Today’s energy predicament is a strange situation that most modelers have never really considered. Let me explain some of the issues I see, using some charts.
[1] It is probably not possible to reduce current energy consumption by 80% or more without dramatically reducing population.
A glance at energy consumption per capita for a few countries suggests that cold countries tend to use a lot more energy per person than warm, wet countries.
Figure 1. Energy consumption per capita in 2019 in selected countries based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
This shouldn’t be a big surprise: Our predecessors in Africa didn’t need much energy. But as humans moved to colder areas, they needed extra warmth, and this required extra energy. The extra energy today is used to build sturdier homes and vehicles, to heat and operate those homes and vehicles, and to build the factories, roads and other structures needed to keep the whole operation going.
Saudi Arabia (not shown on Figure 1) is an example of a hot, dry country that uses a lot of energy. Its energy consumption per capita in 2019 (322 GJ per capita) was very close to that of Norway. It needs to keep its population cool, besides running its large oil operation.
If the entire world population could adopt the lifestyle of Bangladesh or India, we could indeed get our energy consumption down to a very low level. But this is difficult to do when the climate doesn’t cooperate. This means that if energy usage needs to fall dramatically, population will probably need to fall in areas where heating or air conditioning are essential for living.
[2] Many people think that “running out” of oil supplies should be our big worry. I believe that lack of the “demand” needed to keep oil and other energy prices up should be at least as big a worry.
The events of 2020 have shown us that a reduction in energy demand can occur very quickly, in ways we would not expect.
Oil demand can fall from less international trade, from fewer international air flights, and from fewer trips by commuters. Demand for electricity (made mostly with coal or natural gas) is likely to fall if fewer buildings are occupied. This will happen if universities offer courses only online, if nursing homes close for lack of residents who want to live there, or if young people move back with their parents for lack of jobs.
In some ways, the word “appetite” might be a better word than “demand.” Either high or low appetite can be a problem for people. People with excessive appetite tend to get fat; people with low appetite (perhaps as a side-effect of depression or of cancer treatments) can become frail.
Similarly, either high or low energy appetite can also be a problem for an economy. High appetite leads to high oil prices, as occurred back in 2008. These are distressing to oil consumers. Low appetite tends to lead to low energy prices. These are distressing to energy producers. They may cut back on production, as OPEC nations have done in the recent past, in an attempt to get prices back up. Some energy producers may file for bankruptcy.
Figure 2. Weekly average spot oil prices for Brent, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Just as people can die from indirect effects of too little appetite, an economy can fail if it cannot keep its energy prices (appetite) up. In fact, an economy will probably collapse quite quickly if it cannot keep oil and other energy prices up. The cost of mining or otherwise extracting energy supplies tends to increase over time because the cheapest, easiest-to-extract supplies are taken first. The selling price of energy products needs to keep rising as well, in order for producers to be able to make a profit and, therefore, be able to continue production.
We know that historically, many economies have collapsed. Revelation 18:11-13 tells us that in the case of the collapse of ancient Babylon, the problem at the time of collapse was inadequate demand for the goods produced. There was not even demand for slaves, which was the type of energy available for purchase at that time. This lack of demand (or low appetite) is similar to the low oil price problem we are encountering today.
[3] The big reduction in energy appetite since mid-2008 has particularly affected the US, EU, and Japan.
We would expect lower energy prices to eventually lead to a decline in energy production because producers will find production unprofitable. On a world basis, however, we don’t see this pattern occurring except during the Great Recession itself (Figure 3).
Figure 3. World per capita energy consumption, based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. On a worldwide basis, energy production and consumption are virtually identical because storage is small compared to production and consumption.
Note that in Figure 3, energy consumption is on a “per capita” basis. This is because energy is required for making goods and services; the higher the population, the greater the quantity of goods and services required to maintain a given standard of living. If energy consumption per capita is rising, there is a good chance that living standards are rising.
The countries of the US, EU, and Japan have not been very successful in keeping their energy consumption per capita level since the big drop in oil prices in mid-2008.
Figure 4. Per capita energy consumption for the US, EU, and Japan, based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
The falling per capita energy consumption for the US, EU, and Japan is what one would expect if economic conditions were getting worse in these countries. For example, this pattern might be expected if young people are having difficulty finding jobs that pay well. It might also happen if repayment of debt starts interfering with young people being able to buy homes and cars. When fewer goods of these types are purchased, less energy consumption per capita is required.
The pattern of falling energy consumption per capita cannot continue for long without reaching a breaking point because people with low wages (or no jobs at all) will become more and more distressed. In fact, we started seeing an increasing number of demonstrations related to low wage levels, low pension levels, and lack of government services starting in 2019. This problem has only gotten worse with layoffs related to the pandemic in 2020. These layoffs corresponded to substantial further reduction in energy consumption per capita.
[4] China, India, and Vietnam are examples of countries whose energy consumption per capita has risen in recent years.
Not all countries have done as poorly as the major economies in recent years:
Figure 5. Some examples of countries with rising energy consumption per capita, based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
These Asian countries could outcompete the US, EU, and Japan in several ways:
- Big undeveloped coal reserves. These resources could be used as an inexpensive fuel to compete with countries that had depleted their own coal resources. Coal tends to be less expensive than other types of energy, especially if pollution problems are ignored.
- Warmer climate, so these countries did not need much fuel for heating. Even Southern China does not heat its buildings in winter.
- Pollution was generally ignored.
- New, more efficient factories could be built.
- Lower wages because of
- Milder climate
- Inexpensive fuel supply
- Lower medical costs
- Lower standard of living
The developed economies were concerned about reducing their own CO2 emissions. Moving heavy industry to these Asian nations meant that the developed economies could benefit in three ways:
- Their own CO2 emissions would fall, whether or not world emissions fell.
- Pollution problems would be moved offshore.
- The cost of finished goods for consumers would be lower.
Moving heavy industry to these and other Asian countries meant the loss of jobs that had paid fairly well in the US, Europe, and Japan. While new jobs replaced the old jobs, they generally did not pay as well, leading to the falling energy consumption per capita pattern seen in Figure 4.
[5] The growing Asian economies in Figure 5 are now reaching coal limits.
While these economies were built on coal reserves, these reserves are becoming depleted. All three of the countries shown in Figure 5 have become net coal importers.
Figure 6. Coal production versus consumption in 2019 for China, India and Vietnam based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
[6] World coal production has remained on a bumpy plateau since 2011, suggesting that its extraction is reaching limits. (Figure 7)
Figure 7. World energy consumption by type, based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. “Renewables” represents renewables other than hydroelectricity. Total world consumption is approximately equal to total world production, since stored amounts are small.
Figure 8, below, shows that growth in China’s coal production was the major reason for the big rise in world coal consumption between 2002 and 2011. In fact, this rise in production started immediately after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Figure 8. World coal production by country based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
China’s rapid growth in coal production stopped in 2011. The problem was that extraction from an increasing share of coal mines became unprofitable: The cost of extraction rose but coal prices did not rise to match these higher costs. China could build new mines in locations more distant from where the coal was to be used, but transportation costs would tend to make this coal higher-cost as well. China could increase its coal consumption by importing coal, but that would also be more expensive.
Figure 9. Coal production for selected areas based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In Figure 9, above, we see how dramatically higher China’s coal production has been, in comparison to coal production in other areas of the world. After China’s coal production stalled about 2011, it bounced back in 2018 and 2019 as the country opened mines in the north of the country, farther from industrial use.
Figure 9 indicates that the US’s coal production was on a long plateau between 1990 and 2008; more recently, the US’s production has fallen. Coal production for Europe was falling even before 1981, but the data available for this chart only goes back to 1981. Declining production again results from the cost of production rising above the prices producers could obtain from selling the coal.
Whether or not world coal production will increase in the future remains to be seen. Normally, a person would expect a long bumpy plateau in coal production, such as the world has experienced since 2011, to precede a fall in production. This would be similar to the pattern observed in the US’s coal production. This pattern would also be similar to the shape modeled by geophysicist M. King Hubbert for many types of resource production.
Figure 10. M. King Hubbert symmetric curve from Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.
[7] World oil production through 2019 has continued upward in an amazingly steady pattern, despite low prices. Its major problem has been unprofitability for producers.
Figure 7 above shows the total amount of oil produced has continued upward in almost a straight line, except for a dip at the time of the Great Recession.
In fact, every person needs goods and services made with energy products. Rising energy consumption per capita will mean that, on average, every person is getting the benefit of more energy supplies. Figure 11 shows information similar to that on Figure 7, except on a per-capita basis.
Figure 11. World per capita energy consumption by type based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. Total world consumption is approximately equal to total world production, since stored amounts are small.
Figure 11 indicates that on a per capita basis, oil supply has been approximately flat. In a way, this should not be surprising. Oil is absolutely essential in many ways. It is used for agriculture, transportation and construction. Oil is also used for its chemical properties in medicines, herbicides, pesticides, lubricants, and many other products. Oil is very energy dense and can be easily stored.
Because of its special properties, many people have assumed that oil prices will always rise. We saw in Figure 2 that this doesn’t actually happen. Low prices have continued for long enough now that they are becoming a serious problem for producers. Many companies are seeking bankruptcy. One analysis shows that 230 oil and gas producers and 214 oilfield services companies have filed for bankruptcy since 2015.
Oil exporters find their countries in financial difficulty, because at low prices, the taxes that they can collect are not sufficient to maintain the programs needed for their people. If the programs cannot be maintained, citizens may become unhappy and revolt.
At this point, oil production during 2020 is down. Figure 12 shows OPEC’s estimate of oil production through July 2020. World oil production is reported to be down about 12%. The highest month of supply was about November 2018.
Figure 12. OPEC and world oil production, in a chart made by OPEC, from the August 2020 OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.
Figure 13 shows oil production for selected areas of the world through 2019.
Figure 13. Oil production for selected areas of the world based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. Europe includes Norway. Russia+ is the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Middle East production tends to bounce up and down. If prices are low, the tendency is to reduce production, as occurred in 2019.
US production rose rapidly between 2008 and 2019, but dipped in 2016, as prices dropped way too low.
Europe’s oil production (including Norway) reached its highest point in the year 2000. It has been declining since then, causing concern for governments.
The production of what I call Russia+ dropped with the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. Oil prices had been very low between 1981 and 1991. It appears to me that these low prices were instrumental in the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union. Production was able to rise again in the early 2000s when prices rose. My concern now is that a similar collapse will happen for some oil exporters in the next few years, due to low prices, and it will lead to a major decline of world oil production.
[8] Natural gas is the fuel that seems to be available in abundant supply, if only the price could be made to rise to a high enough level for producers.
Natural gas production can be seen to be rising on both Figures 7 and 11. The fact that natural gas consumption is rising on a per capita basis in Figure 11 indicates that production is rising robustly–enough to offset weakness in coal production and perhaps help increase the world standard of living, to some extent.
We can see from Figure 14 below that the increase in natural gas production is coming from quite a number of different areas, including the US, Russia and its affiliates, the Middle East, and Australia. Again, Europe (including Norway) seems to be in decline.
Figure 14. Natural gas production for selected areas of the world based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. Europe includes Norway. Russia+ is the Commonwealth of Independent States.
The problem for natural gas is again a price problem. It is difficult to get the price up to a high enough level to cover the cost of both the extraction of natural gas and the infrastructure and fuel needed to transport the natural gas to its destination.
We used to talk about “stranded natural gas,” that is, natural gas that can be extracted, but whose cost of transportation is simply too high to make the overall transaction economic. In fact, historically, a lot of natural gas has simply been burned off as a waste product (flared) or re-injected into oil wells, to keep up pressure, because there was no hope of selling it profitably at a distance. It is this formerly stranded natural gas that is now being produced.
Figure 15. Historical natural gas prices based on data from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy. LNG is liquefied natural gas transported by ship. German imported natural gas is mostly by pipeline. US Henry Hub gas is natural gas without overseas transport costs included.
The increase in investment in natural gas production in recent years has been based on the hope that prices would rise high enough to cover both the cost of extraction and transportation. In fact, prices have tended to fall with crude oil prices, making the overall price far too low for most natural gas producers. Prices in 2020 have been even lower. For example, recent Japan LNG prices have been about $4 per million Btu. Thus, natural gas seems to have exactly the same problem as coal and oil: Prices are far too low for producers.
[9] The world economy is a self-organizing system, powered by energy. It can be expected to behave in a very strange way when diminishing returns become too much of a problem.
In the language of physics, the world economy is a dissipative structure. This has been known at least since 1996. The economy is a self-organizing system powered by energy; it is not possible to significantly reduce energy consumption without a major collapse.
The economy has many parts to it. I have illustrated the situation in the following way:
Figure 16. Chart I used in a talk given at a meeting of the Casualty Actuarial Society.
The fact that consumers are also employees means that if wages fall too low (for a significant share of the population), then consumption will also tend to fall too low.
Prices are set by the market. Contrary to the popular view, prices are not based primarily on scarcity. Instead, they are based on the quantity of finished goods and services that consumers in the aggregate can afford. If wage disparity gets to be too great a problem, commodity prices of all types will tend to fall too low.
[10] Economists and modelers of all kinds have completely misunderstood how the economy actually operates.
Our academic communities each seem to exist in separate ivory towers. Economists don’t talk to physicists. Physicists know that dissipative structures cannot last indefinitely. Humans are dissipative structures; they each have limited lifetimes. Hurricanes are also dissipative structures that last only a limited time.
Most economists and modelers have never considered the possibility that today’s economy, like that of ancient Babylon, could be reaching collapse because of low demand, and thus, low prices.
Economists don’t realize that once energy resources become too depleted, energy prices are not likely to rise high enough for producers to make a profit; instead, the overall system will tend to collapse. Central banks have been trying, without success, to get commodity prices up to the point where they can be profitable for producers, but they have not been successful to date. I am doubtful that even more new tricks, such as Universal Basic Income, will work, either.
The erroneous belief systems of most economists and modelers leads to all kinds of strange results. The economy is modeled as if it will grow indefinitely. Most modelers assume that if we have oil, coal, or natural gas in the ground, plus the technical capability to pull these resources out, we will eventually pull them out. Perhaps a later civilization, built on the remains of our current civilization, can do this, but our current civilization cannot.
Climate change models are applied to fossil fuel assumptions that are absurdly high, given the problems with low energy prices that we are currently encountering. No one stops to model what will happen to the climate if fossil fuel consumption is decreased very quickly, which seems to be a real possibility in 2020. The loss of aerosol emissions (smog, for example) from fossil fuels will tend to spike world temperatures, even with reduced CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
We are led to believe that an economy similar to today’s economy can operate solely on renewables. This is simply absurd. Figures 7 and 11 show that there are nowhere near enough renewables to support today’s population, even if substitution were possible for fossil fuels. In fact, we need fossil fuels to make and maintain solar panels, wind turbines, electric transmission lines, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear power plants.
If we cannot keep fossil fuels operating because of continued low prices, today’s economy can expect a disturbing change for the worse.
““It’s our currency, but it’s your problem,” John Connally, Richard Nixon’s treasury secretary, told the world in 1971. Four decades later, the dollar’s weakness threatens to incite a full-blown currency war that could distract policy makers from their key task of mending the post-pandemic global economy…
“The ECB’s pain is easy to name. The stronger the euro, the greater the disinflationary effects as foreign goods cost less. Imported deflation, often from China, has been a persistent factor in keeping inflation subdued in many developed economies.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-03/euro-v-dollar-a-currency-war-is-the-last-thing-the-world-needs
“The euro weakened after European Central Bank policymakers expressed concern over its recent appreciation.
“The single currency fell 0.3 per cent to $1.1814 on Thursday, following a Financial Times report that several members of the ECB’s governing council had expressed concerns over its rise against the dollar ahead of a monetary policy meeting next week.
“One council member said the euro’s appreciation in recent weeks was “worrisome when you have weak demand, especially as the euro area is the most open economy in the world and unusually dependent on global demand”.”
https://www.ft.com/content/acbd4efd-e8ef-4d16-bf0c-83fc4df83601
It seems like it would be more low commodity prices than imported deflation from China that would be keeping inflation low in most developed economies.
Yes, I feel your analysis of an impending near-term future collapse of Western Civilization is accurate and timely. It is similar to Limitis to Growth (1972), the update by Graham Turner (2014), the Handy model, and the work of Anthropologist Joseph Tainter on the collapse of complex societies based on what he calls the diminishing returns on increasing complexity (he also states that complexity is tied to energy).
It seems the disruption of the pandemic will probably accelerate this process by: widening the wage disparity, increasing poverty, increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of high tech monopolies like Amazon (that canabalize smaller local firms but are ultimately dependent on the whole complex structure working as planned which seems unlikely). Thus, money is now flowing into those firms that will ultimately and possibly soon go bankrupt like oil producers (Amazon, Walmart, Goggle, Apple, Tesla). So yes, I think this energy intensive civilization (like the 25 that preceded it and are all now gone) will collapse and soon (seems before 2030, probably earlier).
My question is, is it possible to intentionally simplify our civilization or a part of it, moving it to a mostly small holder local agricultural system, dispensing with all major uses of energy, cars, planes, ships, but employing things like ox carts, horses, sailing ships, permaculture, urban gardening, natural farming (Korean system based on microorganisms), eating mostly plant based, using insects and domestic animals. All just geared to produce food to keep the 8 billion of us alive. Is it possible as Tainter said to intentionally reverse complexity, he gives only one example, that of the Byzantine Empire that was at once identical to the Western Roman Empire but reduced its energy demand and lasted another thousand years longer (1453 AD) after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD). The “Special Period” in Cuba, after the collapse of the USSR may be a more recent example of this alternative approach.
I don’t think we can keep 8 billion alive, but I suppose that it might be possible to keep quite a few alive in some parts of the world. I think we would have to give up most heating and cooling of homes, and I doubt electricity transmitted over transmission lines would work. The combination would get energy use way down, but it also would get food production way down.
I don’t see a path from where we are now to there, but stranger things have happened.
What you say has been my conclusion too.
Interestingly, I stumbled on an example of what collapse may look like. I spent much of my academic career as a researcher on remote sensing and deforestation, mainly in Madagascar. I first went there in 1987. Madagascar became independent in 1960 from its colonial power France, but French business interests still pulled all the strings after independence. So in 1973 there was another revolution led by a military officer, they threw out most of the French and severed economic ties with the West, and the country aligned itself with the communist block that was the favorite of the Malagasy intellectuals. Their biggest trading partner ended up North Korea, and their economy collapsed. When I first went there in 1987 they were aligned with communists, I saw a few Russians and Chinese.
With the economic collapse many roads out of the capital Antananarivo were nearly impassible, many dams and bridges in the countryside were out, only the biggest towns had electricity. Products in the countryside were few and we heard of shortages of some of the basics like washing soap for clothes and cooking oil. Children in the countryside had never seen cars and they would run in terror when they would see us drive down isolated rural roads. There was only one department store in the capital and they had about 20 kinds of can goods and many empty shelves. Their clientele were mostly foreigners and government workers. There was virtually no government presence outside the capital and large towns. There was one bookstore loaded with communist propaganda. There were virtually no private cars, a few old buses running and some old taxis carrying foreigners, most everyone was walking. Every Friday in the capital there was a huge public market that would take place in the biggest boulevard, and individual farmers would drive a huge array of oxcarts into the city from the countryside. The oxcart train ended up kilometers long coming into the city. There seemed to be no crime in the city and walking at night was safe. There were no homeless, and all the garbage was just a little vegetable waste.
What I found from studying deforestation in Madagascar for nearly 25 years was that the environmental destruction in that island nation accelerated rapidly after the economic collapse following the 1973 Revolution, that in turn forced a majority of the desperately poor both urban and rural dwellers to seek livelihood as rural subsistence farmers, while the population expanded rapidly. Charcoaling the nearest forests accelerated after 1973. Most Malagasy were trying to get subsistence off a marginal (dry) ecosystem, such that a forest that was cut failed to grow back, land degraded like this would not recover.
