It takes energy to accomplish any of the activities that we associate with GDP. It takes energy to grow food: human energy, solar energy, and–in today’s world–the many types of energy used to build and power tractors, transport food to markets, and provide cooling for food that needs to be refrigerated. It takes energy to cook food and to smelt metals. It takes energy to heat and air condition offices and to power the internet. Without adequate energy, the world economy would come to a halt.
We are hitting energy limits right now. Energy per capita is already shrinking, and it seems likely to shrink further in the future. Reaching a limit produces a conflict problem similar to the one in the game musical chairs. This game begins with an equal number of players and chairs. At the start of each round, a chair is removed. The players must then compete for the remaining chairs, and the player who ends the round without a chair is eliminated. There is conflict among players as they fight to obtain one of the available chairs. The conflict within the energy system is somewhat hidden, but the result is similar.
A current conflict is, “How much energy can we spare to fight COVID-19?” It is obvious that expenditures on masks and vaccines have an impact on the economy. It is less obvious that a cutback in airline flights or in restaurant meals to fight COVID-19 indirectly leads to less energy being produced and consumed, worldwide. In total, the world becomes a poorer place. How is the pain of this reduction in energy consumption per capita to be shared? Is it fair that travel and restaurant workers are disproportionately affected? Worldwide, we are seeing a K shaped recovery: The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer.
A major issue is that while we can print money, we cannot print the energy supplies needed to run the economy. As energy supplies deplete, we will increasingly need to “choose our battles.” In the past, humans have been able to win many battles against nature. However, as energy per capita declines in the future, we will be able to win fewer and fewer of these battles against nature, such as our current battle with COVID-19. At some point, we may simply need to let the chips fall where they may. The world economy seems unable to accommodate 7.8 billion people, and we will have no choice but to face this issue.
In this post, I will explain some of the issues involved. At the end of the post, I include a video of a panel discussion that I was part of on the topic of “Energy Is the Economy.” The moderator of the panel discussion was Chris Martenson; the other panelists were Richard Heinberg and Art Berman.
[1] Energy consumption per person varies greatly by country.
Let’s start with a little background. There is huge variability in the quantity of energy consumed per person around the world. There is more than a 100-fold difference between the highest and lowest countries shown on Figure 1.
I have shown only a few example countries, but we can see that cold countries tend to use a lot of energy, relative to their populations. Iceland, with an abundant supply of inexpensive hydroelectric and geothermal electricity, uses it to heat buildings, grow food in greenhouses, mine “bitcoins” and smelt aluminum. Norway and Canada have both oil and gas supplies, besides being producers of hydroelectricity. With abundant fuel supplies and a cold climate, both countries use a great deal of energy relative to the size of their population.
Saudi Arabia also has high energy consumption. It uses its abundant oil and gas supplies to provide air conditioning for its people. It also uses its energy products to enable the operation of businesses that provide jobs for its large population. In addition, Saudi Arabia uses taxes on the oil it produces to subsidize the purchase of imported food, which the country cannot grow locally. As with all oil and gas producers, some portion of the oil and gas produced is used in its own oil and gas operations.
In warm countries, such as those in Middle Africa and India, energy consumption tends to be very low. Most people in these countries walk for transportation or use very crowded public transport. Roads tend not to be paved. Electricity outages are frequent.
One of the few changes that can easily be made to reduce energy consumption is to move manufacturing to lower wage countries. Doing this reduces energy consumption (in the form of electricity) quite significantly. In fact, the rich nations have mostly done this, already.
Trying to squeeze down energy consumption for the many countries around the world will be a huge challenge because energy is involved in every part of economies.
[2] Two hundred years of history shows that very slow growth in energy consumption per capita leads to bad outcomes.
Some readers will remember that I have pieced together data from different sources to put together a reasonable approximation to world energy consumption since 1820. In Figure 3, I have added a rough estimate of the expected drop in future energy consumption that might occur if either (1) the beginning of peak fossil fuels is occurring about now because of continued low fossil fuel prices, or (2) world economies choose to leave fossil fuels and move to renewables between now and 2050 in order to try to help the environment. Thus, Figure 3 shows my estimate of the pattern of total world energy consumption over the period of 1820 to 2050, at 10-year intervals.
The shape of this curve is far different from the one most forecasters expect because they assume that prices will eventually rise high enough so all of the fossil fuels that can be technically extracted will actually be extracted. I expect that oil and other fossil fuel prices will remain too low for producers, for reasons I discuss in Section [4], below. In fact, I have written about this issue in a peer reviewed academic article, published in the journal Energy.
Figure 4 shows this same information as Figure 3, divided by population. In making this chart, I assume that population drops only half as quickly as energy consumption falls after 2020. Total world population drops to 2.8 billion by 2050.
In Figure 4, some parts of the curve are relatively flat, or even slightly falling, while others are rising rapidly. It turns out that rapidly rising times are much better for the economy than flat and falling times. Figure 5 shows the average annual percentage change in energy consumption per capita, for ten-year periods ending the date shown.
If we look back at what happened in Figure 5, we find that when the 10-year growth in energy consumption is very low, or turns negative, conflict and bad outcomes are typical. For example:
- Dip 1: 1861-1865 US Civil War
- Dip 2: Several events
- 1914-1918 World War I
- 1918-1920 Spanish Flu Pandemic
- 1929-1933 Great Depression
- 1939-1945 World War II
- Dip 3: 1991 Collapse of the Central Government of the Soviet Union
- Dip 4: 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic and Recession
Per capita energy consumption was already growing very slowly before 2020 arrived. Energy consumption took a big step downward in 2020 (estimated at 5%) because of the shutdowns and the big cutback in air travel. One of the important things that energy consumption does is provide jobs. With severe cutbacks intended to contain COVID-19, many people in distant countries lost their jobs. Cutbacks of this magnitude quickly cause problems around the world.
For example, if people in rich countries rarely dress up to attend meetings of various kinds, there is much less of a market for dressy clothing. Many people in poor countries make their living manufacturing this type of clothing. With the loss of these sales, workers suddenly found themselves with much reduced income. Poor countries generally do not have good safety nets to provide food for those who are out of work. As a result, the diets of people subject to loss of income became inadequate, leading to greater vulnerability to disease. If the situation continues, some may even die of starvation.
[3] The pattern of world energy consumption between 2020 and 2050 (modeled in Figures 3, 4 and 5) suggests that a very concerning collapse may be ahead.
My model suggests that world energy consumption may fall to about 28 gigajoules per capita per year by 2050 (for a reduced population of 2.8 billion). This is about the level of world energy consumption per capita for the world in 1900.
Alternatively, 28 gigajoules per capita is a little lower than the per capita energy consumption for India in 2019. Of course, some parts of the world might do better than this. For example, Mexico and Brazil both had energy consumption per capita of about 60 gigajoules per capita in 2019. Some countries might be able to do this well in 2050.
Using less energy after 2020 will lead to many changes. Governments will become smaller and provide fewer services such as paved roads. Often, these governments will cover smaller areas than those of countries today. Businesses will become smaller, more local, and more involved with goods rather than services. Individual citizens will be walking more, growing their own food, and doing much less home heating and cooling.
With less energy available, it will be necessary to cut back on fighting unfortunate natural occurrences, such as forest fires, downed electricity transmission lines after hurricanes, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and constantly mutating viruses. Thus, life expectancy is likely to decline.
[4] It is “demand,” and how high energy prices can be raised, that determines how large an energy supply will be available in the future.
I keep making this point in my posts because I sense that it is poorly understood. The big problem that we should be anticipating is energy producers going out of business because energy prices are chronically too low. I see five ways in which energy prices might theoretically be raised:
- A truly booming world economy. This is what raised prices in the 1970s and in the run up to 2008. If there are truly more people who can afford homes and new vehicles, and governments that can afford new roads and other infrastructure, companies extracting oil and coal will build new facilities in higher-cost locations, and thereby expand world supply. The higher prices will help energy companies to be profitable, despite their higher costs. Such a scenario seems very unlikely, given where we are now.
- Government mandates and subsidies. Government mandates are what is maintaining demand for renewables and electric vehicles. Conversely, government mandates are part of what is keeping down tourist travel. Indirectly, this lack of demand relating to travel leads to low oil prices. A government mandate for people to engage in more travel seems unlikely.
- Much reduced wage disparity. If everyone, rich or poor, can afford nice homes, automobiles, and cell phones, commodity prices will tend to be high because buying and operating goods such as these requires the use of commodities. Governments can attempt to fix wage disparity through more printed money, but I am doubtful that this approach will really work because other countries are likely to be unwilling to accept this printed money.
- More debt, sometimes leading to collapsing debt bubbles. Spending can be enhanced if it becomes easier for citizens to buy goods such as homes and vehicles on credit. Likewise, businesses can borrow money to build new factories or, alternatively, to continue to pay wages to workers, even if there isn’t much demand for the goods and services sold. But, if the economy really is not recovering rapidly, these approaches can be expected to lead to crashes.
- Getting rid of COVID-19 inefficiencies and fearfulness. Economies around the world are being depressed to varying degrees by continued inefficiencies caused by social distancing requirements and by fearfulness. If these issues could be eliminated, it might boost economies back up to the already somewhat depressed levels of early 2020.
In summary, the issue we are facing is that oil demand (and thus prices) were far too low for oil producers because of wage disparity before the COVID-19 crisis arrived in March. Trying to get demand back up through more debt seems likely to lead to debt bubbles, which will be in danger of collapsing. There may be temporary price spikes, but a permanent fix is virtually impossible. This is why I am forecasting the severe drop in energy consumption shown in Figures 3 and 4.
[5] We humans don’t need to figure out how to fix the economy optimally between now and 2050.
