent. I believe anything and everything is already being done (that can be done) to preserve civilization as long as possible.
(rant on)
What I gather from this blog (and many other sites and books I have read over the years) is that the simple truth of the matter is that there are limits in a finite world. We are reaching multiple limits right now with respect to energy, climate and resources. Our civilization is leveraging resources to the max in a vain attempt at holding a facade of civilization together. A more apt description of our predicament is overshoot. Logically, the more into overshoot we are the more unstable our predicament becomes. Then, to preserve civilization necessarily implies more overshoot and more instability. At some point ,very soon, (2017, 2018, 2019?) the weakest links will fail leading to a collapse of the financial system.
When the financial system collapses, the overshoot and instability won’t just magically go away. Without an financial system we have no resources. With no resources we have no energy. Without energy we cannot fight back against nature and maintain overshoot. In fact overshoot and instability will take over and attempt to reach a new equilibrium in all aspects of human life. Without a financial system, resource availability will adjust accordingly (downward) so only those resources that are economic will be recovered. There will be no more “borrowing from the future with debt”. Without a function economy that means only things like wood, stones and recycled/re-purposed goods will be available. Without access to food and medicine populations will readjust sharply downward. All this will happen very quickly. It will be a discontinuity from where we were – to where we are headed next (extinction?). This whole idea of a transition takes a functioning economy, energy and resources. When any of those three things are missing, there is no “transition”. The transition becomes an uncontrolled natural adjustment back to a sustainable equilibrium. (rant off)
In general, I agree. I was referring to the idea of building things that last (what Gail agreed) though, which in my case means building a house/ a habitat for a small group of people. I didn’t mean doing this on global scale, which is obviously not possible any more.
I mean personal solutions, not global.
I think that for the long term, what the world needs is things that are easily replaceable, not things that last. A home that can be built with local biomass in a day or two is easily replaceable. A stick that can be used for digging is easily replaceable.
We have temporarily been able to use more and more complex processes to make goods that at one time could last. Unfortunately, they no longer can last, as we lose the resources to maintain them and the systems upon which they depend.
but local biomass is just another term for stuff that grows in our immediate vicinity—and that means trees and grass basically. Trees might last your lifetime, grass certainly won’t.
if you have say, a couple of acres of land available for your subsistence, (food) you cant afford to grow plant material on it to grow a house–not enough space
if your 2 acres happens to be rock, you can use that to build a house, but quarries dont produce food—but in theory you could exchange your rock for someone else’s food
and then commerce kicks off the merry go round again.
Just like the video I featured about Tom Johnson …..hmmm…must of missed that one.
Right. But this way we will back to hunter/gathering style of life soon.
One stick for digging is ok, but what about seven billion sticks? For every person on this planet? And how many local biomass can we build without hurting the environment even more? This way we will shortly decrease carrying capacity (burn/use all the biomass left). Especially in my home climate. I don’t think this is the way for collapse/transition period.
Many will try…a few may succeed….a guy like Johnson or Zimmerman have a chance…
Someone like a Fast Eddy….??? Forgetaboutit
Much appreciated comment. Cardboard boxes wouldn’t be all that easy to produce without some sort of industrial process and the energy to work it. But it sure works well as a “replaceable” material for now. There are ancillary tools and supplies required to work it conveniently, but these are at the low end of the industrial spectrum.
Also, I gather that it’s impossible to see far into the future, and that the best way to approach the distant future is to take the best-informed next step into the near future. Transitioning to the relatively replaceable while trying to test how to extend that increment of transition. Sometimes, extending that increment isn’t technical but social. Everybody having a similar level of the incremental “technology” might help to make it work a little better.
“I think that for the long term, what the world needs is things that are easily replaceable, not things that last.”
Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY
Thanks! Both of these videos demonstrate that even making something that looks simple requires quite a bit of technique.
I was surprised that the ax making video showed the use of fire to hollow out the handle. I suppose by the time complex tools such as these were available, fire would also have been available. I know that fire was also used to make sharper blades.
I was not surprised that a fairly young man was shown doing all of the work involved. A middle-aged woman would be a lot less able to handle these tasks.
and most of the alternative ”basic living” places seem to show young fit beautiful people too.
oh well
Some people prefer different standard of living:
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/25/the-super-rich-are-preparing-for-the-end-of-the-world.html
Iron production:
One puzzle for me is why it’s so commonly thought that growing indispensable plants requires fertile expanses of outlying land sitting there somewhere for people to exploit for growing. They’ll argue you to the floor to insist that food and other needed plants can’t be grown in the city. Meanwhile, the sun doth shine and water fall on the city.
I know a number of people who MAKE soil. I engage to some degree in the practice too. Among the elements that can make soil and that are available in the city are the following:
– sand
– humanure
– leaves and other vegetative matter
– silt.
I may be omitting some things, but not much. I’m not sure whether sand, once installed, needs too much replacement.
And lots of towering trees, cutting off light, at least where I live.
Also, there is too much rock, too close to the surface.
Potatoes.
750 kcal per kg.
1000 kg needed per person and year.
Average yield in England and Wales 4 kg per m2.
250m2 per person.
“there are limits in a finite world.”
Certainly. There are limits to the whole solar system. But the limits are really large, thousands of times that of the Earth. If humans spread out into the solar system, we could have growth for several centuries.
By the time humans start pressing the limits of the solar system, chances are AIs will be in charge.
the earth has been habitable by higher life forms for several hundred million years
instead of looking at ourselves as being the out-thrusting life form to inhabit other solar systems, we should ask why no other visitors have arrived from elsewhere.
when we look at galaxies 5m light years away, it is obvious the same physical forces rule there as here—ie stars rotate round a central gravitational point in exactly the same way that water goes down your plug hole.
if the physics are the same, it follows then that conversion of one energy form into another by artificial means –ie by sentient beings–would use the same fundamental physics as we do, and require a heat process.
axe head or starship—the rule seems inflexible.
if you then have a society that utilises heat, they will be competitive—the universal survival mechanism.
they would therefore compete with each other–they would have no choice, nature rules everywhere.
if that is so, their competition would preclude reaching the stage of interplanetary exploration at any level, they would have extinguished their potential means of doing so before getting started. (just like us) In any event, rules apply there the same as here, starflight is still controlled by the speed of light.
The ultimate reality I leave till last. Travel must have a purpose. The colossal investment in starflight fantasy would preclude any return on it. With a crashing a economy already, and a flight system as yet uninvented, I feel we may be barking up the wrong energy tree here.
Defiantly the wrong tree.
And, even doing the energy and resource math, the speed of light maybe the governor.
With some amusement I see it as easy to overcome, and assumed it will not be a issue.
Good points!
if you then have a society that utilises heat, they will be competitive—the universal survival mechanism.
they would therefore compete with each other–they would have no choice, nature rules everywhere.
if that is so, their competition would preclude reaching the stage of interplanetary exploration at any level, they would have extinguished their potential means of doing so before getting started. (just like us) In any event, rules apply there the same as here, starflight is still controlled by the speed of light.
Even travel to Mars would seem to be in that category.
I enjoyed Paul Chefurka’s thermodynamic take on the ‘Fermi Paradox’. He wonders if it is the fate of all planetary civilisations to fall into the trap of becoming carbon-dependent and drown in the resulting entropy before interstellar travel is possible:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Fermi.html
“society that utilises heat”
I suspect that once a civilization starts tapping their star, heat is no longer a problem. However, cold, which you must have, becomes a problem. If Tabby’s star is alien megastructures, then what we see may be very large and very cold radiators.
sounds like my old school when the janitor used to turn the heating off
Just because Earth has been habitable does not mean an alien species, as we would understand them, would necessarily have been capable of or permitted to discover Earth. It’s also likely that an alien society would have wildly alternate rules and ethics from ours that bend their reality in ways we would consider magical or impossible. Gravity would be different for example and the lifeforms might be silicone based, leading to an existence and evolution different than ours.
It’s also possible that a hypothetical alien species were limited with growth in regards to land size on their respective planet. Perhaps their energy sources were unlimited in nature versus the size of their population? Maybe planets with life are placed a minimum distance from one another to prevent contact barring a specific evolutionary enhancement, so to speak. There likely could be and are countless other possibilities as well.
I would wager that no matter the explanation it is statistically impossible for us to know or understand how reality on other planets would behave when we haven’t even figured out our own properly. We can’t even balance our own checkbook, so to speak. We most certainly aren’t qualified to balance someone else’s. And now it would appear that our current advancement of human consciousness experimentation is finished so we’ll never know. I’m sure NASA, NOAA, and other government organizations are either on the chopping block or will be muted in regards to further discoveries.
i was basing my theories on the known facts, that we can see that gravity functions 5m L yr away the same as it does here, and we have the technolgy to analyse the spectrum of stars to know how they are made up—they have the same elements as our own more or less.
so if the laws of physics are the same, and available materials are the same it seems unlikely that natural forces would throw up a fundamentally different base of life form.
the fundamental law of survival is competition—otherwise nature makes no progression, but remains static—
we can see that that cannot happen anywhere–black holes consume surrounding material on a constant rate. Your bath plughole functions in the same way. The law of gravity is universal. Stronger or weaker on different planetary bodies of course, but the same force.
my contention is, that while alien life forms must exist elsewhere, they are subject to laws above their own capabilities and acceptance.
so by nature of their survival/competition, populations rise to consume available resources. They do not stop and say ”enough is enough”
they must destroy the means by which they “might” begin to explore away from their own planet. Just like we are doing
Of course, with El Supremo now in charge, they might just show up next independence day to save us from ourselves.
In which case i apologise in advance.
You might be overthinking things Norman. For all we know the universe outside of our solar system is a fancy illusion. One of the biggest problems with humanity is that we MUST define everything. Unfortunately this world does not function in such a way that we can just cleanly label things and place them into a box. At some point you will experience or encounter some things that are beyond explanation.
Yes it’s ridiculous Tango. They assume life is abundant in the Universe and other “Earth Like” planets revolve around similar stars……so, what if life is so plentiful and planets like ours so common, do we set out on a contradictory, generational journey in the “hope” that there is no life where we are going. Do we take weapons so we can wipe ’em out if there are. If we get there and they tell us to piss off, what do we do……
IMO opinion such discussion exposes our collective psychopathic tendencies, and disregard for any life, including our own.
Humans aren’t getting off Earth and our technology has far exceeded our ability to responsibly use it. Our fantasies about conquering other planets is just that, pure fantasy. Any species that has evolved enough to travel through black holes is most certainly not a petty species that hastily uses up all of their resources to make iCrap. People in our world are all wearing coke-bottle glasses for the most part.
+++++++
Things are tough enough here where we have air and hot and cold running water and a choice of foods.
How’s is it supposed to work when they get to Mars or where ever and there is no air and no water and nothing green and growing and it’s minus 100degreesF ?
Astronauts come back from six months on the space station and they are so debilitated from the reduced gravity that they can’t walk. You got to figure that these guys were top physical specimens when they left Earth and in six months they can’t walk. And we had to pay Russia $80million for the transportation into orbit.
Tom Murphy did the math on space, http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ a few years back. Murphy’s great.
GM’s rant is pretty much on target. When those trucks stop running, we just have a couple of days of civilization left. Hungry people do what they have to. Everyone that is here today came from ancestors that didn’t just lay down and die when things got rough.
Refugees take off walking because they figure that anywhere else is better than where they’re at. Does this wild delusion of moving to a planet with no air and no water and no food mean that these space migration people see the future Earth as being worse than a planet with no air, water, or food?
Elon Musk (he consults me on all his projects btw) asked me to pass on a message Aubrey—stop nitpickin
Good points Aubrey! It is morbidly funny to think how bad it would have to get here on Earth to make a place with no air, water or food (Mars) a more alluring prospect.
Exactly!
That is something that most people appear to not realise, that the dreams of electric-everything fuelled by wind turbines and solar farms can never happen due to the need for continued surpluses and growth in order to build and maintain the required infrastructure. In a world of declining supplies of energy and other resources, we cannot even maintain what we already have. Creating surpluses by cannabilising the existing economy will not work because that would itself lead to economic recession as we chop pieces of the economy off. Recession leads to rapid collapse of availability of credit which leads to overall collapse of the economy.
The idea of some national economies growing at the expense of others also does not work due to the complex interconnectedness of the global economy (as Gail has pointed out many times).
The gradual collapse suggested by some is therefore not likely. Either a sharp crash or series of sharp crashes would be far more probable.
All of this is before we consider the additional strain of global warming and other systems issues, along with other consequences of generations of industrialisation (such as sizeable areas of land no longer being productive due to chemical pollution and/or salt, and the issue of spent fuel storage that some have mentioned here ).
Judging by the conversations I have had, the statements by various economists, politicians, journalists and technologists, most people (whether by choice or design) just do not understand or realise such matters. They do not realise how serious the situation is.
If people do not understand the situation they are in, then they are not likely to be motivated to adapt to the changing circumstances or to plan and prepare for what lies ahead. Any species which does not adapt appropriately to changing circumstances is headed for extinction.
Of course, the rapidity of the changes we are seeing with regards to natural systems may make adaptation impossible anyway. We shall see.
Not only are most people apparently not aware, it looks to me like most people do not want to be aware. I think it can be argued that, in the developed world at least, most people cannot afford to be aware in the short term, and cannot afford to not be aware in the long term. Short term thinking prevails.
the longest lasting media will be that produced on animal skins—if you exclude stone tablets.
which is pretty much where we came in.
“the longest lasting media will be that produced on animal skins—if you exclude stone tablets.” – Norman Pagett
(sarc)
What Norm? No USB thumb drive? What about Google Drive? Surely such an archaic thing as stone tablets are not superior storage media! Elon Musk will want to have a chat with you about that! (/sarc)
i’ll get onto him right away
i daresay he;s been to busy to think that through
totally agree with you we need to dry cask all the spent fuel rods while we still can along with low cost of maintenance of infrastructure while we still can unfortunately the puppetmasters think that the puppetshow will go on forever…
as far as i can see, if you are talking about using heat, the only accessible energy source outside an industrial infrastructure, is trees and other vegetable material.
animal dung is also processed vegetable matter.
other energy sources from fossil fuels will not be available. i don’t quite see what else there could be.
you cannot have fully independent ”small scale” industry based on ”large scale ” concepts.
examine almost all small scale cottage industry and you will find an ‘industrial economy’ backup—bringing materials in, and taking them out to be sold etc, in exchange for money—which is the tokenisation of industrial labour done elsewhere.
“you cannot have fully independent ”small scale” industry based on ”large scale ” concepts.” – That is brilliant! And that is how people are thinking we can have BAU-lite.
Could the current obesity epidemic in USA be an impediment to the efficiency of the American workers compared to Asian workers? Would they comply If there in fact is work for them?
Yes, America is very much bifurcated between fitness obsessed people, and the average, obese people. The fitness obsessed are maybe 10-15%, the obese are 60-70%. The obese cannot be productive to the same degree, they have too many sick days and healthcare costs.
The obesity epidemic certainly contributes to the high cost of health care. It also leads to more sick days.
There are quite a few jobs available, but they don’t pay enough to cover the cost of getting to work and incidental expenses associated with working. So they are not worth the bother.
For example, it is easy to get a part time minimum wage job ($7.25 hour), with hours varying from week to week. There is no way that most people can get to such work on public transport in the US–little public transport, and what is available often operates only during rush hours on week days. Perhaps a bicycle would work, but even that is difficult, when there are long distances and icy weather in winter or violent storms in summer to contend with. With a part time job, health care would have to be purchased under the ACA, out of the $7.25 per hour, applying to limited hours.
“Get out!” Dutch PM puts his foot down…
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/757851/Mark-Rutte-Netherlands-warning-get-out-of-here-election-Dutch-PM
“Act normal, or go away”, he has told his country in a message seen as a bid to take on the anti-immigration Freedom party.
The country’s leader, who is fighting to win March’s election for his right-wing liberal VVD party, gave the stark warning in full-page adverts across the country’s daily papers.
Mr Rutte, speaking in a follow-up interview with Algemeen Dablad (AD), said: “If you live in a country in which the ways of dealing with others annoys you, you have a choice.
“Get out! You don’t have to be here!”
interesting article about the world economic forum’s annual meeting the IMF and the OECD are realizing that the people are hurting because of income inequality all in the same vein as what Gail has been saying maybe they are reading Gail’s articles. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/will-2017-be-the-year-we-finally-reform-financial-markets/
Thanks! Good luck on actually making this happen.
It seems that the allocation of resources via how much money you have will never change. It’s a religion set in stone. I guess the only way the rich isn’t going to get richer is if their lives are at risk in some way and they voluntarily give some of it up.
No one ever voluntarily gives up power and money, that’s why the elite are tripling down on their hapless gambit to keep it all. In the end the rich and powerful are always separated from their wealth and positions by a sword, a gun, a noose etc.
Iraqis shocked, Trump wants to “keep” their oil…
http://stepfeed.com/iraqis-say-there-s-no-way-trump-will-take-their-oil
A lot of Iraqis are understandably upset after U.S. President Donald Trump suggested his country could get “another chance” to steal their countries oil.
The new American president told the CIA on Saturday that ISIS “probably” wouldn’t exist if the U.S. had “kept the oil.”
“But, okay, maybe we’ll have another chance,” Trump said.
Needless to say, Iraqis weren’t having it.
People, or maybe I should say the American people are too slow witted to understand that Trump is as I refer to him is Mr. MonkeyWrench as opposed to Mr. GoodWrench who was good at fixing things. Trump will monkeywrench i.e. make bold dramatic changes with little or no understanding of their outcome, just as he did with his businesses in which he went bankrupt numerous times. That’s his MO, to do things in a huge way to match the needs of his grandiose viewpoints. If anyone thinks that will work, try playing chess that way. It’s a losing strategy.
Just the trade wars he’s planning on waging will do a lot of economic damage worldwide as global GDP declines pushing countries including the US into recession. Possibly done gradually it could be a good thing to generate more US industrial output, but he’s going to make huge moves way too fast for output to spontaneously react that quickly. The result will be higher costs goods putting even more pressure on people just barely getting by.