There was a democratic revolution around 1990, and the country rejoined the West. The last time I was in 2003, there were many shanty towns all around the capital as rural people flooded back in to the city, street trees disappeared for cooking wood, crime and homelessness were rampant, there were several malls and plastic waste everywhere.
confirms that no nation can hold itself together without cheap energy
if trees are all that’s available then the trees get cut down
the actual size of the country is irrelevant
Australia is in recession, and it is the most severe one on record.
https://cdn-res.keymedia.com/cms/images/us/037/0116_637346251099478924.jpg
The first recession since 1991! Nearly 30 years of economic growth has now come to an end.
The June quarter GDP numbers showed the economy went backwards by 7 per cent — the worst fall on record and slightly worse than most economists had predicted…
US dollar index up today.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Uol9QcFFS7o/X1AEAaWo1cI/AAAAAAABhyo/rclWc2GB23gatUsQF5o4Luc7AC8zIfDmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/dollarintra.PNG
Rising dollar and lower oil prices go together. It becomes too expensive for other countries to buy oil.
https://www.newsmax.com/us/small-nuclear-reactor-approval/2020/09/02/id/985194/
“U.S. officials have for the first time approved a design for a small commercial nuclear reactor, and a Utah energy cooperative wants to build 12 of them in Idaho.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday approved Portland-based NuScale Power’s application for the small modular reactor that Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems plans to build at a U.S. Department of Energy site in eastern Idaho.
The small reactors can produce about 60 megawatts of energy, or enough to power more than 50,000 homes. The proposed project includes 12 small modular reactors. The first would be built in 2029, with the rest in 2030.”
2030! we’re saved!
Two problems:
1. Guarding the reactors.
2. Getting the fuel.
Uranium prices are also too low for uranium producers. It takes fossil fuels to transport them to Idaho. One headache after another.
CHS has a new, open post up which is informative:
“Currently Covid-19 is showing us how we can really call the shots with Big Oil and, perhaps, make them invest more in alternative energy. Oil futures plunged into the negative range for the first time in history during the pandemic (costing more to store than sell). If we take the lesson, and insist on working from home (and businesses find that productivity actually improves, as research shows), and demand stays depressed, Big Oil will have to adjust, just as Big Ag had to adjust with organic foods.”
“We see both internal and external forces interacting with the Covid-19 crisis and the eye-opening shift it has created in perspectives around the desirability of urban living, consuming, and tolerating unsatisfying work. Once the goodies have been removed (TV sports, nights at the bar, etc.) it is remarkable how much we realize we have been evicted from well-being by allowing our senses to be occupied rather than by inhabiting of our intelligence.”
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Referencing CHS in no way means I agree with all he has to say. He mentions Big Ag and I respect his viewpoint, I appreciate the irony of Beyer(of aspirin fame) possibly going bankrupt secondary to its purchase of Monsanto. Glyphosates make much of big ag work and contribute in no small part to the rents on my farm. They also make possible payment of the taxes on my farm which make many services of the county possible. It is a tangled web.
If CHS bores you, JMG has a nice blog on Jung this week, I am partial to Jung. Into this JMG interweaves quantum mechanics – kind of like that subject, action at distance is intriguing, and it is non-deterministic. Also, JMG references Konrad Lorenz and his goslings. What is imprinted in us is a fascinating subject and one wonders given today’s turmoil if a metaphorical mother duck has been replaced by something else which is large and easily followed. So much for free will.
Dennis L.
Thanks!
Herbicides and pesticides do indeed play a big role in agriculture. I have been trying to grow a few things without them, with poor results. I have two peach trees, which should have been sprayed if I really wanted edible peaches. Just keeping rabbits out of sweet potatoes is a problem (that Bayer can’t solve). But bird netting would, and it was all out of stock this year. We don’t appreciate the benefit of fossil fuels and the benefits they provides.
Regarding Lorenze and his ducks, it seems like Fauci is the one many people follow today.
Dennis, if you are interested in Jung, please read Jung. He is a subtle thinker, and deserves ones attention. But if time is short, at least read the book he and Wolfgang Pauli wrote, entitles “Synchronicity”.
“ Unreported CDC numbers: Only 6 percent of 153,504 virus deaths were solely from covid”
https://www.worldtribune.com/unreported-cdc-numbers-only-6-percent-of-153504-virus-deaths-were-solely-from-covid/
What a scam and the hoodwinked public will be BEGGING for injections. While, Anthony Fauci will be hanging out with his friends without his mask on sitting next to his buddies and wife watching a baseball and Bill Gates salivates at the billions his Big Pharma deal will bring him from forced injections.
https://www.newsmax.com/us/vaccine-cdc/2020/09/02/id/985176/
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has told states to prepare for a COVID-19 vaccine to be ready by Nov. 1 and asked them to remove obstacles that would prevent distribution sites from opening.”
I’m fairly confident that there will be no negative consequences if or when it becomes time for me to refuse.
I’m not worried.
“I’m fairly confident that there will be no negative consequences if or when it becomes time for me to refuse.
I’m not worried.”
We all should be, because we may NOT HAVE A CHOICE the way this is going. If you don’t accept forced injections, they can shut you and everyone else down such as freedom of movement outside your home or travel. I have NO intentions of voluntarily taking a bullsh*t injection.
so the anti vaxxer thing is rolling on
I thought OFW’ers might like to digest this, (courtesy of the New York Herald 1904), a seriously weird so called ‘comic book’ railing against vaccination. These are just 3 relevant panels from the strip.
back then they were against vaccination for smallpox
the loonies just refuse to go away, they just wear different clothes
(I put this on medium in order to republish it on OFW)
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/anti-vaxxers-f2a6b9d31ca4
You can have my rushed to market, poorly tested forced injection.
Perhaps it’s the good sensible conformist authoritarians who are the real loonies, Norman, not that it would ever occur to you.
Suzanne Humphries went from being almost as ignorant as you are in 2009 to being fabulously well informed on this subject today. But your main problem is not lack of knowledge; it’s the delusion that you are not ignorant. It’s your lack of knowledge of your limitations is really breathtaking.
“There is so much smallpox history that has never been widely told. It is shocking, and disappointing and needs to be heard by anyone who thinks the smallpox vaccine solved any problems at all.” — Dr. Suzanne Humphries
https://youtu.be/5oot0HUqMcs
Thanks for posting that video Tim. I posted another excellent video of Suzanne Humphries re CV19 here about three months ago, then forgot her name.
Oh come on now. Hardly any deaths are “solely from this or that”. Is is beyond obvious that if someone’s health and immunity is compromised due to some existing chronic illness and they get Covid then the outcome is not likely to be good.
https://www.newsmax.com/health/headline/covid-19-steroids-treatment/2020/09/02/id/985150/
“Corticosteroid drugs offered consistent health benefits, including lowering mortality rates, in those who are seriously ill with COVID-19, a meta-analysis of several scientific studies involving 1,700 patients found.
The new study backs previous evidence that these inexpensive medications show promise in treating COVID-19.”
I hope that “inexpensive” will not prevent widespread use.
I know Kaiser here is using steroids. I talked on a Zoom meeting to a 75 year old woman with COPD who was almost well after 5 days of Prednisone and Azithromycin treatment.
The UK state appears to have shifted its approach to XR – no more hands off.
It is fine for them to have their own perspectives and opinions but they become a problem that society simply has to deal with if they begin to insist that their perspective is the only valid one and that everyone else has to comply with their diktats.
Any state has to demonstrate clearly that it has both the capacity and the will to not tolerate the disruption of everyday life. The UK state appears to have signalled that it intends to do that.
Laws are already in place to completely shut down XR disruption – simply arrest and detain any who engage or attempt to engage in disruption.
It looks like XR will have to pursue the legal and democratic path, the same as everyone else.
> Police haul away Extinction Rebellion activists lying in road to block Boris Johnson’s route to Parliament – as 160 arrests have been made since eco-mob kick-started its fortnight of chaos in the capital on Friday
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8689043/Met-Police-far-arrested-160-Extinction-Rebellion-activists-3-000-flooded-capital.html
The ironic part is that their demonstrations themselves are wastes of energy, particularly so if they incite the State into having to process them.
good work by the police.
it will be interesting to see if these loooons have enough left to keep this up for 14 days.
please keep us updated.
Up to 232 XR arrests as of last night. I am guessing that TP is really not in the mood for further disruption to the economy what with the lock down and the slow return to offices. The situation has impressed on them that disruption does actually matter and that the state has a clear responsibility to maintain the undisturbed operation of everyday life. C19 is a bucket of cold water in the face of the state.
> Police arrest another 72 as they haul away Extinction Rebellion activists lying in road to block Boris Johnson’s route to Parliament – bringing total to 232 since eco-mob kick-started its fortnight of chaos in the capital on Friday
Reflections of an elderly regarding Covid.
Picked this up from ZeroHedge, did not trace back to source, numbers seem reasonable.
“Among the individuals exposed to Covid-19, people aged in their 70s have roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, and 300 times that of those in their 20s. The over-70s have a mortality that is more than 3,000 times higher than children have. ”
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/science-deniers-delaying-herd-immunity-costing-lives
I am 73 in very good health but the lockdown has had an adverse effect. An excellent recreational/exercise/social facility within walking distance was closed and even now is only open in a limited fashion. Dance has stopped, meeting people at social functions has stopped.
For the young Rochester Schools is reopening under remote learning. In the education world one might wonder if this is for the safety of the students or the teachers. That is not an easy question, one can appreciate the anxiety teachers must have if the numbers above are correct. But, the young are the future, they come first.
Some of those on this site look at the population of the world with great concern, my hypothesis is we have disturbed the natural distribution of age with wonderful modern medicine. A recent article stated we(US) as a nation spend more than any other on healthcare, perhaps most of it is spent on increasing our longevity.
So, in the interest of the young, the future, perhaps it is time for the old to step up to the plate. Relax meeting rules, let the old see their grandchildren one more time, touch them, hear their voices, let them gather with friends, smile, laugh one more time. Let the places of religious worship reopen, let us prepare ourselves for whatever comes and face it in peace. Then, as is the nature of a self organizing universe, pass quietly knowing it was most likely the right thing for the next generations.
Dennis L.
Some well known doctor one of the architects of Obama care a few years ago said that humans should stop trying to live past age 75. I agree. My father age 86 has had a couple heart stents a heart valve replacement type 2 diabetes and now is starting to lose his mental faculties. It’s beyond obscene that we keep people like this alive.
So Dennis are you going to do the right thing and off yourself two years from now?
No, but I am not going to fight things, that decision was made some time ago. Covid could be the nail in my coffin, perhaps we have become too attached to life, whatever life, and lose it by clinging to it too fearfully.
As a Christian, perhaps this explains living one’s life in a manner such that one can face the maker with some knowledge that for the most part one did one’s best and be forgiven for the rest. One can hope, doesn’t hurt and in the real world perhaps leads to better behavior and a more pleasant society. I am not religious, but also not a nihilistic cynic, a belief system which I despise.
This Covid thing is real, but humans have faced far worse fates with much more courage and grace. We are destroying our youth, denying them their turn at life.
Dennis L.
you are quite correct of course Dennis
having the ability to keep every scrap of life alive, whether very young or very old, does not provide the financial means to do so. We can’t afford it.
That said, what politician, other than Pol Pot or Korean Kim, is going to tell us that granny has to be allowed to die, when things can be ‘fixed up’ to let her live a year or two longer?
Even more so, if your granny is allowed to die, but the granny of a wealthy family can have as many bits renewed as necessary.
Before complex medical intervention was available, the family doc would come round at the end and just help people on their way, so to speak.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5TbXndl0OTg/VZ6qZJgtr9I/AAAAAAAAv-4/IDjpPn1baa0/s1600/death-panel-obamacare.jpg
Actually, Obamacare is only for the young. Medicare is for the old. It covers illnesses to a much better extent than Obamacare. With Obamacare, a person pays a huge monthly fee and still is has a big deductible when he gets sick.
D, ‘nihilist cynicism’ is not entirely outside of the Christian contemplative tradition and indeed may be indicative of a closer apprehension of the deity and the meaningless and vanity of creatures by comparison.
There is perhaps no obvious reason why a contingent creature that is not self-sufficient in its being would perceive its being as adequate to justify statements that stuff really ‘matters’. Its being is contingent and it spots that things ‘matter’ in their contingency and not absolutely or in itself, which he is not.
There is the concept and phenomenon of ‘abnegation’ encountered by adepts, which is not entirely different from nihilism, and also the abstinence of monks from worldly ‘goods’, which is not entirely different to cynicism.
The best course may be to ‘judge not’. Presumably God gives his gifts as he wills, even to the heathen who ‘disbelieve’. The Quakers emphasise that sort of point, no creature is destitute of the divine essence, even those we might ‘despise’.
Ecclesiastes
7 Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun.
8 Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
One could argue that ‘nihilist cynicism’ gels with the virtue of ‘humility’ as opposed to ‘pride’. Then the human does the contingent stuff, out of humility, as becoming of a contingent creature – rather than in ‘pride’ or because it really ‘matters’.
16 For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.
Tom, I am not “trying to live”; I am simply living. Enjoying good, simple food on a Mediterranean island; engaging in (remote) conversation with my children and grandchildren, with live conversations on the quarter days; happy with my library (‘a dukedom large enough’, as Prospero says), and enjoying every sunrise as another free gift from some Power I trust in on faith.
This is a chart of mortality rates by age and ethnic group. For white people (who tend to have higher vitamin D levels than those with color to their skin) the death rates are much lower than for those with darker skin colors, especially at the younger ages.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/covid-death-rate-by-race-and-age-range-wsj.png
The death rates are much closer to equal for people over 85 years old.
Treatments are getting better all of the time, so death rates now are lower than when most of this information was gathered.
Covid-19 is clearly a racist infection.
Worse even, it is ageist and obeseist.
This is a vitamin D chart I found by race, in the US:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/vitamin-d-status-of-3-us-ethnic-groups.png
Schleicher, R. L., Sternberg, M. R., Lacher, D. A., Sempos, C. T., Looker, A. C., Durazo-Arvizu, R. A.,…Johnson, C. L. (2016). The vitamin D status of the US population from 1988 to 2010 using standardized serum concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D shows recent modest increases. Am J Clin Nutr, 104:454-461. ajcn.nutrition.org
The number of elderly who have died from CV19 in the UK is less than 1% of the total, but you’d think from all the negative propaganda, dying from CV19 was a dead cert.
I know, I know, there is really nothing we can do about..but… regardless…
Ice Sheet Melting Is Perfectly in Line With Our Worst-Case Scenario, Scientists Warn
MARLOWE HOOD, AFP
1 SEPTEMBER 2020
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN’s worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday
Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change.
Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.
That is nearly three times more than mid-range projections from the IPCC’s last major Assessment Report in 2014, which predicts a 70-centimetre rise in sea level from all sources, including mountain glaciers and the expansion of ocean water as it warms.
Despite this clear mismatch between the observed reality of accelerating ice sheet disintegration and the models tracking those trends, a special IPCC report last year on the planet’s frozen regions maintained the same end-of-century projections for Greenland, and allowed for only a small increase from Antarctica under the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
“We need to come up with a new worst-case scenario for the ice sheets because they are already melting at a rate in line with our current one,” lead author Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, told AFP.
https://www.sciencealert.com/ice-sheet-melting-is-perfectly-in-line-with-our-worst-case-scenario-scientists-warn/amp
I’m an old guy, even here in Florida, no worry…but for Permaculture??? 🤭
We make judgments as to what is desirable and what is not. These changes may usher the current group of humans off the planet, but may make the overall dissipative structure of the ecosystem work better in the long run, in terms of dissipating more fossil fuels.
Everything is a value judgement. The way it happened in the past must be the right way.
Yes, we are matter and energy in motion, taking on one form after another, some of which forms suppose that they are awfully important.
If we are to credit current science, then ‘we’ will all end up in black holes, as intense concentrations of energy, and ultimately shrunk back to a single point, to explode and to do it all again.
Likely we will all be back at this precise moment again and again – something to look forward to. Perspective is so important.
«These changes may usher the current group of humans off the planet, but may make the overall dissipative structure of the ecosystem work better in the long run, in terms of dissipating more fossil fuels.
Everything is a value judgement. The way it happened in the past must be the right.»
I must confess i didn’ t understand neither of those two points?
Gail and others have been for years suggesting the possibility of humanoids as predestined terraforming agents of change aka ushering new geological (and biodiversity) epoch after helping to bring about this fossil fuel extravaganza.
The universe seems to be made up from dissipative structures. These dissipative structures are designed to dissipate energy–for example, humans eat food and dissipate it; economies burn oil and other fuels; hurricanes take heat from the water and use it to form massive weather systems.
Ecosystems in general (including economies) are arranged by the maximum power principle (or something very close to it). Howard T. Odum (1983) defines the maximum power principle as a maximization of useful power. It is applied on the ecosystem level by summing up all the contributions to the total power that are useful. It means, that non-useful power is not included in the summation.
Another of Odum’s maximum power principle definitions is “During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.” In other words, plants and animals arrange themselves to make maximum use of sunlight (and water) available to them, in an efficient way. Something similar happens to economies, including all of the source of energy available to them.
Our current economy is reaching the point where more and more of our “investments” are really non-productive, because they do not produce sufficient profits for reinvestment. This means that this particular economy is near the point of collapse as a dissipative structure.
We also know by the work of Eric Chaisson that the there is a general trend toward more energy density in dissipative structures. This requires more complexity.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/13-chaisson-trend-is-toward-more-complex-energy-intense-form.png
Eric Chaisson is author of the 2001 book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature.
If the current economy collapses, as long as there is energy to dissipate, some other dissipative structures will arise to make use of whatever energy there is to dissipate. They will tend to do this in as efficient a way as possible. They will likely need to be able to develop complexity greater than our economy today has developed. I don’t know how this will happen. It could be that radiation from spent fuel pools changes the genes of humans, so that they mutate in various ways. The ones that are best adapted to the new situation will survive. Some may be more intelligent than we are, for example. Changes to the climate may open up new areas of fossil fuels for extraction, as well.
In some ways, the energy that ecosystems (and dissipative structures, in general), are given, are gifts. These gifts need to be used productively, or they will be cut off. After one dissipative structure collapses, different dissipative structures will arise that can use the resources in a more productive way.
With our limited imaginations, we tend to think that our current systems (including climate) are optimal, and that it would be best if we could just keep things the way they are, but that is not the way self-organizing systems work in a finite world. The Higher Power, or whatever is behind the Laws of Physics, will determine how this all works out. We assume that changes from the way things are today are bad. I think they might just be part of a larger plan that we are not aware of.
Thank you so much Gail, that is the closest by far that I seen by way of explaining how the physical world, and life, is ‘will to power’. I will have to give those papers some close attention.
The world is a competition between power-systems (dissipative structures) that tends toward the ever greater concentration of power utilisation to sustain the successful power-system, and the rest of the story is details.
And something similar is happening on a cosmic level, the ever-greater concentration of power utilisation to sustain the power-systems, in which scenario, life, humans and societies have their context as the most recent peaks.
“Boltzmann (1905) said that the struggle for existence is a struggle for free energy available for work, which is a definition very close to the maximum exergy principle introduced in the next section. Similarly, Schrodinger (1946) pointed out that organization is maintained by extracting order from the environment. These two last principles may be interpreted as [that] the systems that are able to gain the most free energy under the given conditions, i.e. to move most away from the thermodynamic equilibrium[,] will prevail. Such systems will gain most biogeochemical energy available for doing work and therefore have most energy stored to use for maintenance and buffer against perturbations.”
The obvious Christian theological angle would be the scholastic doctrine (eg. Aquinas) according to which the entire creation is ‘in the image’ of the creator and ‘partakes’ (Plato) in the form of his being; as the Almighty, or omnipotent, it might make sense that the creation tends (telos) toward the approximation of the creator in the concentration of power utilisation.
Also, his power and the rest of his essence are one (he is simple noumenon) and is divided only in our understanding. Thus for his power and the rest of his essence to exist are the same thing. Thus creatures exist with their essence as, and only as, they exist in their power-utilisation; their power-system and their being is the same thing in their approximation to the divine simplicity that includes his power.
Or something like that.