The economy is a self-organizing system that will figure out on its own the optimal way of “dissipating” energy, to the extent possible. In physics terms, the economy is a dissipative structure. If the energy resource is food, energy will be dissipated by digesting the food. In the case of fossil fuel, energy will be dissipated by burning it. We may like to think that we are in charge, but we really are not. It is the laws of physics, or perhaps the Power behind the laws of physics, that is in charge.
Dissipative structures are not permanent. For example, hurricanes and tornadoes are dissipative structures. Plants and animals are dissipative structures. Eventually, new smaller economies, encompassing smaller areas of the world, may replace the existing world economy.
[6] This is a recent video of a panel discussion on “Energy Is the Economy.”
Chris Martenson is the moderator. Art Berman, Richard Heinberg and I are panelists. The Peak Prosperity folks were kind enough to provide me a copy to put up on my website.
A transcript of this panel discussion can be accessed at this link:
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Still believing the COVID hype huh? Yeah it is a pandemic alright…..we have become so dumb and unhealthy that something resembling the common cold is treated as a pandemic.
Wow. The whole thing is amazing to see.
Bring on the collapse and cleanse away.
Agreed (apart from bringing on the cleansing).
Gail, do you believe the actions of governments ostensibly to counter covid-19 are proportionate to the threat they perceive the virus to be, or do you believe the world economy is being deliberately taken down by the elite for their own nefarious reasons?
The last thing the elite want is to bring down the global economy. Nothing else makes them as anxious about their hold on power. Many of the oligarchs really do worry about a pitchforks-and-torches scenario according to some past comments by people who help them with their investments or their remote survival retreats in New Zealand and South America.
Taken down was a bad phrase. Greater control and downsizing for the majority seems to be what the elite desire if their actions are anything to go by.
Downsizing the majority hurts the oligarchs’ profits. The firms they own stock in need customers with money to spend. The elites worked hard to create the current world order. They are not eager to destroy it. Many people seem to think they are evil geniuses. I think they are self-interested but basically well intentioned bunglers.
Sociopaths who enjoy power over other people is what they are. I wasn’t even comfortable telling my children what to do when they were only small. I’d only advise and explain why they ought to follow my advice. I certainly would never order others that they had to shut down their businesses, that they could only leave their houses once a day to exercise or that they must wear a mask when entering a supermarket. I’d advise them of the risks based on current science and let them make their own minds up what to do.
Nehemiah, it is not how it works. They only care about THEIR game/sport. If the factories ramp down to 20% of full capacity worldwide, so what? It equally affects everybody in TPTB and their sparring partners in an unwinnable match against diminishing returns and marginal utility.
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/25807209.jpg
I’m sorry I missed your comment earlier.
COVID-19 is difficult because each person sees the problem from his/her personal perspective. It is as if there are lots of nodes in a big worldwide network. Based on what people in most of the world see around them, stopping it would be the thing we should make every effort to do. They “know” that science can fix all problems, hopefully quickly. They also know that there is at least some chance that they personally will fare very badly with the disease, or someone they love will have a major problem with it.
People in central Africa and other places where epidemics go around frequently are more likely to take COVID-19 in stride. They know that many people die early; this is just one more reason. If they lose their job, they can perhaps grow root crops locally to help themselves out. Starvation from lack of a job isn’t an issue for everyone, because growing food is relatively easy; storing food is not an issue in places where food grows year around. I get the impression that “land ownership” isn’t the same as much of an issue as it is in the US.
Looking at COVID-19 from a more global perspective, it looks like something that is hardly worth taking the world economy down on account of. It also looks like the world economy is on the edge of collapse anyhow; COVID-19 restrictions could very well push it over the edge. So from this perspective, COVID-19 restrictions tend not to make sense.
I don’t think that the world economy is being taken down by the elite for the nefarious reason. Leaders in countries that are already near the edge of collapse seem to be willing to impose collapse, because the countries are in terrible shape already. It gives them a feeling of control, damps down dissent, and might stop the spread of the virus.
I save some of the best of Gail’s posts in a treasured folder and I am not overstating that this post along with the video of 4 of the brightest most aware people is perhaps the best of her best, the creme de la creme of her fertile organized mind. I am very grateful for the work of these amazing people . There is the dark side. Very few of the rest of the world have this understanding and almost no one in policy enacting positions really get it so expecting useful strategies to come from that quarter is a fools errand. All of us who understand this have already embarked on intelligent responses to this predicament and the best we can hope is that increasing numbers will do the same.
I’m glad you liked the post!
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Massive vote fraud leads to rioting leads to marshal law during which China takes Taiwan. This is my friends take. He is busy finishing up his bugout cabin in the mountains. His take with 200 pounds of rice I can make it through the winter.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map.html
Exactly….if Biden gets in, China will invade Taiwan within 2-6 months. Probably allow for some under the table “diplomacy” where China is reassured they will not be opposed, certain public statements to give the appearance that the US is highly concerned but will refuse to act. The US “stands” with Taiwan ( while allowing them to be subjugated). Will be ugly. It also will provide “cover” while other wars with Russia are ramped up in Syria and perhaps other mid Asia states.
Yes, Biden is indeed the “Manchurian Candidate”. Perhaps that is why I sat out the election nonsense and rewatched the 1960’s “Fu Manchu” movies, starring Christopher Lee as the Master of Crime, and Tsai Chin as his delectable evil daughter. Great retro trash, totally politically incorrect and all the better for it.
Fu was a Qing Dynasty loyalist fighting KMT-supporting British imperialists. I’ve always wanted to write a novel from his perspective.
If China takes Taiwan (and the invasion could only happen during certain months due to the weather), it could then control supplies to Japan and Korea. The USA would cease to be a power in the Western Pacific. Its military knows this and advises presidents accordingly.
Allegations of “massive voting fraud” thing have so far foundered for lack of evidence. In the USA, anyway–Georgia and Belarus are having protests over this very issue.
People who get their news from Drudge wouldn’t have noticed, but Artsakh / Karabakh lost its war with Azerbaijan (supported by Turkey) yesterday. After the fall of Shusha / Shushi, Armenia was forced to sign a capitulaton agreement ceding…almost everything, really.
Foundered for lack of evidence?
Well, the horse is still cantering along on that issue.
In the meantime, this item is selling well and going to be In a lot of people’s Christmas stockings this year.
https://ibinggear.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/joe-biden-fraud-shirt-Ibinggear-sweater-trang-1.jpg
a brief summary of US election procedures:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-11-09/us-presidential-election-not-over-heres-where-things-stand-right-now
the key date is really December 14.
“People who get their news from Drudge” — no need for circumlocutions. It’s okay just to say “Democrats” or “liberals (American-style).” Drudge’s cheerleading for Biden was so extreme it made CNN look like the epitome of objective reporting. But I am sure his glaring switcheroo has cost him a lot of his old readers who have switched to BonginoReport.com in frustration.
Yes, that is certainly an issue worthy of debate. I admire the Ching dynasty, but the Dowager Empress made a disastrous mistake when she started supporting the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists” (義和團運動), which was the excuse the Western powers (+ Japan) needed to intervene. Sun Tzu would have counselled a lower profile and judicious conciliation. The problem of the Christian missionaries could have been solved by diplomacy, though I grant they mostly deserved what happened to them.
And based on the original Fu Manchu novels of English writer Sax Rohmer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu
Don’t hold your breath—
Reality will kill you, ideology is just a mental defect.
Some ideologies are functional guides for living or governing based on the hard lessons of generations past. Others, especially utopian or perfectionist ideologies, not so much.
Yes, only intervene psychosocially when the herd is heading for the abyss following the dictates of the socialist engineering nutjobs.
Let’s hope it’s not in Montana because I will be raiding it😂. What a fool…let me guess he is older than 58 a big time trumper and has not done physical work his whole life… they are a dime a dozen in montana and Idaho….
that’s martial not marshal
You mean as in “caught marshal”? 🙂
https://youtu.be/k7GlHRDtVS4
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Gail….
I have been reading you for years now and I would like to thank you for your work and providing your content free of charge.
Your objectivity and logic and how you present your research in a way that is easy to understand is refreshing.
You have caused me to make peace with my mortality and prepare myself for what is to come and for that I am most grateful. God Bless!
Thanks! I am happy I have been able to help. I think I can be more objective if I am not working to get donations or ad revenue. I am perfectly happy to have other sites copy my posts, because I am not losing ad revenue. And, I don’t think copyright laws are as strict, if I am not trying to make money off of a chart someone else prepared. Of course, I usually make my own, anyhow.
Coronavirus pandemic fuels sharp increase in Japanese suicide rate
“The number of suicides in Japan has increased significantly over recent months. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to take a toll in other countries, too.
This year, Japan’s news headlines have been increasingly dominated by celebrity suicides: On May 23, it was the death of professional wrestler and reality TV star Hana Kimura, 22, and in July, TV actor Haruma Miura, who was 30. In September, actresses Sei Ashina, 36, and Yuko Takeuchi, 40, also died by suicide.”
https://www.dw.com/en/suicide-japan/a-55250637
Hana Kimura (22) apparently killed herself because she was a victim of cyberbullying on SNS. A bit like DJT, she played the role of a “villain” and was hated by a lot of pro-wrestling fans who took her performance at face value. But inside she was a sensitive soul. Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio revealed that Kimura passed away at 4:00 am Japenese time. She died by ingesting hydrogen sulfide.
Her suicide note was posted on her Twitter account. In translation, it reads:
“Nearly 100 frank opinions every day. I couldn’t deny that I was hurt. I’m dead. Thank you for giving me a mother. It was a life I wanted to be loved. Thank you to everyone who supported me. I love it. I’m weak, I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a human anymore. It was a life I wanted to be loved. Thank you everyone, I love you. Bye.”