Then there’s the situation with China. He’s going to pick a war with them over some stupid islands. We will see how big that gets. He is mentally ill as can be seen by his need to alter his own perception of reality with lies as needed to buff up his overblown narcissistic self importance. This is an extremely dangerous time in US & World history.
The fact that he claims we should have kept Iraq’s oil (and may get another chance) shows just how out of touch he is with international law and common decency.
Trump will do exactly what he is told to do. Just as Clinton, Bush, Obama etc… did.
Because the minute they balk at an order (as Kennedy balked at Operation Northwoods) this is what the result would be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU83R7rpXQY
Only a total idiot would think that as POTUS he actually has power to oppose those with the money — he does not — the wise course of action is to play ball — enjoy the limelight — then walk away and collect millions in speaking fees.
Trump apparently does not need the money — he’s all about the limelight. So he will do what he is told.
Notice how he’s suddenly friendly with the CIA… Israel… Warren Buffet and the Davos Crowd were just the other day saying how they would all get along just fine with Don.
Americans have to be the biggest suckers on the planet — you’d think that after seeing what Obama did over the past 8 years you would realize that voting does not result in hope nor change…
The only way you have the slightest shot at any of that is to
https://www.locknloadonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Neuropolitical-White-on-Transparent-2.png
Good luck with that
last graphic insert not showing above, FE, err, TM.
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/24wikia/images/7/73/Sf4-lock.jpg
The fact Trump is going ahead with “The Wall(*)” suggests one of three alternatives:
1) The deep state wants the wall. Trump was the candidate of the deep state all along and his platform is theirs. The US election was rigged in his favour. Trump is a puppet.
2) The deep state is indifferent to the wall. It’s a side issue meant to placate the masses but irrelevant to their plans. The election result did not matter because whichever candidate won was pre-approved and in important matters will do as they are told. Trump is still a puppet.
3) The deep state does not want the wall. The deep state wanted Clinton to win. Trump is his own man.
My money is on 2.
* Substitute for any policy where Trump differs from Clinton.
3) The deep state does not want the wall. The deep state wanted Clinton to win. Trump is his own man.
If this is correct then Trump will soon be dead.
I think #3 as well. But, I think there is a huge internal conflict in the Deep State right now and that is why Trump isn’t dead yet. I have never seen such chaos over an election and especially after the president is sworn in. Something is up.
Whatever happens, will be “predicted” in the past as usual. Everyone speculates about the “Deep State” or “Elders” but AFTER an event occurs, there is the ah ha moment of declaring it’s what the deep state or elders wanted. ACTUAL predictions are never made…..confirmation bias running riot.
Trump is interesting to say the least. Giant…no…gargantuan balls! I think he is doomed to fail but if I were a poor guy struggling in Minnesota or West Virginia he would be my hero
right now.
Greg, another piece of “such chaos”:
http://www.refugee-run.org/
What is needed in that photo essay is a section on the bombing of places like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya etc…. to create a cause and effect storyline…
Rather boring just to see half the story
Throw in a few graphs with the photos, perhaps.
The world has to shrink back in some way. I see the election of Donald Trump as part of that process. Maybe the trade wars will hurt, but we cannot really continue all of the international trade. Wages of non-elite workers are too low. We cannot provide high enough prices for oil, natural gas, coal and uranium.
Gail, I agree with you and I also believe, as do many others, that Trump is merely a signpost on the road to collapse and not the puppet of some shadowy deep state conspiracy..
Chess is fun to play aggressively and recklessly if strong moves are combined with strategy. Trump isn’t applying the strategy part, though.
“Trump isn’t applying the strategy part, though.” – I am not so sure. Look at his cabinet picks.
Look at this moronic 20% tax on Mexican goods that he claims will pay for a wall, lmao. Somebody tell this stupid idiot of a leader that more Mexicans have been leaving than coming in. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/
Professional protestors have nothing better to do…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2017/01/23/the-oil-and-gas-situation-trump-assumes-power-changes-on-the-way
While the Tribe’s concerns certainly appear to be reasonable, it remains to be seen whether the professional protesters will honor the request to vacate the area, especially since they don’t appear to have much else to do.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/01/debt-rattle-january-23-2017/
“You have good times, and then you have bad times to compensate for the artificially good times,” he added. “So we’ll have a downturn and that will be a real challenge for the new administration.” Although most of Wall Street appears bullish about the short-term economic outlook under Trump’s fiscal policy plans, some economists have been less than sanguine. Paul’s critique echoed that of David Stockman, a former Reagan-era budget director who also warned CNBC last week that Trump’s plans would ultimately lead to financial calamity. Paul had refused to endorse Trump from early on in the election cycle, claiming that the now President would divide the Republican Party. Much of Paul’s criticism of Trump lies with the latter’s proposed border taxes, which Paul believes is actually more of a “tariff” that would block free trade. “I think that right now, I’d fear most the retaliation [from other countries] and the burden it’s going to place on the consumer,” said Paul.
I realize Trump’s intention of imposing tariff’s on imports is to reinvigorate US industrial output, however, in the short run it will as Paul says above, put a burden on the consumer. In return foreign countries will put tariff’s on US goods and the we are in real danger of a global recession as world GDP declines sharply.
I think Trump’s nickname should be ‘Mr. Monkeywrench’ as he monkey’s with the system without knowing the impact it will have. That strategy could be likened to haphazardly playing chess which of course leads to unintended negative consequences.
Trump’s tariffs are expected to strengthen the dollar and to lower the cost of imports – and raise taxes …
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Does-Trumps-America-First-Tax-Plan-Benefit-Oil-Gas.html
According to a recent report by PwC, the border adjustment proposal would have a notable impact on the energy industry. Companies that export crude oil as well as those that manufacture and export refined products, equipment and chemicals would benefit from the provision. But companies that import equipment and crude oil for refining and processing would not be able to deduct import expenditures, PwC says.
Economists think that the proposed tax would further strengthen the U.S. dollar, thus leading to lower costs of imported goods and “little or no net change in the after-tax cost of imports”, PwC noted.
Good points! If there is a tax on imported oil, it will lead to higher gasoline prices, even though the world price is not higher.
I find corporeal analogies quite enlightening when reviewing the state of the ailing global economy. Trump’s walls and tariffs feel to me like the equivalent of fatty deposits collecting in its arteries, slowing circulation…
Interesting article here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/01/22/foxconns-possible-us-7-billion-display-plant-yes-transport-not-trump-costs-matter-even-today/#3989b8f769ae
Thanks! One interesting thought: “The globalisation of the past 40 years has been driven by the shipping container more than anything else.”
Now transportation costs seem very important.
“shipping container”
8 years ago I wrote this about containers.
On the trip back, Angel told Max what he knew about containers.
“Those simple boxes made as much change in the world as the invention of steam power, maybe more.”
“How so?”
“Did you ever see Brando in “On the Waterfront”?
“Long time ago. They made that movie before I was born.”
“That film was a fairly accurate picture of the way organized crime ran shipping docks. Lots of cargo lost to dockworker gangs, and it took a week or more to unload a ship. Containers cut the load and unload time to hours, and the locked containers keep most of the goods from being stolen. Before containers, companies had to make goods near to markets. Containers, and the ships that carry them, cut the cost and time for shipping. They cut it so much that making high labor products like clothes moved out of the US. There are close to 15 million of those things coming into the US every year now.”
Keith,
We shouldn’t be surprised that the boxes are ruling our modern lifes:
https://youtu.be/2_2lGkEU4Xs
Lots of newer and fancier versions of this 50 yo song are available.
Yes, seafreight containers allowed automation (see e.g. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150209-the-network-that-runs-the-world) and consequent reduction of the transportation costs.
This automation process is now reaching its limits, and combined with other factors like bad-timed rush on vessels construction, decrease of the volumes, etc.., which makes the transport costs important again.
To re-localize the production in OECD countries may help these OECD countries, but likely not the emergent exporting economies. Sounds like eventual tightening of the borders.
I remember back in my early insurance days that “longshoremen and harbor workers” was a fairly large category of workers who were covered by workers compensation. I haven’t looked at workers compensation at that level of detail in years, but I expect that it would mostly have gone away–just as many of the manufacturing workers have gone away.
One of the major causes of death in recent years is auto/truck accidents. Back injuries were (and probably still are) a major cause of disability.
China and Saudi Arabia both had a foreign trade surplus in 2016 although their exports and imports declined, the trade was still positive.
Still their foreign exchange reserves declined. Are their foreign reserves declining because they are defending their currencies ? Why would they want to have strong currencies ?
China would be a currency manipulator… but they would manipulate the yuan to stronger than what it really is.
China’s foreign reserves seems to be declining because they are defending their currency from falling. This does sound backwards for a major exporter of goods.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/07/chinese-yuan-heres-whats-happening-to-the-currency.html
This is one thing that CNBC is saying:
In other words, dollar-denominated debt would be harder to repay, and imports of oil and other commodities would be more expensive. The other reason it is keeping the currency high, has to do with the yuan being added to the currency basket. China has to have a stable currency to join this basket.
“The other reason it is keeping the currency high, has to do with the yuan being added to the currency basket. China has to have a stable currency to join this basket.”
Why is the IMF currency basket of such an importance? Is it really expected to be used as a world currency except for emergency situations. Not even the euro works well so the IMF-SDR will be even worse. Of course, in an emergency situation it could be helpful, the question is do the chinese policy makers really fear that such a threatening emergency exists or are they vainly dreaming of a global well functioning currency?
Any proposed solution always seems better than none at all. It is hard to believe that working out the details of this proposed solution, and implementing it on a world basis, would have any chance of working. If nothing else, the IMF is an international organization. It will have difficulty maintaining funding, if countries within the organization are having problems.
Christopher,
In my view of non-specialist-at-all, I see the SDR as a new global financial toy, acting like another curtain away from reality.
I’d bet -even if BAU stands- this currency will never hit the real economy.
Just to run global finance ever faster. No problem with its backup, since derivatives are already backed up by nothing (except by govts fiscalities and their differences?)
Oil and other commodity prices stay low with a strong yuan. True. That must be one reason to maintain a strong yuan.
I have also heard that Chinese companies with debt in dollars are the ones buying dollars from the PBOC in exchange for yuan’s and are now paying of their dollar debt while the yuan is strong. That could be one explanation to the decline in Chinas foreign exchange reserves.
A strong yuan might also give Chinese companies better access to expensive US technology ? And also to technology around the world that they need ? They have also been buying up high tech companies around the world to a lower price during the great recession.
A large devaluation would send the US economy into recession ? When they tried to devalue the yuan the US stock market started to plunge into an abyss. They are protecting the US economy… their largest and most important market ? With the US in recession the world is thrown into recession… and with that the global market for their exports goes ?
A large devaluation would make it harder for China to buy oil, coal, and natural gas on world markets. Thus, it would tend to lower world demand, and bring the world price for oil down–also the prices of other goods, perhaps to a lesser extent.
We would have more problems with oil prices not being high enough to support the extraction of oil.
The US economy would be helped (temporarily) by the lower oil prices.
Yes the oil price would fall with the fall of Chinese demand.
All oil producing nations would feel the shock.
Lots of capital flight from China buying up property and investments in other countries. China is cashing in dollar reserves to make up for the drain without “printing” which would weaken their currency. They may try some capital controls to help.
Just my observation. There seem to be as many theories for this as there are economists.
That could be at least part of the story.
Looks as if we should have a fine Thanksgiving Turkey dinner in 2017, heh Tom?
Wonder where the Grain Merchant, Cargill, fits in the pack?
Cargill is one of the world’s largest food companies, employing about 150,000 people across 70 countries. Its results come as swelling supplies of food, ranging from wheat to dairy products and pork, have slashed
profits for farmers and pulled down the price of food, pressuring grocery chains,restaurants and other players.
Cargill Inc. on Tuesday reported a 66 percent jump in profits for its most recent quarter, driven by expanding beef supplies and consumers’ rising appetite for burgers and steaks
http://www.twincities.com/2016/10/04/cargill-fiscal-first-quarter-earnings-rise-66-percent/
Tom Malthus can rest easy, Tom Turkey is going to be plumped and ready to be gobbled down?
Oh, BTW, was the CEO of Cargill seated up front for the swearing in of Trump…like they have been since way back with Kennedy?
Just saying..
ORDO AB CHAO
That’s my wife’s kitchen motto.
I don’t know how she does it.
Energy flows create order. Lack of energy flows, a big oops!
we have only had democracy since the industrial revolution—that says it all
There was 5th Century Athens (slave power)
(if you were a male citizen, probably as democratic as it got)
And 11th Century Iceland (?)
Iceland Althing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althing
yes 5thc athens showed that you need an external energy source to introduce a form of democracy
as to iceland, the population now is only 300000, back then it would have been about 3000, if that–so barely registers.
the isle of man in the uk had the same thing about the same time, so hardly counts in this discussion about democracy either
Right!
Controlled collapse?!? Controlled by whom and how, I’d really like to hear more. No, wait, Alex Jones has a few pieces on that. With all due respect Sir, you really don’t get it
unfortunateley you are amongst the many that have not connected the dots of our present course of destination play the video after you click on the following link https://christiantruther.com/end-times/nwo/economic-collapse-next-globalists-elitists-world-economic-forum-claim-capitalism-needs-urgent-reform/
If we loose too much of the population we loose the ability to extract energy products. So, we would fall back well below pre-industrial levels.
If we lose too much population…when, how?
Sorry Greg,
We’re in a all-or-nothing situation: either we keep everything going on, or we lose everything at once.
No BAU lite.
I connected the dots and the picture is pretty clear to me. I grew up under “communism”. At the societal level there is no difference: the goal is infinite growth on a finite planet, or as the great leader Ceausescu used to say, “Man has tamed nature”. See how that is working out so far. There was a strong state, it owned everything and it used part of the surplus to maintain a strong central bureacracy working. It operated under the same rules, as if the whole country was a business and Ceausescu was the CEO. I heard many die-hard “conservatives” that the country should be run like a business. It seems our current president started on this path even before he was sworn-in. In the end the so-called communism was just a state capitalism, and nothing more. It failed when there was not enough surplus available to maintain the repressive order. Yes, there was an historical context to that, but make no mistake: State capitalism failed because it exhausted its resource base. The whole industrial civilization, aka Capitalism as it is known it in the west is failing for the same reason. The mountain of debt thrown at this predicament is just kicking the can down the road and Gail and other commenters on this blog do a much better job of explaining this than most. The so-called elites just want to preserve BAU and what is debatable is whether or not they realize the predicament we’re in. The link you give only confirms that. The kind of conspiracy theories this and other sites like it are promoting comes IMHO from a superficial understanding of the situation.
Real communism can only exist in small communities, maybe up to 150 members-see the Dunbar number, non-hierarchical and not creating surpluses. To me, that sounds like hunter-gatherer society and if we are lucky, as a species, we might get there again. Or some of us will be saved by some christian God.
And nevermind the 1000 Fukushimas awaiting on the other side of the “controlled collapse”
I appreciate your perspective from the other side of the Iron Curtain. I’m a westerner who used to consider himself a Marxist. I participated in pro-communist groups, voted for socialist candidates (who lost terribly), etc.
Eventually my understanding shifted to what you have described. The socialist economic model still presupposes exploitation and perpetual growth on a finite planet. All the things socialism set out to eradicate (oppression, exploitation, inequality) by shifting the relations of production, were not actually a result of those relations.
They are inherent in civilization itself. No amount of rearranging the pieces of civilization will ever eliminate these great burdens, because the burdens are part and parcel with civilization.
I used to reject anarchism because I didn’t see it as a pragmatic system that could actually function. These days, I’ve recanted and lean towards anarcho-primitivism. My current position is that hunter-gatherer relations were probably the only pragmatic, functioning, sustainable system that ever existed or ever could exist.
Froggman,
Your blog is on my favorite list. Excellent. I was a fierce “conservative” until I came to the US in 1998 and for a few years after, when I started to ask myself and others about the urban/industrial decay. See, from up-close, the US didn’t look so glamorous anymore. To be sure, the difference with Romania was enormous, and still is, in many ways, but this was no Hollywood set. It also helped that I knew a man who opened my eyes to the effects of capitalism “eating its own tail” as in exporting the jobs overseas and forcing the workers left behind into poverty, food stamps, etc. and unable to buy the very products they used to produce. The narrative “poors are lazy” did not make that much sense anymore. But the biggest shock came later on, when I really digested the fact that we live on a finite planet. Yes, most people know that, but how many actually UNDERSTAND it? Not too many radicals amongst us, thanks dr. Guy McPherson for clarifying that. I read somewhere that fish don’t really know they are in the water. It seems that’s the case for most humans too. Of course, much more could be said, but this is not my blog. Grateful to our host for her outstanding work, I’ve learned many things here.
Agreed. We see the same hierarchy issues in animals. The problem cannot go away. Hunter-Gatherers provided as level a society as we could find, and as close to sustainable as possible. But even they wiped out whole species, because of their advantages using fire.
That article about paying people in hotspots makes a seemingly valid point that even with the elimination of some species, HG societies tended to settle down and stabilize in a quite sustainable way, and for a very long time. It appears that while nothing is perfect, some peoples did a whole lot better than we are doing.
thank you for your enlightening reply stinging nettle if global communism is not the answer to our dilemma then i stand corrected but the elites seem to be heading in this direction from what i have read from statements they have made , but regardless of what we all think of what the powers that be are thinking it is good that we can teach each other through our dialog on this honest unbiased website,
It all depends on what you mean by communism. The concept existed long before Karl Marx, of course. However, Marxism still dominates our ideas about communism. Lenin said: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”, proving that, yes, both capitalism and modern communism espoused industrialisation. But all modern communists claimed they were building socialism, which was, they maintained, a necessary stage before communism proper. Yet I can see little or no difference between the theories of communism and those of anarchism.
Of Marxists, there were all sorts: Stalinists, Trotskyists (even though Stalin stole some of Trotsky’s ideas), Maoists, the Khmer Rouge. These all seemed to depend on a centralised repressive dictatorship. The POUM, a Trotskyist-leaning party (which was however denounced by Trotsky) during the Spanish civil war, is for me one of the most interesting examples, as it aimed at industrial democracy and despised the repressive Spanish pro-Moscow Communist Party.