According to the doctrine of God as the ‘first cause’, all things exist by a continued operation of his power (well, of all of his undivided essence, also as form and telos not just as quasi-efficient cause); the maximum power principle would accord with the concept of the ‘secondary cause’ or the material realisation of the first as power.
“inasmuch as the divine essence, which pre-contains in itself all perfection that exists in created things, can be understood either under the notion of action, or under that of power…
“Power is predicated of God not as something really distinct from His knowledge and will, but as differing from them logically; inasmuch as power implies a notion of a principle putting into execution what the will commands, and what knowledge directs, which three things in God are identified.”
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1025.htm
Obviously I am not saying that is the only metaphysical approach to a noumenon that ‘explains’ the power-accumulation of the world but it is likely the closest within your own tradition. Any other would probably be pretty similar anyway. Likely the theology is constructed by analogy with the world anyway, an argument ‘backwards’ to a ‘first cause’ that ‘fits’.
all organisms exist to exploit energy or chemical gradients, so i guess it’s a natural progression of reasoning to elevate that gradient to your basic diety. all hail the buring bush that was really an encounter with a lit natural gas seep, either by lightning strike or by humans fooling around with fire. there are lots of those in the Middle East, aka Bible country.
I am stuck by the end of Malachi (last book in the Old Testament), in its discussion of energy and power, which is supposedly related to the day of judgment: Malachi 4:1-3.
Well-fed calves are full of energy. “The sun of righteousness” is another energy image. The energy will go to the good and be taken away from the evildoer.
I always wonder whether this passage and other similar ones represent how the writers want the situation to turn out. Having a carrot and a stick are helpful for a leader trying to get people to behave in a particular way. Energy is certainly a powerful motivator.
A most thoughtful meditation. Schroedinger’s monograph “What is Life” (1944) was a brilliant and (for its time) quite novel explanation of how life was what we now call a dissipative system, feeding off an entropy gradient. And there is indeed a religious tradition that views God as the prime mover of this situation. But the Book of Revelation I think has a clearer idea: God is both First Cause and Final Cause; and there is your “telos”:
“Εγώ είμαι το Άλφα και το Ωμέγα, ο πρώτος και ο έσχατος, η αρχή και το τέλος” (Revelation xxii:13)
thanks for that.
“After one dissipative structure collapses, different dissipative structures will arise that can use the resources in a more productive way.”
there is one difference that I am considering, that all other dissipative structures differ from the one that has human involvement.
people can look at their dissipative structure which we call “the economy” and more or less figure out if it is growing or shrinking.
IF the situation is “oh, look, the economy is not growing, and maybe is starting to shrink”, THEN people can begin to act on that observation before this particular dissipative structure collapses.
this is the essential difference between an economy and something like a hurricane or a star.
so I remain in the camp of those who don’t see how “the economy” must collapse, when it could be rearranged on the downward slope as the whole structure is starting to lose energy, which is happening now.
How do we act, if we know that the economy must collapse? Our problem is that we can no longer use the energy available in a productive manner. Instead, we must expend too large a share of it in getting it out and transporting it to its final destination. A significant share of the energy produced will likely also have to go to taxes, especially in countries that are energy exporters. (EROEI modelers have forgotten this one, as well as forgotten that intermittent electricity is vastly inferior to electricity that can be regulated.)
The types of energy that are being proposed as replacements are vastly inferior, both in kind and in quantity. There is absolutely nothing we can do.
Exactly David. As long as energy flows and infrastructure/government functions at key hubs, a lot of the periphery may wither and try to live off the crumbs falling their way. If you lack these things you get real fast to a Venezuelan situation.
Insightful, the trick is to guess the next change and invest accordingly – always an optimist. No sarcasm, if one is on a sinking ship with a prized, personal piano, attempting to swim with it is not a good idea, things have changed, let go of the piano.
“These gifts need to be used productively, or they will be cut off.” In my youth the sermon about the prodigal son was repeated often, it has stuck. My ancestors and the people of this great country gave us many gifts, it is our duty to improve them and pass them on to the next generation; the alternative is to send our children into the world naked and tell them to reinvent the wheel and all of society. A corollary is to tread lightly on this earth using what is necessary and no more.
Dennis L.
Becoming a Kardashev type I civilization.
https://youtu.be/dArpj_VxxuQ
According to Wikipedia:
I don’t think we are anywhere near Type I yet.
In fact, the Wikipedia article agrees:
Some people tend to think that IA could play the role of the next “dissipative structure”, as you say. They would be much more efficient than humans in dealing with complexity.
Storing information takes energy. Manipulating existing data takes energy.
I see continuation of our electrical systems a very “iffy” prospect, for any length of time. I hope people working on AI have a way around this difficulty. California gives an example of what happens on parts of the world that depend on intermittent electricity. Also, one cannot depend on imported intermittent electricity.
Fires under power lines and wind storms are other issues. Someone, with fossil fuel powered vehicles and replacement parts made with fossil fuels, has to keep fixing parts that have broken.
Gail, as you say there is no way to decrease our energy consumption without reducing population. If population was, let’s say 500 millions people on the planet, I guess it would be quite easy to keep electricity networks working in some places. Why not?
What are those few remaining souls going to use the electricity for? Are they going to make their own light bulbs, refrigerators and computer chips?
Thank you, Gail, for this clarifaction. Howard T. Odum is one of those Robert E. Ulanowicz builds on in his book The Third Window.
In the book he works out the following three postulates for an ecological metaphysics:
1. The operation of any system is vulnerable to disruption by chance events.
2. A process, via mediation by other processes, may be capable of influencing itself.
3. Systems differ from one another according to their history, some of which is recorded in their material configurations.
These are some reflections:
*The concept of radical chance means a change or a phenomenon that can not be calculated and predicted – nor by means of probability calculation, which presupposes that what is calculated is singular (atomic), homogeneous, and repeatable. The radically random marks a hole (a gap) in the mechanically acting matter.
* Radical chance does not have the status of epistemic ignorance (which will disappear only if we gather more facts and more empirical data), but constitutes an ontological necessity.
* The world is not causally closed, but open.
* The causal chains – based on particles in physics, genes in biology and energy units per person in the economy – are not enough to determine concrete and individual phenomena such as a war.
* To claim that peak coal in Britain caused the First World War is analogous to the statement of Carl Sagan who, after observing a battle between two rhinos, exclaimed “look, this makes molecules!”
* In complex, network-based systems, causality runs both from the bottom up and from the top down.
* An ecological metaphysics has two important consequences: it saves free will and does not make it logically possible to argue against the belief in a divine intervention.
Thanks! I have corresponded with Robert Ulanovicz. I have also met some of H.T. Odum’s relatives in person (Betty, his widow and Mary, his daughter).
Of your list, I am struck by “The world is not causally closed, but open.” There has to be something other than chance variation that explains the trend toward greater complexity that we see. This might be called “continuous creation.” Or maybe it is lots of co-incidences that happen together. Or, I suppose, free will could have something to do with it.
I ordered a used copy of Ulanovicz’s book, but it hasn’t come yet.
my guess is that some people want to keep enough oil under the the ground to feed those few electricity networks in some places on earth fot the next 200 years, or more.
“Perfectly in line with our worst case scenario”? Are we talking about genuine research of alarmist press releases? Based on the IPCC’s long record of lying for profit, I strongly suspect the latter. Whenever did a government funded science project say “it’s not as bad as we feared; reduce our funding”?
exactly.
we should trust the science, but unfortunately scientists are as apt to fall under the influence of big money as much as any other person.
or as someone once said: follow the money.
perhaps too obvious.
As I understand it, the IPCC is a large committee of climate researchers, nominated by governments. Governments are not above placing apologists for themselves onto this panel. The IPCC reports issued have to reach a high degree of consensus, in order to be signed-off. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and USA are unwilling to have scary scenarios issued and have pushed hard to moderate the report conclusions. Hence the IPCC reports have tended to underestimate the rates of change in climate indicators, but not to a degree sufficient to satisfy hard-core anti-science campaigners, who have successfully pushed the line that IPCC reports are alarmist nonsense. A large percentage of the American population now believes the IPCC is without merit and concerned only to scare people with unrealistic projections.
The big problem with the IPCC report is the input parameters that they have chosen to use. It is your basic “garbage in, garbage out” problem. The report may (or may not, I don’t know) work if given correct input parameters with respect to future fossil fuel extraction. Even their low estimates are far too high.
Hi Gail, what input parameters are in error or not applicable? You mentioned improbably high future fossil fuel consumption above. Anything else concern you?
It is the fossil fuel consumption problem that I am aware of. Even when the makers attempt to use lower estimates, they don’t realize that we are up against limit right now.
The evidence indicates otherwise, Robert. You are welcomed to have your opinion about it all. Like Gail likes to remind us all, “There is really nothing we can do about it”.
A report from people who actually visit the arctic and antarctic and tell the truth about what they find:
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/unexpected-ice
That’s right: the antarctic ice sheet is growing.
But it’s vanishing everywhere else and global temperatures are still rising. It’s in the article.
This is a case of looking at the mote in someone else’s eye and failing to see the beam in their own.
A “mote” in somebody’s eye? The IPCC didn’t get the data wrong about this bit of Greenland or that bit of Siberia; they got it wrong, totally, hopelessly wrong, about an entire continent, and the one that just happens to hold more than half the world’s ice. That’s pretty wrong, don’t you think? And then they claim the data match their models, when those models had predicted a massive melting of antarctic ice that simply didn’t happen.
But there is a better test. Some years ago, that model was leaked to an independent researcher who did what IPCC wouldn’t do: he ran it backwards. And then compared its output with the hard data from the Greenland ice cores. And guess what: it was wrong. That is the acid test of a scientific model, because if it cannot correctly retrodict, it surely cannot correctly predict. An embarrassing incident never mentioned again.
Hardly a surprise, a warmer climate equates to higher amount of water vapor that eventually ends up in the poles as frost, snow and ice.
The icy poles is an anomaly on earth.
The icy poles are a consequence of the fact that we are in an interglacial. In the Carboniferous era, the Earth was tropical almost up to the (ice free) poles. Thanks to the enormous amount of vegetation and the associated photosynthesis, the atmosphere also had far more oxygen, and hardly any carbon dioxide. Rather a blow for the simplistic “models” that claim CO2 drives global warming. The south pole was also ice free for a long time, because Antarctica was then at a much lower latitude (and of course populated by hoards of Shoggoths).
The sad truth is, climate is a complex, metastable dissipative system that we still do not well understand. A fact that perhaps certain organisations have learned to exploit in order to further their own agendas.
Somebody should have told the former First Couple about this before they committed to buying their new seven-bedroom home on Martha’s Vineyard. The house stands 3.33 feet (a bit less than 1 meter) above sea level.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/8f/a4/678fa407dabf1b8cebf0f48593395b03.jpg
Obama must be making nice fees for his speeches.
I’m also a bit concerned about the viability of Leo DiCaprio’s 104-acre tropical private island that he’s in the process of turning into an exclusive eco-luxury resort. DiCaprio’s intensive efforts at environmental restoration shall be put to good use and eventually create a private island paradise with posh villas, precious infinity pools and stunning sunset views….
Although as long as the guests are gill-breathing I can’t see any major problems….
https://www.2luxury2.com/wp-content/uploads/Leonardo-di-Caprio-Eco-Resort-Belize.jpg
Re: the loss of species.
An estimated 99.9% of species that have ever existed are gone extinct. There is nothing unusual about extinction, species come and species go. It is all part of the natural churn. That is how the world works.
In itself it does not ‘matter’ if species go extinct. Indeed it would not matter in itself if the entire cosmos suddenly blinked out of existence.
Things matter or do not matter to humans depending on the disposition of their will, and even then many of them have the awareness to understand that it matters only to them and not in itself.
That something matters assumes someone to whom it matters. I would be very interested to hear an articulation of what ‘matters’ even means without reference to some subject to whom it matters.
Thus humans are free with regard to whether or not the extinction of species matters. To some it matters a great deal and that is fine. To others it matters not at all and that is fine. To some it matters some and that is fine too.
No one is ‘better’ than another else by whether it matters or not to them. ‘Better’ assumes some criterion that is subjectively constructed. People have different ideas about what is ‘better’, just as they have different ideas about what ‘matters’, and that is fine too.
By the same token, people are free to assert that they are ‘better’ than other people according to their own idea of it but not absolutely.
In itself, nothing is ‘better’ or ‘worse’, as the ancient Cynics professed. It cannot be asserted however that it is better to live according to that maxim without contradicting it.
Humans affectations are just that, they are not located or deified in nature or in reality itself.
Human perspectives have evolved to in some sense advance the interests of humans, not to grasp some ‘inner moral nature’ or ‘import’ of reality, which is rather an illusion that is sometimes in some sense somewhat beneficial to humans.
However adaptation is an approximation, an ongoing process of self-alteration, and traits can be harmful as well as beneficial. That is where reason comes in, and the human ability to critically evaluate our own psychological traits and to modify them ad hoc. That too is an adaptation.
Ultimately we will have to decide what sort of planet suits us, not only economically or for purposes of hygiene but aesthetically.
That should not be confused with lamentations however or with attempts to emotionally or ‘morally’ manipulate or to slander other people. It is a communal human exercise in which people express their own subjective perspective and opinion and not a transcendent, objective or imperative ‘truth’.
Those are the terms in which we may explore the loss and the preservation of species while retaining humility and the mutual sensitivity and respect without which no communal discussion is really possible.
Nor is any entertaining discussion possible without – oh, dare I say it -BORES………
They act, you see, as a foil and contrast to the more interesting comments of others. Setting them off, as it were……
Well, I certainly seem to have ‘set you off’ on one.
I hope that you are not calling my post ‘boring’ lol
Perhaps ‘entertainment’ too is in the eye of the beholder.
I was in full agreement with the first half of your comment. But then I feel asleep in the middle of it. So I don’t feel qualified to give an opinion on whether or not it was boring.
No worries, I often pass out while listening to classical music on the cans too comfy on the sofa – I take it as a compliment. I sometimes need a poke at concerts or I am that one, snoring away.
Xabier, you’re a delight and always on point. I’ll quit here, ha ha!
Yes, easy rudeness is always… well, easy rudeness.
I guess that is one way to ‘quit’.
Another way to quit is not to get involved in the first place if you have nothing substantive to add.
But each must be themselves I suppose, and that is fine.
Where would society be without a variety of different characters to divide the labour.
🤣👍
My understanding of evolution is that there are more or less random deviations from the characteristics of parents in the offspring of plants and animals. The ones that survive are the ones that are “better adapted” to the new situation, as the world ecosystem constantly evolves.
What is better therefore changes with the time and place. It needs to be understood in context. Humans in some parts of the world seem to have developed more adaptation to complexity. Complexity would seem to be the direction the universe is headed. From this point of view, adaptation to complexity (more or less intelligence) would seem to be better.
What goes into this adaptation to complexity? Perhaps it is partly what is measured by intelligence tests. I don’t think it is necessarily an extraordinarily good memory. Hunter- gatherers would have had to have had extraordinarily good memories, to be able to remember paths and determine where to go, at what season, for food, I would think. I understand that H-G had bigger brains than we do today.
Evolution is equally survival of the fittest and quickest to adapt to a new habitat.
For example cave dwelling humans in Africa that discovers fire and clothing and thus the migration to colder climates/habitats takes place.
The same holds true for technology. Just because airplanes were invented does not imply relegating ships and rail to the dustbin of history. On the contrary actually, it develops into a symbiotic relationship.
The idea that evolution is survival of the fittest is flatly an oversimplification.
My understanding is that the degree of complexity that has been attained is far too high, relative to what simple chance variation would allow. In particular, life began on earth far too early for it to have happened only by chance variation. There has to be some guiding force the leading the variations in the direction of increased complexity. In some interpretations, these could be simply a long series of chance coincidences. For example, how did the earth happen to become so amenable to living beings? It would seem to have to take a huge number of coincidences.
Yes, the randomness of mutation seems to express the principle that nothing is better or worse in itself, its aptness is contingent and relative to its environment within the genome, the ecology and the society and to its place within them.
Similarly, for something to ‘matter’ expresses its adaptive ‘importance’.
As things have taken a rather philosophical turn I would like to add this quote attributed to Confucius –
‘And remember, no matter where you go, there you are’.
Back on the physical plane I suggest that it does matter that we humans are now so numerous and rapacious that we are crowding out and destroying numerous other species we share this planet with. What to do about it is another issue entirely. How one can say that “population is not an issue” is beyond me. If there was an order of magnitude less of we humans we would not even be having this conversation or this blog because it would not be relevant. Now however…
There seems to be a definite correlation between copulation and population.
All other factors being equal, the more copulation the more population, and the more population the more copulation.
So making some of the other factors unequal may lead the way to a solution to this issue.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for the video! Back in the late 1980s here in the USA, got interested in Permaculture myself and attended numerous events first sponsored by Slippery Rock University outside of Pittsburgh by a Professor Macoskey, now deceased but his work still lives on there
The Robert A. Macoskey Center for Sustainable Systems Education and Research at Slippery Rock University will offer an Introduction to Permaculture Design on Saturday, August 23rd from 9:00 a.m. until noon. The workshop will introduce permaculture design, using the Macoskey Center as a model. Beginning in 1987, principles and practices of permaculture have been used to guide the design and development of the Center as a holistic and organic system. This system includes gardens, an edible landscape, natural building methods, LEED-certified building design and renewable energy systems. Participants will learn the principles and practices of permaculture and see firsthand how they have been applied at the center.
The University also offers degrees in related fields of “Sustainability”.
So, during these decades the penetration of this movement has had limited cultural shift by and large. Really it’s still a fringe sub group that practices in varying degrees.
Also, unfortunately, the status quo is resistant to radical change and will put up roadblocks to pioneer individuals. One example is a former leader and owner/editor of the Permaculture Activist magazine for ,two decades. Moved to his hometown of Bloomington, IN, and purchased a property and undertook to transform the place on a living model of Permaculture He even became active in town meeting/government.
To make the story short, one very vocal neighbor objected to the look because of property values and became nit picky about codes and things. In the end, Mr Bane and his partner decided to sell and move out to a more rural area without restrictions.
I read stories here in South Florida of the same, no growing of food in the front. no bees, no chickens, no this or that…
At this point in our crisis, do we really have time for such silliness?
I have planted tomatoes, eggplants, and jalapeño peppers next to my mailbox in my front yard. I have only received positive comments about this. After I planted them, I have noticed that several other homes have vegetables planted somewhere in the front yard. People realize that most lawns have very little area with adequate sunshine for vegetables. If these places are in the front yard, people will plant vegetables there.
I guess you enjoy somewhat favorable climate and precipitation, it’s great you can inspire your neighbors. The sales of gardening supplies spiked recently..
Thanks for the article.
Glad to head of it, Gail….another couple here in Florida had to fight for the right to garden…
It took six years, but they won. An appeals court had ruled against Ricketts, but the Florida Legislature passed a bill protecting vegetable gardens, and last week Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law.
“After nearly six years of fighting … I will once again be able to legally plant vegetables in my front yard,” Ricketts said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Legislature and the governor for standing up to protect my freedom to grow healthy food on my own property.”
She lamented that the fight even had to happen. “We had a beautiful, nutritious garden for many years before the Village went out of its way to ban it and then threatened us with ruinous fines,” she said.
“Gardening is wonderful,” Ricketts told the Miami Herald on Monday. “I feel victory. … I have no words.”
Property Values Are Sacred!
We have no zoning here in the UK, but I got a lot of stick for my lovely and productive garden: I just ignored them and they had to accept it.
And then the hedge (finally) grew and I can’t see the buggers and they can’t see me.
Perfick!
UK neighbours can be absolutely awful. The intense territoriality is likely due to the sudden overcrowded urbanisation of a predominantly peasant population that is long adapted to more control over its own space.
We are lucky, our residency has green expanses, so the people are much less minded to interfere with other people. Space is important.
It is ironic that UK house prices have shot up to record levels due to c19. And post-lock down redundancies may lead to cut price sales. Decisions.
I hadn’t realized that UK home prices had shot up.