Haruma Miura (30) was a successful actor who was popular, and was known to be a sensitive soul. He began acting at the age of seven. His parents divorced and his mother remarried when he was in junior high school. Neighbors say his mother and grandmother ran away from home about three years ago and that his mother and stepfather live separately now. From around that time, his close friends started to worry about him because he was drinking too much and quite often, and because he preferred to drink alone. When COVID came along, the stage musical “Whistle Down the Wind”, in which Miura played the main role, started on March 7 and was canceled on the 29th before it was set to finish. Before it was decided that the musical would have to be cancelled, the show’s official SNS account received a flood of criticism because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This ended up annoying Haruma. He was found to have hanged himself in his apartment in July.
Actress Sei Ashina’s (36) recent apparent suicide was widely reported internationally because back in 2007 she had appeared together with Kiera Knightly in François Girard’s movie Silk. Irritatingly, the British and American media insisted on referring to her as “an actor”—damn their Newspeak!! She was found dead at her Tokyo apartment. Like many suicides, she didn’t leave a note.
Japanese actress Yuko Takeuchi (40), to stardom in the 1999 NHK morning drama Asuka as a teenager, died in an apparent suicide. She was found limp at her apartment in Tokyo in September.
All died alone at home alone, probably by their own hand. All were well loved by a legion of fans, professionally successful, and in the prime of life. Obviously something very important and basic was missing from their lives. Otherwise, why would they want to do a thing like that?
I notice that deaths actually fell by about 10% during the early period of the pandemic. It is since June that suicides have risen.
Suicides always rise during recessions, but total death rates always fall (they even fell during the worst years of the Great Depression), unless you are in the midst of a pandemic. However, Japan has done an excellent job of minimizing covid-related deaths. BTW, why are our celebrities not offing themselves?
“Indigenous communities in Mexico are suing the government over plans by a Total-owned company to install more than a million solar panels near their homes… To make space for the photovoltaic panels, project developers plan to clear 600 hectares of trees and other wild vegetation.
“Residents fear deforestation of the site will create a “heat island” and worsen water shortages… Dependent on small-scale agriculture and bee farming, people in both villages have opposed the plans, saying the project will hurt their livelihoods for little reward.
““The contracts only benefit… the Americans who designed the project. The villagers are only left with the crumbs,” said Abraham Chi, a resident of the nearby town of Muna.”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/10/23/mayan-communities-suing-mexican-government-million-solar-panel-megaproject/?fbclid=IwAR0yYDjOe7OvNeKzjWJKroGuSP5dKje0oBvtwRglqTZEwT3tC_ddkksjsio
Just finished On The Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux.
Even as a former resident of Mexico, I learned a lot.
Highly recommended.
This is an oil company doing a “green” project, so shouldn’t everyone be happy?
This situation is multiplies in the thousand or millions worldwide. Development appears to be the current religion of this civilization.
Hey, it’s solar, so that makes it “sustainable” development. Most of the environmentalists/greens these days don’t seem to resemble the hippies and back-to-the-landers who sought a simpler life in the 1970s. Now they denounce “neo-Malthusianism,” promote open borders and population growth, and dream of sustaining modern lifestyles by replacing biomass with intermittent renewables. Batteries will provide the storage and EV’s will replace ICE’s. It’s the impossible dream, but I think at some level they realize the the preservation of their liberal social values require the preservation of modern lifestyles, dense urban settlements, and high material standards of living, so the impossible dream takes precedence these days over realism. At least their boomer counterparts acknowledged the necessity downsizing and fundamental change.
Resistance to change can be partly explained by falling birthrates. With smaller families, first born children form a higher proportion of the total number. Frank Sulloway, using sound statistical methods in his book _Born to Rebel_, shows that first born children tend to be less open to change than younger born, excepting changes that tend to reinforce the social order in some way, which they are more accepting of than the younger born.
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Tim:
“or the dreaded 2050 problem when all the clocks in all the microchips revert back to 1850?”
Haha!
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Another good post. Here in France, we are in lockdown – AGAIN! President Macron is bound and determined to follow the IMF projections and contract the French economy by 10% for 2020 as a whole. He also has no understanding of why the French hate lockdowns. It is not just grandparents’ memories of the Nazis. It is also being treated like a child and told you have to wear a mask when you go on a walk in the woods and you can only go 1 kilometer from home. Also, you can drive anywhere for essential items, but you cannot ride your bike.
Civilization will collapse – not with a shout but with a whimper.
“you cannot ride your bike.” I meant further than a kilometer .
This could lead to a serious shortage of onions!
https://www.completefrance.com/polopoly_fs/1.5912952!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/image.jpg
New cases look like they went down for a bit, and then rose. At the current high level, they are about 79.1 per 100,000 compared to the US’s 33. This is a ratio of about 2.4 to US cases.
Deaths per 100,000 population in France are about .725. The comparable number for the US is .285. So France’s deaths are about 2.5 times as high as the US’s.
“In the decade since the global financial crisis, there’s been a large build-up in sovereign debt by almost all Western nations… the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend.
“At some point policymakers …face a difficult set of choices. Do they go down the path of deleveraging via fire (inflation) or ice (deflation)?
“…In an ideal world, the Royal Bank of Australia can lay up kindling around the barn, chip sparks at it, get a nice toasty campfire going, then dampen it down again at will. But as this country knows all too well, fires usually end up being much harder to put out than they are to start.”
https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/beware-of-burning-down-the-barn-to-bury-the-debt-20201108-p56ci6
“The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s growing dominance of its bond market is sparking unfavorable comparisons with Japan.
“The RBNZ’s ownership of the nation’s outstanding nominal government bonds has rocketed from 6% to 37% in the space of seven months, according to calculations by Bloomberg based on data from the central bank.”
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/japanification-stalks-zealand-debt-37-013223619.html
6% to 37%..Im speechless.
New Zealand is a small and remote country. Probably not a lot of demand for its bonds. America’s deep and liquid bond market is the envy of the world. That is probably the number one reason the rest of the world continues to accept the USD as the global reserve currency, even more than the fact that oil is normally traded in USD.
QE around the world!
“Banks have been told that relying on a small number of external suppliers could put financial stability at risk, sounding a warning months after the collapse of German payments provider Wirecard had a knock-on effect on British fintech firms…
“”A major disruption, outage or failure at one of these third parties could create a single point of failure with potential adverse consequences for financial stability and/or the safety and soundness of multiple financial institutions,” The Financial Stability Board said.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/11/09/watchdog-warns-banks-reliance-external-suppliers/
“All eyes in the fintech world were trained on Ant Financial last week, after the Chinese group was dramatically blocked from launching its $37bn initial public offering at the eleventh hour. Theories abounded about the reasons: it was a political slapdown; there were technical shortcomings in the company’s prospectus disclosures.
“An additional motive, though, is more fundamental. As Ant has morphed from a tech group that processes payments into a giant credit platform, it has become a potential systemic risk.”
https://www.ft.com/content/3bf4cec5-eabf-4d98-aed5-abee83837ad8
A person wonders what the real story is.
“Banks have been told that relying on a small number of external suppliers could put financial stability at risk” — In complexity theory, the number of suppliers would be an example of the diversity “dial.” Diversity if one of four key characteristics of complex adaptive systems that work best in the middle of the range. If you dial one of the “knobs” up too high or too low, the system develops problems. Globally, many industries today are so concentrated that they lack diversity. The financial system is one of these industries, and one on which the smooth functioning of all the rest depends.
“There is a risk of a new world war if current, smaller conflicts escalate out of control, drawing in more countries and weapons, the head of the UK armed forces has warned.
“General Sir Nick Carter said the global economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic could also trigger new security threats, even war.”
https://news.sky.com/story/risk-of-new-world-war-is-real-head-of-uk-armed-forces-warns-12126389
I am guessing that a major war may use different weapons than in the past. For example, the release of viruses meant to do harm. Interference with the internet system. Hacking of the electrical system.
Bubonic plague is one very effective one.
Bubonic plague is caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium, and for the moment is easily treated with antibiotics. In a post-industrial society with a much lower population, and possibly no antibiotics, yes, could be an effective killer.
You need cats, barn owls, and terriers to control the rodent population. Certain species of snake too. The prairie dogs of the American west are an ideal host population for Yersinia pestis. Pneumonic plague is a variant of bubonic that spreads human-to-human through the air. That is the one I would choose if I were a super-villain in a James Bond movie. Even better if you engineer an antibiotic resistant variety. Frankly, you could evolve resistant varieties in a petri dish with old fashioned technology, no high tech genetic engineering necessary. Of course, what goes around may come around.
“The simplistic physics is that one barrel of oil contains roughly the same energy as 4 years of human labour.”
Correct, but only this high lever of net energy enabled the existence of our actual level of complexity.
If the net-ernergy lever declines (what is happening from now on), our actual high level of complexity (just in time BAU) collapses. We will face a Seneca cliff, as our actual reached equilibrium-lvel needs exact the actual available level of net energy.
Oil will still be useful in the future, but on a much lower level of complexity with only the few humans that can be supported without our JIT-BAU-System.
As Norman said: You won´t like downsizing!