As for Romania, the joke went that Stalin had invented socialism within one country, but Ceaușescu had invented socialism within one family (because he stole everything for himself). North Korea now claims to espouse Juche rather than Marxism-Leninism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
I well remember the Weimar Britain of the 1970s, when the economy got worse by the year (until we got North Sea oil) and there were all sorts of Marxists all over the bloody place: Socialist Workers, Vanessa’s Redgrave’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party, etc., etc. In the elections we had all sorts of minor parties in addition to the Marxists: National Front, National Party, English National Party, Road Safety-White Resident, not forgetting the Monster Raving Loony Party. The political scene in the mid-1970s was rather aptly satirised by Monty Python:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYNJuP6m9JU
With apologies to Gail, who is of Norwegian descent.
Moving to capitalism, we have all sorts of capitalism too. German capitalism is very different in nature from British capitalism, and Japanese capitalism, as no doubt Tim Groves could tell us, is different again. But it’s true – modern capitalism and communism both promote industrialisation, and even the Greens seem to espouse an unlikely industrialism-lite.
Fortunately, the Norwegians do not bear any grudges against Monty Python:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By95MlAGTjE
Nor did they pay us Brits anything for stealing our humour. 🙁
Silly!
Thanks. It does seem that they would like to go in that direction, the idiotic attempts to eliminate cash are one example, but we all know that in the age of diminishing returns-see Tainter, complex social arrangements tend to crumble to what can be sustained by the surpluses available. Most people take for granted the power of governments to control large territories with very diverse populations but they forget the energy surplus. That is the only thing holding them together. Trying to hold them together by force will just waste resources that could have been directed to cushioning the fall. Ditto for the next wave of infrastructure and industrial investment in the US. Building and upgrading fossil fuel/automobile infrastructure at the end of the fossil fuel/automobile era seems like madness to me. Many times I question my own sanity, but then I read blogs like this and don’t feel like I am that crazy. Cheers!
I suspect that they are trying to find a solution to the huge income disparities we are now encountering.
There is a difference between running the state as a business and as a monopoly.
Stinging Nettle-
I remember well the day Ceausesu was taken out and shot. Romania is an interesting country. It looks beautiful to me and the people seem well connected with the land in the rural areas. Do you get to visit any and has it changed much in the last 25 years?
I do visit, and it has changed, trying to “catch-up” with the west. People used to be connected to the land, now the prevailing culture wants nothing but a western lifestyle. Little do they realise this is a race with no end in sight. The heavy industrial economy built by Ceausescu in the 60s and 70s with IMF credit, in his idiotic attempt to emulate the Juche system of North Korea’s Kim-Il-Sung, was sold for scrap in the 90s by the former aparatchiks turned into capitalists. Inflation and unemployment soared, the environmental degradation is appaling and everyone depends on BAU for survival. The countryside is mostly inhabited by older people and a lot of the agricultural land is fallow as it is cheaper to buy, for example, tomatoes grown in Spain than to grow and sell them locally. The supermarket chains that entered the market after the country joined the EU in 2007 are using their economies of scale to effectively drive out the small local producers. But that’s something that happens everywhere. Yes, there are a few areas that seem to be from another era, Prince Charles is involved in a preservation project in Transylvania, which is nice, but as an old saying goes, one flower does not make it spring.
The whole world seems to become homogenized.
theres two ways this cookie will crumble the extinction level event or the controlled collapse where capitalism is replaced by global communism and a vastly reduced world population. i believe the second option is where we are heading and the elites have primed the financial system for the final collapse which will usher in the painful period of re-adjustment as our capitalistic economic model is replaced by Communism.Renewable energy will play a major role in the new world order along with the remaining fossil fuels.yes comrades we are in for some interesting times.
Tribal not global. We in our little survival areas will not have a clue what’s going on anywhere else as there will be no global communication systems.
If you believe communism will replace whatever we have now then you must assume it is not those with money who are in charge.
I can’t understand why communism should be more efficient than whatever we have now. Short-circuited democracy and make believe economics and still incentive for needed workers to work.
Yes. I suppose that The term “communism” implies a very complex, centralized, industrial world order for which there appears to be no energy to run it. Among a lot of other things.
“Community” is different. No central government implies. Hugely decreased complexity. No responsibility of anyone for the whole. It would be natural enough for one community to interact–trade, etc.–with the next one over…
But that is all jumping the gun. Each community now could be run better than it is under bau. Most of us have been blessed with plenty of time to learn some sense and get more resilient. Forces of inertia-especially the bewildering needs of the networked economy–are so huge that I defy anybody to predict exactly how it will change, collapse, transmute, whatever. For certain, you can’t solve a problem using the same mindset that caused it. I recommend putting future “post collapse” scenarios completely out of one’s mind–it will be a COMPLETE surprise–while fully focusing on the gargantuan challenges at hand.
Where is there any community? Relatives can’t stand each other and neighbours don’t talk.
Atomization. Facebook likes. Everybody in their own little bubble.
https://consortiumnews.com/2012/08/15/atomized-america-of-late-stage-capitalism/
I’m new to Facebook, (FB) but I try sometimes posting something of common (meant-to-be-unifying) interest to the “public.” The Arab Spring seemed to use FB effectively toward a common cause. Their problem was the lack of strategy–no constructive planning at all.
I can’t understand why communism should be more efficient than whatever we have now.
In the sense of last longer (for efficient), I think it is, because more regulation tends to slow things down, by limiting the financial craziness for example.
I don’t think global communism will work. Historically, it has not used enough debt, and there aren’t enough incentives in place for people to work. The only renewable energy that will be used will be low-tech renewable energy, not high tech wind turbines and solar PV.
Also, a new system without electricity is going to be a huge problem, especially with respect to spent fuel ponds.
It went from essentially a feudal society in Russia, to putting a satellite in orbit in 50 years.
But agree, Marx’s genus was his analysis of capitalism, and his concept of dialectical materialism (he may have proved time travel, as no one could of been that insightful).
As a government system? Much too much of a optimist of human nature.
A interesting perspective (not favorable to Marx):
http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/01/the-madness-of-karl-marx/
Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, a dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, “Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated”. And above all else, “Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.”
Richard Lewontin
Communism was very lucky to have survived WW2, it was such a near run thing at Moscow and Stalingrad, that you would have to suppose that Western assistance prevented defeat. After that Stalin’s spy network supplied all the required information to let off bombs and orbit the Earth…..he starved a lot of his people to get there though.
Actually, the Soviets won WWII.
(The Western Allies were lucky to retain as much of Europe as they did)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/?utm_term=.5887b57fe574
The Red Army was “the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,” writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945.” The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.
“It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance,” writes Hastings.
“The vast majority of German soldiers were killed fighting on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union (and, at various points, allies such as Romania and partisan forces fighting all across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). Germany’s largest defeats happened in the East: in the same month as D-Day, part of an operation caused about 100k German casualties, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, which caused about 800k German casualties.
The Soviets also sacrificed far more toward victory, with north of 25 million casualites, compared to about 3 million by all the Western allies fighting Germany (the figures get higher quickly if we include casualties against Japan, given the Japanese treatment of the people living in conquered Western colonies such as Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia, although the figure is still well below 10 million).
Once it was clear that Germany would be defeated and occupied, millions of Germans – both civilians and soliders – fled west, to surrender to the Western allies instead of the Soviets. If only the Western allies were fighting Germany, those people would likely have stayed at their posts and in their war factories, continuing to fight against the allies.”
Spare me the history lesson Duncan. The quite silly implication you make is that Russia would have beaten Germany without assistance. The US supplied trucks, tanks, planes, machinery and food via the Mermansk convoys.
Russia would have been defeated without help. The fact that they sacrificed millions of men needlessly is their own problem, Stalin had a total disregard for the lives of soldiers, many were sent to Gulags or executed simply for retreating or being captured. They were sent into battle and into needless offences with no training, unarmed and illequipped. Stalin had purged most senior officers before the war so they were very poorly led. The Allied bombing campaign kept German soldiers, planes and equipment from the Eastern Front.
The Germans were stopped just 20 miles from Moscow. As I said, it was such a near run thing that you would have to assume, that Allied assistance played a part, same goes for Stalingrad. Once the Germans began to retreat, it was only a matter of time before they were defeated, that Russia was willing to sacrifice more to get to Berlin first is a matter for politics and ruthlessness. Stalin was a Dictator and answered to no one, not even the Politburo.
I agree, that communism on a global scale won’t work. Most of what we consider modern technology is very sophisticated engineering. It takes a lot of very talented hard working specialized staff to even maintain the basics (food, electricity, shelter) of what we have now. Where is the incentive for anyone to work extremely hard only to have the same quality of life as someone who does nothing at all? I just don’t see how communism can extend what we have at all.
Actually, the Soviets were very good at large engineering projects.
From pipelines to space, they excelled.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druzhba_pipeline
Consumer goods?
Not so good.
Another example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano–Shushenskaya_Dam
“The plant is operated by RusHydro.[3] As of 2009, it was the largest power plant in Russia and the world’s sixth-largest hydroelectric plant by average power generation. It provides more than a quarter of RusHydro’s generation capacity.[4][5] The plant operated ten type РО-230/833-0-677 hydro turbines[6] manufactured at the Leningradsky Metallichesky Zavod, each with a capacity of 640 MW at 194-metre (636 ft) head.[7] The total installed capacity of the plant is 6,400 MW; its average annual production is 23.5 TWh, which peaked in 2006 at 26.8 TWh.”
If you take the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_Dam#2009_accident the Soviets were not so good at large engineering projects.
Maintenance and recognizing when you must shut down and fix are not their strong points.
It is still a whole lot better than the one we keep hearing about in Iraq. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-dam-breach-fail-northern-iraq-isis-kill-million-nuclear-catastrophe-engineers-risk-a7510686.html
Top 20 Largest Power Stations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations
Russia 3
USA 1
What about pragmatism in place of communism or capitalism? What if we start with a collective goal–like, say, managing nuclear waste? (There would of course be many other objectives as well.) Then work backwards from there, doing whatever needs doing to meet the goal? Systems thinking would be helpful. What if there were a systems thinking world order?
tried to post this earlier but it kept vanishing—wondering if there’s some kind of peculiar word block out there wordpress doesnt like.
Apologies if its floating around duplicated
_________
whatever “ism” you choose, it cannot survive without surplus, except maybe cannib- alism—and even that needs surplus people elsewhere i guess.
To reiterate from a previous post:
All physical effort was expended in catching food and basic survival, which left no energy surplus. Without energy surplus there could be no specialization, no society and no economy.
So if you’re going to have fas-cism comm-unism, buddhism—anything—as a basis of society, you must have “collectivism” to provide group means and support.
And if you have any form of ‘collective society’ there will inevitably be a hierarchy, and if there’s a hierarchy there will be someone running it
and if there’s someone running it he (unless its a matriarchy) will run it for the benefit of himself and his immediate clan or tribe in furtherance of his own genetic stream. And he will be unpleasant to non clan members. He will have no choice, Genes do not give us choices in a broad overall sense because we are driven to survive.
As I’ve pointed out before, the democracies and civilised patterns of behaviour we see at this point in time have only existed during our era of fossil fuel use–(ie cheap energy)
When cheap energy goes, democracy will go with it. The two are inseparable,
The notion of an ”ism” as some kind of political system to help our future is a fallacy, because whatever it is cannot exist without input of surplus energy from an external source
seems wordpress doesnt like cann –ib–alism—should anyone feel so inclined in the future
“Genes do not give us choices in a broad overall sense because we are driven to survive.”
This is MOL what I’m saying. You explain widely that the way we are living and governed means we will NOT survive. Nuclear waste ought to get everybody’s attention for that one.
So here’s a very unpopular contention for you. We’re in this pickle not due to energy dissipation (although I’m glad to learn how decisive that is), or overpopulation, or the nature of economics. (Despite my inadequate knowledge base) I buy that all these things are very decisive indeed.
So we are where we are. No need to complain or point fingers. We have the energy/surplus (whatever you call it) to live now as we do…TODAY. We have the means to stop TODAY and reflect on our trajectory toward extinction.
Granted, most people have totally different ideas about the state of things. But there exists today the means to address a large number of people who will listen. That doesn’t require any more surplus (your term) than what we have TODAY!
You may believe we are all automatons programmed ONLY to do what is sure to kill us. But then you say “Genes do not give us choices in a broad overall sense because we are driven to survive.” We either want to survive or we want to die. Which one is it? (Please don’t tell me about the future or the past, or the state of energy at some other period of time.) Can we TODAY, with the resources we have DECIDE (If you grant any power at all to do so) that to survive, we need to change some things. Among these, is that we must harness the resources we have AT PRESENT to make changes that are more conducive to survival than not.
I really don’t care what comes of this effort. It just seems logical to attempt it given genes that are presumably disposed to survival. If humans can’t get it together to stop for a second and reflect on our trajectory, then we are a useless piece of sh.. as a species and we deserve to die.
@Artleads and frogman—Ive tried to reply to your interesting comments, but for some reason it keeps vanishing
Ive obviously used a bad word that wordpress doesnt like but i can’t figure out what it is. There are none that I can see
Its quite comprehensive so I will probably post it on medium again and put a link to it here shortly
@Artleads and Froggman
re—((((This is MOL what I’m saying. You explain widely that the way we are living and governed means we will NOT survive. Nuclear waste ought to get everybody’s attention for that one.)))))
Couldn’t get my reply to your comments on OFW, cant figure out why, just kept rejecting it.
so put it on Medium instead.
The tone of it is slightly different, but the basic drift is the same
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/self-aware-a36a00e863a7#.3p8cg7b9k
Nice essay! I have no idea why it would not go up on OFW.
I think that there may be a third option: (3) We are a species made by god, that is subject to the laws of physics and evolutionary forces. Because we are in some sense a special species, the outcome may not be as predetermined as this essay suggests. The outcome will still be within the laws of physics and evolution but may be, for example, outside of this universe.
if we are a species created by some kind of external entity, as a conscious act—however that may be described—then because it cannot be proven, it must be lumped under ‘belief” and so goes under option 1 i think
and if it is covered by option one, then we have no need to worry about anything, because i dont think an external entity would go to all the trouble of letting us loose on a planet to see us exterminate ourselves.
unless of course we were a creation brought into being under the current laws of physics, by a sentient body of some kind; if we were then that description neatly fits a laboratory experiment.
which means that we are likely to get flushed down the galactic toilet when the experiment is finished.
“outside of this universe”
I suspect this is what happens. It’s possibly the reason for the Fermi paradox. I don’t know if this is how it might go, but unloading into a simulated universe is one way we can imagine that is in a way “outside.” See _Accelerando_ or _The Rapture of the Nerds_ for fictional treatments (both available on line).
Artleads,
In my opinion it’s too late. Has always been, but this time we seem to get really close to the end of this era.
You’re using many words such as choose, prefer, want, decide, etc. Sure one can do whatever at her/his individual level, but it won’t change the collective outcome.
I personnally prefer to keep on trying to learn and understand, rather than running around crying aloud that we must do something in order to avoid the unavoidable. Accept the reality.
You’re talking about stopping now and look at what we have at the present time, sort of a reset. The problem here is that we no longer live at the present time. Thanks to the magics of the debt, we’re living on borrowed time. As soon as we realize it, we don’t just stop, we fall.
NB: by “we”, I understand not only us humans, but the whole Gaïa. Until what point will we fall is a very good question.
Artleads: these words would have to come from a charismatic leader. Someone who can say that we will deal with this now and everything else can wait. I just don’t see it happening since people will support the leader that promises short term wealth for themselves, and this is true for all ruling systems, not just modern democracy.
It has to come from below. The people must wake up and smell the coffee, like the people posting here have done. I think the important thing is to be calm about it and accept that things most likely will end badly, everything else is a bonus. Get busy living or get busy dying!
I’m not so sure we are driven to survive. I think we should deconstruct that concept a bit. I think we’re driven to seek rewards via the limbic system. The limbic system evolved outside of civilization to reward behaviors that led to survival. But civilization has changed the reward/survival equation, while our limbic systems remain the same.
Thus we will consume, extract, construct, destroy, procreate, eat, fight, WIN our way to our own destruction. The things that used to ensure survival now ensure our demise, but we can’t stop doing them because its what our biology drives us to do.
Catch 22.
“limbic systems”
I think the story is a little more complicated, but you are certainly on the right track.
My path through this maze led me to consider conditional behaviors. Today very few of us are subjected to capture situations, but that was not the case in the past for perhaps 10% of our female ancestors. Those who had the psychological traits to bond became out ancestors, those without the traits became breakfast. It’s no wonder that most of us have this psychological trait. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding
Good point! There is always a need to look at the current situation, and figure out what the best strategy might be.
This is another way of looking at it. But I keep saying that all the opinions and facts need to assembled together and sorted through.
“What if we gave universal income to people in biodiversity hotpots?”
“Capitalism is an economic system founded on ceaseless expansion,” Dawson, who specializes in Postcolonial studies, said. “It must grow at a compound rate or it will experience convulsive economic and social crises. The contradictions of this system are patently self-evident: an economic system based on infinite expansion must inevitably crash into the natural limits of finite ecosystems.”
https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/flip.it%2F3SI5E8-what-if-we-gave-universal-income-to-peo/f-b540104dc8%2Ftheguardian.com
Modify message
My guess is that giving universal income to people in biodiversity hot spots would lead to massive road building and the use of cars and other polluting devices. Admittedly, these things would come from elsewhere, damaging the environment in other places. But it also would damage the local environment, and people learned about the possibility of more, more, more and changed their environment.
@ Stefeun,
“I personnally prefer to keep on trying to learn and understand, rather than running around crying aloud that we must do something in order to avoid the unavoidable. Accept the reality.”
But you need systems thinking to understand anything. Are you factoring that in? I don’t know if it’s Voltaire or who someone told me said, to paraphrase, “We must assemble our facts.” That is a prerequisite for systems thinking, I imagine.
And that meme segues into the issue of individual v collective action toward DOING anything. I agree with Gail’s (and others’s) suggestion that “the world” (however you define it), is self organizing. But to quote the Michael Jackson song, WE are the world. You seem to take a position that we can step out of the world to some lofty height whence to pontificate about it. Can’t be done. You’re part of this self organizing something whether you like it or not. You cannot avoid acting, with conscious purpose or otherwise.