I have noticed in my neighborhood that homes that were formerly rented out are being rehabbed, to try to attract buyers who will live there themselves. (Being next to a university, there is a big demand for rental property.) Prices are up, as people look for homes that are more suitable for working from home.
But I wonder what will happen, with another round or two of layoffs, in the next few months. Of course, it is possible for central banks to keep low-interest funds flowing for those who are able to buy.
Well now, seems Boeing has another problem on their plate
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4MWEAkjh5DM
Seems the carbon fiber sections of the tail have been compromised where they meet and may not withstand the engineering demands required of them in service. Hopefully, its a limited production recent event that can be corrected without too much fanfare.
Even so. not a good sign from the number one exporter of the USA
It seems that rich and powerful Chinese are fleeing the country in droves, junks, or any way they can.
https://youtu.be/LbfDvJCQMj4
Note, this epoch-making video is from the not-very-popular-with-the-Chinese-authorities people at the Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times is an international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement, based in the United States. The newspaper is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty Television.
Thanks for that insight, I feel that I understand the situation in China better now.
CCP is set against Falun Gong and the video makes clear that is mutual, which gives some context to the CCP attitude.
Falun Gong is not merely a ‘persecuted’ religion, it is a religion that is hostile to the CCP state.
CCP is quite sensitive to its own interests and to the political stability of China. It is not ‘persecuting’ religions just for the sake of it but for the good of China as they see it.
There is always a trade off between liberty and security when it comes to hostile religions, in the West too like with militant religionists associated with Islam.
The Reformation and the French Revolution were in part also about decoupling religion from social influence and about the assertion of the independent state in early modern period.
CCP is striving to maintain rather than to achieve secularisation in China. We have already achieved a stable balance between the state and religion, they are yet to do that.
*Cough, cough* BS.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Naval_Jack_of_the_Republic_of_China.svg/2880px-Naval_Jack_of_the_Republic_of_China.svg.png
Which point do you wish to contest – or do you just not like China and expect everyone else to be in a permanent state of bias against it?
We are not on a maga rally here.
Basically I would like contest it all. Including your reply to my objection. The idea that I would bear grudges against the Chinese people is absurd. Rather the Chinese bear grudges against me, ask my former cohabitee originating from 唐山市. 🤣👍
You are aware that the CCP is a construct of the west? Now, tell me how do you feel about the fact that the CCP bandits is running the errands of the west, oppressing the rather fantastic people of China in the process?
https://media.makeameme.org/created/Please-tell-me-p4fxcq.jpg
https://www.straitstimes.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_pictrure_780x520_/public/articles/2020/01/12/wh_32561339_120129.jpg
Oh I see, you are not feeling particular stable ATM and you are running with that. No worries, enjoy.
Oh really?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERTqut3XUAImTs2.jpg
Power has always been a difficult problem for humans to manage. And if I may be permitted to make a crude generalization—I may? Well, thanks!— in China, power has tended to be verging towards the absolute for the past two or three thousand years at least. In China, you either have power, or else you are under its thumb, boot or shackle. Oppression has long been a major pollutant of the air people are forced to breathe there.
Shifting to Communism didn’t change that situation. Power shifted to new holders who were just as autocratic and paternalistic as the imperialists of centuries past had been. The new rulers made new rules. But the average person was just as much on the receiving end and the rules were just as strict and possibly even more strictly enforced.
In fact, authoritarianism is working so nicely in China that the Globalists are doing their best to install Chinese-style governance in the rest of the world, beginning with the “Five Eyes” nations that Orwell referred to as “Oceania”.
If you think you’re oppressed in the West now, you’re going to be in for a lifetime of really good nostalgia once you’re living in Social Credit Score Heaven with Chinese Characteristics.
They’re working hard in Auckland and Melbourne at this moment to move this long-planned social engineering project forward.
Perhaps a useful reference: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Bertrand-Jouvenel/dp/0865971137
Interesting. Published in 1945. It looks like it can be purchased as a used book.
Yes, of course you may. Your observation is in line with my own hypothesis that power in the cosmos tends to concentrate.
I suspect that I am hoping that it is not true but Gail seems to have confirmed it with her comment about the maximum power principle.
I suppose that there is always some comfort in the thought that wherever we might live, we could be living somewhere else.
China does seem to have the government aiming at the highest control of its people. My impression has been that it is a relatively unhappy place as well, but this may be primarily related to low energy consumption per capita. When I look at the ranking of countries by happiness, it seems to be highly correlated with energy consumption per capita. The top twenty countries are high energy consumption countries, per capita:
Finland
Denmark
Switzerland
Iceland
Norway
Netherlands
Sweden
New Zealand
Austria
Luxembourg
The bottom 10 are low energy consumption per capita countries:
Afghanistan
South Sudan
Zimbabwe
Rwanda
Central African Republic
Tanzania
Botswana
Yemen
Malawi
India
In this survey, China ranked 96th for happiness. I would think that all of the control of the people would make them unhappy, but perhaps that is something a person gets used to as well.
The energy consumption would have to be concentrated at the top to give so much power to the government. The concentration may make the situation unstable. It would seem as if when energy consumption starts to recede, it might be both the very big cities that are affected (such as Beijing, London, New York) and the tops of political hierarchies. If parts of China are doing poorly, it would seem like it could split into pieces as well, perhaps with less hold on citizens.
I looked further and found the actual UN happiness report. There are 153 countries ranked. China ranks 94th. The countries ranking close to China are https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/social-environments-for-world-happiness/
I have also added energy consumption per capita, for those countries that BP estimates this. (BP has a lot of “all other” groupings.)
Azerbaijan – 65.3
Macedonia – 53.7
Ghana – 6.6 if part of West Africa
Nepal – 17.0 if part of “Other Asia Pacific”
Turkey – 77.4
China – 98.8
Turkmenistan – 243.6 Rapidly developing natural gas and oil producer – I expect the poor people are getting no benefit of this, however.
Bulgaria – 106.7
Morocco – 26.0
Cameroon – 6.6 if part of Western Africa
Venezuela – 78.1
China seems to rank low in happiness relative to where its energy consumption per capita would seem to put it.
Taiwan ranks 26th in happiness. It has higher energy consumption per capita than China, however (202.3).
Perhaps the degree of un/happiness is due to the unequal distribution of energy consumption among the populace, or to the unequal ‘power’ distribution and the control of citizens, or both/ and/ or other factors too. Likely it does come back to ‘power’ in some sense as the ability to realise human potential.
it’s always been about unequal distribution of power and energy
for one man to live in a castle 500 years ago probably required 20000 men and families to live in hovels
The CCP uses the Fa Leuhn Gong very profitably for its organ harvesting and transplant industry. 10,000-11,000 transplants a year at a $50, 000-$100,000 per surgery are performed each year. And because only one in ten organ is a viable match (corneas, hearts, kidneys, etc), that means about 100,000 Fa Leuhn Gong must be kept available in the organ harvesting pipeline at any one time.
In the USA or UK, where there is a huge voluntary organ donor network – in the UK it has 18 million volunteers – you might have to wait a year for a donor. China not too long ago started a voluntary program. It had signed up 37 donors at last reckoning. But somehow in China you can book in advance with no longer than ten days wait. Organs guaranteed same-day fresh. International patients more than welcome.
Fa Leuhn Gong’s moto is truth, compassion, something…I figure the CCP doesn’t like that “Truth” bit.
It sounds like this is a trend that has been going on since at least 2017. We know that rich Chinese have been trying to buy homes in Australia or the US. This video mentions Cyprus as well. Things are going downhill for China; it is not surprising that those in charge would want to go elsewhere.
Sunshine and depopulation:
It was always interesting for me why the part of my village, situated on the Northeast slope, is without the permanent residents, or just some lonely peoply inhabit it.
Also the houses in the upper part of my village, under the given slope, are shifted farther from the slope, so that they can receive more sunshine.
It is sure that we need both sunshine and water. We seek this combination subconsciously.
http://www.suncalc.org
The part on the Northeastern slope, which is now almost without inhabitatants, was inhabited by the dark-skinned Roma people and those mixed with them.
Taking into account this fact, what is the future of the black and hispanic people in the USA?
One of the videos from the recent US riots show a black guy -mourning drive through- that devastated main street shops in his area (“..we used to eat there, bought stuff over here..” etc) – and now have to resort to that very distant mega big box store, which is still opened.
ps now another matter is that those tiny wild bunch arsonist gangs could have been bused in from another location abyway, most locals seem to protest in ~calm manner during the day..
ps in general terms for all communities on would expect step up of the processes in balkanization, abandonment-triage, secession from the union (declared or not)..
I am not sure what the future is for any of us.
I know that historically, the people in cold areas learned to use coal and other fuel. This led to industrialization and a different type of economy than in more traditional locations. The dark skinned people tend to come from the less industrialized economies, in areas closer to the equator. Even in China, most of the industry (at least historically) was in the Northeast. This is the way it was in the US as well.
Somehow, the dark skinned people are “late to the party.” Their skin colors are not conducive to having adequate Vitamin D production, when they move to less sunny areas, so that their health is not as good. They don’t always have the same traditions (always on time, do things in a conscientious way. They start at the bottom of the economic hierarchies in their new homelands, and it is hard for them to get out. When things get tough, they tend to get squeezed out.
Francois Roddier would talk about the people at the bottom of the hierarchy being frozen out, like ice forming when there isn’t enough heat. We may not like that happening, but it seems to happen.
The lack of energy and sunshine is also the reason why big buildings in the city centres, like that of Detroit, become abandoned.
We may face the similar situation now everywhere when shopping and offices with all of the services are leaving the centres of the cities.
https://images.app.goo.gl/WpRDign5uxYhNvTU6
“The collapse in real interest rates to below zero means the U.S. government is being paid to borrow and spend. This is obviously rare, but that doesn’t mean the situation will soon reverse.
“Absent a low probability event like mass civil unrest or a balance of payments crisis, about the only thing could spur real rates to turn positive would be a massive infrastructure plan by the government.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-08-31/negative-real-rates-aren-t-reversing-anytime-soon
My impression is that China is spending a whole lot on its infrastructure now to keep employment up and commodity prices from collapsing.
This may be an approach taken here as well.
Worth a read:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/The-Real-Reason-The-Oil-Rally-Has-Fizzled-Out.html
This fellow thinks that lack of new investment in oil oil production capacity is eventually going to lead to higher prices. Maybe prices will temporarily spike (perhaps with a war), but I am doubtful about them lasting long enough to get production up.
“There’s no magic wand.
“There’s no magic wand that gets my in-laws to go out to a restaurant next week. In the absence of them going to a restaurant, there’s no magic wand that keeps all the restaurants in business and their workers employed and thus able to pay their rent, and their landlords then able to pay for their loans.”
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/can-government-contain-the-economic-crisis
“The hotel industry remains on brink of collapse amid the pandemic, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association.”
Video:
https://money.yahoo.com/hotel-industry-remains-brink-collapse-170759787.html
“Swissport warned on Monday of thousands more job losses at the world’s largest baggage-handling business, as it forecast a pandemic-fuelled slump in the global travel industry to last until 2024…
“The airline industry and its associated services have been hammered by the pandemic, with international passenger travel almost completely halted for months.”
https://www.ft.com/content/e38bb9b0-e0a6-4d9a-8aeb-61b0e88977f2
“Continental, the German car parts maker, deepened its cost-cutting programme and warned that a further 10,000 jobs were at risk, as the coronavirus crisis hammered the global auto industry.”
https://www.ft.com/content/db5b7869-8b0a-403e-b52a-f792df1bd736
While the COVID pandemic is certainly a game changer and is accelerating the decline in economic growth things were not looking good for 2020 to begin with.
“U.S. auto sales declined in 2019 as major automakers posted a weak finish to the year and American consumers continued to favor trucks and SUVs over cars.
Nonseasonally adjusted passenger car sales in the U.S. for 2019 declined 10.9% to 4.7 million units, versus 5.3 million units in 2018, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis.
Sales of trucks, minivans and SUVs for the year totaled 12.2 million units, up 2.8% from the 2018 figure of 11.9 million units.
The overall nonseasonally adjusted U.S. vehicle sales for the period fell 1.4% to 17.0 million units, versus 17.2 million units a year ago.
Detroit-based General Motors Co. sold 2.9 million vehicles in 2019, a year-over-year decline of 2.3%. The company’s sales were down 6.3% for the fourth quarter of 2019 at 735,909 vehicles. Each of the automaker’s brands was down year over year in the fourth quarter.
Ford Motor Co. posted a decline in its total U.S. sales for the period. The Michigan-based automaker sold 2.4 million vehicles, down 3% from 2018.
In the fourth quarter, Ford sold 601,862 vehicles, down 1.3% year over year”.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/us-auto-sales-decline-1-4-in-2019-car-sales-plummet-as-trucks-suvs-gain-56480367
Exactly! The economy was already doing poorly, especially for auto makers. It didn’t take much persuading to close down factories. But this just made the overall situation worse.
Maybe the only option will be staying in people’s homes, rather than in hotels, in the future.
“Euro zone inflation turned negative last month for the first time since May 2016, raising chances that the European Central Bank will have to inject yet more stimulus to generate price growth which has undershot its target for over seven years…
“Worryingly for policymakers, underlying inflation also tumbled…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-inflation/europes-inflation-plunge-to-raise-red-flags-at-ecb-idUKKBN25S4GD
“July was marked by some relaxation of COVID-19 measures in many EU Member States, but despite this, the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in the eurozone went up to 7.9% from 7.7% in June.”
[These figures are artificially low because furloughs are still in place].
https://www.euronews.com/2020/09/01/eurozone-unemployment-rose-to-7-9-in-july-despite-covid-measures-easing-in-many-countries
“The eurozone retail trade volume slipped 1.3% on a monthly basis in July, according to the EU’s statistical office Thursday.
“The figure also fell 0.8% in the EU27 in July, compared to a month earlier.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/eurozone-retail-trade-volume-down-in-july/1961849
Getting commodity prices up is a huge problem.
“Venezuela Faces The Real Possibility Oil Production Dropping To Zero… At the end of July 2020, according to Baker Hughes, there were no active oil rigs in Venezuela and only one operational natural gas rig.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Venezuela-Faces-The-Real-Possibility-Oil-Production-Dropping-To-Zero.html
“Brazil’s economy has officially entered a recession following the swingeing impact of the coronavirus crisis, which has so far killed more than 120,000 Brazilians and pushed millions into unemployment.”
https://www.ft.com/content/dc045f17-c90b-4098-bda1-4f7471699070
“Brazil’s official interest rates and the average cost of servicing its public debt have never been lower, but investors are becoming worried that the government could face a funding crisis next year.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy-funding-analysis/brazils-fiscal-fragility-stokes-funding-fears-despite-record-low-rates-idUKKBN25R1GK
“Unemployment in Colombia is recovering only slightly from the historic economic collapse between March and April when the COVID-19 pandemic left 5 million people without a job…
“The [weak] recovery of jobs indicates the devastating and long-lasting effects of the pandemic and the relative small impact of the government’s gradual reactivation of economic activity.”
https://colombiareports.com/employment-in-colombia-barely-recovering-from-covid-19-collapse/
The South American countries got hit by COVID during their winter, when more people are inside, in unventilated areas. The US uses a lot of air conditioning, so a lot of people are inside in summer as well. Perhaps the parts of the Southern hemisphere that don’t use much air conditioning will do better in their summer.
Some of these articles are painful to read. They ignore the quality of the oil being produced. It’s all “mismanagement “. As if a political system bringS prosperity. It’s resources pure and simple. Politicians are parasites. They live off surplus energy. Why no one gets this is disturbing.
Politicians are elected because they have a good story to tell. It generally is not true.
Venezuela stopping oil production is ironic, when it is reported to have the highest “proved oil reserves” in the world. I checked, and it is reporting the same reserves at the end of 2019 as it did at the end of 2018. The reserves are higher than Saudi Arabia’s.
“Schlumberger has become the biggest oil-service industry player yet to abandon frac work in North America, a sign that activity in the U.S. shale patch may never revisit previous highs.”
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/9/1/schlumberger-s-north-american-frac-exit-may-signal-the-end-of-the-us-shale-boom
“The Trump administration on Monday issued a proposal that would make it easier to permit oil and gas drilling operations in national forests, angering environmental groups who said the move would harm wildlife and increase greenhouse gas emissions.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-forests/trump-administration-proposes-easing-oil-and-gas-permitting-in-national-forests-idUSKBN25R2O5
I imagine with the low oil price, Schlumberger can’t charge enough for its services.
Jeez folks, the comments are bleak for this post.
I became resigned to our collective fate some years ago and do my best to enjoy the lunacy of it all. Really, as a species we’re pretty nuts.
Who knows how long the party train can keep on rolling? There are loads of people being thrown off, so it can keep chuffin’ along.
I’ve not seen any conclusive data on how much of a bite out of energy consumption COVID has taken, anybody know? Any extrapolations on how much time it buys us?
According to Gail’s view, the covid situation should speed up the collapse, since it caused energy prices to collapse. The main problem is the non-elites will not be able to afford energy at a price profitable to extract said energy.
“… how much of a bite out of energy consumption COVID has taken, anybody know? Any extrapolations on how much time it buys us?
one of Gail’s graphs shows oil down 12% in 2020.
it buys more time for “us” in the Core countries.
at least until about 2030.
I am not sure that we know for certain yet.
The IEA says it expects oil demand as follows:
2019 – 99.2 million barrels per day
2020 – 91.1
2010 – 97. 1
The 2020 demand would represent an 8.2% drop from the 2019 demand, if we believe this.
The EIA shows this chart with respect to the drop for jet fuel:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44996
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2020.09.02/main.svg
Of course, this is the extreme case. On one of the EIA reports, it shows petroleum consumption down 28% in April and down 22% in May, relative to a year ago.
Other fuels vary, with natural gas increasingly substituting for coal. Total primary energy consumption is reported to be down 14% in April and 13% in May, relative to one year ago. These are preliminary numbers, which may be revised.
so if total primary energy consumption was about flat in Jan Feb March and then is down about 12% for the next 9 months (each month relative to one year ago), then 2020 will be down about 9%.
that’s all just rough guesstimate.
I think the real number will be in a range of slightly better to much worse, since the economy could deteriorate quickly in these last 4 months of 2020.
it’s not the end of the world.
I looked at a US electricity report as well. April is down 6% and May is down 7% relative to a year ago. June is reported to be 1% higher than a year ago. Of course, electricity consumption depends a whole lot on heating and cooling demand. If June was a bit warmer than a year ago, that would bring the percentage up.
It is really the oil sector that is down. Other parts are not down a whole lot.
I’M NOT INTO PERMACULTURE OR ECOVILLAGES, but I think this co-founder of the movement has evolved. The video is free for a short time, which is why I post it now.
David Holmgren seems to be talking about using permaculture to allow suburban residents to increase the food output from their land. Probably not a bad thing to do, if there is a way for people to do this.
Permaculture is supposed to be an “anti-silo” principle, and among the aspects of that is to integrate housing and growing. Holmgren talks very interestingly about the collapse of the commercial building industry ( the centerpost of BAU after mining collapses…or that’s what I thought I heard). If commercial building collapses then regulation collapses too, allowing both bad and good, wise and unwise building projects to proliferate. He’s a big proponent of improvisation and retrofitting in construction.
There is an element that we never take into account, and I leave you a video on Youtube
I am going to call him in a funny way Schrödinger’s Dog.
Before the race car reaches the dog, what percentage of survival do you give the little dog after the event?
https://youtu.be/AfinICWxpvo
o look at
El perro más afortunado del mundo hace de escape milagro como coche de rally
i’m glad the little guy made it. he should return to the bump in the road and kiss/lick the ground. now that’s a black swan.
Thanks for your recent write-up..
Noticed this..Federal Reserve up to what they do best…no end in sight
Bloomberg
Fed’s Mortgage-Buying Spree at $1 Trillion With No End in Sight
Christopher Maloney
September 1, 2020, 6:23 PM EDT
Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve has snapped up $1 trillion of mortgage bonds since March, a record pace of purchasing, as the U.S. central bank tries to blunt the impact of the Covid-19 recession on American homeowners.