I agree with you. The economy is moving toward a much lower level of complexity, now that net energy is depleting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
SNIP
Some of the most important characteristics of complex systems are:[19]
SNIP
…any element or sub-system in the system is affected by and affects several other elements or sub-systems
The interactions are non-linear: small changes in inputs, physical interactions or stimuli can cause large effects or very significant changes in outputs
SNIP
The overall behavior of the system of elements is not predicted by the behavior of the individual elements
Such systems may be open and it may be difficult or impossible to define system boundaries
Complex systems operate under far from equilibrium conditions. THERE HAS TO BE A CONSTANT FLOW OF ENERGY TO MAINTAIN THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SYSTEM. [emphasis added]
Complex systems have a history. They evolve and their past is co-responsible for their present behavior
Elements in the system may be ignorant of the behavior of the system as a whole, responding only to the information or physical stimuli available to them locally
“Labour is urging the government to enact a vast green stimulus to create 400,000 jobs and jolt the UK of out of the economic depression triggered by Covid-19.
“The party wants chancellor Rishi Sunak to commit to at least £30 billion in capital investment over the next year and a half – warning that “austerity isn’t the answer”.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-green-new-deal-jobs-30-billion-stimulus-austerity-b1719833.html
“Chancellor Rishi Sunak will on Monday outline plans to launch the UK’s first green gilts in an attempt to bolster the country’s low-carbon credentials.”
https://www.ft.com/content/54a81c62-bcf7-431b-81ac-63ad22637363
“Climate change poses a bigger risk to the world than the coronavirus pandemic or the financial crisis, Andrew Bailey has warned, ordering banks to act now to protect themselves and the economy.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/11/09/climate-change-bigger-risk-covid-says-andrew-bailey/
What, I wonder, is the Return on Investment of “low carbon credentials”? Other than more politicians and bureaucrats clocking up more frequent flyer miles travelling to expensive self congratulatory conferences? But then, what was the RoI of the South Sea Bubble? Mundus vult decipi.
The push for “Greentopia” is just a gravy train for a slightly reconfigured set of vested interests with the added bonus that it comes with what looks like the moral high ground.
Mundus vult decipi indeed.
Saul Alinsky emphasized in _Rules for Radicals_ that you should always seize the moral high ground. Position yourself on the side of the angels. Maybe that is why moral posturing and virtue signaling have exploded since the 1960s. Realism often fails the moral high ground test. A naive young fellow I once knew used to object in our conversations, “But you can’t take away peoples’ hope! You have to give them hope!” I have heard that in Russia the physicians don’t like to tell terminal patients that they are dying. No use taking away their hope. Then they might resort to some unproven remedy.
I see all kinds of iffy ideas, including “expansion of carbon capture” in the Green New Deal Funding.
“Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal producer, said there was a risk it could go bankrupt for the second time in five years, as it raced to renegotiate debts in the wake of tumbling demand for the fossil fuel.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7ef222f6-616c-4831-8193-9429f2ce9661
“China’s coal imports have dropped by 47 per cent in October compared with the corresponding period last year as trade tensions with Australia worsened.”
https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/china-coal-imports-almost-halve-year-over-year/
[Indonesian] State-owned coal miner PT Bukit Asam booked a decline in net profits for the third consecutive quarter as weak coal demand, impacted by the COVID-19 health crisis, continued to take its toll on the company’s finances.
“Bukit Asam’s net profits dipped 44.2 percent year-on-year…”
https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/11/09/bukit-asam-profits-dip-44-percent-in-september-amid-weak-coal-demand.html
I expect that China is trying to keep its coal prices up, to help its coal producers.
This is the low price problem for coal that I keep talking about hitting agin.
When oil becomes sufficiently scarce, you will see coal to liquids plants springing up in countries with coal deposits (unless they need their coal for electricity more). I read somewhere that they would yield gasoline at around 7 to 8 dollars a gallon, based on early 2000’s buying power of dollars.
Yup, Nazi Germany kept the Kriegsmaschine operational, well, almost on CtL plants. South Africa during apartheid. Sasol still runs plants.
BBC propaganda in full swing.
US election: Biden urges mask-wearing to save ‘thousands of lives’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2020-54875485
>>On Monday, Mr Biden set out the blueprints for his Transition Covid-19 Advisory Board.
In a TV address, he said “I implore you, wear a mask”, calling it the “single most effective thing we can do to stop the spread of Covid”.
He added: “A mask is not a political statement but it is a good way to start pulling the country together.”<>Government trained OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration – USA] mask experts Tammy Clark & Kristen Meghan join Del in-studio to break down vital info on masks, PPE, and their role in #CV19 prevention. Every adult on this planet wearing a mask needs to hear this riveting discussion.<<
This is the most convincing video I have seen that masks are a waste of time regarding CV19. Wearing a mask does serve a purpose but it is not to prevent the spread of the virus, but to spread fear. What is needed in a resource-constrained world where TPTB have a plan.
The link from the second item above has vanished, and text become muddled? Let’s try posting the link again (the mask whistleblower video):
https://www.bitchute.com/video/nKU8JO1YPL6m/
I am not getting the video to play. I did hear Biden’s speech.
Odd. That is a USA-based video and works fine for me.
This link might work:
https://thehighwire.com/videos/mask-whistleblowers-tell-all/
although it probably links to the same video.
Incidentally, most of Del Bigtree’s videos are on YouTube, but looks like they have banned this one.
Maybe we should consider the fact that it appears that the “We are hitting energy limits right now.” is is actually created by particular interest groups in pursuit of profit using Government political mandates. There are still massive amounts of real energy sources like coal and Nuclear. The absurdity of RE Wind and Solar is a cause for concern as it has clearly led to massively artificial price increases in electrical energy cost and massive grid instability. “The economy is a self-organizing system”, is it not after all political government interference in the economy and that is problematic and that is creating the problem?
>>There are still massive amounts of real energy sources like coal and Nuclear.
Coal and uranium suffer from exactly the same issues of depletion of non-renewable resources as crude oil. All the easy (cheap to extract) coal and uranium has been extracted. As with oil, most of what is left will remain in the ground, thank goodness.
Well, as discussed before there is a lot of fuel for breeder reactors in decades or centuries (actually it’s a whole system of reprocessing spent fuel, old-existing design and new reactors), but since the whole NPP industry (apart from few exceptions) went moribund globally, it’s doubtful – improbable it will be deployed on needed dominant scale ever even in the countries who have the pilot program ready or needed skills to develop it on reasonable time frame, as there is enough natgas and coal to muddle through “emergencies” in hermit – closed economy style for a while. And I’ll repeat myself for n-th time, there must be reasoning (behind) why China did not opt for that route and instead build a gigantic array of next gen coal (liquid metal cooled) in the western deserts. Not only costs (marginally cheaper?), perhaps part of the reasoning is there are %% chances of that ultimate global doom-war scenario, so fewer reactors near agglomerations and farmland the better.. Build that breeder network only after the “round eye” threat is no longer a concern..
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-if-you-stay-here-much-longer-you-ll-all-be-slitty-eyed-prince-philip-74-34-77.jpg
worldofhamunanotg wrote: “as discussed before there is a lot of fuel for breeder reactors in decades or centuries….And I’ll repeat myself for n-th time, there must be reasoning (behind) why China did not opt for that route and instead build a gigantic array of next gen coal”
Yeah, there must be a reason, gee, I wonder what it could be:
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/india-wants-to-build-dangerous-fast-breeder-reactors/
India was planning to build six fast breeder reactors in 2016, but now in 2018, they’ve reduced the number to 2. This is despite the high cost, instability, danger, and accidents of the 16 previous world-wide attempts that have shut down, including the Monju fast breeder in Japan, which began decommissioning in 2018.
Breeders that produce commercial power don’t exist. There are only four small experimental prototypes operating.
SNIP
In the more than 60 years that have passed since the adoption of the three-phase plan, we have learned a lot about breeder reactors. Three of the important lessons are that fast breeder reactors are costly to build and operate; they have special safety problems; and they have severe reliability problems, including persistent sodium leaks.
These problems were observed in countries around the world, and have not been solved despite spending over $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) on breeder reactor research and development, and on constructing prototypes.
ALSO worth reading:
http://energyskeptic.com/2017/nuclear-power/
There are still massive Uranium reserves with respect. In fact there is a glut and that is why the price is so low. Who says that all reserves have been discovered for crude oil? The MSM driving a narrative.
First, the MSM is stunningly quiet on the impending energy crisis, so they can hardly be “driving” this particular “narrative.”
“Who says [almost] all the crude oil has been discovered?”
For one, the venerable Royal Society. Here are some highlights of their paper on the subject:
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/royal-society-on-peak-oil-and-how-much-oil-is-left/
“massive uranium reserves…a glut” — Technically, a glut refers to supply, which can fluctuate rapidly. But what about those reserves? No problem there, right?
http://energyskeptic.com/2017/nuclear-power/
SNIP
Energy experts warn that an acute shortage of uranium is going to hit the nuclear energy industry. Dr Yogi Goswami, co-director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of Florida warns that proven reserves of uranium will last less than 30 years. By 2050, all proven and undiscovered reserves of uranium will be over. Current nuclear plants consume around 67,000 tonnes of high-grade uranium per year. With present world uranium reserves of 5.5 million tons, we have enough to last last 42 years. If more nuclear plants are built, then we have less than 30 years left (Coumans).
Uranium production peaked in the 1980s but supplies continued to meet demand because weapons decommissioned after the Cold War were converted commercial fuel. Those sources are now drying up, and a new demand-driven peak may be on the horizon.
The only way we could extend our supplies of uranium is to build breeder reactors. But we don’t have any idea how to do that and we’ve been trying since the 1950s.
SNIP
Nuclear power depends on fossil fuels to exist (Ahmed 2017)
“One extensive study finds that the construction, mining, milling, transporting, refining, enrichment, waste reprocessing/disposal, fabrication, operation and decommissioning processes of nuclear power are heavily dependent on fossil fuels (Pearce 2008). This raises serious questions about the viability of nuclear power in about two decades time, when hydrocarbon resources are likely to be well past their production peaks.