Now, if your view of the world is materialist while not ALSO spiritual, the conversation stops here. IF you incorporate the spiritual (which I contend can be scientifically verified) then your intention matters in a different way from a lack thereof. Since I tend to lean this way, I say that my acting with intention affects the world differently, more in keeping with my wishes, than not doing so.
But there is also the science v art conundrum. I believe that the world (reality?) is as much about art as it is science. In art, you must express something. I’m expressing something with my time and energy. I believe that expression matters in the big self-organizing milieu we all exist within.
But this is getting too long and I have somewhere to go.
Cheers
Artleads,
I didn’t imagine you could misunderstand my pontificating positions that much.
Just one comment: you say I cannot just sit on the side of the road watching how the world runs because I’m part of it (I’d rather agree with that), and a few lines below you talk about a separate spirituality that would have to be purposedly incorporated into your intentional acts.
For me it’s a contradiction. NB: rhetorical question, doesn’t require any answer.
“My guess is that giving universal income to people in biodiversity hot spots would lead to massive road building and the use of cars and other polluting devices. Admittedly, these things would come from elsewhere, damaging the environment in other places. But it also would damage the local environment, and people learned about the possibility of more, more, more and changed their environment.”
Thanks, Gail. I love this point.
Artleads,
The example you’re giving (managing nuclear waste) is maybe a collective goal, but IMHO not an example of systems thinking. It’s not even half-way, still in the problem-solution paradigm.
A genuine systems thinking would try to take into account all the possible outcomes of an action, weight them against other actions implemented, etc.
Huge work with no return (what’s the cost for our species to be still alive in the far future?). I fear we have neither time nor upfront resource available for that.
Moreover, when such incomplete decisions are taken, the cheaters always have the final word.
Stefeun,
I thought systems thinking could apply big or small. I student from Stanford once came to a grade school class I was teaching to talk about how systems thinking would apply to building a skyscraper (or similarly large bldg). By considering all the elements involved, you would know how to schedule the installation of fixtures that couldn’t get through doors once finished. The simple image is to avoid painting yourself into a corner.
Then there might be systems thinking for governance of the whole world. Of course, if you prefer to sit and wait for death, that would strike you as a waste of time. You may also prefer to play god and decide what’s not worth it for the human being to survive, assuming also that you know about the distant future. Furthermore, you might disparage poor slobs who don’t care about the distant future at all; just about resisting extinction at any level, for any period of time. It takes leisure, privilege, comfort, and maybe (ironically) denial to take a lofty view of the issue. (If you see extinction in as glaring a term as I do, you might instead feel desperate.)
Greg,
Communism can work ONLY at a global scale ; hence its failure.
Aren’t you using individual’s metrics to judge an ideology whose purpose is actually to acheive collective goals?
Micro and macro often have different objectives (even though the final target is the same for both).
Moreover, we now know that none of them “works”, because of bad definition of our objectives (the faster burner always wins in the end).
Greg,
“I just don’t see how communism can extend what we have at all.”
Should I understand that you want more?
Sorry, I’m afraid it’s too late for that.
Right spent fuel ponds are the Achilles Heel to the survivability factor. Debt I agree is the force that drives production. Without the pressure of debt the communist system collapsed. The motive to produce is likely a bigger factor than many realize. Some might reason it’s evolutionary but if so why Soviet failure? It must be more than perpetuating species. Personal survival? OK. But won’t explain advanced civilization. Belief is the ultimate driver. What have Americans come to believe?
Whatever it is they believe, the outcome is detrimental for them and the rest of the world. They have brought about their own economic ruin as well as the 6th great extinction. How cool is that? The Soviets were hardier, despite seeming economic failure. What the hell good is economic success under these conditions?
The Soviet Failure had to do with low oil prices. It was an oil exporter. It couldn’t get enough money to build out more extraction capability. That happened when prices rose again, but industrial production never recovered. It was good for the West that the Soviet Union collapsed. Otherwise, the oil we have been using recently would be gone. FSU = Former Soviet Union
A little clarification on the status of women in some middle eastern countries:
Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries. In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property.
Today, these rights are all but absent under the U.S.-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki.
http://muftah.org/was-life-for-iraqi-women-better-under-saddam/#.WIVgBlN97IU
During the Gadhafi era, women made steady progress in gaining access to education and work. It became very common to see female lawyers, judges, civilian pilots and university professors.
One of the greatest achievements for women under the Gadhafi regime was unlimited access to free education at all levels. Realizing the importance of education in modernizing society, the former regime made it compulsory for parents to keep their children of both sexes in school until the age of nine. This is now reflected in Libyan women being highly educated, as compared to the region. In Libya today, a majority of female students intend to attend college and an almost equal number of women (32%) as men (33%) hold university degrees, while almost 77% of female high school graduates intend to pursue higher degrees both inside Libya and abroad.
Since NATO helped rebels topple the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, women in the new Libya have suffered ironically at the hands of those who claim to have liberated them, most of whom became militias involved in crime. While claims of mass rape during the 2011 war still remain uninvestigated, it is well known that violence against women is a major issue. Because of social taboos, it is hard for victims to come forward and the country’s successive governments have made no serious efforts to look into the matter.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/libya-women-murder-situation-gaddafi-regime-militias.html#ixzz4WXrZnFx2
Interesting!
In Libya under Gadhafi, Libya’s oil exports per capita were quite high. More recently, they have been a lot lower. I think this underlies the problem they are now having.
Thanks for that clarity. It’s hard to break through the propaganda. The US is the opposite of what it portends to be. Sadam and Quadafi dared defy the petrodollar system and suffered the consequences. Next up Iran and Saudi. It’s all about high EROEI oil. The American Dream is sponsored by the vanquished.
Same with women in Afghanistan under the Soviet Invasion.
But women in Iraq and Libya have rights greater than any in the Arab and Persian World.
(My stepdaughter was a UN Human Rights Worker and I have primary insight into her experiences).
looks like shtf time in uk as well
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-risk-assessment-global-warming-government-accused-burying-report-a7540726.html
About all we can do is move out of the way.
Things like floods and hurricanes can be better prepared for though.
They sure need to turn off that CO2 machine some how. It’s that ‘longage of people” problem. 2017: The year when they turn off the CO2 machine.
That’ll fix everything.
All the women who have been and are currently oppressed, raped, beaten and forced into marriages at age 12 would be horrified at the comments by many of you on this blog. All of the children and women who have had bombs strapped to their bodies would be outraged by your waving of the hands at the monstrosity of Islam. Over 1 Million people have been tortured and murdered by the followers of Islam since 2010 and you guys want to laugh this off as a problem of oil? With the exception of Dolph, most of your comments show that you truly are out of touch elitist shills. If your wife, mother or child had been raped and beaten for nothing more than not believing in Mohammed you would be singing a far different tune.
May I suggest a venue where you will be taken seriously?
Examination of religion has meme protection here.
https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg
Of course it is a war. Oddly the west refuses to defend itself. So, it is clear who will win the war. Good bye individual enlightenment, democracy, rule of law, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, individual rights.
I bet they’d be far more horrified if one were to discuss the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that the western powers have blasted, incinerated, incarcerated, tortured, killed, maimed, raped, beaten, robbed, spat on, betrayed, and so on ….
Over the past century or so.
Ask yourself — which culture is more barbaric?
Why pick out Muslims? The West has done as much or worse to their own. Ask the Chineses, Indians, Africans, natives everywhere the list is endless. Ever heard of WW1 or WW2. There was Korea and Vietnam, Muslims aren’t special in any regard, religion has nothing to do with oil and wars being fought because of it. Muslim or calathumpian makes no difference. Trouble is you have to be religious (a Muslim) to claim to be oppressed in the Middle East, the Christians in Syria have no say, they are being driven out of the Middle East and Northern Africa.
A Greek tragedy: how much can one nation take?
Greece’s economic crisis has disappeared from the minds of many in Europe, but inside the country, the pain is only getting worse
Unemployment is at 23 per cent and 44 per cent of those aged 15-24 are out of work. More than a fifth of Greeks get by without basics such as heating or a telephone connection.
In 2015, 15 per cent of the population lived in extreme poverty compared with 2 per cent in 2009, according to a recent study by Dianeosis, a Greek NGO. “There are families that do not have anything to eat,” says Petropoulos, a squat man in his mid-forties. “I give bread away for nothing. I know everybody here and I know who needs it the most.”
Spending on hospitals, schools and social safety nets has been slashed, leaving increasing numbers of Greece’s most vulnerable without support.
Many local schools have been shut or had budgets trimmed. Bus routes, an essential link to nearby towns, have been axed, forcing villages to operate community taxi schemes.
Last year pension payments were cut by as much as 40 per cent, while this year will bring €1bn worth of new taxes on cars, telecoms, television, fuel, cigarettes, coffee and beer, and a €5.7bn cut to public sector salaries and pensions.
“Human relationships have changed. People are closed off in their homes. They don’t come out,” she says. “Those that had businesses here have now closed them.”
“My business is getting harder and harder,” says Andriopoulou, who has run the shop with her husband for 35 years. Twenty per cent of her customers pay on credit.
“They pay when the pension comes. They pay when they can,” she says, pulling out a well-thumbed notebook from next to the cash register. “Many times the old help the young. [2017] will be much, much worse,” she says. “Because of taxes going up and pensions going down.”
Austerity measures mean that close to half of pensioners now have a monthly income that puts them below the country’s poverty line, according to a recent report by a group of retiree associations.
“The money that the government gives us is just taken back in taxes. There is not anything left to survive on, for food, for essentials,” says mayor Petropoulos, who also runs a small ramshackle goat farm a mile or so outside the village.
“The thing we see that is most needed right now is food. That shows that the problems are about essentials, not about quality of life. It is about subsistence,” she says.
https://www.ft.com/content/44478b7e-dd09-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1dce
The Greeks need to stop moaning. They continue to receive billions from the ECB which allows them to live large. It’s not like they are starving for christ sake!
They really should be grateful for their daily bread.
After all – they could be abandoned like the Venezuelans….
Cry babies!
When global collapse comes then they can moan and wail. But they will not be drowned out by a global cacophany of moaning and wailing (and suffering and dying)
i’ve thought for a long time that the Greeks are our advance warning of the future
ie a cultured civilised european nation where the money (aka energy) has simply run out
Greece fits exactly with my fundamental law of collective survival:
if a nation doesn’t produce enough indigenous surplus energy to support the demands of its people, from within its own borders they must beg, buy, borrow or steal it from somewhere else, or face eventual collapse and starvation until their numbers reach a sustainable level.
The Greeks can’t really borrow any more, so they are now reduced to begging.
They, like the rest of us are in denial—blaming politicians or whatever,
When the EU bank goes bust, its closing time for Greece
(and elsewhere)
Greece is going to be the least of our worries (unless you’re a Greek of course.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2015/07/29/and-you-thought-greece-had-a-problem/#comments
Dear Thomas/Eddy/Paul,
Good to see you posting again. You add a dimension here that is sorely missed when you take a break. Norman is great also. Just wanted to let you know you are both very appreciated. What a great blog Gail has created here. Too bad the subject matter is so grim, but maybe we’ll get lucky, who knows, humans are always at their best when their backs are pushed up against a wall (and they wake up in time to realize it).
Best,
Doom
That”s a great article you posted about 1.5 years ago, Norman. Still true if not truer today.
My thanks, too.
“In 2015, 15 per cent of the population lived in extreme poverty compared with 2 per cent in 2009.” – At this rate by the end of this year (2017) the extreme poverty rate would be around 30%. Increasing to 60% in 2019. Dang we are getting close to a major catastrophe.
We have more countries moving into the ranks of countries with problems all of the time. Mexico’s slowdown in oil exports is a big problem for them. Also, Trump’s not wanting to put new factories here hurts them as well.
Zero sum game, where the sum is getting a bit smaller each year!
Let me say that of course the West isn’t innocent. Nobody really is in this giant game.
But what’s different is that Islam doesn’t share ideas, doesn’t exchange knowledge like we do. The rest of the world has a long tradition of openness and debate that Islam lacks. It isn’t interested. There’s no such thing as Gail’s blog in Islam. There’s only “Are you Muslim and what type are you” and “If you are different you are an infidel and the Koran says it’s ok to kill you”. You think they are debating the ins and outs of anything?
Yes, of course we should have gotten off their oil a long time ago, and yes we should have never allowed them to spread, let them fight each other in their deserts.
Islamic Golden Age
Scholars at an Abbasid library, from the Maqamat of al-Hariri by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, Baghdad, 1237 AD
The Islamic Golden Age refers to a period in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century, during which much of the historically Islamic world was ruled by various caliphates and science, economic development and cultural works flourished.[1][2][3] This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the world’s classical knowledge into the Arabic language.[4][5]
This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 AD.[6] A few contemporary scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries.[1][2][3]
Contents [hide]
1 History of the concept
2 Causes
2.1 Religious influence
2.2 Earlier cultural influence
2.3 Government sponsorship
2.4 New technology
3 Philosophy
3.1 Metaphysics
3.2 Epistemology
4 Mathematics
4.1 Algebra
4.2 Geometry
4.3 Trigonometry
4.4 Calculus
5 Scientific method
6 Physics
6.1 Astronomy
6.2 Optics
7 Chemistry
8 Biology
8.1 Anatomy
8.2 Evolution
9 Engineering
10 Social sciences
11 Healthcare
11.1 Hospitals
11.2 Pharmacies
11.3 Medicine
11.4 Surgery
12 Education
13 Commerce and travel
14 Arts and culture
14.1 Poetry
14.2 Art
14.3 Architecture
14.4 Freedom of expression
15 Decline
15.1 Invasions
15.2 Economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
That said – progress is what got us to where we now stand – on the precipice of extinction.
Which raises the question – if we want to survive as a species should we not embrace a movement that identifies progress as the enemy?
Say the Khmer Rouge – perhaps ISIS?
Nothing is perfect – but Elon Musk is most definitely not the answer
Actually, Musk is the problem.
Agreed, technology is the problem. Modern technology requires a lot of energy to keep it running. Get rid of the modern technology and voilà you get rid of the energy problem.
I thought that Musk was providing hopium – which through some weird kind of magic helps prolong BAU. I thought you were a defender of all methods to prolong BAU – however radical. Doesn’t Musk et al count?
I think Islam is the least of our problems! FWIW it might be nice to have a common enemy to unite the desperate masses of the west as collapse moves ever forward.
My impression is that Islam tends to encourage large families–but that is just from observation of population growth.
The real problem may be the growth in prosperity in the Middle East that allowed a much larger share of the children to live.
“tends to encourage large families”
I think it is Arab culture rather than Islam per se. Iran, which is the Shia branch of Islam, has reached 2 children per woman.
Population growth *without* economic growth equal or greater than the population growth is a situation that leads to war. Given the environment in which humans evolved, it makes sense.
If population growth slows down and economic growth gets ahead of population growth, then we see wars and related disturbances fade out. That’s what happened to the IRA. After a long delay, the effect of the Irish women cutting the number of children they had to replacement is what killed support for the IRA.
Unfortunately, I can’t see that happening in Arab cultures that repress women. On the other hand, birth control is legal in Saudi Arabia. I can remember when it was not.
Good points. I had heard that Iran was different from most other Middle Eastern countries, in terms of births per mother.
Also, the issue is really economic growth per capita. When it changes to shrinkage, there are a lot of unhappy people.
“Also, the issue is really economic growth per capita. When it changes to shrinkage, there are a lot of unhappy people.”
Exactly.
It is a historical fact that the Irish women reduced their birth rate over some decades to close to replacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland I make the case that the lower population growth raised the income per capita and that the improved prospects shut off support for the IRA.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy
“Sound energy policy begins with the recognition that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves right here in America. The Trump Administration will embrace the shale oil and gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans. We must take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, especially those on federal lands that the American people own.”
Those folks need to read and understand Charlie Hall and our Gail, also Art Berman, before throwing too much energy/debt at shale oil and gas. Maybe a field trip to the oil shale deposits in NE Utah might be instructional. Talk to Shell about the ERoEI there.
Unless of course, they are thinking short term, not long term, like most politicians.
Long term thinking is over. Today planning is whatever it takes to get another year then, another week, then finally to get one more day out of (anything resembling) BAU. literally everything will be tried until the global economy flies apart.
And somehow, we need to get the price up to a level where we can extract it.
If we dump it on the world market, we will depress the price further.
“We must take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves” – Too bad it would costs $100 trillion to extract it!
Funny that there are so many “feminist” riots against the new leader of America, but none against the destruction of women in Islam.
Female ranks above non-caucasian in the leftist pecking order.
Also, visceral personal hatred of the Donald “trumps” all other considerations for some of these protesters. To some extent it’s the mirror image of Obama hatred or Hillary hatred by some on the right, although they are taking it to extremes not seen in the US since the Nixon years.
Of all the protests and riots going on, three words come to mind: woe is me.
So the fact that Muslim women must cover their hair and faces and are not allowed to vote, own real estate or drive cars isn’t proof enough? Ever seen a middle east soccer match? No women allowed inside the stadium. OPEN YOUR EYES or be blind to the real problems and threats to our society.
If we are going to get into cartoonish oversimplifications of social issues, it can reasonably be argued that Western civilization triumphed while oppressing women and slaughtering anyone who disagreed with them. Most SJWs claim this and to disagree with them would be a form of male oppression. But looked at statistically, the correlation between respecting the rights of women and our civilization going downhill is stark. Some say it began with legalizing women’s right to vote. Others insist that liberating them from corsets and allowing them to reveal their ankles in public was the real kicker.
Certainly, encouraging women to compete against men in the workplace, allowing them access to no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, and their own credit cards, and freeing them from the need stay at home and mind the kids has helped contribute to the current situation in which Western civilization is toppling nicely all by itself without any need for help from outsiders, while portraits, busts and statues of its former heroes are now routinely banished from show at its premier institutes of learning for fear of upsetting student sensibilities.