The Fed bought around $300 billion of the bonds in each of March and April, and since then has been buying about $100 billion a month. It now owns almost a third of bonds backed by home loans in the U.S. Buying the securities has pushed mortgage rates lower, with the average 30-year rate falling to 2.91% as of last week from 3.3% in early February.
…….
Supporting Economy
The Fed’s purchase activity has allowed risk premiums, or spreads, on mortgage bonds to remain little changed now compared with the end of last year. It has also helped improve mortgage-bond returns for the year, compared with performance in the first few months of 2020. The Bloomberg Barclays U.S. MBS index’s has bounced back to -0.34% as of Friday’s close from a year-to-date low of -2.87% on March 19.
Buying so many home loans is the right thing for the central bank to do to support the economy, Kevin Jackson, a managing director on the mortgage trading desk at Wells Fargo & Co., said in an interview with Bloomberg.
“We had a pandemic arise and you needed a force to come into the market and stabilize things,” Jackson said.
Supporting the Economy…you mean The Fed IS the Economy!🚀👍😜
I see that the CDC is getting into the act, as well. In Unprecedented Move, CDC Halts Most Rental Evictions Until End Of 2020
And where in the Constitution, pray tell, does it give the CDC the power to abolish the Obligation of Contracts? This act of medical tyranny should be struck down in ten seconds flat. And it gives us one more reason to abolish the CDC, which is clearly about controlling not the disease, but the people.
The horrible realization is this: Covid-19 is a bio-weapon designed to cull world population. The current stock market mania is proof the 1% have given up on the USA, and are stealing as much wealth as possible before the music stops. One morning we’ll awake to find the wealthy people have stolen away in the night, to their comfortable citadels. Nothing will get any better from today. This is only the beginning. Make ready your home and family as best you can.
“The horrible realization is this: Covid-19 is a bio-weapon designed to cull world population.”
then it’s a design failure.
pop increase was about 200,000 yesterday, is about 200,000 today, and will be about 200,000 tomorrow.
“The current stock market mania is proof the 1% have given up on the USA…”
no, it’s just evidence that there are a few economic corners which govs/CBs have painted themselves into.
markets can’t go down, or else the economic consequences will be devastating (also interest rates must stay near zero).
but true, things will generally get worse.
Once the elites are safe in their ivory towers, who’s gonna do the dirty job for them ? Who will grow their food once they run out of cans ? Slaves with RFID chips ?
The elites need ‘the herd’. Given the possibility, they surely would like to keep things going forever. If the herd is culled, they no longer have someone to command. They have to operate society all by themselves, at all levels. Does it sounds plausible ? No.
Is the stock market mania a proof ? It’s a sign that we are in uncharted territory, nothing more.
The horrible realization is this: the ‘culling the herd’ narrative is massive BS.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-13/the-creation-of-society-s-shared-hallucinations/
@davidinamonthorayearoradecade- The 1% do not need the herd. This is not 1947. You and others have missed the point entirely. If you think the recent stock market mania is just a consequence from CB behavior, there’s not much hope for you to understand. Covid-19 was not a design failure. It served their purpose perfectly to rob the treasury and destabilize the planet. Try telling someone who’s lost a family member, been evicted, or lost a job with 5 children to support that C-19 was a design failure. Too many adults with normalcy bias here. Most of you are deep in debt with no job security or savings, and living on the edge, yet you still refuse to see what is happening. Go back to sleep. The elites love you, and they need you, so rest well.
haven’t you heard?
it’s bAU today, baby!
Heh. I miss Fast Eddy on these sorts of points.
This is a Goldilocks virus for them.. it’s *juuuust* scary enough to keep most people afraid and quiescent, but not so deadly as to not be able to “prolong the glide” (an aviation analogy someone had mentioned here). “Deaths of despair” will just recede into the background.
I too believe that’s the case. Covid was engineered to “lower CO2 emissions” and produce a “more sustainable” economy, while giving financial sharks the opportunity to grab some billions more. And a “more sustainable economy” implies a sharp reducing of energy and resources consumption (aka elimination of the middle classes) and a equal reducing of world population over the next decade. The Plan is very well meaning and conceived IMO, and seems to be following its due course. I tip my hat for the helders, although i dont’ believe this gonna work. Too late for engineers to save the day and all sort of clever tinkering. Maybe if they have tried it in the seventies (or even better, in 1945)….
I thought that too until I read
the great transition now I know the truth its capitalism that is our enemy and thats what social distancing has begun the rationing of economic activity for developed countries to bring in this new economic system based on less stuff of course the governments are not in on it or the central banks all they know is too print more money,They are not trying to kill us they are trying to kill capitalism .
Only so if the virus proves to have a mass long-term effect of sterility in males, of which there are some hints but nothing certain.
As a mass-killer, it is something of a non-starter: unless it leads to catastrophic economic failure and state collapse – but how could the hidden elites survive that?
I am inclined a little to believe that it was possibly released deliberately to impede China’s imperial aspirations – clearly a main policy of the US – through prolonged global economic disruption (China needs BAU more than anyone else) but without causing a mass die-off.
But in all of this we move in a world of shadows and suspicions……
Xabier –> This is not a place to post your personal junk.
There is no long-term sterility in any illnesses, and covid only killed 20,000 people who didn’t already have an illness (co-morbidity)
Total deaths in the U.S. were about 170,000 over 6 months – almost 50% less than the most severe flu season in the last 30 years.
You have been duped by authoritarians and seditious leaders.
Pull your head out and see the light.
You are free to go where you want and not wear a mask.
Very drole, and so well expressed, too: you must have had an excellent education and be the pride and delight of your parents.
Actually, there is some evidence that severe testes damage is caused in the most serious cases, but as, so far, they have been 100% terminal it might well be no long-term problem.
We shall have to see.
Oh, and by the way, I DO wear a mask when required.
These farmers and their blunt talk, aye Xabier?
Don’t worry mate. Despite the warning from the agricultural high-school graduate, you are free post to anything you like here as long as Gail allows.
We don’t quite understand how many different roles COVID-19 plays.
It is possible that it was designed to be a bioweapon, but it doesn’t kill people very effectively. In fact, it mutated shortly after it got started. The newer version is more infectious but less lethal. We keep finding drugs (old and new) to cure it, so it kills less and less well. If it was intended to be a bioweapon, it looks like it probably was released accidentally, however.
If there is a higher power that is “pulling the strings” to determine what exactly happens here, COVID-19 could be part of that plan. The fact that people are afraid of it is bringing down the whole economy, in a slow motion pattern. Some parts of the world economy may collapse while others remain standing, but in more limited form.
Or, some might argue, it is just another coronavirus to add to our collection. If the vaccine makers can make a vaccine that works, it may help the economics of vaccine makers.
If there is a higher power that is “pulling the strings”
Do you mean a power even higher than Bill Gates?
Telecommunication and computation infrastructure providers. Unfair business advantages. 📱👂
Owning most of Apple isn’t going to help the 1% when the currency becomes worthless. As someone in IT, these elite can’t even get their wifi routers to work properly without help. How are they going to run a complex citadel?
This author interviewed on NPR states. “TANKERSLEY: In the times in the past, after World War II in particular, when America succeeded and grew the economy and pulled millions of people into the middle class, it did so on the backs of greater empowerment of workers in the economy who had been denied opportunity. What that really means is women and – of all races and men of color and immigrants. When we tore down barriers to advancement for those workers, the entire economy thrived.”
https://www.nprillinois.org/post/nyt-reporter-discusses-economic-influence-2020-election#stream/0
So you see the easy to extract energy available after world war 2 had nothing to do with the thriving economy. It resulted from barriers to advancement for people of color and women being tore down. Its so simple. All we have to do is put people of color and women in jobs regardless of their skill set and the economy will “thrive”.
It was the demand created by all of the people who could be added to the workforce that allowed the economy to grow. In fact, the debt added was important as well, plus the fact that at that time, there were inexpensive to extract energy resources available.
The war effort allowed the US and other countries to borrow money for their citizens. The money could be used to pay for additional war materials to be built using newly recruited workers. Some would be paid for working directly in the war effort. Others would work in support job. Quite a few newly employed women were included at this time. People of color were also employed.
All of this extra demand helped pull oil prices up and allowed more oil to be extracted and refined. It was the war effort that finally moved the US and Europe out of the depression.
Hi Gail! Nice post. I think you mentioned in the past that we would never “see graphs bend down”. Do you still support that view, and if not, what changed? Thanks!
At one time, I thought the stock market would fall, indicating that limits were at hand. Later, I wrote that I didn’t think that we would see graphs “bend down.” Stock prices seem to be pretty easy to manipulate. Instead, we may be headed for breakage in some part of the market that is hard to fix, perhaps in international money exchange.
In some sense, the issue is what shape the collapse can take. I had never thought of people all wanting to self-isolate for fear of a virus. This can produce a slower collapse than I thought about. But there is still a real problem with “breakage” occurring at some point. I suppose the question is about how stair steps down really take place. Is there a bend, before sharp steps down, or not?
i am currently reading the great transition on pdf it is about 180 pages long it outlines a plan on transitioning away from our growth based economy to a fairer sustainable system from what i’ve read so far it may actually work here is a link to some of the thinking behind it all the good thing about all this is that depopulation is not on the agenda everyone gets to live just more frugally and more happier . Part of the plan involves a 67% inheritance tax on everyone but if thats what it takes to save us from an unsustainable path then it would be worth it.
https://greattransition.org/publication/fight-for-new-economy
adonis, I poked around but am missing a 180-pg. doc. within the links at that page.
Reading Wallis’ self-introduction, though, he seems exquisitely deluded:
“I’d like to see a multi-scale network of cutting edge entities and activities.”
Well, all righty then!
And I’d like a pony.
One question that does not seem to be asked is, “What is the gov. overhead?”
The problem with all of these “kumbaya” initiatives is that they assume there will be a large, stable, global, government to institute and to shepherd along their desired policies. Being policy wonks, they can’t imagine policy wonks becoming extinct just when they think the world “needs” them most!
And as I’ve stated before, the “wealth” that these people have their eyes on is largely fictional to begin with.
to find the pdf just google “the great transition pdf” the first result that comes up should be the 180 page pdf their should be some words along the lines UK CLIMATE STRATEGY just click on this. Unfortunatetely my browser does not work with PDFs that is why I cannot provide a link to that pdf.So yes please read the pdf and tell me what you think .I think this could be very important because this 180 page PDF could be a plan to solve the problems that we face inequalities diminishing returns and a ruined natural world ,in fact the covid 19 could be their doing and the early days of “the great transition” into a new economy .
Yes, they are somewhat deluded as to what they imagine to be solid foundations.
There was an hilarious (is it really funny, or am I going just a little mad?) article in The Guardian yesterday referring to the necessity of large tax rises – on both rich and poor (!!!) – to maintain the system as it currently functions, and make up for COVID losses, but only ‘once a firm and strong recovery’ is in place. It is assumed that such a recovery is possible, even inevitable.
Higher taxes, of largely imaginary, paper wealth to maintain an increasingly unviable BAU which cannot function far into the 21st century, given the greatly changed energy equation and resources problem.
Of course, after the Black Death governments also tried to get villagers and townsmen to pay the same total tax as they were paying before the plague hit -raised 2 or 3 times per capita – to maintain their own comfy version of BAU: castles, tournaments and endless war.
Perhaps the tournaments and endless wars helped to keep the population level of the nobles in check and the tax and fees base sustainable. An ‘elite’ can be so only if it is small. More dead nobles means more nobility to go around for the living ones.
To follow Gail’s posts and comments, here are the old RSS links (should still work):
https://ourfiniteworld.com/feed/
https://ourfiniteworld.com/comments/feed/
I don’t think it works now.
I thought might be part of what I was having trouble with, when Microsoft products started claiming my site had a virus.
Commenter Dennis L. wonders why all this talk about non-breeders have such hatred for the human species and says if he had it to do over he would have five children instead of one.
Commenter Oh Dear says we should celebrate humanities success on this planet and continue to breed so others can enjoy the fruits of civilization while they last.
These two comments illustrate how our massive cerebral cortex still overlies a primitive ape brain that just wants to pass on our genes. This always comes out whenever the subject of breeding is brought up.
The end of industrial civilization and the untimely deaths of billions of intelligent apes is going to be the biggest deal this planet has ever seen. I doubt that anything much will be left by the time we finish killing off all the remaining wildlife and setting off nuclear bombs and power plants. But you are right Oh Dear it was an amazing piece of work. Turning this entire planet into habitat for industrial humans and our livestock was a one time deal, never to be repeated. As my friend and mentor Jay Hanson used to say it was a nice planet while it lasted.
I saw this coming a long time ago so 30 years ago when most of my peers where starting families I got a vasectomy instead. My wife was totally in agreement. I do wonder if some you parents don’t have some regrets when you think about what your offspring are going to have to deal with. Even if you won’t admit it.
You can add James Howard Kunstler and Nate Hagens to your short list of non-breeders.
Tom,
All respect to you, five vs one makes absolutely no difference. For me, a child involved considerable sacrifice, it is a tough job. Reality is whose children do the childless invest in? Look at one, two children, etc. and how much of a cut can the old take from these kids?
The problem is the length of time the old are around, it is mostly a non productive time, it is self reinforcing, kids can’t have kids due to economic reasons.
There aren’t many solutions and those available may not be very pleasant.
All the best,
Dennis L.
Dennis,
I watched the talk by Nate Hagens you linked to. He is not as pessimistic as I am. I am not sure he takes into account human nature. There was also an interview with Sid Smith linked to recently. He pointed out that human existence has always been precarious up until recently and will be so again soon. I am very glad to not have children.
I am not really an advocate of zero children.
I suppose I am more aware than most of the problems with government pension plans. People today think Social Security will be here forever. Without children, a person needs to be able to work until the day of their death. That may be true with children as well, but there is some chance that the children will help care for you.
Also, family groups are important. We cannot succeed entirely by ourselves. I grew up with a great deal of family around. I can’t quite imagine no family at all. An awfully lot of spouses die young, leaving many older people alone in their later years.
Having a wider family increases, all things being equal, the chance of not suffering too greatly when one becomes feeble and useless – even in hunter-gatherer groups.
Pension plans and welfare schemes are,clearly, the staff which will break, and it is unwise to rely on them.
However, as our economies collapse, family members are less and less likely to have a surplus to sustain demanding elderly relations, and also more likely to be dispersed (fleeing local collapses, forced labour for welfare schemes, the only jobs being far distant, war, etc).
In the pre-FF age, it was very common indeed for the elderly to be alone at the end -and if very old indeed to have outlived all their children – and to have relations who were simply too poor to do anything for them, much as we like to romanticize that time. If taken in by a married daughter they would be a burden and not very welcome.
Thankfully, so many people died in their late 50’s and early 60’s, so could do some work until the very end. As collapse progresses, life-extending medical treatments will certainly vanish, and the population will balance out again.
Of the few people I have known with something approaching a real peasant background, from large families in fairly traditional societies they have mostly expressed horror at the thought of looking after elderly parents, or even just living with them!
The moral is maybe to make every effort have very good relations with your offspring, recognize that even parents must make no assumptions about their rights, and they should be polite and thankful for any favours.
Dennis L, I am one of the few people here who does indeed have five children. And allow me to affirm that together they have given me more worry, more concern, and less free time. But also more pure, unalloyed joy than everything else in my life put together. Children are the greatest gift of all.
Well, I’m shocked, I thought only chavs and Mushlimbs had 5 children these days, What was wrong with buying a series of dogs instead? You’re cruel to dogs, you are.
As collapse progresses, and the conditions of life grow harder and amenities decline, there will be far fewer elderly or incapable and sick people around to demand their cut, things will in a way balance out. That’s my ‘hopeful’ prognosis!
Tom, though I also chose not to have children, I think your next-to-last paragraph is somewhat unkind. Everyone born at any time in history has to eat at a banquet table they themselves did not set.
I understand Dennis to some extent, more now that I am in my “waning years” (I am 60). Having not entirely fulfilled my own genetic programming, there’s not a lot to do other than sit around and consume. While I had a “job” there was a superficial sense of purpose. That purpose is now falling away for many people.
I can feel a natural urge to help young friends of ours who are raising their first child. Grandmothering and grandfathering and passing on useful skills are also part of the programming.
If we are not here to express who we are, then why are we here? That can be said from either a deterministic secular or a religious perspective. There is not really a lot to be gained by browbeating koalas into swimming upstream, I have realized.
Humans will always look for someone to blame, though, and we will probably see the end of that with the end of the species.
Yes Lidia it probably was a little unkind. If humans didn’t have the ability to reproduce themselves we wouldn’t be here. Our intelligence and self-awareness makes our own deaths almost unbearable so any that can be avoided at this point seems like a good thing to me.
Speaking of unbearable… would you have been this committed to birth control?
http://heretical.com/bjerre/aborig2.html
I don’t think of my own death as “unbearable”, and don’t understand those who might think that of theirs. I’m nothing special, and neither are they. To my mind, insistence on continuance at any cost is (to use a very old-fashioned term) “unseemly”.
That might be another way in which I have faulty programming.
Tom, I do not find my death “almost unbearable”. Death is a part of life, and we can value life all the more because we know “neither the day nor the hour”. In that mood, when I was 70 I instructed my employer to cancel my health insurance. It was a pointless expense anyway; upon arriving in Singapore I had registered as a private patient, and paid cash on the nail ever since. I also executed a living will, there legally binding, that explicitly prohibited any “extreme” medical interventions when it was obvious they would only delay the inevitable.
And, of course, a real will disposing of my worldly assets.
As the Prayer Book says “But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health.”
Lidia17,
I smile quietly at your comment, we are a very nice and thoughtful group. There is or are few really perfect ways to live a life, everything is a trade off. The best part of a job is having people around, it is a nice social circle.
The social aspect of Covid is the pits,
It is good you help young friends, if we are able some of us can give a hand to the young, sometimes “inventing” a job which maintains respect can be helpful for those whose hours and income have been cut.
I enjoy your comments,
Dennis L.
Lidia17, are you the same person who used to comment extensively on Nature Bats Last and its supplemental forum?
Tom, I didn’t find you unkind in the least. Directness is appreciated by a lot of us concerning this topic.
Yes.
“Directness is appreciated by a lot of us concerning this topic.”
Good, then I can be direct in telling you that blame after the fact objectively only serves to stoke our own egos about being “right”.
There is no “right” here: only what is.
What is, is right.
Thanks for the “unkind” comment, Tom! Why Lidia is wasting her time trying to censor Gail’s site is strange, to say the least.
Most of us non-breeders in my real-life/Internet circles do not shame those who decide to have kids, especially since most humans are ignorant concerning science matters and/or just don’t give a rip. However, we do go out of our way to praise to the skies those who choose the less traveled path of non-reproduction.
After all, they certainly deserve it since they’ve been accused of “selfishness” and “immaturity” since Day One! And I’ve always been a fan of outliers in general, so I know how lucky I was to find my wife of over 30 years who initiated the child-free discussion in the first place.
“All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is right.”
(Alexander Pope, 1688 to1744, “An Essay on Man”, ll 89 to 94)
Oh my!
Not being a literary scholar, I have never read that gentleman. I would like to gather some classic books for the rainy days ahead.
“The end of industrial civilization and the untimely deaths of billions of intelligent apes is going to be the biggest deal this planet has ever seen.”
Well, the ‘planet’ has never ‘seen’ anything and nothing is a ‘deal’ to it. You are anthropomorphising as many ecologically concerned persons tend to do.
You might have addressed the points that I and others made rather than going for the easy ‘ape brain’ insult.
I will be happy to continue the discussion in a spirit of pleasant cooperation if you choose to do that.
Perhaps we should remember that this is not the first extinction. It might help to set aside 31 October as Species Remembrance Day, when we reflect on all the creatures great and small that are no longer with us, from trilobites to passenger pigeons, and mentally prepare ourselves for the day we too enter the Hall of Extinction. Gaia giveth, and Gaia taketh away. Blessed be.
Life has to go on. I have never liked cemeteries, let alone ‘remembrance days’. I feel that there is enough doom and gloom without institutionalising it. I need sun and light to thrive, gloom does not suit me.