Further, the study concludes that nuclear power is simply not efficient enough to replace fossil fuels, an endeavor which would require nuclear production to increase by 10.5% every year from 2010 to 2050-an “unsustainable prospect”. This large growth rate requires a “cannibalistic effect”, whereby nuclear energy itself must be used to supply the energy to construct future nuclear power plants. The upshot is that the books cannot be balanced as the tremendous amounts of energy necessary for mining and processing uranium ore, building and operating the power plant, and so on, cannot be offset by output in a high growth scenario. In particular, growth limits are set by the grade of uranium ore available-and high-grade uranium is predicted to become rapidly depleted in coming decades, leaving largely low-grade ore falling below 0.02% (Pearce 2008)”.
SNIP
This is a liquid transportation fuels crisis. The Achilles heel of civilization is our dependency on trucks of all kinds, which run on diesel fuel because diesel engines are far more powerful than steam, gasoline, electric or any other engine on earth (Vaclav Smil. 2010. Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines. MIT Press). Billions of trucks (and equipment) are required to keep the supply chains going that every person and business on earth depends on, as well as mining, agriculture, road / construction, logging trucks and so on) Since trucks can’t run on electricity, anything that generates electricity is not a solution, nor is it likely that the electric grid can ever be 100% renewable (read “When trucks stop running”, this can’t be explained in a sound-bite), or that we could replace billions of diesel engines in the short time left.
SNIP
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/energy-watch-group-peak-uranium-2020-2035/
Energy Watch Group. March 2013. Fossil and Nuclear Fuels – the Supply Outlook (172 pages)
Uranium production peaks for the same reasons as oil, coal, and natural gas: the depletion of easy and cheap to develop mines. EWG’s guess is peak will happen between 2020 and 2035.
SNIP
I don’t think that it is government interference in the system that is causing the problem. Coal, uranium, and oil are all depleting. All of them are having problems with prices not rising with the rising cost of extractions. Oil production seems to have peaked, and coal production is not far away from peaking.
Government interference has created the myth that renewables can substitute for other energy sources. Intermittent electricity sources can’t substitute for dispatchable electricity. At best, it could be greatly overbuilt, and only the part needed, used.
Even with this, I don’t think we could manage with an all-electric economy. We would have to use some of the electricity to make a liquid fuel that could be used for transport. We don’t have time to do all of the things researchers would like to do, however.
Thank you Maam.
Government are also creating levies and taxes and massive restrictions using environmental hobbling preventing or limiting the free market to invest in further exploration of the resource. As a matter of fact Mark Carney Eco Warrior in Chief of the UN is using coercion and punitive threats against any investors who support the convention fuels industry. It all has to be “Green and Clean” which Re is not by any means. Its politically motivated purely for the Financial and banking Cartel. That is what I was referring to as Governments are forced to comply or face dire punitive financial consequences. Protectionism in favour of the RE industry and UN-IRENA
Government is just another integral component of the self-organizing system, not an outside force that “interferes” in the system.
No it is not self organising but more like a self guzzling device of tax payer money. That is exactly where the UN want them and have got them….Except Trump, Bolsanaro and Lukashenko because they have seen through the fraud, all being attacked by the media hounds on behalf of the parasite class.
Every component of our self-organizing system requires energy and therefore money to function. The UN members are appointed by individual governments. The UN does their bidding, not the other way around. No matter who was running the governments or the corporations or anything else during the last 200 years, we would have ended up with a system very similar to the one we have now. If we could run the experiment over a hundred times, only the historical details would vary in each run, but the fundamental characteristics of the system would have come out essentially the same. Once you’re on the fossil fuel gravy train, the course of its future development is driven by a certain inescapable logic.
In theory, the world could have slowed it down 50 years ago and buffered the wind down as much as possible, but that would have required too many participants making sacrifices for benefits that would mostly accrue to a future generation. “Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!” Yeah, baby. BAU! Look out wall, here we come!
Thank you for another great article covering an important topic.
It leads to other interesting considerations. An example is “energy footprint of a population”.
Based on numbers from 2018
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Staaten_und_Territorien_nach_Bev%C3%B6lkerungsentwicklung
and 2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
(yes there is some “minor flaw” due to numbers being from different years) you can come up with
energy consumption (work per year) in Watt for different countries:
(1 W average = 8.76 kWh per year (365 × 24 Wh per year))
Afghanistan 4372.7
Bangladesh 46275.8
Germany 441315.7
India 1033000.3
United States 3128726.4
China 3352785.9
And there is some further skew in that comparison. Energy consumption of developing countries often include consumption to produce consumer goods for developed countries. The energy used to produce such goods is often not included in the budget of the developed countries importing these goods.
However, looking at the two “top dogs” in energy consumption, think about what will happen when its obvious that there is a limit to cheaply extractable energy resources. The economic war (e.g. fought with tariffs) is one of the possible scenarios, playing out today. There are more.
If a person want to look at the total energy consumption of the world, BP data says that China was the largest consumer in the world, with 24.3% of world energy consumption in 2019 (quite a lot of this used making goods for export). The US was second, consuming 16.2% of the world’s energy supply. The EU, in total, consumed 11.8% of the world’s energy supply. These three combined make up 52.3% of the world’s energy consumption.
The next highest seems to be India, with 5.8% and Russia with 5.1%.
Greetings from Finland after looong pause. Experienced My own Seneca Cliff of income, due losing My Job cos of Covid. Thanks Gail for the new Post. I have to disagree with population size 2050, some truely catastrophic should happen to reduce the population that steeply. I mean in 30years most of the world population would be practically dead before their time 🤔
Hopefully I am wrong. We have gotten used to medical care solving all problems, and heat for our homes. We can’t count on these things forever.
Hi Gail. Are you familiar with the work of Jack Alpert of the Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory? In a recent video presentation, Alpert makes the argument that 8 to 10 billion people will die in the next 80 years…by 2100. He argues that the sun can only support about 600 million hunter/gatherers, a group he calls sun machines. The rest of mankind is dependent upon crust extractions of fossil fuels and mineral mining for existence. He credits you in this video. The 9 minute video is interesting. Cheers.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnyweoke5Cc
Yes, I am familiar with the work of Jack Alpert. I have met him in person several times, and he emails me from time to time. He has been making videos similar to this for a number of years.
He sent a link to an early version of this video and asked something like, “Do you see things I should change?” I said that I didn’t really agree with his approach, but I didn’t see things I would change.
He said he had based his ideas (at least partly) on what I was saying, so he would credit me, regardless of whether this was my approach.
In Alpert’s proposed scenario, there would always be disgruntled people who fled into the uninhabited countryside even if they they had to take up a poorer existence. Eventually, the 50 million people still living modern lifestyles in their hydroelectrically fueled refuges would die off from the accumulation of mutational load, an untended consequence of generations of low childhood mortality. Also, dams do not remain viable forever either. Finally, the falling intelligence that results from giving potential mothers educational and career opportunities would eventually make the populations of these city-states too dumb and undisciplined to maintain their advanced mini-civilizations. It is just a matter of time which one would bring them down first.
Yes, the crux of going full bore over the seneca cliff, into overshoot and catastrophe, versus the Calhounian slow burn into oblivion of a technocrat “world government”.
It is about time to give up on the chauvinism of Mankind and pursue the logical consequence of it all. The Machine.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2271/4369/products/TW010AP-Phoenix_Rising_1024x1024.jpg
London Has Fallen | Retail, Hospitality & Entertainment Collapse!
This video has pretty much convinced me that London is dead. It also works as a very nice travelogue.
As Neil McCoy-Ward says in the intro, he took a walk around the empty West End in mid-October. This video will show you London like you’ve never seen it before. Businesses are simply collapsing, retail, hospitality, entertainment, it’s all disappearing at a rapid rate. The London we all remember and love, is disappearing and will never be the same again.
https://youtu.be/Dd2-VY6roL0
People like ‘Sanpo Stroll’ on Youtube give a very accurate idea of what all parts of London are like now, without any rhetoric.
Ironically, this is one of the best times to walk London’s streets and enjoy all the details of the architecture.
Although being unable to turn in to a nice old boozer for refreshment and a pie would be a bore.
Xabier, the best time to study the architecture of a city is when it is ruined. I learned that in Karnak, Mycenae, Tiryns, Troy, Knossos, Ephesus, Tenochtitlan, Uxmal, Machu Picchu, and many more. Perhaps in future people my actually visit New York, for the same reason.
It’s called “ruin porn”.
And that is what can happen while energy is still plentiful. Now that the Flynn Effect has stalled out and western IQ scores are dropping about a point per decade (and conscientiousness too, but that is harder to measure over time), I expect in about 6 generations that western civ in general will be about as orderly and well maintained as Detroit is today. BAU. baby!
heartbreaking
thanks for sharing the sadness of it all
It’s been years now that I’ve been bleating on about cities collapsing if the energy-input of its citizens is removed
Norman, many’s the time I’ve walked up the stairs at Oxford Circus Station only to find it next to impossible to get onto the pavement due to the dense crowds, mainly of tourists, that used to throng Soho and Mayfair. Seeing the crossroads almost deserted was quite shocking for Me. I agree with Xabier it’s a great time for viewing the architecture at leisure.
Some trivia: Back in the late 197os, I worked in the Post Office at Heddon St, just off Regent Street a few hundred yards from Oxford Circus. The place is probably best known to rock fans as the backdrop to the photo where the young David Bowie posed in 1972 outside the furrier company K.West for the cover of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
https://youtu.be/jlFdJdeUZgw
The album opens with the song “Five Years”, which as I’m sure all the old codgers here know begins with the lyric:
Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
Which seems to be about where a lot of us may be right now.