OPENING OUR EYES to the oppression of women in parts of the Middle East is all very well, but it would be myopic indeed to presume that this was one of the real problems or threats to Western civilization. If your eyes are fixated on the phantom menace of Islam, you are not paying attention. Our problems are home grown. The prognosis was laid out nicely in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Robert Hughes’s Culture of Complaint (1993) among other places, well before hordes of marauding Muslims flowing across our open borders were even on the radar.
So you think that Islam is the number one problem in our societies ; I also assume you believe the “solution” is more war against them..?
Who is blind? Who is the fanatic?
We must kill anyone who has what we want and need – and take it from them – so that we can continue to live large
Unfortunately for the Muslims, many of them live in places that have a great deal of oil – and we have decided that this oil is ours
Not too dissimilar to a weak, small dog being thrown a bucket of bones — in a neighbourhood infested with large vicious hungry dogs.
We are very lucky the leader of our dog pack is really big and fast and mean.
definitely a godly error to leave christian oil under muslim desrts
Best distilled explanation of the cause of Middle Eastern war I’ve heard lately.
Thanks
Interesting way of putting the problem!
I thought this was a place to read about and discuss our energy predicament. Personally I have no interest in reading overly simplistic Islamaphobic garbage. Take it elsewhere.
we face 3 main catastrophic problems—energy depletion, climate change and overpopulation.
each impacts on the other in ways we cannot foresee.
When energy is in depletion, too many people fight over it, when they fight they use every ”cause” in the book to justify it
100 years ago, pre oil, whatever muslims did to their womenfolk and to each other was of no consequence. Now the conflict is expanding world wide and its affecting all of us, because everybody wants to inflict their dogma on everybody else as part of conflict justification and self identity
(sarc) But Victor, those Muslims have our oil. We in the West are God’s chosen ones and he told us it is OK to bomb them to oblivion to get our oil. I am sure it is in the Bible somewhere. (/sarc)
Low reproduction rate societies and high reproduction rate societies can both persist if separated geographically. In today’s world where there is no separation only high reproduction rate societies will persist.
in the late 1800s in uk, we had only red squirrels
then some idiot brought in greys, and introduced them onto his estate ”for variety”
now the uk red squirells are confined to isolated woodlands and islands
then there is the story of the ammonites (a cousin to the living-fossil nautilus), who rapidly expanded into every ecological niche from pole to pole, big ones, medium ones, small ones, and then suddenly all went extinct.
Bingo.
That’s why most of the Southern, Western Europe and Scandinavia is already lost, obviously the ultimate irreversible demographic switch will be plainly visible only by 2040-2050, so before that and in the meanwhile people can merrily enjoy and adjust to slowly progressing 15-20-30% minorities taking over.
Hopefully before I die there might be still visible some cultural and ethnic delimitation zone roughly on the geographic line of Finland-Russia-Poland-Bavaria-Hungary-Serbia. This partitioning might hold for some time or be swept into dust in only further span of few decades or alternatively on the other hand even another “reconquista” at some point could reverse the tide and move upto the shores of the Atlantic/English Channel again. As always climate instability, diseases, natural catastrophes and or other such strong factors could help to propel one or the other scenarios to fruition.
ps the above is obviously meant “as a side story” to the general FW predicament
I have never been to the Middle East. DIdn’t think I would be very welcome.
My wife worked in Qatar for a couple of years — she was treated with respect and never encountered any hostility.
She always wore western attire – did not cover up.
Women wore mini skirts in Iran in the 60’s. “Things” can change rapidly under dictatorships and if there is a buck in it somewhere, rapidly might be an understatement.
Interestingly Iran is another country (Iraq and Libya two others) that were driven into the arms of religious fanatics following CIA coups — and women’s rights were crushed.
Perhaps if the US did not support the House of Saud in the KSA women might by now have achieved a status above that of mongrel dogs.
Islam is a huge threat to Western civilization and all humanity. Their main issue is oppressing women and slaughtering anyone who disagrees with them. Muhammad raped your girls – that’s where the promise of 12 virgins (underage girls) to Jihadi martyrs comes from.
“That they are angry is to be expected” – this is an incredibly foolish statement. Their religion has made them angry – for thousands of years.
“promise of 12 virgins
So it’s no longer 72?
Was that a special offer? (Times are difficult for all ;-))
Or were they talking about raisins?
Some scholars argue that the promise of 72 virgins is a mistranslation from “72 angels”[56] or even from “72 white raisins, of crystal clarity”.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri#Alleged_.2272_virgins.22
Anyway, the “underage girls” seem to come from your imagination only, and “There is no concept of a “72 virgins” for martyrdom in Shia Islam.” (same link).
This comment is not directed especially at you T.Roy, I just wanted to underline it’s much easier to propagate unverified memes (my own research was very superficial, took me 5 min to gather sufficient info to question your buzz) and to declare the enemy is the devil (non-human?) when you want to fight him.
And, once again, this has nothing to do with religion, which is just erected as a smoke-screen to reinforce the narrative and hide what’s really going on behind.
++++++++++++
Mohammed’s alleged child raping exploits are even less verifiable than Trump’s pussy grabbing, or Hillary’s for that matter, and all are equally irrelevant to the issues we concern ourselves with at OFW. Islam or forces operating under its rubric may or may not be a threat to humanity, but if we are going to play the game of debating that issue, we need to a least “stay in the ballpark”, otherwise nobody else is going to be able to catch or hit the balls we pitch.
My own take: The Military Industrial Complex needs enemies and the nastier and more evil they are the better. If there aren’t any around they make their own. In the case of the Mujahadin, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS and other groups, there’s a fair amount of evidence and a lot of speculation that this is precisely what happened. You only have to read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard or look up Robin Cook’s comments to see “inside” confirmation of this line of thought. And it all makes perfect business sense as in a peaceful world most of the corporations producing military hardware would be bankrupt and an veritable army of analysts, advisors, journalists and consultants would out of a job.
Also, we should never forget Orwell’s insight that Oceania has always been at war with both Eurasia and Eastasia, with most of the actual fisticuffs going on by proxy in mainly Muslim Asia and Africa.
Mohammed would have made an excellent Catholic priest.
Territoriality is practiced by many of the close relatives of humans, such a chimps. We would figure out a way to be territorial, if religion weren’t around as a convenient excuse. This is particularly the case when there is not enough to go around.
initially we worshipped the spirits of the material world, then we centralised that to several Gods above us, then we centralised further to single deity. Then some decided even that was too distant and we ended up with a representative in Rome.
Now, we have abandoned altogether the idea of salvation from afar/beyond and we believe in the god of ‘Technology’; truly the ‘Ford’ (Google/Tesla?) of our day!
Sure, we will bend our knees again as technology fails to deliver, and fall in behind the remnant church of God, but the myths are bound to remain….I can hear the ‘if only’s’ re Fusion/singularity/renewable energy from the future already. Even now I remember ‘power to cheap the meter”.
Not only the god of Technology, but the god of Finance. Janet Yellen and the other central bankers, plus the IMF, can save us. We have no need for other gods.
I don’t agree that a religion makes a person angry. There are a lot of other things for people to be angry about both in this country and in the Middle East. There are a lot of people without a job that could provide them with a good living, both places.
Religion per se doesn’t make a person angry. But……if you drove a car with anti Christianity slogans on it in the US South and Bible Belt one might get a taste of anger. Same goes for the Catholic regions of South America, even more so in Moslem countries like for instance Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. Tolerance is for leadership speeches and law enforcement. Where there is no law or the law is complicit, religious intolerance would probably serface with and compliment racial intolerance and there will be plenty of anger…imo of course but history would tend to agree with me. As things fall apart, minorities or those with less power get scapegoated. There will in time, be oodles of blame for everyone to dish out. Self blame I assume will not be on the agenda.
I would imagine that if we who live lives of corpulence in the Christian west were forced to trade places with the weak but energy rich middle east — we would find that many among us would, out of desperation, turn to tactics of terror to fight our oppressors.
And I can easily imagine that the Christian religion would be our rallying point.
In Robert Fisk’s book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation he asks the head of the Lebanese Hizbollah
What drives a bomber to kill the innocent child?
“Imagine you are in a sauna,” Nasrallah replied. “It is very hot but you know that in the next room there is air conditioning, an armchair, classical music and a cocktail.” There was a pause as the Hizbollah leader moved his hand swiftly upwards, as if opening a door. “So you pass easily into the next room.” I will not forget the smile he then visited upon me. “That,” he said, “is how I would explain the mind of the martyr to a Westerner.”
If we were put stuffed into the sauna — I have zero doubt – there would be those among us who would resort to these very same tactics.
Islam does not have a monopoly on false virgins.
when the shit hits the fan and you haven’t eaten for days you won’t give a thought to religion, only to food.
I would agree 100%.
I know and have encountered plenty of Muslim people — they are generally not different than most people I have met in my lifetime — i.e. they are not generally angry.
Most dogs are also generally not angry — but if you have a hungry dog — and you forcefully snatch a bone from his mouth — that usually will end badly for your hand….
Muslims are not angry because they ‘hate our way of life’ — most if not all of them would be pleased to lead lives that resembled ours i.e. well paid jobs, a bit of leisure time, plentiful good food, comfortable homes etc…
What really pisses them off is not related to religion — it is the knowledge that we deny them the opportunity to live lives similar to ours — by blasting them into pieces and pillaging their resources — to support our way of life.
One can hardly blame them
We need to ask ourselves — what would we do if the tables were turned?
That’s their excuse, it’s not a reason. They overpopulated way beyond recoverable overshoot and it wouldn’t have been possible, without the riches oil and gas bestowed on them. It was nature taking its course. Of course now there are too many claims on limited pieces of pie and the inevitable outcome is either blaming themselves or looking for someone else to blame. They accepted the golden fiddle from the devil (as did the west) and now the devil wants his due. The Middle East just happened to draw the short straw and they are going first.
that pretty much sums things up
The “not enough to go around problem.” Not everyone can have the Western lifestyle–world resources don’t permit it; CO2 problems would be even worse, if we tried.
Wealthy Westerners have a difficult time of “walking a mile in a mans shoes”. I don’t give a rats behind about Islam, Islamic countries, or Islamic people. I don’t care if they survive or perish, and I do not want them moving into my country, because I like my own indigenous culture just fine, thank you. I can understand how they might be more than a tad upset, though, about us overthrowing their governments, bombing their friends and families, and generally behaving like rapacious imperialists. I can say with some certainty that where I a young muslim man in one of the countries the west has meddled in, I would be waging jihad too. This doesn’t mean I have forgotten which team I am on, just that I can understand where their rage comes from.
None of this matters, of course, as the long emergency is going to make present day Iraq look like a beach resort once the ball gets rolling………
I used to live with Muslims from Indonesia and Malaysia. Nicest people you could ever meet. But mention the name of “Salman Rushdie” to them and they would start foaming at the mouth and reaching for the nearest kitchen knife. Religion certainly can make people angry. Religion makes me angry and I’m not even religious.
I don’t think anyone I ever encountered during my 7 years in Indonesia would even know the name Rushdie.
We were all postgraduate students living together in the UK at the time “Satanic Verses” was first published.
Regardless of our differences, it’s been a pleasure to interact at this blog.
As times get rough, whatever you do, whatever you think of other groups in this world, please, I’m begging you, don’t go down to Islam.
Resist Islam. I can’t bear to see Islam take over a collapsed world.
It’s not that I have a great love of everyone else, but I can’t envision them spreading and taking over as things go down. But Islam, I can. I can envision Islam filling the void.
But your view of a dystopian post collapse plays into the sharia law you fear. If you don’t see the possibility of a rigorous, orderly, spare, rational, principled world post collapse, then you can only throw up your hands, disengage, and let the horrible men eat your lunch.
The future, if there is a future, belongs to the producers. How could it be anything else when there is no surplus?
The future belongs to the Navy.
Islam is not per se a threat. It is one the West created. In our haste to waste resources anywhere resources, mainly oil, were around rapacious westerners exploited them and wilfully trod on Islam’s toes. paying no respect. That they are angry is to be expected. We made the rod for our backs.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/18/chinas-holdings-of-us-treasuries-plunge-at-historic-pace/
And China’s foreign exchange reserves are now down $1T since 2014 from $4T to $3T today.
The emerging market foreign exchange reserves are melting away. Where is all this money going ? To the US and EU ? Is this the new QE ?
If the emerging markets forex is now heading to the US and this is the new QE program, then the Fed has to raise interest rates to strengthen the dollar to control the flow so that the US economy doesn’t explode in a massive asset bubble ?
Goldman Sachs, The FED, and the CIA run the country. There are only 4 things a president has to do to keep them happy.
1. Support the MIC unconditionally.
2. Never say anything about the FED.
3. Do not allow any new regulations with regards to Wall Street.
4. Support Israel unconditionally.
Other issues — Obamacare, the Wall, gay rights, abortion rights, supreme court justices, etc are irrelevant.
Obama was a dream president for them. He had a little trouble with 4, but that was just because Netanyahu was a jerk. They are rewarding Obama with a going away present by taking down Netanyahu even as we speak.
How will Trump do? Now that things have been explained to him, he is doing quite well. He is quickly redirecting attention towards the issues that don’t matter. I think he will follow in Obama’s footsteps and be very successful as president.
Thanks. This does feel like a clarification.
I agree, but I was thinking today, we underestimate how close America is to implosion. This is a fairly typical pattern in history…the elites overplay their hand, divide up the society, and everybody else shuts down or massacres each other, and the elites go down with the ship (yes, this does happen).
Trump is the signal that the average, little guy white American is fed up. Interesting, you didn’t think this would happen. You thought the resistance would come from blacks, for instance, forgetting that they have been placated so well by drugs, foodstuffs, welfare, entertainment.
We’ll also have to see how the asians, muslims, mexicans etc. react. Lots of moving parts.
“You thought the resistance would come from blacks, for instance, forgetting that they have been placated so well by drugs, foodstuffs, welfare, entertainment.”
But they’ve been “placated” mostly by imprisonment. You seem always to overlook that.
The opinion of blacks, etc won’t be relevant since they lack military power. Asians who have money will leave when it gets too hot. I will refrain from speaking about the rest.
“I think he will follow in Obama’s footsteps and be very successful as president.”
That’s some wishful thinking. Obamacare is not irrelevant as we will see as millions lose their insurance or it gets re-written so much so my people opt out of their current health ins. and go back to having a catastrophic policy to save money and just hope they remain in good health. This is huge, because finally there were clear rules to help people get, afford and keep health insurance. Now it’s going bye bye. as Trump today signed off on numerous aspects of that program to eliminate our rights, like pre-existing etc.
Also, Trump seems like the type of person who is going to want a war, big or small who knows, but it’s in the works. He’ll get into with China or NK, or Iran but mark my words war is coming.
There will also be riots due to the huge reductions in the social safety net, like major reductions in food stamps, a much higher SS retirement age, huge cuts to medicare and Medicaid. He says he’s going to be a prez for the people, but it will be the opposite and people will take out their anger in the streets.
Trump also sh#@canned Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions today. This is going to be the most expensive presidential entertainment ever and the American people are going to get their clocks cleaned. We may even lose the mortgage deduction which is something Ryan wants to do so they can afford the corporate tax cuts.
The other thing about Trump is he wants to shake things up. Anything and everything will get dramatically altered to the point it will probably initiate a slowdown in the economy causing a major recession. People are delusional if they think this idiot’s going to be good for America.
One detail: People are delusional if they think BAU can continue for four more years, with any president.
Uh oh, that puts me in the delusional crowd. Guess I just don’t have a handle on how thin the veneer has gotten. Anyway, we shall see with time, but meanwhile I certainly think things could go downhill fast if Trump and the GOP see their plans through to dramatically reduce the social safety net. I also think when Trump says he’s going to put people first, he means the wealthy.
Neither Trump nor GOP ever mentioned or have plans to reduce the safety net. Obama and prior administrations have given away our jobs and saddled us with massive debt. Middle class income has shrunk, and so has the middle class under Obama. We have biggest income inequality gap with Obama and over 95 Million people out of work. Please open your eyes to the reality and stop listening to propaganda coming from the mainstream media. The middle of our country is hollowed out and the coastal cities will follow if we don;t change course soon. Seattle, Portland, San Fran,etc. all have MASSIVE homeless populations. Why do you think that is?
You think Obama started it? 2008 happened under Bush, if he was so great he should have prevented it. Tell us what Trump would have done differently that would have secured a better outcome. Tell us ANYTHING that could have been done better that would have resulted in a better outcome for the middle classes. Your mistake is you assume there is a political solution to what ails the world and the ails are varied, vast and many.
America Will be Great Again! Nice tag line. It even has a sharp hook that is getting chomped on by suckers.
And you are being played T Roy. Like a one string guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8H-67ILaqc
Nothing Is Real: When Reality TV Programming Masquerades as Politics
http://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/nothing_is_real_when_reality_tv_programming_masquerades_as_politics
Davos Set Learns to Love Donald Trump on Eve of Inauguration
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-19/davos-set-learns-to-love-donald-trump-on-eve-of-inauguration
Buffett Says He Supports Trump’s Cabinet Picks ‘Overwhelmingly’
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/buffett-says-he-supports-trump-s-cabinet-picks-overwhelmingly
Trump visits CIA headquarters after sharply criticizing the intelligence community
“There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” said Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/21/trump-to-visit-cia-headquarters-after-sharply-criticizing-the-intelligence-community/?utm_term=.d3c56db42f81
Bill and Hillary attended The Donald’s wedding.
After becoming engaged in 2004, Donald and Melania were married in an Anglican service on January 22, 2005, at The Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida, followed by a reception in the ballroom at Donald’s Mar-a-Lago estate.[41][42]
The event was attended by celebrities such as Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Rudy Giuliani, Heidi Klum, Star Jones, P. Diddy, Shaquille O’Neal, Barbara Walters, Conrad Black, Regis Philbin, Simon Cowell, Kelly Ripa, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, and former president Bill Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
Return of the Neocons: Trump’s Surprising Cabinet Candidates
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/11/17/Return-Neocons-Trump-s-Surprising-Cabinet-Candidates
Goldman Sachs: Occupying Washington again
https://www.ft.com/content/84d0ac4c-def9-11e6-9d7c-be108f1c1dce (drop the headline into a google search if you want to get around the paywall)
Chicken in the corn
Say the corn can’t grow, mamma
When chicken in the corn
Say the corn can’t grow
When chicken in the corn
Say the corn can’t grow
When chicken in the corn
Say the corn can’t grow
Dig T Roy —- dig it.