Oh dear, I did not intend my post to convey doom. I intended it to be a celebration of the endless variety of life in all its forms. And of our great good fortune in being give an hour upon the stage to rejoice over its wonders past and present. I find happiness even sweeter because it is transitory. As the Romans said, “Carpe diem”. And I have loved cemeteries, ever since reading Gray’s Elegy. Especially the Protestant Cemetery in Robe, the burial place of both Keats and Shelley. As the latter said, “It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place”.
Oct 31st: too much candy to collect with my offspring.
every living species on the planet can communicate with its own kind in ways we do not comprehend
it would seem to me that that makes the planet itself an aware entity
if this is so, then the planet must recognise that it is being put under stress by an invasive organism which is wrecking the living environment for all other species and putting their lives at risk.
on that premise, it is not too difficult a leap of imagination to realise that the release of a virus that kills off a few hundred thousand of that invasive organism, and panics the rest into committing economic suicide, might just be the means by which the planet is preserving itself.
“I got a vasectomy instead.”
That was your personal lifestyle choice that you had every right to make, but do not expect everyone else to validate it for you, society does not work like that.
If you were confident in your own choice then you would not insist that everyone agree that your personal choice was the ‘right one’ or the ‘only right one’, and that there is no other way of looking at the situation.
It was your choice and one that you have to live with, not me or anyone else.
Other people chose to have kids and they are glad that they did. They are not going to regret those choices, and the lives of their beloved family members that they gave life to, just to make you feel better about your choices.
We all make choices and choices have consequences, as well as rewards, and we have to learn to live with that, even if they were made in decades past. Some of us are glad of our choices, and we are not looking for validation from random strangers on the web.
Nor do we feel the need to insult other people who made different decisions.
Choices are our own responsibility, no one else’s.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Tom. My vasectomy was obtained the same week we had our cat fixed, a doubly good period of time. I’ll add Kunstler and Hagens to the list, along with Derrick Jensen, born in 1960, Dr. Karen Shragg, born in 1954, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian, born in 1928. Jack was concerned with both our coming and our going, something which few people know about.
Blaise, you can add H. R. Giger, born in 1940, to the list. Even though he wasn’t a scientist, he knew how to observe the world through a clear lens. In 1967, before Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others dealing with overpopulation, he created “Birth Machine,” which illustrated ecological destruction through the human flood. Preventing bullet-babies’ births is always a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Giger#/media/File:Birth_Machine.jpg
I chose to have 2 children. They are currently pre-teens and loving life. If life gets bad, wasn’t it still worth it for the good times? I would have preferred to exist and experience the joy and suffering, rather than not exist.
As one of my favorite musicians said: “How strange it is to be anything at all.”
Robert Smith of The Cure has always been a likable fellow, and I’m quite sure that the band’s name is what it is due to this viewpoint:
https://external-preview.redd.it/1F9fECWd83SrzYsTHk0q8MQy0hlUubNbhDqit3MM2p4.png?auto=webp&s=0e2ccb5ff050af50894a2c4e36483cf9951c4df2
Robert does have an endearing quality about him, ha ha! And I’ll add Giger to the list for being awake ‘n’ aware. Of course, he’s known mainly for his “Alien” creature, humans being what they are.
Here’s Tom Waits, who doesn’t qualify for the list since he has three kids, but what the heck! I like what he has to say because I’m down to 20 minutes of Internet time daily precisely for this reason:
https://thisbugslifedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/11904113_10153451419455236_5978987165039497963_n.jpg
Clearly you recognize Gail as a good writer if she merits part of your 20 min.!
As a life long cure fan, I agreed with him up until I had a child. Having a child usually cures you of this viewpoint.
I am programmed to feel that way towards my progeny.
Thanks for that lovely perspective, EW.
If some disagree then they always know what they can do.
Biblical quibble: The author of the Revelation (traditionally John the Beloved) seems to be a late first-century inhabitant of somewhere in the area of Asia Minor. Here he is not really talking about Babylon, but alluding to OT prophets like Jeremiah who prophesied about it. (Some commentators think he is imitating the lament for the merchants of Tyre in Ezekiel 27:1-36.) “Babylon” is probably a symbol of Rome. I assume “John” was drawing on his own awareness of economic collapse in his general setting.
For everybody discussing whether to have kids or not, your choices won’t make any difference to the environment. Population being a function of food supply, if you don’t have them, somebody else will. The only way to reduce the population long-term is to eliminate our sources of food, and then I have to ask about your goals.
Bad iron age fiction.
Violent also– try Homer– much better writer and story teller.
Those wandering goat herders were violent and ignorant.
Homer’s work is at least just as violent. Agamemnon said of his enemies that “We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs — not even they must live.” And that’s just one example.
Bad fiction and mean characters . . .
I’ve always had a good laugh from a particular paragraph in Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian.” I thought from around the age of 8 or 9 exactly what he states here, especially about the poor pigs:
[Quote] There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chooses to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. ‘He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever,” . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: “Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away”.’ This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects. [End Quote]
“wisdom”…
if only Jesus had told his followers “I sayeth to you, the Adam and Eve story is fayke news and so is the Ark and Flood story. You will find this hard to understand, but thousands of years from now humans will figure out the real story. Oh, and angels and demons were also the fictional creations of our superstitiouus uneducated ancestors”
that would have been impressive.
(perhaps Bertrand Russell covered that ground also.)
QUOTE:***For everybody discussing whether to have kids or not, your choices won’t make any difference to the environment.***
At least I won’t have to be burdened with the personal responsibility of bringing up a child in a world that’s disintegrating into chaos — and telling him/her that this is the sorry world s/he’s going to have to live in.
This I agree with 110%. At least I can sleep peacefully at night knowing that I haven’t created any fresh hostages to fate, cannon fodder for the war machine, or grist for the dark satanic mills. And my conscience is unburdened by any of the sins that offspring these days routinely accuse their parents of. 🙂
Exactly, SomeoneInAsia. I’m not a fan of unnecessary suffering, so this comment from a population activist has always resonated with me:
“With the earth groaning under the weight of 7+ billion people, most wanting to consume as much as possible, I think the last thing any ecologically literate person would do is add to the burden. Ah, but it’s so important that my special genes have a connection to the future, isn’t it? Never mind that that future is going to be a nightmare on stilts.”
“Ah, but it’s so important that my special genes have a connection to the future, isn’t it? Never mind that that future is going to be a nightmare on stilts.”
This was also my dilemma. There two narratives in this area – the environmental vs. the genome race. And there are two quotes of Charles Darwin:
“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
not the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
and these quotes rather remind me of the basic evolutionary instinct, which is the fundamental force behind all leaving creatures. So if nature says let’s race and most adaptable livings will survive, and this is our subconscious purpose, why not take part in this journey? Why give up? Aren’t we the most sapient and conscious beings? Aren’t we able to make of adaptation skills our advantage? I think that if homo sapiens deserves survival let the most wise, conscious, strong and adaptable of us make through the bottleneck.
Why leave the world for the “barbarians”? Don’t you agree?
Hah! Westerners have self-domesticated to the point that we are not only unwilling to procreate, we are unwilling to protect our own culture and institutions, so they simply shan’t exist any more. Such orchids as we are unlikely to survive outside the glasshouse.
Once the windows of the glasshouse are broken, who shall there be to make new glass? If we haven’t the means, then whole swaths of technology will become again as magic.
“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.” I don’t agree with the word “efficient”.. Many creatures are much more *efficient* at surviving than humans. Humans have created both abstract and concrete exosomatic structures which allowed us to break down more energy gradients than ever. Our “intelligence” and superficial consciousness has been in service to that process, it strikes me. Once that potential is reduced, though, it’s entirely possible we see a regression in human development (should near-term extinction not occur).
The strongest are those who are able to acquire what they need without regret or remorse. Ants and termites don’t go through struggle sessions.
Einstein once said: There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
I prefer the latter perspective although I am no stranger to the first.
We still are the ultimate predator on this planet. If we are going down let’s have some dignity and self-respect. We are doomed, nevertheless self-hate is not helpful.
Garrett explains very well how population is not a driver of collapse: rather energy and material efficiency is: https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2019/06/it-seems-so-easy-to-blame-excess.html
Gail showed charts before where you can see how the population boom *follows* the boom in energy consumption
And the Catholic Church is still anti-abortion and pro lots of children. They say they don’t need to justify this as its ‘god’s will’.
Yep, Jean Wilson, and it’s not just the Catholics, of course. Most of Religion Inc. promotes the sheer human masses as a wonderful growth industry for themselves and our masters.
Cartoon from Nina Paley, friend of Les U. Knight and artist/video creator, who was born in 1968 and is another one who chose not to reproduce:
“Sheep Souls”
https://blog.ninapaley.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NA_SheepSouls_raw_960.png
Actually, it is the nature of dissipative structures to “dissipate” energy as efficiently as possible. Having several children works in that direction. We shouldn’t blame religion; we should blame the physics.
Well, shucks, I proudly confess to being a failed “dissipative structure” then! When I told my wife a few minutes ago that she was one too, she just grinned. All kidding aside, It’s all her fault really since she trusted what her lyin’ eyes were telling her in the 1970s concerning all the hordes of humans moving into and giving birth in her beautiful area, and then she told me about it; plus, she’s no mathematician, and I’m not either, but Albert Bartlett got his message across loud and clear:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population locally, nationally, or globally?”
Thanks for the open forum, Gail.
Having children is largely an instinctive and thoughtless process, even when we imagine that we have reasoned about it and have ‘chosen’ our mate for reproduction (largely an illusion if ‘love’ is involved as many have discovered to their great regret once the chemicals stop fizzing).
So, yes, it’s all biological instinct and, at root, physics.
No blame, but lots of pain -as always. That’s Life.
>>Garrett explains very well how population is not a driver of collapse
I am thinking over-population is bad, end of story.
I don’t understand your point? Can you explain in more detail please?
Too much population leads to the need for complexity to solve problems like the need to irrigate the land to get more food from it, to feed the now larger population. Specialization and a hierarchical structure tend to result. This, of course lead to wage disparity. It is wage disparity that brings the system down if the complexity does not really solve the problem of “not enough to go around.”
It is ultimately the “not enough to go around” problem that is behind collapse.
I think Garrett is looking at current population, and the fact that people themselves aren’t a big part of energy consumption. I would agree that in today’s world, energy and material efficiency definitely lead to collapse, in some sense independent of population.
But, looked at more broadly, population growth is what leads to the quest for “more efficiency.” It is when the “more efficiency” doesn’t yield enough benefit, and there is too much wage disparity, then civilization tends to collapse.
By the way, I do not agree with I=PAT. It only took a small number of hunter gatherers to burn down whole forests, leading to climate change. It is the ability to burn things that leads to a lot of impact.
Tim Murray, a Canadian blogger who is childfree by choice, wrote this satirical entry that’s actually too close to the truth, especially this:
“Oh, and by the way, our procreative choices are NOYB. Pushing other people and other species off the plate is our sacred personal right.”
MEET THE PERCAPITAS
Hi there! We’re the Percapitas.
We’ve cut per capita consumption and our per capita waste. We compost, we conserve, we re-use and we recycle. And we’re going to teach our three carbon footprints—-Mark, David and Robert—to do the same.
Yes, we know that each of us will require more than 38,000 pounds of mined resources each and every year to maintain our cosmetically green American lifestyle, or 2.96 million pounds in our average lifetime of 77.9 years. That’s 8,509 lbs. of stone, 5,599 lbs. of sand and gravel, 496 lbs. of cement, 357 lbs. of iron ore, 421 lbs. of salt, 217 lbs. of phosphate rock, 164 lbs. of clay, 65 lbs. of aluminum, 12 lbs. of copper, 11 lbs. of lead, 6 lbs. of zinc, 36 lbs. of soda ash, 5 lbs. of manganese, 332 lbs. of other non-metals for making glass, chemicals, soaps, paper, computers and cell phones, 24 lbs. of other metals for the same uses plus electronics, TV and video equipment and more—–not to mention 951 gallons of petroleum, 6,792 lbs. of coal, 80,905 cubic feet of natural gas and 1/4 lb. of uranium to generate the energy each of us uses in one year.
And we also know that our typical suburban house—–the one with the Prius in the driveway—-was constructed with a million pounds of minerals and metals as were 130 million other homes across the country. Ours needed insulation (using silica, feldspar, and trona), roofing (silica sands, limestone and petroleum) and hardware (iron, zinc, copper, steel, brass), as well as windows made from trona, silica sand, limestone and feldspar, and concrete foundations made from sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made of limestone, bauxite, clay, shale and gypsum and is reinforced by steel rods. And we expect that another 70 million such homes will need to be built by mid-century to accommodate the next 150 million additional people who will make America their home, making us even more vibrant, diverse and strong than we already are now. People are our greatest resource—-and besides, our local Sierra Club branch assures us that we can “de-couple” population and economic growth from environmental degradation! We can’t wait until they de-couple ice cream consumption from caloric gain and thirst from the desire for fluid.
Now, some doomsayers like analyst Chris Clugston have warned us that 69 metals and minerals vital to our industrial economy have peaked and will soon not be affordably accessible. But we both majored in classic economics at Northwestern and so we know that substitutes will be always be found if the price is right. You can never discount human ingenuity and there is a technological fix for everything. We can have ‘green growth’. What we can’t have though, is pessimism. We need hope to get us through the night. Cassandras need not apply!
OK, it’s true. We could have done better. By not having three kids we could have saved the atmosphere from an extra 28,223 metric tons of C02 each year—or 58 times the amount that we have saved by switching to a fuel efficient car, driving less, recycling, installing CFLs, replacing our inefficient refrigerator and old windows. And by adopting rather than conceiving, we would not have added to the 350,000 children who are born every day to a planet now burdened with 7 billion humans, and braced for more. But we thought that it was vitally necessary that the world have our genes and that our children have the same pair of eyes or ears that we have. And besides, if educated, responsible and morally superior people like us don’t have children, then “they” will overwhelm us. So let the breeding war begin!
Oh, and by the way, our procreative choices are NOYB. Pushing other people and other species off the plate is our sacred personal right.
We’re the Percapitas. We’re green, we’re progressive, we read Utne and Mother Jones, we listen to NPR, vote liberal Democrat and we are oh so much more aware and responsible than you are!
(Does anybody have a cream pie handy?)
Tim Murray
July 19/2011
Of course, part of the misunderstanding is “substitutes will be always be found if the price is right.” In fact, all of these minerals themselves will be found and delivered if the price is right. We just can’t get the price up high enough.
The system seems to fix the children problem, if people spend enough years in school. They seem to believe that they have to make use of all of their years of schooling, so they don’t start having babies until very late, if at all. The generations become 35 years apart, instead of 20 years apart. They become so busy with their work that they tend to neglect the few children they have, which is sad.
>>Oil Companies Wonder If It’s Worth Looking for Oil Anymore
“More European producers are saying energy resources worth billions of dollars now might never be pumped out of the ground.”
A bizarre sub-title. Worth billions? If they can’t get the oil out of the ground at a profit then it is worthless.
Gilbert Mercier and Dady Chery can also be added to the non-breeders list. They both appear to be in their 60s and do not dodge the hard issues. Chery is of particular interest:
“Dady Chery grew up at the heart of an extended working-class family in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She emigrated to New York when she was fourteen, and since then has traveled throughout the world and lived in Europe and several North American cities. She writes in English, French, and her native Créole. She holds a doctorate.”
I like what she wrote here:
” . . . parenthood should be heavily taxed in proportion to the number of children, and adults without children should be those to receive the tax breaks. The notion that children are a burden to the community at large, and not a blessing, must become part of the discourse. Ultimately, this should become incorporated in the culture to such a degree that the sight of a mother or father with three or four children will become obscene. To have any future as a species, our population needs to drop, as does our consumption.”
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2014/11/14/overpopulation-fuels-climate-change-breeding-ourselves-to-extinction/
I agree entirely. it is necessary for human and planetary survival. But most UK residents would consider this a bit fascist, maybe even Nazi-ist.
There would be no point to taxing parenthood when the Tory Party has admitted 3,071,000 net entrants to UK over the past 10 years, and they have now agreed with CBI to lift any cap on the number of entrants.
They admitted over 700,000 incomers in the 12 months to July 2020 (ONS, August 2020).
UK has structural debt and the Office of Budget Responsibility calculates the required population level decades in advance, regardless of what anyone votes for. TP broke four successive GE manifesto pledges to severely reduce the number of incomers.
UK labour productivity growth has flat lined at near zero since 2008, and total factor productivity growth is in the red. Organised British capital requires ever more workers to countervail those tendencies and to maintain GDP growth.
The capitalist state, with its profit- and structural debt-based economy cannot survive without a growing population. It is built into the system whether anyone likes it or not.
The situation is similar in other ‘mature’ capitalist economies in late capitalism.
Anyone who tries to make a fuss about population levels does not understand the underlying politico-economic situation and they are wasting their time. If tens of millions of voters can simply be repeatedly ignored then so can they.
Yes, and all the incomers to developed economies commence consuming at a new, higher, level.. which is kind of the “point” (if you are Coca-Cola or Mercedes or Nike).
Yep, an increased domestic workforce, consumer base and tax base – it all keeps the cogs of the capitalist state spinning – and more bucks for international capital too.
I will never understand how people still suppose that mass incomers is a ‘left wing’ policy, it is simply driven by the needs of the capitalist economic base. How obvious could it be?
The TP/ CBI have always been fully in favour of it, whatever ‘messages’ TP sends out to their voters come election time. They may be fooling millions but they are not fooling me.
My left-wing area is very pro-migrant. One theory goes that the ascent of the feminine into politics creates a situation in which every stray critter needs to be taken in and mothered. I’m not opposed to this theory, nor to the idea that TPTB would be cynically taking advantage of this psychological tendency.
https://www.cbi.org.uk/articles/government-announces-the-new-immigration-system-design/
How has the CBI influenced post-Brexit immigration?
Through public interventions, evidence-submissions and private lobbying, the CBI has secured several policy wins which mean the new immigration system will be more flexible, fair and responsive to the economy than it would have been under earlier government plans.
Reduced the salary threshold so that £20,480 is now possible – the government originally set the salary threshold at £30,000, which would have excluded 60% of medium skilled jobs being eligible for overseas workers. Under the new system overseas workers are eligible for a visa if they earn above the minimum salary threshold of £20,480 (and meet criteria for top-up ‘points’). They are guaranteed a visa if they earn over £25,600
Secured commitment to a genuine points-based route in the future – while it won’t be ready from day one, an individual will have the right to work in the UK based solely on their individual characteristics (like qualifications, age, work experience), rather than the job they are coming to do. This is a ‘genuine’ points-based route, similar to Australia, and will enable more flexibility in the new system
Gained assurance that free movement continues for a further six months – although the new immigration system technically comes into force on 1 Jan 2021, the government have confirmed that the checks employers must carry out when hiring EU nationals won’t change until 30 June 2021 (to align with deadline for the EU Settlement Scheme). Employers will still be able to hire EU nationals based solely on their passport/ID card for an extra six months (over which period EU nationals still have visa free travel to the UK)
Secured an extension to the post-study work visa – students can now stay and apply for work in the UK for up to two years after their University course ends (up from six months). This is especially important for businesses that hire graduates, and the Higher Education sector.
The CBI still believes that lower wages mean higher profits. They have failed to learn the lesson Henry Ford tried to teach us: higher wages mean a more motivated workforce, hence higher productivity; and workers with higher disposable income will purchase more, hence higher sales. And as he proved with his own money in his own factories, the result is a virtuous circle. But too many companies are still trapped in a zero sum mindset.
“… has traveled throughout the world and lived in Europe and several North American cities.”
“To have any future as a species, our population needs to drop, as does our consumption.”
she travels the world and lectures us to reduce our consumption.
is there a time when that hypocrisy “will become obscene”?
I hardly think one person no longer travelling because it is hypocritical to do so will make any difference. If the rest of society is travelling by air for holidays, surely it is ok for someone to travel to try and create a better world?
Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey . . . whoops, I mean davidinamonthetc.