How’s that for artistic prescience?
One of my favourite David Bowie songs. Ziggy – one of the few records I ever bought. I have long-wondered when the ‘five years’ would arrive.
how long before grass starts growing in the cracks in the pavement
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahrám, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.”
London Calling!
November 5th, the first night of the latest lockdown, and thousands to tens of thousands of mostly unmasked naughty people on the streets without permission. There are a few Guy Fawkes masks but you’d expect that on Guy Fawkes Night. The police are trying their best to intimidate the peaceful street people but they are totally outnumbered and you can see their heart isn’t really in it.
Boris is going to have to get a lot meaner if he’s going to save us from ourselves.
https://youtu.be/rSAlLGwNhu4
It doesn’t look like citizens are happy with the Lockdown idea!
(Yes, I have changed my ‘handle’.)
Hi Gail, thanks for your new article. It disturbingly ‘dovetails’ with my other reading. As you know, I have been reading through Nietzsche’s later books, BGE, TAC, TOTI, EH and I have got to Zarathustra.
Zarathustra announces the ‘great contempt of mankind’ for itself and the coming ‘storm’ that will ravage mankind and reduce its numbers. The entire book is about that sort of thing, which frankly can be a bit depressing.
The ‘masses’ of today are, we might say, the ‘herds’ of the bourgeois states, its worker-consumers. We are the ‘children’ of the capitalist states with their profit, debt and growth based capitalist economies. The capitalist states need ever more workers and consumers to allow for the expansion of profit and debt-service and for the economy to survive. They ‘breed’ and incorporate us into their dissipative structures.
For Nietzsche, it is a ‘moral’ question, regarding the best sort of society and the sort of ‘castes’ that it entails. He likes to pose as the ‘immoralist’ but he is thoroughly a moralist, just with a different, ‘physiological’ moral system. He wanted to replace us all with a newly bred, smaller population that is adapted to castes – something closer to feudalism (well, to the Lawbook of Manu, in fact).
The ‘green’, XR and ‘birth strike’ folk also want to reduce our numbers, again for ‘moral reasons’, for the sort of society that is more compatible and adapted to the finite environment – though it would be a hard one to square that with the profit, growth and debt based capitalist economies.
Christianity also proposes the ‘great tribulation’, the ‘condemnation’ and numerical reduction of the masses of the ‘great cities of the merchants’, and the ‘fall of Babylon’. It proposes a moral-spiritual rationale for the replacement of the present dispensation with the ‘new heavens and new earth’.
In your analysis, we have a purely physical, energetic explanation of the coming ‘storm’. The indifference of nature toward us is itself a kind of analogous ‘contempt’. There is no ‘moral’ basis for the ‘cull’, just the simple ‘fact’ and the physical, energetic ‘reason’ of it. It is a purely ‘materialistic’ analysis, closer to Marx in that sense. Yet it can ‘interface’ with other ‘narratives’.
The solitary preacher Zarathustra may soon get the ‘wars’ and the destruction that he hoped for – to be joined by the other ‘horsemen’ of plague and famine. Be careful what you ‘wish’ for, Zarathustra. We may indeed wake up one day to find ourselves in a chapter of TSZ – with the XR sort of crowd allied with the bourgeois states – the new ‘ideological superstructure’ of contracting, imploding capitalism.
How ironic that the capitalist states themselves, the bourgeois, ‘mediocre’ societies that Nietzsche so despised, would accomplish what he never could. It was only ever a matter of time before the ‘balloon’ of bourgeois population expansion finally ‘popped’. Old parson Malthus may ‘laugh last’.
Anyway, thanks again Gail. It is a reminder to ‘enjoy’ BAU while we still can, and to be ‘glad’ of the sort of societies that we live in – wherever they may ultimately be headed.
Psalm cxviii:24. And thank you for quoting the real English Bible. Let me agree with you from the same document: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” Ecclesiastes iii:1
Another good verse!
Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, we do need to enjoy BAU while we have it, regardless of where things might be headed.
Figure 3. Estimate by Gail Tverberg of World Energy Consumption from 1820 to 2050. Amounts for earliest years based on estimates in Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects and BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy for the years 1965 to 2019. Energy consumption for 2020 is estimated to be 5% below that for 2019. Energy for years after 2020 is assumed to fall by 6.6% per year, so that the amount reaches a level similar to renewables only by 2050. Amounts shown include more use of local energy products (wood and animal dung) than BP includes.
This forecast of a 6.6% per year decline in energy consumption and its implications is something that the vast majority of people will not want to hear about. I mentioned the figure to Mrs Tim yesterday and told her it wasn’t the sort of thing that I could bring up in conversation with other people, especially younger people or those with children or grandchildren. Her reply was, “What about me! I don’t want to hear about it either. I just want to be able to live out the last part of my life without being affected by it.”
I told her not to worry because there are various things we can do to limit the impact on us personally, and because the full monty of the crisis may not strike our little corner of the world in the 20~25 years we’ve realistically got left. Just don’t keep partying like its 1999 and appreciate what you’ve got.
https://youtu.be/YR-h3BDlG0Q
What we need _is_ precisely austerity to put our priorities in order. Abolishing drudgery by the means of mechanization does not imply becoming an entitled cry baby.
George Carlin was a very perceptive person. Good video.
Tim> could you pls. brake down from your particular point that ~20-25yrs estimate. Is it based on assumption of critical goods availability for next ~5-10yrs + ~15-20yrs ideal longevity – durability of it.. ? Or something completely different on your mind (hard core triage forced upon 2.5-3rd world coming first)?
True story my grandparents have ~30yrs old fridge-freezer combo by Electrolux (.se) still working great, I doubt you can get anywhere near with today’s manuf goods be it even the expensive German brands but with more electronics nonsense inside and outsourced supplier chain all over the place..
Don’t tell Mrs Tim, but I don’t think we can guarantee a comfortable existence for the next 20 to 25 years here in Japan. I feel the need to paraphrase Admiral Ackbar who looked like a fish crossed with Winston Churchill in Star Wars and say “Our societies cannot repel energy production demand of that magnitude!” On the steep downslope, the socioeconomic infrastructure could well collapse suddenly or within months to years. We are energy and mineral starved and food self-sufficiency is currently about 40%. On the other hand, there are still a lot of smart people in the corporate sector who are good at surviving, negotiating and innovating. Japan still has a lot of electronics and automotive manufacturing and the people to keep this stuff running. And more nuclear power plants are starting up, allowing electricity prices to fall and reducing the need for fossil fuel imports. So if we’re lucky, we may be able to maintain Great Depression-like conditions for a decade or two, or else become part of the Neo-Third World
But much will depend on what happens around the world, and I don’t think it’s possible in principle to predict how things are going to unfold. Not a lot of people anticipated the COVID crisis, for instance. And other crises are sure to knock on our door unexpected. Then we have the ongoing battle between the Dragon and the Eagle. The twists and turns of that are going to reverberate around the world.
My crystal ball shows me that much of the Third World will carry on pretty much as usual. Their energy consumption is limited already, and their people are mostly poor and reliant on traditional safety nets provided by family, local community, etc. It may not be possible for the owners of these countries’ debts to squeeze much out of them.
China will also carry on regardless in their over-managed and super-efficient way. And Russia is sitting on a lot more reasonably-cheap-to-produce FF energy than they need domestically, so they should be OK.
North America and Western Europe are now looking distinctly dodgy. Several nations led by the UK and Greece— are approaching the edge of the precipice and in danger of staggering into the abyss. I am not sure whether the lockdowns are being deliberately aimed at precipitating economic collapse or at reducing social security commitments by eliminating as many old and sick people as possible, but that is going to be their end result. Are they shrinking the population in order to be able to run the post-COVID economy mostly on renewables?
The useful life of machinery and tools is one of Xabier’s fields of expertise. My own experience tells me that for home appliances and office equipment, the older it is the longer it is likely to last. The makers of are always finding new ways of making stuff flimsier and more prone to fall apart not long after the warranty period expires. Also, more expensive appliances can be a good investment as they are likely to operate better and last longer. So it may not be a good idea to throw older working machines away just because they are no longer fashionable. The replacements may work less well overall.
You mentioned your grandparents’ 30yrs old fridge-freezer combo. Maybe you should ask them to leave it to you in their will. The biggest downside of older equipment is that it is less energy efficient, which is not really a problem if electricity is available cheaply. The other downside is that if parts need to be replaced it might be difficult find replacements or repairmen willing to work on them. Also, you may have to take care not to lock yourself inside some of those really old fridges. But the appliances themselves are substantial and dependable.
There is an enormous amount of potentially useful older machinery and equipment that gets abandoned or disposed of in the First World. Last year a man from Sri Lanka visited my place in Kyoto in a light truck in search of junked machines he could ship back to his homeland. He is based in a town on the Sea of Japan coast about 200km away from me and has spent years scavenging the countryside for this sort of treasure. To my knowledge are also Russians, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Pakistanis engaged this game. Up to now, most Japanese small-scale farmers have preferred to own their own machinery rather than share or rent it, and they’ve been prepared to pay a lot of money to keep a set of “Thunderbirds” such as rice planters, harvesters and tractors that they only use once or twice a year. When people retire or die and nobody takes over on the farm, the family may try to dispose of the equipment, and these scavengers provide a convenient way of doing that.
I would think that if industrial production of farm equipment stopped today, there may be enough in Japan to keep the farming industry going for up to 50 years IF fuel continues to be available. Actually, there is still plenty of half-century-old equipment such as binders (which cut and bind rice prior to stacking) and straw cutters still in use among smallholders who grow rice. But in a nod toward energy conservation, I’ve also seen pedal powered threshing machines made exclusively from iron, steel and aluminum on sale in home centers.