We seem to have the same folks running Washington, no matter what.
you think like me
when promises of infinite prosperity are seen as the ultimate hoax—societal breakdown is inevitable.
He will be good for the people that run America. In fact, every one of your points does not have a negative effect on the four points the president needs to adhere to. They simply are a distraction. Mark my words, and mark them well. The three organizations that run this show now have Trump on board. He will be a two term president. Will he be bad for the majority of Americans — absolutely.
You are completely wrong and I couldn’t disagree with you more. Please read my comments above. Obama and past administrations have killed our jobs, saddled us with massive debt, and used divisive racial politics to point the finger at anyone but themselves. Please stop listening to the mainstream propaganda. Trump is the best thing that’s happened to the PEOPLE of this country in a long, long time.
Nothing mainstream about what I am saying. You will see.
Below is a link to a interesting piece in the New Yorker, written by John Cassidy, Jan 20th
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trump-the-impulsive-demagogue-in-the-white-house?mbid=nl_170121_Daily&CNDID=40996129&spMailingID=10271935&spUserID=MTMzMTg0ODUyODc5S0&spJobID=1081691111&spReportId=MTA4MTY5MTExMQS2
Stigler-
The current U.S. health care system is mathematically unsustainable. It is %20 of GDP while most other western nations are half that. Without considering any other problem the health care system alone is going to bankrupt that nation and soon. Anyone who defends the status quo is simply not looking at the numbers.
As for war is coming….that last psychopath sicko of a leader had over 26000 bombs dropped in at least seven different nations in 2016 alone. Perpetual war is here. There has been so much war that people have become immune to it.
None of the above counter arguments changed my mind about any of the points I made. They still stand.
A lot of people talk about unfunded liabilities over future expenses such as health care and pensions. Be assured. There is no such thing as an unfunded liability for a sovereign government!
Whenever a bill comes through the government simply pays it ad hoc. It doesn’t borrow or save at all let alone for some future guessed cost.
Social Security and Medicare (and equivalent programs elsewhere) are “pay as you go” programs. You will definitely not hear me talking about “unfunded liabilities.” They are not liabilities, because they have only been “sort of” promised. The benefits will be available, if the economy is able to provide them. If not, they disappear! (Most likely, the government does, too, because eliminating such programs would make governments very unpopular.)
The issue is that in any given year, the amount of goods is pretty much determined by various things, including the number of employed workers, and the amount of energy available to make goods and services. Growing debt used to play a big role in keeping commodity prices up at a high enough level to encourage commodity production, but this isn’t happening very well any more. Commodity prices are way too low, and it is hard to see how adding more debt will fix them.
When a whole lot more people retire, it creates a double problem (1) there are fewer workers (relative to population) and (2) there are more retirees. This means that each worker, in an absolute sense, will need to get less, when the retirees get more. This arrangement tends to make workers very unhappy.
The way we allocate goods is with our financial system. Somehow, the retirees need to get more of the goods that that the fewer workers produce. The major practical way of doing this is by raising taxes on the workers and giving the funds to the retirees (or their physicians). There might be some other approaches as well, in terms of deficit spending, in an attempt to use inflation to do part of the reallocation. But the net effect is the same–we are basically trying to reallocate a “pot” of goods and services between workers and retirees, with the retirees getting a whole lot more.
Eventually, the workers revolt. The young workers and the workers with less education aren’t getting a big enough share of the total amount of goods and services that are being produced. In fact, that is part of what the election of Trump and the passage the other Brexit is about.
The printing of money is an attempted band aid on the problem. Can we temporarily get some more of the world economy’s output, if we print more money? It is not a strategy that works well for economies. When energy prices were closer to where they needed to be, adding debt could be helpful, especially if it was debt that actually was “productive” debt–went to create a new factory or a new road, for example.
Governments that print endless money, when they have nothing behind them, are likely to collapse. The standard economic story isn’t true, but at this point in time, MMT isn’t either.
What you say is mostly true enough. Certainly on this site one can see that the future won’t be a continuation of the past so forecasts are fraught at best. In principle however the government doesn’t have the shackles the mainstream economist narrative puts on it. [MMT by the way is reality economics, not theoretical. It just tells it like it is.] It explains why the government has no unfunded liabilities and can never go broke etc. That’s not to say it cannot happen if the whole world crashes into chaos. It’s all based around written laws so they have to survive. When and if there is an interregnum between todays status quo and collapse, governments will be FORCED to pay everyone a subsidy so that everyone, jobless and not can stay alive. It will have to be a military operation, with rationing etc like done in wartime. I see no plans.
Today though it would help, not hinder to have a realistic economic narrative, as described by MMT. All the mainstream does is sell itself to the parasites at the top table and to their co parasite politicians doing their bidding. Economically there is room to move today as economies are deflating in a one way downward slide to collapse. The gap into which governments can create spending money -by buying debt – is called the fiscal gap. In the US in 2012 it was estimated at c,$2 Trillion. It would be much more now. This space can be filled without inflation, but eventually inflation won’t matter if it can get us more to eat. Productive debt is a rare item, it’s all financial today, asset inflation etc. It’s just a sign we are in the end zone of our techno-industrial dynasty.
The big question is whether more debt gets you more at all. Debt is what pulls the economy along. But you need cheap energy as well. Once the cheap energy is gone, it is hard for debt to do everything on its own. China is starting to run into this limit. I agree that more debt is probably a better choice than austerity to try to solve an inadequate resource problem. But at some point, an implosion comes, and the whole thing falls apart. The debt helps bring the whole system up to a peak before it collapses.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2015/09/20150916_obo.jpg
https://waronjesus.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/303687_433664670002739_1227079433_n.jpg
Thomas-
Great post. It is difficult to understand the phycology behind the acceptance of that last sicko presidents atrocities. The more I think about it the more I see how easy it is for populations to be manipulated. The two in that picture are responsible for at least a few hundred thousand deaths that did not have to be.
that last graphic is dated. it did not include Syria for Obama. Obama 7, Bush 4.
not too bad a record for a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Stilgar-
You didn’t make any points that I can see. I didn’t think there was a right to health care in the U.S. constitution. For what it is worth, in my province, people feel the same way about it. We are increasing the budget for health care at about 6% a year while the economy grows by 1%. Any government that tries to do anything about it is very unpopular. It is very hard for people to accept.
I cannot understand how anyone here can argue about the math on this.
You could do a lot better if the US mindset you describe was more like other western nations. They think they pay out of taxes [they don’t] but in the US the insurances schemes are all profit oriented. The vested interests are all profit oriented. So you have a system which cost at least double what socialised medicine costs. It really trashes the concept that the private sector can do better than governments.
The issue has not very much to do with insurance companies, and their quest for profits. It has a lot more to do with other parts of the system. The fact that every cost is insured means that ordinary people can’t/ don’t shop around. Doctors and hospitals sell services. These include keeping dying people alive as long as possible, and very elderly people as long as possible. Also fixing tiny disabilities. There are some elderly patients who seem to use visits to their physicians as their form of entertainment. (Medicare isn’t through the insurance companies, either.)
Many people are in poor health because of poor food (too much meat, and sweets) and too little exercise. This contributes to the problem as well.
Kurt, excellent post. Sadly I agree with you.
Dead-on Kurt. Incisive and prescient insight.
“Now that things have been explained to him, he is doing quite well.”
He’s 3 for 4 in the first 48 hours!
Canceling Coal Plants
https://www.planetizen.com/node/90800/china-cancels-103-coal-power-plants-still-has-too-much-coal-capacity
We will see how this all works out!
Are you old enough to remember this Spitting Image skit about Ian McGregor, who was hired by Margaret Thatcher to close down the UK coal industry?
Sir Ian Kinloch MacGregor, KBE (21 September 1912 – 13 April 1998) was a Scottish-American metallurgist and industrialist, most famous in the UK for his controversial tenure at British Steel Corporation and his conduct during the 1984–85 miners’ strike while managing the National Coal Board.
https://youtu.be/SUkMqQ6lKm8
if anybody’s interested i just posted a piece on Extranewsfeed which sort of links in to the stuff on here, about survival and politics and stuff, nearly 2000 words so too long to post on OFW
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/an-infinity-of-futility-ecb8c4edc887#.8ykf6v6qb
Thanks!
Great analysis–
Just a small point of order Norman. You often refer to hydrocarbons as the energy that powered and powers our run up to overshoot, for want of another description. When you do though, you omit coal. Coal started it all and it is still the base of energy use, though oil and gas supply the turbo charge. The correct term IMO is fossil fuels…..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon
Good point!
thanks for the comment, but i did say coal oil and gas in there twice—but in any event, I think (as I said) that the complexity of the civilization we have has been mainly due to the infinite fungibility of oil and oil based products. I didn’t get too wordy on it, because I didn’t think it was necessary. Early 2oth c had steam powered trucks and streetcars for instance, (and cars) but they were a dead end, as were (ultimately) locomotives.
Germany on the other hand fought WW2 on coal to oil liquids conversion–but that couldnt outfight oil either
when I’m discussing all this stuff I do tend to lump it all in as hydrocarbons—saves a bit of writing time and varies the wordage I think
Yes that’s right, although coal use was increasing gradually up until the first decade of the 20th century, it was oil that lit the fuse on growth and it took coal with it, up to the point where the world burns something like 8B tonnes of coal annually. China for instance could not have achieved its relatively recent trade dominance without it. Oil and coal supplements one another. Coal provided the suburbs and jobs, oil and gas feeds the cancer for want of a nicer term. The arterial supplies are narrowing now……..the cancer might die.
Right! We need a variety of different kinds of energy. Cheap is the important characteristic for some things; portable and dense is the important characteristic for other types of energy.
“different kinds of energy”
It’s worth keeping in mind that we can make transport fuels from coal. The Germans ran WW II largely on coal derived fuel and for a long time South Africa made did the same.
You need fresh water and a fairly high price of oil. Those have been the reasons that the US has not scaled up coal to liquid. Our big supplies of coal are in the arid west, where water is a problem. Also, price didn’t stay up high enough, long enough. China has similar issues with coal to liquid. The country as a whole is quite arid, and the coal producing regions are especially arid. I don’t think that they have actually produced much coal-to-liquid, but I know that they have investigated the issue.
“fresh water”
From the chemistry of the reaction, you don’t need a lot of water. It’s on the order of a bbl of water per bbl of oil. With some loss of efficiency, you can use air condensers instead of cooling towers.
The closest thing the US has to a Coal to Liquids is a plant in North Dakota that makes synthetic natural gas from lignite. http://www.dakotagas.com/About_Us/History/ I imagine it has been subject to forensic actuary studies. As I recall, lots of money was written off. I think the current business makes a profit, but it’s like Iridium, the original investors took a bath.
About ten years ago, I used to talk in chat to the guy mentioned in the history who took 12,000 tons of lignite to South Africa to test in the Sasol gasifiers.
Cleaning the coal that is used in the process takes water as well, I believe.
“Cleaning”
A lot of coal is cleaned with water, but I don’t think this particular process does that. Lots of cleaning, but they clean the gas rather than the coal.
Perhaps this process substitutes for cleaning of the coal for shipping. From my correspondence with Chinese co-authors about the Chinese coal situation, I know that lack of water has been a concern, even without coal to liquid operations.
the coal to liquid process is a short energy-burst to cover an emergency situation
the germans were forced to do it for their wartime economy, which by its very nature could not be sustained for long
south africa did it for the same reason–an emergency short energy-burst situation again, which like germany was unsustainable
both ultimately failed, both were dictatorships with no accountability for their actions to their people or the outside world, The correlation between the two is very similar.
You also have to factor in the labour necessary to get the coal, both regimes essentially used slave labour.
in many respects its like corn to ethanol, taking one usable form of energy, hydrocarbon derivatives, using that to grow the corn, then using corn to make ethanol, then using ethanol to move wheeled vehicles around.
It too is a short energy-burst situation, unsustainable.
” unsustainable”
I don’t see coal to liquids as being more or less sustainable than using oil. Neither will work long term.
i agree that neither will work long term
i was just pointing out the craziness that sets out to convert one form of fossil fuel into another—a two stage process.
and that the sasol system can only be used as a kind of crisis product
Kinda like shale oil is a very expensive short burst technology … to cover an emergency situation
pretty much yes
trouble is the producers convince investors that its permanent
Right FE,
And the tool is the debt.
Ninja!
A true wordsmith
Nicely done. A bit different view than mine, especially with respect to the timing of the problem.
Timing is always the bugbear in this Gail—I don’t think I put a time in any real sense—just an observation that we will witness the events of the next 20/30 years—or at least some of us will.
Breakdown will start as viable oil supplies diminish and can no longer be easily accessed. That could be as soon as the 2020s. But there is a lot of momentum in the system, and denialism will get stronger before the futility of it hits home.
Already climate change has been removed from the White House agenda, and El Supremo asserts that there’s 400 years worth of coal and 50trn $ worth of gas to be had.
More ‘truth denial’. Naked emperors always hire people who they know will stand around and admire their new clothes.
Ive said on numerous occasions, the vast majority of people are convinced that prosperity can be voted for. El Supremo as president confirmed that.
Societal breakdown is certain when promises are not delivered—they can’t be (hence “Futile Infinity”). You could have 20 years of conflict before everybody’s energy (ie ammunition) runs out.
Going out to 2050 was stretching it maybe beyond the limit really but I chose that as a midpoint of the century, because it covered the period of the ‘unborn’. Saying ‘never getting born’ would have complicated it too much, and made the article pretty pointless too, and taken us into the surreal maybe.
My personal opinion is that even after a seriously catastrophic event there will always be observers, right up to the end of the century and beyond. Whether we retain the collective impetus to reform ourselves into viable units remains to be seen—impossible to offer an opinion on it. I don’t see how we could live other than in groups sufficient to offer collective strength and support.
if no groups reform, then it really would be game over…and hello meerkats probably.–until one of them accidentally bangs 2 rocks together and makes a spark
I would say 2020 as the start of the oil crash is optimistic.
Unless somethings changes fast, the math starting in 2018 is getting dicey.
But predictions are hard, and oil is especially a troublesome resource to forecast.
But we shall see—-
i think it kicks off in different places–different time—different intensity–different temperament
all depends on the location, existing infrastructure and so on.–where one nation might go down in 2020—another might struggle on to 2030/5…NZ might be a good example of the latter, Isolated, sane and able to feed itself.
Saudi would be the exact opposite on each count
I would be rather less optimistic where New Zealand is concerned. For starters, we are heavily dependent upon diesel fuelled trucks to transport food from farms / factories to towns and cities. We rely upon imported oil for that. We also import a lot of food. We rely upon imports for everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes, parts for the pumps that keep the water flowing in the cities to parts for the power stations. In addition to that, we have among the highest levels of household indebtedness in the world – largely thanks to people taking out mortgages to buy houses, though our low wage high cost economy has a role to play in encouraging borrowing.
The mainstream commercial news media perform an absolutely horrid job of reporting on foreign news, so that most people are simply unaware of how serious the global situation is right now. Planning for the future involves taking on a thirty year mortgage to buy an overpriced house by the sea and putting a small percentage of each paycheque into Kiwisaver.
Which will happen first: financial collapse prompting banks to foreclose on properties causing mass homelessness, or rising sea levels flooding homes causing mass homelessness at the same time as global financial collapse occurs so that banks are hit by both domestic and foreign issues and collapse? As with others around the world, our government insists upon pursuing economic growth as a core policy – all the political parties have that same platform, though the Greens offer “sustainable” growth. Clearly, sanity left the land a long time ago.
@Curt
Thanks for your response re NZ—I used NZ as the best option available to hold at least something together, not to carry on bau
Whether things could carry on there at all would be subject to a lot of unknown factors, but as I made in my comparison, better than Saudi and most other places.
As you say, the NZ govt insists on economic growth, for no better reason than all other countries preach the same nonsense. Post crash, growth is over so nations will have to fall back on indigenous resources.
In the caseof saudi, that’s sand basically, in the case of NZ it seems to provide a pleasant living environment, but not one that would support a finance based industrial economy such as we have at the moment.
Problem is, everyone else knows where NZ is, and would come up with the same conclusion as me
I am unclear as to why so many people see growth as the enemy.
Growth is good.
Let’s revisit this when growth stops – permanently.
We may have a few days to discuss this before the power goes out – and we all die
Thomas / FE …”growth is good”
It depends what growth you are talking about … more of these folk in your backyard?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/88712766/super-rich-preppers-buying-up-in-new-zealand-in-case-of-us-collapse
Any type of growth that keeps BAU from collapsing — is good.
Even QE inspired growth is good. Heck – even fake growth (as in govt lies) is good – if it gives people confidence and encourages them to run up the credit card
I saw the original article in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
I have not come across any such people but then I suppose most of these people do not actually live in NZ — they just own property in the country.
that link about NZ seems to confirm what i said in an earlier post—look at the world map and NZ stands out as the logical place to be come shtf time.
it even has the shape of a couple of lifeboats—sort of.
Trouble is everyone will get the same idea
bit like the Titanic, when the ship was going down, folks didnt look over the side wondering what all those little boats were for down there in the sea–they knew.
“Timing of the problem.”
There is a lot of chaos (in the mathematical sense) in economics. The further out you go, the harder it is to predict what the conditions will be. It’s not like celestial mechanics were we can predict an asteroid hit for years in advance (if we see it coming).
For example, the CDC estimates that we have something like a 1% chance per year of a flu strain emerging that will be as bad as the one in 1918. For strains of flu that infect birds, the chances are somewhat higher. We have seen several of those outbreaks over the past couple of decades, including ones that hit the US. The mortality rate for humans with H5N1 is 60%. Fortunately it only rarely infects humans–so far.
If you want to consider uncertainties, imagine what more than half the world wide human population dying would do to the economy.
But wait, there’s more!
Is it possible to build fusion reactors? It is hard to say, but there are thousands of people trying. One or more might hit the jackpot. What would the economic effects be of energy cost falling by half or three quarters?
Or consider a large volcano eruption disrupting agriculture for a few years like Tambora did (Year Without a Summer).