Here ya go, david. Feel better now?
http://vhemt.org/CO2-e.avoided.jpg
I’m not debating those facts.
just pointing out that a message filled with hypocrisy is usually ineffective.
Large tax credit for first child, smaller (1/2) tax credit for second child. No tax credits for any additional children. All birth control free with very easy access for all. Girls receive an annual award (monetary, tuition grant, etc.) for every year she hasn’t gotten pregnant until the age 24. For pregnant single females, mandatory DNA paternity testing for required alimony assistance.
Easier than that. Continuous cutting of childcare subsidies and funding to $0
Agreed. No tax credits, no subsidies; people pay for their own children out of their own pocket. If you can’t afford it, don’t breed it. If you do breed it, look after it yourself.
Yes, taxing requires a government 🤭
Great report. Thanks for your research and perspective — always interesting and mind-opening.
Agree with your assessment wholeheartedly, Gail. It’s unfortunate that so many people believe in the infinite growth myth and the ‘hope’ that renewables will get us there without a hitch. I feel a Black Swan Event on the horizon for an awful lot of people…
Excellent post as usual, and entirely appropriate. What you might call a back-to-basics post, reminding us of the bottom line which it is too easy to forget about, or not know about – the limits to energy availability, and its decline.
1/ It is probably not possible to reduce current energy consumption by 80% or more without dramatically reducing population.
I think in theory it is, but in practice you hit the nail on the head. For example, in the UK you can buy cars that manage 70+ miles to the gallon (our first car bought in 2007, petrol, attained this). Who buys a vehicle based on optimum fuel efficiency? Almost no-one.The most fuel efficient speed for a car is about 55 mph. Who drives at close to 55 mph? Almost no-one. Even where the speed limit is 70 mph, it not not fast enough for most drivers in the UK.
2/ Many people think that “running out” of oil supplies should be our big worry. I believe that lack of the “demand” needed to keep oil and other energy prices up should be at least as big a worry.
Two sides of the same coin. Modern society has grown more complex and much, much more populated over time, at the same time as fossil energy has become more expensive to extract because what is left is of poorer quality, smaller, more polluted fields (think heavy metals and hydrogen sulphide), offshore, deeper etc. The ‘easy’ oil, and coal, have long since gone, and we seem to have reached the point where the average price to extract these resources is beyond what economies can afford. Economies have been cushioned by debt for how long, 20+ years? Surely we will go with a bang, not a whimper?
“We would expect lower energy prices to eventually lead to a decline in energy production because producers will find production unprofitable. ”
A couple of weeks ago BP announced it was moving out of oil, for environmental reasons (climate change bollox), towards renewables. What BP cannot do is develop new oil fields from scratch and make a profit. It was effectively an announcement of game over for industrial society. Every MSM outlet in the UK should have picked up the story as the official end of civilisation as we know it, but nothing, absolutely zilch.
“In fact, we started seeing an increasing number of demonstrations related to low wage levels, low pension levels, and lack of government services starting in 2019. This problem has only gotten worse with layoffs related to the pandemic in 2020.”
This is just gearing up in the UK. Today furlough payments dropped from 80% to 70%: “Furlough wind down: ‘We prepared for the worst'” [not]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53982422
“Figure 7 above shows the total amount of oil produced has continued upward in almost a straight line, except for a dip at the time of the Great Recession.”
That looks like oil in the sense of ‘all liquid fuels’ so includes liquid from Venezuelan heavy oil (not really a liquid and very expensive to process), Canadian tar sands (not a liquid and very expensive to process), USA corn (heavily subsidised and very expensive to process). etc.
“If the programs cannot be maintained, citizens may become unhappy and revolt.”
They certainly will / are. If the programs cannot be maintained, citizens will become jobless and very hungry / homeless, and more prone to diseases.
>>If we cannot keep fossil fuels operating because of continued low prices,
>>today’s economy can expect a disturbing change for the worse.
2021 will be an interesting year.
Ah—now there I’m the ‘almost no one’ for a change
Yesterday I drove back from london, not jammed roads–but busy enough to prevent anyone but total idiots from going much above 55-60–you just run up behind someone else
so I relaxed and did 83mpg in a 1.6L car
good to feel smug for once–a mutinous starling
Bingo – Gail’s got it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-16/oil-companies-wonder-if-it-s-worth-looking-for-oil-anymore?
I don’t remember seeing the term “stranded assets” recently, when talking about fossil fuels, but this article uses it.
Back in 2016, I was one of the co-authors of an article published in the journal Energy called An oil production forecast for China consider economic limits. It says that the amount of oil that can be produced depends on how high the price will rise. Read Section 2 of the article.
Another brilliant report. Thank you Gail. Human population will revert to the mean, there is no doubt.
No, it won’t.
Not as long as there is hydro power, geothermal and nuclear power. And of course the perpetual allure of fusion power.
“Uranium extraction from seawater: Uranium is most often mined from the Earth’s crust, but it can also be extracted from seawater, which contains large quantities of uranium (3.3 ppb, or 4.6 trillion kg). Theoretically, that amount would last for 5,700 years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power.”
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
The problem with extracting any mineral from sea water is getting the price low enough. Uranium, like other energy products, has tended to have low prices in recent years. The prices of all energy products tend to move together.
the Japanese government was pursuing U from seawater about 30-40 years ago. they even built a prototype extraction plant. I visited their HQ in Tokyo. they proudly had a vial of yellow solution on a cabinet they said was concentrated U-238 from seawater. I told them that if they planned to keep it there for awhile, they might want to place some shielding around it.
anyway, the moral of that story is if it is valuable to you, you might not care about the market price. not too sure they want to pursue nuclear energy now.
Great essay as usual Gail. Someday perhaps you could discuss the implications of governments nationalizing their energy sectors, which seems to be the next probable step in our ongoing collapse.
That would be a great topic for Gail.
Mainly replying because I can’t find another way to subscribe to the comments.
I think you have to comment to subscribe to the comments. I don’t know of another way.
ElbowWilham, there used to be links in the blog sidebar to follow posts and comments via RSS. They don’t seem to have survived the re-design.
At one point, I set up the reader “Feedly” to follow comments here, and it still seems to be working. I can’t get a clean link out of Feedly, but perhaps you can parse the following in a way that is useful to you:
https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fourfiniteworld.com%2Fcomments%2Ffeed%2F
This link seems to work for me. I suppose I could put up a link to it.
I do follow OFW on feedly. I will try that link for the comments, thanks!
I did put up a Feedly comment link in the sidebar. Hopefully this will work.
I actually like getting the comments in my email. Easier to follow then comments in Feedly. I don’t mind posting a thanks when you write an article in order to subscribe.
I agree, a great topic. Of course, government control of energy resources will not make them easier to extract. The necessary corollary of this change is that the resources will be extracted by slave labour. As China has show quite successfully. And as the UK government tried, albeit using more palatable terminology, after Peak Coal. Hence the General Strike of 1926.
Thanks, Gail, for correctly listing overpopulation as No. 1 on your list. The subject, also, always stirs up the herd and satisfies my gallows-humor quota concerning humanity’s so-called depth, ha ha!
Kristine Mattis should be added to the non-breeder list. This young woman has chosen this route because of moral issues [wow, what a concept!] and her in-depth knowledge of ecology; however, in the following article she typically, as most science communicators do, skirts that issue by suggesting that humans have one to two children instead.
https://medium.com/@k_mattis/eco-crises-doom-gloom-truth-consequences-22205258d50b
“however, in the following article she typically, as most science communicators do, skirts that issue by suggesting that humans have one to two children instead.”
I seem to missing your point, which is what?
>>by suggesting that humans have one to two children instead
This is an excellent suggestion.
Better than 4 (rich people, in the UK), or a dozen (not so rich people, in the UK).
Minority of One, I believe Luke is referring to the fact that Mattis has chosen to have zero kids, yet she refrains from suggesting this as a viable option in her article. It’s a cop-out on her part, but it’s an understandable one.
So we must “change our way of life radically and immediately.” Did the members of the Club of Rome do that? No. Did Al Gore do that? No. Did the “hockey stick” hoaxer do that? No. Did any of the members of the IPCC do that? No. In fact, all these people made a very comfortable living telling the rest of us to go back to the stone age.
Which is why I ignore them. Science may or may not save the world, but shameless hypocrisy surely won’t.
And she has the obligatory “western man bad, indigenous people good” riff. Conveniently forgetting that the indigenous people of Central and South America wiped out all the local megafauna before the beginning of recorded history.
“the indigenous people of Central and South America wiped out all the local megafauna before the beginning of recorded history.”
This is why I think the equation
Environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology
or I = P x A x T
is a bunch of nonsense. It doesn’t take many people or much technology. It just takes the ability to control fire, and biomass to burn (local forests), and very few people. Fire can also be used to drive animals where desired.
Gail, thank you once again for a compelling and thought provoking post. It is my evening unwinding time here (1940 @ GMT+2), but maybe I shall have some thoughts tomorrow. One afterthought, however: I fear the heart of the problem is not energy itself, but our collective delusions about energy which prevent up from seeing the problem.
Norman Pagett said: We are programmed to reproduce ourselves, and importantly, enjoy doing so.
—————–
Oh, Norman, I guess some of us, including a couple of your siblings, have “faulty” programming, thank goodness! It’s gratifying to be an outlier in an important category such as population.
Another interesting comment from another site:
[Quote] I’ve never really appreciated how advanced my high-school science teachers in the late 1970s to early 1980s were until now. We read and discussed Ehrlich, the Meadowses, Catton, and others. Despite that, ego usually trumps empathy and awareness in most humans, so the majority of my fellow students went on to perform socially acceptable conformity and competition in a lockstep, robotic, unthinking fashion: college, career, marriage, material accumulation, children. [End Quote]
individually we have choices
collectively we do not
That is a good way of putting the problem.
I’m going with faulty programming. There is a bell curve in terms of procreation, with people at the extreme ends tending to have fewer children.
Oops.. bell curve of intelligence.. trying to find where I saw that. If I come across it I will post it.
seems there’s a lot of ding-donging in the middle of the bellcurve then
I would expect the curve is different for women than men, and probably different in different societies.
We know that in general, a much larger share of women are mothers than the share of men who are fathers. Some men get passed by as being unsuitable. This is also true if parents pick prospective spouses for their children.
In general, it is rich men who tend to have children. In many cultures, rich men can have several wives. Women are attracted to men whom they believe can provide for a family. Parents tend to pick out male spouses who look like they can provide for the family. I expect that intelligence is to some extent related to being a good provider. There may be other characteristics as well (conscientious, know the techniques of farming, access to land for farming).
Now that some women have careers, this distorts the historical pattern. Perhaps that is what you are commenting about.
Herrnstein and Murray: “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life”; Free Press 1996, ISBN 978-0684824291
https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
The whole isn’t worth watching in my opinion, but the intro is amusing.
Silly! I remember seeing this some time ago. An exaggeration, but some truth to it. The highly educated wait until it is too late to reproduce; some of the others are eager to start early.
I am here like many others trying to understand, so per usual, no argument.
Claud Shannon if I remember correctly had a theory that if something sent over a wire, etc. did not make a difference it was noise.
Paul Ehrlich wrote a book, it did not make a difference, we are here with more people than predicted possible.
Dennis and Donna Meadows wrote a book somewhat accurately predicting the future and other than a description, it did not change things, it did not make a difference.
Above I mentioned Haber and Borlaug, they made a difference whether one likes the difference or not.
Someone mentioned couples without children. Is that the same as silence on a phone line, background noise? If something does not make a difference is it basically nothing?
All this keeps coming back to self organization and a higher power, maybe it is supposed to be this way.
Dennis L.
I sometimes wonder of global warming together with high radiation from spent fuel ponds will together change the ecosystem enough that a somewhat mutated type of humans can extract the remaining fossil fuels. Places that were too cold in the past will no longer need to be bypassed.
This might be the way the higher power expects/wants the situation to turn out. We have our focus on how things have been in the past. This may not be the way that things need to be in the future. We are “running out” of accessible resources using our current approach. A new approach, from a new civilization, is needed.
a murmuration of starlings is one of the most beautiful sights in nature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY
no individual starling is ‘aware’
the starling group is not ‘aware’—- they do not ‘know’ why they do it, at least not in our terms
they move collectively, just as we move collectively
it makes no difference if a starling decides to do his own thing and rebel and decide he’s a robin., or decide to remain celibate.
the group is what it is
humankind is no different, though arguably less awe inspiring to watch
>>a murmuration of starlings is one of the most beautiful sights in nature.
On this occasion Norman, I agree with you entirely.
They wreak havoc, pooping out vast amounts of guano on unsuspecting neighborhoods!
http://3.citynews-today.stgy.it/~media/original-hi/8576517130677/macchina-escrementi-2-2.jpeg
In some parts of Rome, you can’t walk on the sidewalk for how slippery it is, and people will venture out with umbrellas. The birds are attracted to urban warmth at night, and range about the surrounding fields for food during the day.
A murmuration of starlings, a congregation of plovers, or a lamentation of crows—different birds provoke different emotions among different humans.
Or, as Norman might put it, we’ve been “programmed” to react to what we see in the natural world.
And I know the chap who programmed us in programme after programme after programme.
…. a murmuration of starlings is one of the most beautiful sights in nature….
You’ve all been watching too much David Attenborough!
https://media.makeameme.org/created/someday-i-hope-593015.jpg
of my limited lifeskills, one of them is formulating my own opinions
You’ve been programmed to think that, Norman. 🙂
But a lot of your opinions were formulated by somebody else and you simply borrowed them without attribution either consciously or unconsciously, or because they were out there floating in the ether, just as George Harrison borrowed the riff to the Chiffon’s hit single He’s So Fine for his own mega-hit My Sweet Lord.
In this you are far from unique. I for one spout other people’s opinions as if I’d come up with them myself all the time.
Both songs are great, by they way. Have a listen!
https://youtu.be/JjdGtVQIGFQ
When I learned these collective nouns it was a “murder” of crows. And isn’t David Attenborough the man who filmed a lot of dead walruses lying at the bottom of a cliff, and blamed it on global warming, when in fact it was his own flying camera drone that had stampeded them? Another hypocrite who has made a lot of money, and generated a huge carbon footprint, complaining about global warming.
Music is culturally defined. That’s why Arab and Indian music sound rubbish to Western ears.
the evening call to prayer of the muezzin is one of the most beautiful sounds imaginable. in its right context, drifting over the Nile
Is Beauty the purpose of the universe? Can the fact that we perceive beauty let use believe that we may be connected to the Higher Power?
nope
our intellect has given us time to relax from the business of feeding and procreation.
We use that time to see and/or create beauty in everything around us, and create artifacts for no better reason than it pleases us to look at them
So after we’ve eaten the meat from a bone, we carve it into a flute. No other animal does that.
No higher power involved
Nonsense, Norman.
Of course our intellect comes from a Higher Power (with a capital H and P). Where else could it come from?
i can only assume you are engaged in your usual windup (FE lite)
Norman, when you play the flute, who created the harmonies of the diatonic scale it uses? No human; those harmonies are based on pure mathematics, which existed before there was a Cosmos.
Eugene Wigner wrote a book called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”, which I think is as good a meditation on the subject as you can find. It echoes Galileo’s comment: “The Book of Nature is written in the Language of Mathematics”.
i might have missed one or two
but there a three main types of musical instrument:
things you bang, twang or blow
all subject to the natural laws of harmonics—which i don’t intend to go into here, except to say they are not celestial
but as Caliban put it:
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
Primitive man made those noises, by banging upon a stretched animal skin, twanging on a taut animal sinew, or blowing through a hollow animal bone. It would have been casual amusement in the beginning.
No godly finger reaching to show the right notes, and necessarily in the right order.
He knew nothing of harmonics, only what was pleasurable to the ear. Notes were formed, as a language was formed, again, pleasurable to the ear.
We dislike discordant voices, a Mozart aria or a Shakespere sonnet can stir deep emotion like nothing else. The sounds of a ranting Hitler are offensive to most of us.
Such sounds are the culmination of a million years of vocal development, as are the sounds of an orchestra created from those three original sound-sources.
Humankind learned the mathematics of sound, just as we learned the mathematics of flight and gravity.
For Norman:
Thank you for your quotation from “TheTempest”, a favourite passage from one of my favourite plays. Bu the way, I named my first daughter “Miranda”. Your main argument, that we learned about harmony from Nature, is one I entirely agree with; we knew about harmony for thousands of years before Pythagoras of Samos put it on a mathematical basis.
But who created the resonating structures in the inner ear that allow us to perceive harmony? I cannot see how natural selection could have done that; it does not seem to improve our chances of survival; rather, our chances of singing and dancing. Perhaps, once again, we are facing entelechy, final causes. Or perhaps something transcendent:
“From Harmony, from Heav’ly harmony
This universal frame began,…”
(John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day”, published in 1687, the year of Newton’s “Principia”)
The Tempest was battered into me when I was 14 by a whackaholic headmaster, who took us to see it live at Stratford.
His final words as I left were: Promise me you will continue to write. (after flogging me through skool—seems he cared after all.)
He teaching stuck with me though, gf and I spend many happy weekends there, now we can stay at Alvaston Manor—just across the river from the theatre.
Our senses never leave us. The joy of theatre is more intense than ever. So I thank him for that.
Which bring to the point of their purpose–that of survival
A smell will whip you back 50 years in an instant–
why?
because knowing the smell of threat can save your life
Same with hearing, of which I think harmonics are incidental to aspects in the ear system to do with balance.
A classically trained pianist will not only tell you the name of a piece being played–but the pianists name and the make of the piano.
I might differentiate between a Broadwood and a Steinway–but that would be it.
My hearing hasn’t been trained sufficiently.
However, if I was living wild in a forest, that sound difference might tell me about something I might eat, or was likely to eat me.
In the wild, hearing too can mean life or death, just like smell. so it evolves for the fittest in what they choose to do.
the hearing/balance combo is best seen in the bar athlete in gymnastics—a lifetime of training to use the balancing system which is in all of us. Their resonating structures are developed beyond our comprehension.
All our senses have evolved to aid survival, our current ‘existence’ has allowed us to adapt them for the side issue of pleasure—as I said,how else can a single Shakespeare line :
‘This fair child shall sum my count’ leave you wrecked even though you’ve heard it a hundred times before?
Or the sublime political truth of:
Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee,
Command the health of it?
resonates with everyone who understands it.
Seems to me our mental faculties are attuned to expect that pleasure rush from words or music delivered in harmonic perfection and timeless truth.
Natural selection has done exactly that, as I see it.
Human senses are not better than other creatures, but our combination of them seems the best compromise of all 5.
All these senses were necessary for us to get to where we are. Critters that lacked them evolved into something else. (or not at all)
You have the mental freedom to believe otherwise of course, but to infer that parts, or all of us were ‘created’ sets humankind along the path of divinity.
If we go there, then that means that everything we do is part of a divine plan, of which we know not.
I don’t think we can embrace that idea—It’s got us into enough trouble as it is.
Yep. Rufus, you deserve a gold star. If we were not connected to the Higher Power, we would be unable to perceive beauty. Moreover, it’s because people’s connection to the Higher Power is suppressed and denied that their aesthetic sensibilities become so perverted.
https://youtu.be/aGHWI46QLZ4
Prince Charles was right. He expanded on his views in a book, “A Vision of Britain”, in my library until I gave it to a daughter. If you doubt his vision, compare the London of Sir Christopher Wren with the London of today.
Hi Gail, you mention the relative advantage of warm places. We can also consider the advantage of nations that reduce pensions, wars, medical, and needless education.
I could think about a lot of other things to talk about, but the post was getting very long as it was.
When there is not enough go around, pensions, medical costs and needless education will certainly disappear.
I am not sure about war. It may be replaced by local violent protests and a rise in local rates of murder and domestic violence. Or maybe violence of many forms will escalate, as it is not possible to maintain the things we have today.
If we could really maintain the things we have today, insurance policies would pay for the damaged buildings and stolen contents of buildings. GDP would rise because of the violence. Even windstorms would help GDP, because new buildings would be able to replace old ones.