Great post Tim. Thanks !
Thanks very much! I try to be entertaining as well as informative. My intuition tells me that we are going to need our individual and collective sense of humour if we are to have a fighting chance of getting through the coming decades.
I expect plenty of refurbishment centers to pop up. Bicycle shops and repairs is having a heyday. Retro stuff and electronics restoration is going nuts on youtube.
Conversion kits (crate motors) for FF burners seem to gaining traction.
We do need to appreciate what we have. We also have to appreciate that most people have a very hard time dealing with this information. This is why we don’t see it on the front page of the paper.
I think my grandparents would have said something like, “We lived a large part of our lives without cars or electricity or natural gas or running water, so we’ll adjust.”
So many people today are second generation or later urbanites that many cannot even dream of a self-sufficient existence. Of course, our cities are not designed for that world, but it will not mean instant collapse. In other parts of the world, modern cities have somehow muddled through the deprivations of wars waged in whole or in part on their own soil. The difference is that this “war” will continue for decades, until the world is unrecognizable.
What do you think k about peak oil demand predictions Gail?
Our problem is precisely “peak demand.” Too much of the world’s population is too poor to buy very many goods and services. This lack of affordability of finished goods and services is what causes demand for the commodities used to make those finished goods and services to drop.
The peak demand projections based on more efficient cars, or using electric cars, or fossil fuels being replaced by renewables are basically nonsense, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, I know, so why does media keep peddling the whole green stuff? I mean, like these people really think we’re gonna have modern civilization powered by wind and leaves? Why do governments keep drafting bullshit tyrannical laws aimed at outlawing the sale of ICE cars and undermining plastics?
Are they actually serious about going green? or are they just pandering to the ESG bubble?
It is hard to believe that the media keeps peddling the green story. What seems to have happened:
1. Starting about the early 1970s, many people became aware that we were likely to “run out” of oil, or perhaps of fossil fuels in general. In fact, Admiral Hyman Rickover started telling this story in 1957.
2. People assumed the problem would be high prices. They also assumed that these high prices would enable high-priced substitutes. High prices would also allow us to get a great deal of fossil fuels out of the ground, so we could build green devices and other things.
3. With all of this fossil fuel that seemed to be available, climate change also seemed to also be an upcoming problem. Climate change was a more distant, and somewhat less scary story than running out. There was some belief that tackling the climate change story would give a “two-fer.” If green devices could act as a substitute for fossil fuels, they might solve both the “running out” and the “climate change” problems at once.
4. Governments gave out grants to work on various aspects of climate change and “green” substitutes for fossil fuels. Universities were short of funding, so research tended to be centered around subjects for which there was outside funding. Professors got promoted based on how many research grants they were able to get. All of these studies were on narrow aspects of the overall picture. No one understood enough of the picture to figure out that what was being proposed could not possibly work. EROEI calculations were misleading, because they looked at too narrow a piece of energy needs.
5. Politicians liked having a “good news” story to tell. They could point to academic studies that seemed to support what they were saying. No on stopped to figure out that the story was pretty much nonsense. Everyone needed and wanted a “happily ever after” story, so that is all we got.
6. There are many deal killers for green energy. One is the fact that energy prices do not rise high enough to allow all of the manipulation and storage required for green energy. Another is the quantities of materials required. A third is the huge amount of pollution that would occur, in making and disposing of these devices. A fourth is the timing required for a changeover.
Did I just miss it? Was the word “nuclear’ used even once?
I have trouble with posts getting too long for readers. It is hard to cover all topics.
The World Nuclear Association says: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
Nuclear is a way of trying to extend the fossil fuel supply. Nuclear is one type of energy we have had problems with. People are afraid of it. There is a problem with spent fuel pools and with long-term storage of spent fuel. There is an issue of things going badly wrong, especially if we permanently lose grid electricity. There is also the issue of decommissioning all of the old nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants in countries with wind and solar are having problems with profitability because wind and solar are given the subsidy of “always going first.” This means that rates are often too low or negative for nuclear. Nuclear plants that are still operational are being closed down because of the preferences given wind and solar. The electricity generated by nuclear is much better quality than that generated by wind and solar, however. In rich countries, the cost of building nuclear power plants is now high, because everyone is afraid of it and demands extra safety measures. Costs of new nuclear power plants have tended to be lower in the countries where they are actually being built.
I don’t think that nuclear power is a magic bullet, but it might be possible to continue to use recently built nuclear power plants for some years. (Many older nuclear power plants are getting near the end of their lifetimes and it is difficult finding suitable replacements. France, especially, is running into this issue.)
It was around 2005 that I first became aware of the phenomenon known as ‘peak oil’. Time flies, and a few years later here we are. As a blast from the past, I link to one of those articles that scared the wits out of me back then:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/apr/21/oilandpetrol.news
‘Oil, Smoke and Mirrors (documentary)’. Another old classic. I advise Normals not to watch it, because it mentions ‘nine eleven’ in passing.
But these were unrelated events to peaky oily 2000s right?
/sarc off
Ah, the good old days. I made my family and friends watch “end of suburbia” (on DVD at the time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&pbjreload=101)
They all thought I was nuts, and we all moved on with our lives.
About time for a rerun when they have been cooking in the Covid and peak oil stew for some time?
Player error
The player is having trouble. We’ll have it back up and running as soon as possible.”
First saw that more than 12 hours ago! And why does a movie need a player on the client side anyway? Haven’t they heard of .mp4? Needless complexity and IT hubris strikes again.
Your browswer is basically an operating system these days.
Here is the vest peak oil documentary I have seen — “A Crude Awakening,” 2006, so it is pre-fracking, but it is still relevant. The time table has just been pushed back a while, for which I am grateful. Unfortunately, that means total oil will peak closer to coal, gas, and uranium.
“Pull the tower” (ie, building 7), said Silverstein. However, they could not “pull the tower” if they had to prepare it for demolition while the back side was a raging inferno. Even without a fire in progress, preparing a building for demolition requires time. So WHY did they prepare building seven for demolition BEFORE 9-11? Did they prepare the Twin Towers for demolition at the same time? And why doesn’t anyone in the MSM ever ask this question? (Answer: key decision makers in the MSM are paid CIA “assets” in both America and Europe, and probably some other countries.)
Excellent post, a good summary of where we have been re energy, and where we are going.
For future global energy production / consumption, I have found Ugo Bardi’s Seneca Cliff very convincing. Your figures 3 and 4 look very like similar to Ugo’s and seem like the most realistic scenario to me.
Incidentally, Tim Watkins just posted an article very similar to those in OFW, and indeed references you:
The narrative problem after peak oil
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/11/06/the-narrative-problem-after-peak-oil/
yes, that TW article is an excellent summary of how govs/CBs cannot remedy the present and future economic crises because these are energy crises.
Gail is referenced for her correct idea that energy resources will continue to be too low priced because of demand destruction.
Thanks! That is really an excellent article by Tim Watkins. I notice that at the end he says,
So, it looks like Tim Watkins is forecasting an eventually decent to an energy level close to the 1800 to 1820 level. (This was when the population level was close to 1 billion, worldwide.) I was hoping that at 2050, the world would not yet have descended all the way to that level. Whatever the energy situation is, it looks very bad.
Good article but I think the forecast drop is a little extreme. I expect the curve on the way down to mirror the curve on the way up. However neither forecast is very optimistic.
I’ve just stolen this quote from Dissident on Peak Oil which relates to your comment
“That is indeed the correct shape for the Hubbert curve. It cannot be a symmetrical Gaussian since demand does not symmetrically fall after peak. In fact, the demand growth skews the Gaussian by moving the future tail forward towards the peak. A symmetric Gaussian would require the extraction rates to fall off to match the historical increase in extraction from new discoveries. This is not happening anywhere. Thus we have a catastrophic decline after peak that is routinely ignored in peak oil discussions. The world will not experience a slow wind down lasting 100 years. It will see a crash lasting probably less than 20 years.”
While symmetry may seem elegant, it’s not how things usually play out.
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/09/dealing-with-collapse-seneca-strategy.html
Any system engineer worth is salt has at least a Plan B ready in his back pocket, if time permits, another Plan C … Plan Z.
However, the current paradigm seem to be running without a plan altogether, except for hope, which isn’t a plan at all, and as we all know by now is a fools errand. Hope is the worst possible strategy with no tactics.
“Hope is for suckers”
— Alan Watts
Yes, it’s our old friend the Seneca curve.
“Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid.”
—Lucius Anneus Seneca
Recently, lot of people are beginning to notice this with regard to their life savings.
Tim, if we look at Seneca’s own Rome, was he right? The start of the Roman Empire can be dated precisely: to Octavian’s victory at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.
Its peak is debatable, but I agree with Gibbon, that it occurred with Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 AD. Which gives us 220 years (there being no year zero).
And when did it meet the Cliff? More debatable, but if asked to stick a pin into the timeline, I would put it in 378 AD, the battle of Adrianople. Which gives us 198 years.
So perhaps Adam Smith had the right of it: “There is a lot of ruin in a nation”.
So it takes about 200 years for the corruption and genetic cruft to build up? Once people conveniently dispose the fundamenta of energy-economics shit goes south rather fast.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any vicious germanic tribes to kick our entitled rear ends, actually the Germans are as decadent and addicted to the delusion as the rest.
Supply lines to cities that support millions were not built overnight, but they can fail overnight. Complex systems are designed and built slowly, then fail all at once.