All of these are the kinds of uncertainty about the future we have to cope with. Those of us who are interested in a better future work on projects the best we can while being aware that our efforts may be vain.
Currently I am working on a design and cost estimate for a space company town and industrial facility. It is uncertain that we need humans in space to construct power satellites–robots and teleoperation might do the job. But we don’t have the robots or teleoperation equipment up to the task yet. If we put a couple of hundred people out there (enough to build a test run of 10 to 12 power satellites a year) then they need living space, air, radiation shielding, artificial gravity, food, water and power. In the context of the material flow needed to build power satellites, food, water, air and power are almost free. Living space, radiation shielding and artificial gravity interact and generate most of the cost. It’s something in the range of $10 B to set up. That’s in the context of $100-120 B per year of income from the pilot production.
Of course, if it works, replacing fossil fuels this way will take an expansion of 30 times and construction for a decade to reach 3000 power satellites. It might go on longer to pull more of the population out of energy poverty.
If nothing else, I might salvage the design study as background for a story.
I’m hoping you will come up with a variation on the space wheel from 2001, Keith. It’s a good way of getting enough artificial gravity without having to spin the thing too fast. A space station on that scale has always seemed to me basically a very practical and doable endeavor.
On the other hand, I can’t see the space elevator from The Fountains of Paradise ever getting built. But what a feat of imagination!
“variation on the space wheel”
Where you get problems with a space wheel is the radiation shielding and the need to get light into the interior. It’s been designed, which you can see in these:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Design.html
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceres/index.html
In hard copy, that’s 4 pounds of books. I just weighed them. 🙂
Everything you might want to know about rotating habitats is there.
To get a base case, I am assuming a spherical habitat. One 50 m in diameter needs 6 meters of shielding and spins at ~6 RPM to get 1 g at the rim. It takes about 400 kW of motor to spin it up in an hour.
In a six hour orbit, the Earth is 44 deg wide. Most impressive view in the solar system.
Cheers! This is great, Keith.
whatever ideas you are working on—you’d better hurry up
There’s 7.5 bn people running on empty, so if we are to avoid coming to a stop, the new energy source had better be up and running during this coming decade, because if it isn’t, it’s game over.
Why? because any large scale industrial process (which is what you’re talking about) requires a similar sized industrial process to produce it, which at the moment means ‘conventional’ energy input.
No use reaching say—2050/60, then finally showing how nuclear fusion really works after all, if the base society in which it exists has fallen apart while waiting. Nuclear fusion (or anything else of the same ilk) will not rebuild and restart civilisation, only sustain what exists.
Neither will it produce “stuff” or negate the Jevons paradox
+++100
Norman, if we are still being plagued by Jevon’s paradox in 2050/60, I’ll be well pleased.
But in the mean time, not everyone is convinced that it is a genuine effect. Take this guy:
admit it, while high gasoline prices might make you cancel the family road trip to the Grand Canyon this summer, nothing, not even free gasoline, could make you do it twice.
https://thinkprogress.org/debunking-the-jevons-paradox-nobody-goes-there-anymore-its-too-crowded-7fec531b1411#.q0ijqjh3e
@ Tim
you may well be right about the Jevons effect in the future, but the fact remains that we have consumed to the maximum up to the present.
no doubt this was made inevitable through constant rise in population—-80m new arrival each year would inevitably consume energy efficiencies from previous years.
then you only have to look at consumer goods—take a nice house built in the 20s say, in uk–the garage, if it had one was minute. Now cars are parked outside because they are too wide to get through the doors.
Same with stuff inside the house, full if gizmos that didnt exist 80 yearsago.
The means to produce stuff was there, so ”stuff” was bought, used and discarded.
I hardly watch TV—but for those who do, it seems a 50″ screen is a must, to watch crap.
If the “means” to buy stuff goes, then the Jevons paradox will no longer apply obviously
As to going places–I went to Egypt in 2015, a dump, and wouldnt go again, but there are lots of places I would go and probably will if i feel so inclined because i have the means to do so.
If I reduce my AC costs (energy use) with a new energy efficient system I do not use more cool air – but what I do do is I take the savings and I buy more stuff.
Of perhaps I put the savings into the bank which means that it gets loaned out 8x over and used to buy more stuff.
I suppose I could burn the saved cash – but then the central banks are always pumping more out.
This is evidence the Jevon was correct
https://i0.wp.com/www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/world_energy_population.png
Wow, he totally didn’t get Jevons Paradox at all!
I see that he is also a “clean energy” proponent…
Nuclear fusion is like the speed of light.
It is always 20 years out, no matter when observed.
“hurry up”
I agree. Also agree with your analysis about the need for a huge industrial process on the ground. The number of Skylons needed takes an expansion of the aircraft industry by about 50%. Most of the fossil energy input is in the form of LNG from which LH2 rocket fuel is made.
I am not sure how much will apply out to 2050. If Kurzweil is right, humans will not be in charge by that date. How AIs will solve energy is anyone’s guess.
The problem is that this whole approach to power satellites (cheaper than fossil fuels) is not one of the major ideas on the table. Wind and ground solar are, even though these (as Gail points out) have serious problems associated with them.
It would sure be nice to have the resources to fully analyze the problems.
It would certainly help if we could put off the problem 20 or 30 years.
tambora affected earth for 2 years and didnt dent population rise
another big one might be 300 years or 3 weeks ahead—so i think we discount that
as to the return on investment in satellite technolgy,
i think its important to try to grasp the ‘unlimited energy’ does not guarantee ‘unlimlited prosperity’.
it’s not energy, but how you use it.
if we cant use energy to make stuff to sell to each other and exchange tokens ad infinitum, then such economic progress that we have made up to now will regress.
asto half the population dying, we live in an interlocked system, it would bot be possible to remove half and expect the remainder to just pick up as if nothing had happened.
“expect the remainder to just pick up”
Our ancestors did after the Black Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
But times have changed. You might be right.
nope
the black death removed a third of the population, the people left had exactly the same subsistence living that they had before—just fewer of them.
98% of the people were employed in agriculture before the black death—98% after it, hence things remained much the same.
They tried to sell their labour for higher wages, but the King tried to stop it, and did for a while,
The effect was inevitable, wages rose as the elite competed over energy resources—human muscle power. (peasants revolt 1381—40 years after the worst of the black death, when new workers became available)
they became higher paid, but that simply put food prices up, so ultimately things didnt change much because a peasant society cannot elevate itself beyond its available energy input and food output
There was no real change in peasant society in europe in real terms until the 1800s, maybe later.
we will be much worse off, because survivors then knew what they were doing re food production—most of us do not
“98%”
That sounded too high. So I looked
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/
At the worse, it was 75%, probably around 60% in England.
As to “we will be much worse off” that really depends on how much support the farmers have in their tools of production. Cut off from fuel and spare parts, production would fall like a rock. With fuel and parts, farm income would be depressed by loss of market.
by 98 % i meant the people directly or indirectly concerned with agriculture, not just those working in the fields.. might have been slightly less, but not much. The figure is irrelevant
agriculture supported everything
but it still doesn’t divert from my main point that the plague didnt affect food output balance, as people died in equal proportion more or less.
If the land didnt produce as much food, there were fewer mouths to feed anyway so field were left uncultivated
(that is well documented)
Peasants prime skill is food production—ours is anything but that
unfortunately agricultural production supported the lifestyle of the aristos…who were not best pleased at having their income cut. They tried to enforce pre plague wages, the serfs werent having it—so revolted.
Norman, that was a good read, and I couldn’t find much to disagree with in it. Like you, I am a Malthusian at heart, and although Malthus’s catastrophe (a prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production) has so far been averted, but I don’t regard his theory as having been disproven. I think the catastrophe has merely been postponed due to human ingenuity, including the ingenuity to continue securing energy sources and other resources and making technological progress in harnessing them.
Questions we need to ask include “How much longer can this go on?” and “Can we keep doing this indefinitely?” Clearly, a great many people are not interested in exploring either question or else they think they already have the answer. The cornucopian responses are “Forever” and “Yes, of course”. While doomer responses might echo FE’s “This may be our last Christmas before the SHTF.” I’m interested in the answers, but as with so many things in life, I don’t feel qualified to give them. I recognize that I have insufficient data,. There could be new developments we are unaware of and some of the things we think we know may not be as clearcut as we assume.
On the other hand, the world and its resources are finite, human population is still rising, and the laws of thermodynamics wait for no one. So there is plenty of reason for thinking people to be concerned or alarmed.
You also mentioned about “the delusion that supply really is infinite,” adding that “We must add that personal lie to the climate change hoax list.”
I found that last sentence to be rather vague. I assume you mean that the idea that climate change is a hoax (as encapsulated in that well known Donald trump tweet) is a lie. But your intended meaning it isn’t clear to me. As you probably know, I am skeptical that anthropogenic climate change is a major threat to life or civilization. There have been a mountain of predictions of doom and disaster made over the past 30 years on that front by people in positions of authority who, with hindsight, we can now see that many of them didn’t know what they were talking about. Also, it is clear that “climate change” has been touted as a justification for funding all kinds of “renewable” and “clean” energy programs and for making “wealth transfers” that have amounted to taking money out of the pockets of the working- and middle-classes in the First World and put it largely into the pockets of the elites in the Third World. So while it may not be a hoax, it has been used as the basis of numerous rackets.
In stark contrast with the issue of the impending end of BAU, the impending end of a comfortable climate gets lavish media attention and many billions of dollars in state funding are spent each year on specialists who are ostensibly researching, analyzing, clarifying and projecting it. For all we know, climate change studies (along with lots of other government-funded research) may be part a huge Keynesian job creation scheme, the equivalent of paying people to dig holes and then fill them in again for the technically educated middle classes who would never lower themselves to working with an actual pick and shovel to make a living. But I digress…
It seems to me that your reasoning about collapse stands on its own merits and that the cornucopians don’t have any strong specific evidence that would allow them to disprove or falsify the general thrust of your thesis. All they really have are two rather weak lines of hopium, namely “it won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet” and “something will turn up”. Against that, the vast bulk of the statistical evidence in the public domain indicates that our resource base (not to mention our financial system) really are heading for collapse.
thanks for reading it Tim, and putting in your comments–really useful.
The last paragraph about the supernova was intended to imagine what it would be like looking back to ”now” from the future. An explosion that takes the human race with it.
Our use of fossil fuels has, in historical terms, been almost instantaneous, although in our time awareness, 250 years seems a long time. Only since ww2 has universal transport etc been available, mass air travel and so on. An instant in history.
Or did you mean the sentence “climate change hoax list?” by that I meant that nutcase politicos seem to regard the whole set of problems as some kind of hoax and grand conspiracy by scientists.
The human race cannot reach 10+bn,in the next 30 years, so it follows that something will prevent it thats beyond our control and is rapid.
As I see it we have 3 options
Disease
War
Natural mega-disaster
We can cure diseases, at least short term, hopefully common sense will avoid nuclear war.
That only leaves mega-disaster, and theres only one thing big enough to do the job over a short timescale
And that seems to be methane release. Which has happened before. Records show massive heating over a just a decade in the past.
We can’t know exactly when of course, but the Arctic is definetly heating up right now.
As to the other shtf stuff it’s has already arrived for Greece I think, and hit them in one way, and say Syria, hit in another way, Venezuala another…each country being affected in different ways at different rates by apparently different factors
Its doubtful if any have the energy forces available to rebuild what they had—but one can never be sure, None recognise the true nature of the problem, the end of cheap energy and thus the end of cheap money.
With El Supremo blundering on and fantasising about energy reserves—shtf time could arrive for the USA very soon, particularly when his promises are seen to be hollow and folks start getting annoyed there too. You have the very real makings of a military dictatorship there in the short term.
But every nation has a fantasy about infinite growth, none of which can be fulfilled.
“methane release.”
Back in 2009 I was invited to give a talk about power satellites at a DSRC (Defense Sciences Research Council) meeting at Stanford. I was talking about power satellites being able to displace fossil fuels for a number of years before we came up with a business plan that made economic sense.
One of the other presenters was Stuart Strand. He proposed a way to get a substantial reduction of methane in the air. The idea was a bit of genetic engineering to add 5 methane processing genes to corn. Turns out the US corn crop filters the whole atmosphere every year. More about it here:
Stuart Strand Lab / Projects
faculty.washington.edu/sstrand/project4.html
I thought it was a really cool idea.
Norman – what about two more options to cull and perhaps exterminate the enormous herd — both related to the imminent collapse of the financial system and the end of energy:
– mass if not total starvation because our food supply chain from beginning to to end absolutely must have energy inputs to continue production
– mass radiation poisoning and cancer caused by the catastrophic released of radiation and associated toxins due to the inability to manage spent nuclear fuel ponds (which requires the full force of BAU including electricity)
Tim,
Just an hypothesis regarding Malthus, extrapolation on his exponential curve and discussion about the carrying capacity K, as introduced by Verhulst, then considered as a moving target (no longer a constant value).
I made 2 comments in this thread but probably they weren’t very understandable:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the-world-economy-starts-coming-apart/comment-page-3/#comment-111663
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the-world-economy-starts-coming-apart/comment-page-3/#comment-111671
In short, K has increased thanks to fossil fuels, and we (our economy) followed at increasing speed. So far we weren’t really in overshoot at the moment K increased, since we were still below K.
Then K’s increase slowed down, and we had to keep on growing ; then we actually found ourselves in real overshoot, above K’s value.
My hypothesis is that this real overshoot is made of debt, just allowing us to buy some more time against fake promises of energy.
Then K’s value will suddenly drop (end of unreplaced FF), no reason therefore to believe that our economy can’t crash at double-speed (K + Debt).
My initial theory has been demonstrated to be wrong because of the ‘green revolution’
I would like to take this opportunity to update my theory based on what has transpired since it was initially proposed.
The ‘green revolution’ has been the primary driver that allows over 7,000,000,000 people to not starve.
So one might argue it has been a wonderful development
But on the other hand the green revolution is powered by fossil fuels – for which there is no substitute – and as we are seeing — that age is about to end because we have picked the low hanging fruit.
Further – the green revolution also resulted in the sterilization of the best farmlands on the planet.
If it were not for the green revolution the human species might have died back and the survivors may have returned to a more sustainable hunter gatherer existence.
But now billions are going to die because there will be little or no food available.
My updated theory would suggest this is quite likely going to result in the extinction of the human species – and a hell of a lot of other species given the amount of guns and ammunition that will be deployed killing anything that can be eaten
FE,
FF was the fuel,
Green Revolution (and others) were the set of tools,
which we developed so we could burn FF as fast as possible.
Dare I say the additional 7B sapiens is only a secondary tool in this purpose ?
I wanted to say that the carrying capacity K was increased by new findings of energy sources (FF) and the ways (tools) to use them for our profit (or is it that of the 2nd Law?)
Malthus,
I think your “initial theory” wasn’t wrong, just incomplete.
it’s just the upper limit (K) that exists, but doesn’t behave as expected.
On our side, we also have found some strange tricks, such as stretch the time.
Stefeun. I think you are probably spot on.
The increase in K conveniently provided with a slope we could collectively run up. Then when the slope started to flatten out, we kept running / flying above it in thin air thanks to the marvelous, remarkable debt engine driving us from behind.
Something like this:
https://youtu.be/_d8ROhH3_vs
Right!
Norman, I’m not going to start worrying about methane at this point because it took me twenty years to stop worrying about carbon dioxide, and at this stage of my life in need to conserve my mental energy in order to ponder and study economic collapse. 🙂
It’s OK for healthy youngsters with fully functioning nervous systems such as Tango Oscar, whose nerves must be like copper wires. But since I went through my middle-aged crisis, I no longer have the luxury of being able to worry or get scared or angry without suffering severe psychosomatic reactions. The least bit of aggravation causes my tinnitus to flare up and once the adrenaline gets going I experience a queasy stomach, tight chest and a lump in the throat.
So I have a cuppa tea say to myself, “don’t worry, be happy”.
Also, without having read much of the research on how dangerous it is going to be when the entire Arctic is bubbling methane like a huge tank of rotting sewage, I’m reassured in the knowledge that it really was much warmer there during the Holocene optimum.This was a time around 6 or 8,000 years ago, when the Sahara Desert was mostly savannah and Lake Chad was more extensive than today’s Caspian Sea. There are always winners and losers when the climate shifts.
What was going on around the Arctic at that time? Would you believe boreal forests all the way north to the Siberian Arctic coast?
Over most of Russia, forest advanced to or near the current arctic coastline between 9000 and 7000 yr B.P. and retreated to its present position by between 4000 and 3000 yr B.P. Forest establishment and retreat was roughly synchronous across most of northern Russia.” (…..) During the period of maximum forest extension, the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0°C warmer than modern. The development of forest and expansion of treeline likely reflects a number of complimentary environmental conditions, including heightened summer insolation, the demise of Eurasian ice sheets, reduced sea-ice cover, greater continentality with eustatically lower sea level, and extreme Arctic penetration of warm North Atlantic waters. The late Holocene retreat of Eurasian treeline coincides with declining summer insolation, cooling arctic waters, and neoglaciation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222513245_Holocene_Treeline_History_and_Climate_Change_Across_Northern_Eurasia
@Tim
I just listed the 3 things that ‘could’ bring about a ‘decade’ collapse. No doubt there are others but I couldn’t think of any.
population can’t hit 10bn, so something will prevent it.
tho maybe it wont, and Africa and a few other places will be allowed to starve.
who knows what political order will take over to allow that to happen.?
i try to write all my stuff from a laid back position too—though with grandkids thats difficult, they ignore my rantings anyway so i dont bother.
Also I don’t see how we can relate to previous time periods that covered 000s of years because there were far less people. If tides rose a bit, or deserts encroached, people wouldn’t be aware of it
1000 years is 40 generations, with no written history that puts it beyond comprehension
Another classic case of a lifetime winner of the “Fast Eddy Challenge” that is awarded posthumously to Dugout Dick…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KD53LVjXIHs
The people of Salmon soon coined a new name for Zimmerman, who became “Dugout Dick.”