I have mentioned it before. I am very surprised that pension payouts have not take a big hit already. Of course, the funds can and do pay out to those already retired sums that the fund cannot really cannot afford in the long-term. That is the other side of the coin of a fund being under-funded, which nearly all funds are.
Talking of education, there is something odd going on at Scottish schools:
Tens of thousands of Scottish pupils absent from school
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53983392
Is homeschooling legal in Scotland?
“The Scottish government said it was common for other viral infections to circulate after a “prolonged break” away from school.”
I can vouch that my eldest had to take today off after a bad night with a rotten cold.
Actually, so did my daughter, but 100,000+? Maybe that’s what happens after several months of lockdown, lowered resistance. What does that portend for us oldies?
we look at our current energy consumption rate as something that has grown over the last couple of centuries– around 1800 to present, comprising coal oil and gas, to give us everything we now see as our ‘human right’ —ie heat light food transport health –+++++.
We elect politicians to confirm this. Those that don’t, don’t get elected, (or live in some places)
In Human terms that’s maybe 8 generations. To the unthinkers, that is ‘forever’.
Roughly the timespan too, of the existence of the USA, which is coincidentally also the biggest consumer of energy. And also the biggest energy delusionist nation.
Our political systems have also grown in tandem with that energy expansion and consumption. Before we gained access to our current levels of cheap surplus energy availability, democracies did not exist.
Before cheap surplus energy the social cohesion of any so called ‘civilised’ society could only be supported by a slave/serf underclass.
The alternative was the hunter/gatherer existence.
But suppose we are looking at it from the wrong perspective?
Humankind has been around for maybe 2 m years (counting ‘us’ from the start of fire use)
Looked at from a 2 m year perspective, 8 generations has been the blink of an eye.
Making the last 200 years just a brief flash of heat and light, merely the supernova of man’s imagined ownership of the Earth that we did our best to destroy, not only for ourselves but for all other species whose home this is.
Polticians and economists told us we could set fire to the Earth itself to make money.
And we believed them.
Looked at from a 2 m year perspective, 8 generations has been the blink of an eye.
No, it’s been more like a romantic weekend in Paris for the humanoid family.
the best way to ruin a romantic weekend is to take the family
returning with one is a different matter of course
Excellent yet disturbing article Gail. Your views on the Nuclear fuel industry would be most welcome.
I didn’t have space/time to get into that.
GJ per capita for nuclear reached a peak way back in 2001.
The Three Mile Island accident happened in 1979. The Chernobyl accident happened in 1986. The Fukushima accident happened in 2011. There is a lead time in building new reactors. All of these accidents have led to much more expensive designs that supposedly reduce the likelihood of future accidents. Poor countries sometimes build reactors in an inexpensive way, however. A person wonders whether this will lead to more accidents. And then there is concern about spent fuel.
There are several areas of the world where nuclear production has been growing in recent years. China is the biggest. India, Pakistan, Iran, and Russia show growth in production. Pretty much everyplace else shows declines in nuclear production.
I worked 5 years in Bangladesh in an agricultural project. Energy consumption varies a lot between Dhaka
In the rich area of Gulshan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAPKoyiNh_8
Kazi Nazrul Islam avenue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VU_-mo87Pk
and rural areas
I especially liked your video of transportation in rural areas of Bangladesh. People who aren’t used to cars can’t see what the great attraction is to them, especially if the roads cannot really be used by cars.
This is a photo I took of men repairing a road in India. They laid down branches to stop traffic.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/men-repairing-road.jpg
This is a photo of a woman in India carrying water from the place that has water available each morning, to her home.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/woman-carrying-two-pots-of-water-on-her-head.jpg
This is a photo of women washing clothes in a pond.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/women-washing-clothes.jpg
Yes, life is in the living of it. Lovely photos.
As I said above, there is a subjective element to the appraisal of the value of different lifestyles – which perhaps is another way of saying that humans have evolved to be adaptable and that we find ‘value’ in very many different circumstances.
Humans will find plenty worth living for after the collapse of industrialisation just as we did before it. Life and its value is in the living of it – and not in any one dogmatic appraisal. Life provides its own perspectives and its own value. All is well and all will be well.
FWIW, that is my experience at 73, I read both Ehrlich and Meadows, fortunately didn’t follow through on their ideas, had I to do over would have had five children rather than one.
Dennis L.
Thanks for your perspective, it is heart warming.
in the millennia before the industrial revolution, nobody was ‘aware’ of it
nobody said—‘hey guys, serfdom sucks, its time we had an industrial revolution’
but now
we know about the benefits of industry , the food, the instant wheels etc
so when all that has gone, we will not ‘unlearn’ it all
instead everyone will start screaming hoax and conspiracy, and we will begin to kill each other to prove ourselves right.
The industrial revolution set us on our present course. we were told it was forever.
the don is still banging on about the ‘American dream’—i suppose it’s too much to hope that he’s a secret OFW lurker, and gradually finding out what is really going on
Yes, as the old saying goes, we never really appreciate what we have until we lose it.
Soon enough new kids will come through who have no memory of industrialism.
Oldens will be like ‘yea, we used to fly 1000X beyond the horizon. Men flew to the moon up there.’
And the cheeky kids will be like, ‘really. she used to have wings and she reckons that she is the man in the moon too, whatever!’
Of course, the mountains of junk cities will strongly suggest that something massive happened there. Relics of gone age, eventually forgotten.
Humans will get over it eventually.
… As the other old saying goes, you do not miss what you never had.
That will be true for future generations.
No doubt careful parents will raise their kids with that perspective in mind. Humans are resilient and we help each other to be so.
This means that if energy usage needs to fall dramatically, population will probably need to fall in areas where heating or air conditioning are essential for living.
Phoenix goes back to a population of 25,000, and Las Vegas is a small gas stop?
Lets hope
Gail wrote: [1] It is probably not possible to reduce current energy consumption by 80% or more without dramatically reducing population.
—————–
Exactly.
Interesting comment from another site:
[Quote]
At least [Richard] Heinberg, born in 1950, never personally reproduced. He’s an extreme rarity in the groups involving doomers/environmentalists/scientists/anybody intellectually capable of understanding the math behind exponential growth. The very few, off the top of my head, who have taken the overpopulation topic seriously by having zero kids are the following [a pathetically short list]:
Alice Friedemann, born in mid-1950s
Dennis and Donella Meadows, born in 1942 and 1941, respectively
Terry Tempest Williams, born in 1955
Chris Packham, born in 1961
Guy McPherson, born in 1960
Sam Mitchell, born in 1959
Les U. Knight, born in late 1940s
Paul Ehrlich, born in 1932, had one daughter in 1955, years before he became aware and wrote his book; unfortunately, she went on to have three daughters, who have provided her with numerous grandchildren. Pentti Linkola, born in 1932, had two daughters, born in 1961 and 1963, years before overpopulation hit the news. His daughters were much wiser and certainly more empathetic, since they chose to have zero children. [End Quote]
Prof. Charles Hall, born in 1943, has no children of his own. He married a woman who had a child by a previous marriage, however. Hall is known for his EROEI theories.
we can only look on population expansion from a collective, not individual viewpoint
i had 3 kids, my bro had 2, other bro and sis had none, so that leaves us one up, but my 3 had 7 more,
but bring in other family threads from g-grandparents, and it becomes nonsense–my g-grandparents had 21–but only 14 survived, g-parents had 9, all survived, and that’s just one family thread. I’ve got cousins all over the place by now.
We are programmed to reproduce ourselves, and importantly, enjoy doing so.
So we do.
Our emotional development takes little account in general terms of the state of the planet
The ultimate contraceptive, unfortunately, is a starving mother. She doesn’t release eggs
“We are programmed to reproduce ourselves, and importantly, enjoy doing so.
So we do.
Our emotional development takes little account in general terms of the state of the planet
The ultimate contraceptive, unfortunately, is a starving mother. She doesn’t release eggs”
There were many examples in history of homo sapiens of population control. Famine is only one of them, wars were also efficient. But this was shocking to me. In this great book, mentioned by Gail, “Craig Dilworth – Too Smart for Our Own Good_ The Ecological Predicament of Humankind (2009)” there is this quote about internal population checks:
Most demographers agree that functional relationships between the
normal birth rate and other requirements (for example, the mobility
of the female) favor the cultural regulation of fertility through
such practices as infanticide, abortion, lactation taboos, etc. These
practices have the effect of homeostatically keeping population size
below the point at which diminishing returns from the local habitat
would come into play.
…
As regards infanticide, often involving exposure,185 a study of modern hunter-gatherers revealed that it was practised in 80 of the 86 societies examined; and it was estimated that between 15 and 50 per cent of all live births ended in infanticide in societies at this level of development. Another study found that abortion was practised in 13 of 15 such societies.
i did say
‘the ultimate contraceptive’
i didn’t infer that it was the only one
Never meant to say otherwise. I just mentioned interesting fact.
No “we” don’t. Stop projecting your own life choices onto others.
in all my comments on this thread, I’ve been at pains to put things over in a ‘collective’ context (tho it never seems to work)
that is the whole point—it has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal ‘lifestyle choice.’
Why do you think a lion tiger or bear fights for access to the female, while the female herself relaxes while they carry on trying to kill each other?
Its because the urge to reproduce is so powerful and so rewarding that the male risks his life to get there.
the female then chooses the winner because she knows that he will be most likely to provide the strongest offspring,
The female urge to reproduce is far stronger than the male. It’s just that she’\s more careful (choosy) about it.
In the same way, it is the human female who chooses her male mate. (not the other way round) Only difference is that human females are smart enough to let the male think he does the ‘choosing’ and he’s the ‘boss’.
That’s the joke on all of us guys.
Some of us get it, a lot don’t
I don’t disagree that it is the females that does the selection. Of course some courtship improves the odds for the male, but it can be a bit much at times watching the betas humiliate themselves. Just leave the women goddamn alone until she shows an interest in you. Never have I observed a good long-time relationship where the woman was coaxed into a relationship.
However the rather idiotic male dominance hierarchies and the female social status hierarchies is quite tiring for anyone with some distance to the bread and circuses. The godawful “social media” and corporate/guvmint hierarchy have cranked that oozing stinker to 11.
How about having a good long look at how Gaia performs her act and try to mimic that? It’s not exactly going against the grain of selection pressures of worthwhile males and balanced females not tending towards the overly feminine or masculine.
The only reason to get offspring is because it should be interesting. Following the dictates of the primate limbic system is a disaster in the making. The rapacious primate, in the current form, are not particularly well suited as governors of a planetary civilization.
Yapping on about the “programming” is clearly misleading when there exists people like me that simply does not want to reproduce in the current situation.
The Calhoun Mouse Utopia experiment clearly gives irrefutable evidence of this mammalian trait.
https://youtu.be/NgGLFozNM2o
I have never understood this obsession with having zero children. If everyone that could have children stuck to two, the population would still plummet. I suspect that even if people stuck to three maximum, the population would still drop. A fifth of all couples in the UK have no children, and many choose to have only one.
Plus in the UK there is no incentive to have small families, beyond large families being unaffordable for most. There is no govt plan for a sustainable population (whatever that means), there is no social pressure to have smaller families, and if you are really poor or rich, money is no problem. It surely would be if the govt limited child benefit to two children, or three, but that is considered a Natzee-style policy.
The argument is now academic anyway. We are headed for a world where fossil fuel use is headed for extinction, and our numbers will drop accordingly. Extreme overshoot will be followed by extreme die-off. No optimism or pessimism about it. That is just the way it is.
what’s going on
“His daughters were much wiser and certainly more empathetic, since they chose to have zero children. ”
I don’t understand, if they lived beyond a period of being productive they relied on someone else’s child to support them. Did they terminate their lives when no longer able to carry on? If they did, they were wiser, they were empathetic in not taking from a child raised by another. Why would anyone want to share the labor of their children to support these “wise” women?
This hatred of the human race is puzzling. Should one want to hate try Haber who gave rise to the nitrogen process which in part allowed the green revolution. How about Norman Ernest Borlaug generally credited with the first green revolution.
Think how wonderful the world would be with women starving, not ovulating and not over running the world with people. It would be a beautiful world with people all skin and bones barely able to move. Wild a… guess, it will not be a woman coming up with that idea.
A quote from Ehrlich, “The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future” and believe that it achieved their goals because “it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future.”[2]
They were flat out wrong and yet they claim the book alerted people. How? By telling them everything was hopeless and we were going to starve? Academics cling to their ideas with a self righteousness that is curious even when they miss the prediction by at least seventy years.
We humans are along for the ride, get use to it; determinism is dead. What reduced green house gases was a virus, one might even say the earth is self regulating.
Dennis L.
No human is supporting another human in IC, that is the job of the machine and finite resources at work.
The problem with the rapacious primate is the sanctimony of the religion of children.
The future isn’t in the hands of children, it is in the capacity to source energy and put it into work.
So drop that human chauvinism, and those tiring sermons regarding the virtue of children. It is silly.
Actually, humans are a very important part of the whole cycle, in my opinion. Demand cannot stay high enough to make the system work unless people have people do have children. Think of all of the jobs that go away if people stop having children. We don’t need teachers. We don’t need new homes or new roads to those homes. We just need to deal with a society that is getting ever-older and less able to take care of itself.
Yep, Kowalainen. You wouldn’t know it from a lot of responses on THIS site, but through the efforts of one individual at a time, such as Marcia Drut-Davis, a woman in her mid-70s, we can see a slow sea change in human closed-mindedness and personal defensiveness concerning reproducing. Here’s an article on her “60 Minutes” appearance in 1974 with the pompous, preening Mike Wallace:
[Quote] “Mike Wallace even ended the segment saying, ‘Pardon our perversion for showing this on Mother’s Day,’ wearing an expression of intense concern.”
https://www.lauracarroll.com/60-minutes-treat-the-childfree/
I agree with the drift of the responses to this point.
Overpopulation is not the problem that we face. The problem is one of increasingly unprofitable energy. That was always going to be the problem in the end. Nor could Westerners have made much difference to the timing, most population growth has been in other regions and it is projected to remain so. So why not have lots of kids, and plenty of people to enjoy the benefits of civilisation while they still can.
I say, have more kids, not fewer. Those lives have their own value and more people means more life-value, if one wants to put it that way. We should congratulate ourselves, not berate ourselves, over how well we have done, to produce so many people with such a high lifestyle. We are the pinnacle locus of human life-value – in so far as that can be measured, there is obviously a subjective aspect to it.
It was always going to collapse in the end – but that is just how it goes. Industrialisation was never going to be sustainable but that is no reason not to have done it and to have enjoyed it. Nothing lasts forever, not life itself, but that is no reason not to live and to enjoy doing things. Eventual failure is the frame of all life, of all of things bar the cosmos itself, but life is in the living not in the failing.
Only then does overpopulation become a problem, when it becomes a reality – and then it is a ‘problem’ that will solve itself in population collapse. But so what, that is how it goes, surely it was better to have many people who enjoyed an advanced lifestyle in the first place than never at all. It is better that some should ultimately die untimely than that very many should never have been at all and never have enjoyed an advanced lifestyle.
So well done humanity, we developed human life to the utmost and we kept it going until the very end. Top marks all round.
It will be for future generations to rebuild as best as they can, just as we built as best as we could. Life goes on and life will go on. That is what life does. It grows, expands, dominates, appropriates, exploits and utilises – and when it suffers a set back, it starts again. Maybe humans will never again reach the heights of development that we have – we really lived, and we should be proud of that. We won at being civilised, developed humans, in so far as any creature ever really does win.
We could have been ants instead, and had a different evolutionary strategy, but there are plenty of ants being ants anyway, there is no shortage of them. So hey, we did our own human thing and we did very well at it, particularly in recent times. Well done.
>>Overpopulation is not the problem that we face.
Eh? If there were 200 M people in the world (the world population at about 0 BC), that would be about 1/40 th today’s population. 35 M in China, 1.625 M in the UK (the traffic!), 8.25 M in the USA. The seas would be pristine, the Amazon would be intact, we’d still have rhinoceros spices that have gone extinct.
Sure but that is an ecological – or rather, philosophical – question rather than the energy issue here.
Is it ‘better’ to have 7.8 billion humans or more forest and species at the present time?
That is a matter of opinion. Indeed it is a purely human question that is framed in terms of human perspectives and values. We evolved to have perspectives that advance human life in some way, not to grasp any mythical ‘inner moral truth’ of the cosmos or the earth.
Without humans and our perspectives, the cosmos and all that is in it is just matter (and energy) in motion, without any ‘meaning’, ‘beauty’ or ‘value’. So there is no one ‘true’ answer to such a question, just human perspectives that presuppose human subjects who interpret each other and other objects in their own ways.
Accordingly you are free to develop your own perspective and feelings about it, the same as everyone else. But if you were to entirely remove humans from the equation (which you do not) then all that you would be left with is a meaningless, non-aesthetic, valueless cosmos. It is a kind of nihilism if taken to the extreme.
But if you want a beautiful, meaningful, valuable world then you must have humans for whom it has those qualities. We do not love nature itself but nature as we experience it. We do not admire the beauty in nature itself but the beauty that we see in it. We are not in awe of nature itself, rather that is our aesthetic response to our own subjective construction of it.
As Schopenhauer states at the outset in his great work:
“If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.”
Download here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-pdf.pdf
The nature of humanity to to do something that is, at the time, considered to be progress for the species. In one form or another.
This is also true for ants but they have developed a group life cycle that is individually very short and thus annually self controlling for entire populations – especially in non-ideal living environments.
It’s basically the same for may insects and they persist rather well.
For larger creatures the survival pattern is a little longer and humans seem to have created the opportunities to extend human life for the masses some way beyond what was “normal” just a few generations ago. Humans are near the top of the longevity chart in today’s world.
But it’s ephemeral.
Our evidence for our understanding of our place in the development of life on the planet is based on remarkably little evidence for the amount of time elapsed.
Human patterns of population growth and decline may well have existed in some form many times in the past. We go back a few hundred years, maybe a thousand or two in some cases, and find “evidence” of development and then make assumptions about what went before.
Consider this.
If, for the same of argument, an Ice Age similar to the last major Ice Age started tomorrow and the ice caps extended as far south as they did in the last Glacial period, how much evidence of our current existence would be found by those re-establishing a human presence in the north and south of the planet many millennia from now when the ice receded?
Where would they look?
How deep would they have to dig?
What might they find?
Would they really care?
By then they may have plenty of forests that would allow then to operate on a migratory basis, building shelters and moving on when resources were expended for the year.
Maybe they would harness the energy potential of wood – provided the planet had retained enough atmospheric CO2 to allow trees to grow.
I have no problem with those who elect to be non-breeders but ultimately they are somewhat superfluous so there seems to be little need for them to force their apparent dedication on others. At best they may slow the next demise by a few minutes. Indeed it they really want to rid the planet of most humans as quickly as possible they could so worse than supporting those whom they consider to be “over-populators”. That way the “end” of humans by overpopulation would come sooner.
Then the planet could get back to it’s own “normal”.
Whatever that might be at the time.
Yes, ‘overpopulation’ will solve itself as an inevitable outcome of economic collapse rather than through ‘virtue’ on the part of the celibate or abstinent.
They would better get at it between the sheets if they want to hasten the process by perhaps a few milliseconds. Go out and buy loads of stuff, and help to use up the affordable energy that is left. Take some flights to the sun.
‘Vice’ is the new ‘virtue’, who knew?
The implication of Gail’s perspective of unprofitable energy-based collapse is that we really do not need to worry about population levels, as they will soon crash anyway.
Hey, one less thing to worry about and an impetus to enjoy it while we still can.
I am quite sure the barn swallows would object to fewer people. Those birds quite prefer breeding in inhabited houses. The discussion is always cart before the horse, typical of westerners and those biblical influences of culture. How about having a good long look towards the thought processes of the east?
Humans destroy ecosystems AND terraform ecosystems with the corresponding changes in the flora and fauna. Gaia could not care less.
For the most part we are busy turning mineral into nutrients, such as bringing phosphorous, trapped carbon and other raw materials back into the biosphere. Is that bad? I guess not.
Well written, I’m quoting it to people. Great.