Realizing that the rocky slopes of the mountains could be hollowed out to make cozy quarters, Dugout Dick got to work using only a pick-axe, a shovel, a wheelbarrow and his bare hands. He outfitted his cave with scraps and cast-offs, and moved in. Then he made another. And another. Until his death in 2010, Dugout Dick carved out an entire village of caves, renting some out to campers, sojourners, and like-minded “off the grid” homesteaders ($2 a night, or $25 a month).
Dugout was never actually deeded the land, and although essentially a squatter, local authorities and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) understood his place in the history of Idaho wanderers and settlers. They granted him lifetime rights, with the understanding that the land would be reclaimed by the BLM after he passed away. He squeezed as much time as he could out of the deal, living off the land until the age of 94.
After Dugout died, the BLM came in, and—to the dismay of locals and media alike—destroyed the caves citing health and safety concerns.
didn’t he used to star in those old Roy Rogers movies?
I just rememember—Gabby Hayes
Norman and Artleads found another GREAT clip of Dugout Dicks place before he died..
AMAZING….a look into our future world….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lYOfdpnoayY
That is about what we would “normally” look like sans clothing though. Without access to external energy we are toast.
I wonder if there’s a gentle way to steer the BLM (and other land-related bureaucracies) away from overpreoccupation with safety rules? (For other occasions) The Trump Admin could be the cure. So too could budget cuts. I think it will work better if we have a coherent plan and some justification for it to present to BLM? Was it Joe? The guy doing a lot of the talking? He did very well!
The BLM destroyed the life creations of Mr. Zimmerman to discourage others of like spirit to carry on the ideal of being independent, self reliant and resourceful in the primitive sense of living. The government’s policy has been to herd the population off the rural landscape into concentrated centers called cities and urban areas….better to control and direct the masses. Look what has happened to the family farmer….pretty much non existent non a days and what is left of them very old. Of course, there are market garden farmers….a footnote in labor statistics.
BTW, if one would write a list of where NOT to establish a survival sooner homestead…
Dugout Dicks place would be on the top 10.
Remarkable he produced most of what he ate! Yogurt, being his favorite.
Any other candidates to mention for the Fast Eddy Challenge award?
Not clear if bureaucrats think this all through, or if they aren’t “selected” for control and rigidity through their cultural indoctrination. It strikes me that a lot of governmental behaviors are based on models that no one is directly in charge of. Once it’s set up it tends to perpetuate itself? So you have to make bureaucrats comply through shock, subterfuge, surprise, puzzlement, confusion, good sense–every possible means at one’s disposal. Now we may have shrinking budgets to add to our arsenal.
One strategy we might have tried to save dugout’s life’s work would be to turn the whole area into a historic park for folk culture. It would still be there to foster ideas (even if no one could live there), the park would earn money, etc… Maybe.
It’s war.
Artleads, one of the lessons both Tom Johnson and Mr. Zimmerman provided to us was how to manage without “money”. Gail has stressed that the financial services system is likely to fail first and with it the Fiat currency most of us relay on to survive.
Both of these individuals were adaptable, had a skill set for their region, flexible with a circle of people that could provide support, and did not look to the Government to bail them out when tuff times hit.
Paul Hawkins, author of the Ecology of Commerce” and other works, stressed that when corporations seek solutions that require throwing money at the problem…it will likely fail.
At this very moment…the system itself is throwing money at the problem…
We all agree here that failure is at hand.🎆🎏
Almost everyone in govt is unaware or in denial of these realities. So I’d play their delusional game to stall them. Anything to keep the destroy crew away.
“Paul Hawkins, author of the Ecology of Commerce” and other works, stressed that when corporations seek solutions that require throwing money at the problem…it will likely fail.
At this very moment…the system itself is throwing money at the problem…”
So true. The very important writer, Jane Jacobs (who fought the urban redevelopment schemes of Robert Moses in NY) called it catastrophic money.
With the help of OFW, I was able at the last election to see for the first time the pointlessness of throwing money at so called problems. I voted against every bond issue. Against money for schools, roads (no problem with that one!), senior this or that, everything!
First official confirmation that China’s GDP figures are not entirely to be trusted – shock, horror!
“Liaoning governor says many cities and counties across the province massaged economic figures, with some local governments inflating fiscal income by up to 23 per cent…”
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2063125/liaoning-governor-confirms-economic-data-faked-2011-2014
Surprise!
None of the “official” economic figures can be trusted. All countries are floating on hot air right now.
Although the President of the United States is a figurehead, figureheads do matter.
All in all I think we may very well mark this day as the beginning of the end. The fact that Trump is President speaks volumes about our present situation.
I didn’t think I could dislike anyone more than Bush, but the outgoing stooge is an even more vile and twisted individual. Presidents may be figureheads but I’m quite sure they have a fair bit of say on how many bombs are going to be dropped on any given day. Maybe he could reduce the droning of the poor people trying to clean up the bodies of the previous drone strike?
That being said, I expect our poor atheist friends heads are going to explode if they have to hear one more preacher at the inauguration.
I wholly agree. I think we have just witnessed the last inauguration ever..
i detest (myself) having to agree with you—because i know what that means
A shortened version of what Ive posted before:
Trump cant live up to his fatuous promises
economy nosedives
civil unrest begins
violence spreads
infrastructure begins breakdown
secessions threatened
military called in to restore order
cities become untenable
Trump takes emergency powers (temporarily of course)
military falls in behind him (he has already hired the generals)
dissenters arrested for sake of national security.
Dictator in the oval office
future pres elections suspended. (till we find out whats going on)
secessionist wars by,,,2020/5?
2030 USA is now 6 autonomous states
trump finally bankrupt
Mostly agree except I think Trump dies or is assassinated in his first term in office. Very symbolic that the American Dream dies with him.
a forecast of mine from some months back—
——trump is not the danger, it is who follows him.
if trump is got rid of, that leaves pence—a godbotherer if ever there was one
with him you’d get a theocratic dictator.–I cant verfify if he’s a dominionist or not.
Yes I know, Pence is no doubt a theological figure. New Dark Ages anyone?
Norman-
With respect, I think you are completely wrong about any kind of theocratic rule emerging. I’ve been involved with religious people my whole life and there are exceedingly few I’ve ever met, or who’s work I have read, that show any interest in that kind of power. For every Christian you could give as an example I think I could find 100 that would be appalled at the idea and would resist across all denominations.
There are plenty of monied interests that would use/create a crisis to increase control over people that are a far more obvious a threat. The non-godbotherer dictators in waiting are out their too, they have the real power, and they are not going to let it go. They are far more likely to impose more control over people.
All my opinion of course, which is not worth much;-)
And yes, Trump’s promises…man is he in for a rude awakening.
Joe
i agree with your comments about people who follow the Christian (or any other) faith as it should be followed, unfortunately that excludes the wild and wacky extremists.
As late as 1937 Hitler was giving god-infused speeches, and the belt buckle of the SS had “Gott mit Unz” stamped on it.
That’s not an implausible events timeline but if trump is dictator at year 2030, I absolutely guarantee you he won’t be bankrupt. The whole idea behind him wanting the presidency is to safeguard his future. Then again a non corrupt dictator is a possibility, maybe it isn’t Trump because he’ll be well past 80 years old.
“I think we have just witnessed the last inauguration ever..”
I’ve got my fingers crossed.
ive been saying all along that we’ll be sideswiped by something unexpected
already all climate change stuff has been remove from the gov website
he’s going to start clampdowns on ”violence”—and remove scrutiny from police actions
you can hear the drumbeat of the dictator from here in uk
i weep for you all
I’ve got my fingers crossed
Me too…………………………
As I said at the beginning of this post, many people would think that the economy started coming apart with the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.
trump will be the fall guy when the system crashes and the us dollar ceases being the reserve currency some one will need to be blamed trump will be the elites patsy because they will bring in the next phase of there masterplan which will prop up the system once again who knows what the next monetary policies will be possibly cashbans and bail-ins and negative interest rates whatever it is it will involve a noticeable drop in our living standards
“China’s 2016 raw coal production slides 9.4pct YoY”
http://www.sxcoal.com/news/4551578/info/en
“US coal production declines 17% in 2016”
http://www.sxcoal.com/news/4551165/info/en
Il est mort
Thanks for the updates. The comparisons in my chart are of consumption, not production. I assumed smaller drops in coal consumption in Figure 2 of my post than these drops in production. The US especially would decrease more in 2016 with these numbers.
Welcome back FE/Thomas Malthus, hope the vacation was good and blood pressures down from the endless doomer bible thrumping the endless armies of hopium addicts 😉
Hineni
Interesting audio!
weve really missed you buddy posting has slowed down ever since youre disappearing act
I couldn’t seem to find much about what caused the blackout in the first place. Bad luck? Running the system to close to/over power levels? Power company trying to get rid of its worst customer? Renweable’s being depended on and droppping the ball? Global warming causing temp to spike past what system was desinged for back in the day when it was built? All of the above? Something else?
Are they going to fix the plant only to have it break again next year?
“AGL’s diverse portfolio of energy generation means the contract will be supplied by a mix of both thermal and renewable generation…”
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/update-1agl-alcoa-reach-supply-deal-as-part-of-smelter-rescue-package-20170119-01485
Of course I find this right after I post, but the plot thickens! Storms? Wind-not-blowing? Surge in demand on a day the system is already at peak?
In any event it seems “people” are slowly waking up to/realizing “renewable’s” may not be the salvation everyone thinks they are. Well if it is in their backyard it seems. I’m sure plenty of Americans if they were to stumble upon this event, would assume it must be due to local incompetance, and there is no way it could happen in the land of the free? Or have all the alumium smelters already been globalised and there are none left to break in the States?
http://reneweconomy.com.au/agl-says-blackout-not-fault-of-wind-farms-but-barnaby-and-media-know-best-18972/
With renewable’s failing to fill the gap on one side of the equation, and new oil and gas discoveries hitting record lows, it seems even the most ardent wishful dreamers will have to soon admit this is not a normal boom/bust cycle? This isn’t a dip, this is a soon to be free-fall situation, or at least major recession/depression building/here? Or will they assume Mr. Fusion’s are right around the corner, the market will save the day, we’ll just pull a manhattan project if things got really bad, this is all just Large Corporation / State Agencies saber rattling and trying to get some sort of sweetheart deal for themselves, no real danger, just a head fake to make everyone think there is a problem…
I wonder how many people died on the Titanic, still thinking the ship was unsinkable?
I wonder how many died because instead of trying to get to safety at the first hint of a problem, they assumed everything was under control, no need to panic surely that ice cold water seeping into my room is just a leak from the water closet…
Thanks for the heads up on the Australian blackout. I’ll attach a link that gives an initial outline of the sequence of events, and a photo of a bent transmission tower.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-20/blackout-investigation-puts-power-import-plan-on-hold/8195394
“But in a notice to the electricity market, AEMO said its analysis of the September 28 blackout identified a “potential stability issue” when high power imports coincide with high levels of wind generation.”
So, as expected, it takes more than one fault to cause a blackout. Some things will be fixed, but obviously digging aluminium out of a smelter, or coal from the ducts of a tripped power station, is not the sort of problem you want as a result.
I’d guess that for the moment, running a grid with more than 50% of wind energy and no gas turbines or equivalent online, will fail sooner or later. The solution is driver, inevitably, by politics and money.
I saw some earlier articles. Too much complexity, perhaps. Storm was a major cause, but there we responses by the various energy providers (and their software) that added to the problem, as I recall.
Increasing interconnection, increasing complexity.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-12/renewable-energy-mix-played-role-in-sa-blackout/8111184
“He said a second interconnector into New South Wales was actually agreed to in the 1990s, and then scrapped by the then-Liberal government. “When the former government privatised ETSA [Electricity Trust of South Australia], as part of the deal to maximise sale price, they knocked out building an interconnector to NSW,” he said. “It would have cost us $90 million back then, today the cost is a billion dollars.””
Part of the problem is politicans promising something for nothing. When it gets built, either the cost goes up, or something gets left out. Unfortunately, the cheapest way to fix these sort of problems is some form of burden sharing, and that increases linkage, and hence complexity. In the above case, and area got islanded, reducing complexity, but it wasn’t able to stand alone. However, the rest of the system, and Australia, survived.
Thanks! I understand people in South Australia think the change to renewable energy has gone too far without enough planning etc.
Oil and gas discoveries around the world dropped last year to their lowest since the 1940s after companies sharply cut back in their search for new resources amid falling oil prices.
The decline in discoveries means companies such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell will struggle to offset the natural depletion of existing fields, reinforcing forecasts of a supply shortage by the end of the decade.
Total oil and gas resources found in 2016 reached just more than 6 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe), said Sona Mlada, senior analyst at Oslo-based consultancy Rystad Energy.
The numbers do not include North American shale resources which have been a key driver in supply growth in recent years.
Offshore liquid discoveries, where most major new fields have been found in recent decades, reached 2.3 billion boe last year, 90 percent below 2010 levels.
As a result, companies were able on average to replace only 10 percent of their oil and liquid gas reserves last year, compared with a reserve replacement ratio of 30 percent in 2013.
“The lack of discovered volumes in 2016 will not have an immediate impact on the global oil supply in the short-term, given the lead time it takes from the discovery to start-up of a field’s production,” Mlada said.
“However, these ‘missing’ discovered volumes in the current years could have an impact on the global supply some 10 years down the line – depending on the investment decisions of the exploration companies.”
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?hpf=1&a_id=148160
“forecasts of a supply shortage by the end of the decade” – that assumes demand will stay at least what it is today. That may not be the case if more countries fall off the wagon. If the global economy continues to erode as it appears it will, oil demand (and fossil fuels in general) will continue to decline.
I think we are past a critical threshold of the number of people employed in productive jobs. Those jobs are largely gone. The only jobs left are parasitic jobs: government, banking and finance. To bring back those critical manufacturing jobs would require bringing back cheap energy supplies. We are in a conundrum for sure.
Discovered volumes, and amounts available, depend greatly on prices. At low prices, little is discovered.
I have posted this chart from the 2015 IEA World Energy Outlook, showing how the IEA sees volumes rising with rising prices.
The problem, as I keep saying, is affordability. If we could get oil prices up to $300 per barrel, there would be a gracious plenty of world oil supply.
answer me this question gail according to that graph if the barrel price is at 50 dollars a barrel how many recoverable barrels do we get from conventional crude what i am seeing from this graph is that at 50 dollars a barrel we will get at least 500 billion barrels of conventional crude am i correct gail ?
Work out how many billion barrels of oil a year the world requires, extrapolate from there.
It looks to me as though the IEA thinks we will get something close to 500 billion barrels more conventional oil, at $50 per barrel. They must be imagining things.
$300 a barrel is way off affordable, so unless inflation makes $300 worth what $50 is today the oil will stay in the ground.
$300 per barrel is supposedly inflation adjusted.
was reading this document i still think the elites have a masterplan to save the planet and part of the world’s population i know the majority of the posters on this site do not believe that ‘they’ do have a plan but read this document whether or not it is authentic i do not know… http://www.iahf.com/biowar/991020a.html
“all nations have quotas for population reduction on a yearly basis, which will be enforced by the Security Council”
Ehh. Maybe regular wars are preferable to that.
More than a bit bizarre. Would never go anywhere. “Races not equal.”
I agree. Just unrealistic. Nature doesn’t really care about us anyway.
When was this document formulated? I know a lot of people still hold those racial views, although the world has become too complex for me to think they could have near term practical chance of being acted upon.
The forceful sense of urgency and mission (come hell or high water) is something that could apply at the present, but with more scientifically grounded views. For instance, acknowledging the urgency of fuel ponds, cascading extinctions, resource losses, etc..
The forcefulness is nice, but you need some intelligence behind it.
september the 20th 1991
artleads if the ‘elites’ hold these ‘racist views’ then i wonder what measures they will take to avoid the end of ‘bau’
Sorry, not sure I understand the question, but probably couldn’t answer if I did. Thanks for the date.
1) The racist views don’t sound like something the present world order would sanction at a very high level of power. Among the poor, yes.
2) Kurt had the idea that the following were what TPTB would demand of presidents. It felt like reality when I first read it, but after a while, I start thinking the list doesn’t reflect intelligence either.
1. Support the MIC unconditionally.
2. Never say anything about the FED.
3. Do not allow any new regulations with regards to Wall Street.
4. Support Israel unconditionally.
The whole thing leaves me baffled.
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Whining: “Without labourers from the EU, fruit and vegetable growers will not get their crops off the fields. ”
http://www.monbiot.com/2017/01/11/grim-reaping/
How about picking the fruit and veggies yourself… No – can’t be done. Even with staggering unemployment in the UK.
Migrant workers seems to be a very short step from slaves, and apparently that’s what it takes to put apples in the grocery store at a price people are willing to pay.
It could be done, but the British moved their peasants to the cities a long time ago and the rural population with ties to the land is not that large anymore. Farm labouring can pay OK, but it is physically demanding and therefore less attractive to a lot of Brits than sitting at home and collecting the dole.
Here in Japan, where the rural communities were never bulldozed in the name of progress, I buy my apples from an agricultural coop in the north of the country staffed with local labour, ordering them in 10kg boxes via the Web, and they arrive within a week, costing only half as much as the ones in the supermarkets. They come in various shapes and sizes and are basically the apples that lost out in the beauty contest, but if anything they taste better than what the supermarkets have on offer.
I hear such unfavorable comments about Japan, and its lack of growth. Bad, bad, bad. But they seem to be hanging on in spite of it all, and they’ve maintained some really good elements of their past cultural greatness.
Seems us “well to do” elites expect our dirty, drunge work be performed by “underlings” and that is the natural “order,” of the world…..boy, are we in for a rude awaking….very soon.
If things unwind enough, there will only be room on this Earth for the hardiest of humans. That would leave the elite out of the mix for a while at least. It would be a slow, grinding, hunter-gatherer based existence in that case. I fear that is the future we face though. Technology will be scaled way-way back. So too will the CO2 emissions, pollution and waste.
Yep, All “good” things must come to an end….
Sorry Guys, that means BAU and our Fossil Fuel Age 🎃
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWSOPUfYF0
Sing it Jackson…loud and clear.
Very nice audio
Here’s another one of Jackson Browne’s classics.
I’m sure we can all identify with the sentiments.
https://youtu.be/Vq25ZJwZJzU