As Hannibal surmised, a city of almost a million can be taken down simply by breaking the aqueducts. Perhaps the only single point of failure in Roman engineering. Unlike modern engineering. From a recent episode of Air Crash Investigation: an aeroplane destroyed by the absence of a single “cotter pin”, a component about the size of a darning needle. Happily, only one fatality. https://generalaviationnews.com/2013/10/09/missing-cotter-pin-brings-down-luscombe/
A larger major European city can be taken down with such ease.
If the useless eaters gets too rowdy, boom, power outage.
If it does not help, no more food trucked in.
Now try to revolt cold, hungry and demotivated.
Yes, when the US blows a country back to the stone age it first takes out water, electric and sewage plants.
No need for kinetic warfare in the EU. Simply hack the infrastructure and create a “malfunction”. Stuxnet their asses.
https://i.imgur.com/Oo7kjoB.png
Hubbert assumed that the current economic system would be in place the whole time. The problem of depletion in one well affecting the economy would be offset by another new well taking its place.
Hubbert’s assumptions were correct, based on the time he was looking at. But when the system as a whole hits limits, the problem is keeping the whole system together adequately. The world economy is likely to fracture into many small pieces, without an adequate mix of resources in any of them. In this condition, it is hard to produce much of anything.
The crucial thing is to make resilience testable.
Make dry runs for about a month in each region of the networked system by disconnecting it from the supply chain/energy grid.
Wherever it breaks down, patch it up and move on to the next subnet. Call it the hardening process.
In a maximally resilient topology only information passes between the nodes. Due to the resources geographic localization, that is of course not possible.
If the output of a subnetwork is marginally productive while standing on “its own”, then it should be reconfigured, disbanded and ultimately abandoned.
The curve cannot be symmetrical. Sure, that looked possible when we expected conventional oil to decline 2 to 3% per year, but technology has improved and declining fields now fall 7 to 8% per year according to the IEA. Tight (fracked) oil and deep underwater fields decline even faster. For a while we may be able to drill more wells to offset of the declining ones, but these will be smaller deposits, the bigger ones having been tapped first. And there is second problem.
As the EROI falls, the net energy falls. When the oil industry started, if you extracted a barrel of oil, you got to use 99% of it. If the EROI falls to 10, you only get to use 90%. If it falls to 5, you will get to use only 80%. So net oil production will fall even faster than total oil production.
Maybe some of the input energy can come from non-oil sources, but that only gets us to other peaks that much faster. Many non-renewable peaks are forecast to cluster in the next few decades.
Keep in mind too that when global oil production falls to 1965 levels, we will not be living 1965 lifestyles for two reasons. One, the total population is much larger than in 1965 and, two, in 1965 only a small number of countries were using any non-trivial amounts of oil, whereas today virtually the whole world is heavily dependent on oil. So when the oil pie shrinks to its 1965 size, we will be dividing it among a LOT more consumers than we were in 1965.
And in 1965, a large part of the world was poorly nourished and living on the edge of famine. The Green Revolution, which relies heavily on fossil fuel inputs, enlarged the global food supply, so, once we got past the early 1970s, the world avoided mass famine and the population continued to grow.
A UN study concluded that far and away the biggest contributor to social unrest, revolution, and civil war was food scarcity. Democracy is a western invention that spread slowly and fitfully, and even some countries that hold elections have democracies that are total shams. (The US is close to being one of those countries this year!) When food becomes scarcer, I expect to see a rise in authoritarian governments.
“Total world population drops to 2.8 billion by 2050.”
Eek! I was hoping to live to about 2050.
“Dissipative structures are not permanent. For example, hurricanes and tornadoes are dissipative structures. Plants and animals are dissipative structures.”
Or as the Buddhists say, “all compounded phenomena are impermanent.”
“5. Getting rid of COVID inefficiencies and fearfulness […] might boost economies back up to the already somewhat depressed levels of early 2020.”
So…hooray?
https://apnews.com/article/pfizer-vaccine-effective-early-data-4f4ae2e3bad122d17742be22a2240ae8
okay, so their vaccine has tested out to be about 90% effective, which is higher than almost anyone expected.
hasn’t Pfizer been told that an effective vaccine will interfere with the Great Reset?
Don’t worry, the next viral strain is in production. Just gotta cook it into the perfect IC sizzle temperature to get those princesses out of the comfort zone.
Perhaps it’s a gradual layered process, this initial corona wave sets the stage and another bug is released later to attach-mingle on it as on some substrate or gate function.. Hence that’s when the real hard de-pop in xy% is about to commence.. ?
On related note, perhaps I came from limited data set, but so far I’ve seen alleged corona ICU beds – patients mostly/only on Chinese or Russian TV not on European or US channels..
Meaning, on some level it could be coordinated hoax in the sense all parties playing or make believe playing the same game but for some reason with these odd differences showing up..
My hunch is that it is likely a good idea to play along. Failing to do that might end in more hurt than neccessary down the line.
Scraping off the pointless extremities of the FF jobs program is a good idea. For example, dumb ass tourism, hotels and restaurants. Commuting to work, when it can with a slight efficiency reduction be performed from home. etc..
Basically LTG Scenario 3 lite. Yet.
It will take some time to build up the distributed infrastructure. The era of centralization is over. Lose some top-end efficiency and gain resiliency towards interruption and distaster. Well worth going distributed.
david… the CEO of Pfizer has just liquidated his entire hoard of company stock. Would he be doing that if he had a vaccine worth a trillion dollars? No: this is a classic “pump and dump”.
It’s more likely the R&D department informing him that this little bugger is a man made David, intended to cripple the Goliath IC.
Ah, how Tripitakaist, Biblical and Śrutical it is. Rather lovely when the delusions of infinite growth clash with the delusions of a green new deal.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/818Yz2DBO8L._AC_SX450_.jpg
Hi Gail
Above, you say “In Figure 3, I have added a rough estimate of the expected drop in future energy consumption that might occur if either (1) the beginning of peak fossil fuels is occurring about now because of continued low fossil fuel prices,….” And “In summary, the issue we are facing is that oil demand (and thus prices) were far too low for oil producers because of wage disparity before the COVID crisis arrived in March.”
In your model, would I be correct in saying you assuming some annual production decline rates for existing oil fields globally, say 3-6% noted by some studies, and no replacement to that production, because of oil prices lower than that required for commercial oil producers?
Any thoughts on whether the U.S. can nationalize its oil production and tax its citizens to fund such oil extraction/production? Is the EROI of fracked oil high enough to justify production under a nationalized system, or is/was fracking only possible because of central bank liquidity and lack of moral hazard for investors?
It seems the game of musical chairs for the world’s resources is about to get a little more intense.
Regards
Exactly my belief. “Affordability” of shale extraction doesn’t matter. EROI does. If the physics supports it, all you need to get it out of the ground is coercion/incentives/promises/lies.
yes, the simplistic physics is that one barrel of oil contains roughly the same energy as 4 years of human labour.
“Any thoughts on whether the U.S. can nationalize its oil production and tax its citizens to fund such oil extraction/production? Is the EROI of fracked oil high enough to justify production under a nationalized system…”
yes, even the higher cost fracked oil is “worth it” because, same answer as above, the energy content in one barrel (at say $100) is far more energy than 4 years of human labour.
so US nationalization would be a win/win by getting the energy and removing the barriers of price and profitability.
because it is such a good idea, it is doubtful that US politicians will ever implement it. 😉
I keep having a scene in my mind….it is an oil rig, and around it is a huge spoked wheel with hundreds of slaves pushing it round and round. The spiked wheel is connected to the drill stem, they are manually drilling a well.
Sounds like the sort of thing that would look great as a prop in Mad Max 7.
How about a wind turbine-powered drilling rig?
Well (excuse the pun) if it were a fracking process being implemented with slaves doing manual extraction work (AKA grunting), soon there may well be (… oh, I did it again)..a shortage of drinkable water in the area to keep the fracking units fracking.
Jesse, the Romans did exactly that, but with oxen. Lifting weights by rotating a capstan connected to a hoist. They even invented a gearing system that allowed the hoist to be lowered without turning the capstan around, so maximising the work of the oxen.
13th cathedrals and castles were built using human ‘hamster wheels’ for hoisting but that is no way to sustain a 21st century civilisation
But, Norman, there *is* no way to sustain a 21st century civilisation.
we’re gonna need a bigger hamster wheel
In order to maintain production, we need is a complete networked system that extracts oil and makes goods and services with these oil products. Somehow, enough funds from the networked system must get back to those extracting the oil to keep the process going. There must also be enough funds from the networked system going back to the government, so that it can keep order and can provide the services such as roads and schools. In some cases, governments may need to provide citizens food subsidies, so that the country can afford to import food from elsewhere to feed their populations. In areas of the US with shutdowns, governments may need to provide many unemployed people with funds to provide for their continued buying of food, clothing, rent, and everything else.
The part of this system that tends to fail early on is the government part. Unhappy citizens overthrow the government. Or international trade fails (perhaps because of financial problems), making it impossible to get replacement parts needed for oil extraction, processing, and making goods and services with the oil. A financial system failure may be instrumental in greatly reducing world trade.
It seems possible that in some parts of the world, including the US, some smaller versions of governments than we have today can, in fact, make a system work that will allow continuation of the use of fossil fuels in general, including oil. It seems like a lot of our current system would need to go away. Somehow, the system needs to offload a whole lot of not-very-productive people (including retirees). It needs to offload a lot of unnecessary functions (a lot of the financial system, in-person schools for children, most health care). Perhaps the change happens by “productive” states (red states) banding together, and unproductive states (blue states) ending up on their own, as they shut down to prevent COVID-19. In fact, states might need to split (Minnesota ex Minneapolis, for example). Europe acts like a giant blue-state area.
I am not really a fan of EROI as it is usually used. I think that the only EROI that makes a difference is the overall EROI of the entire fuel mix. This needs to be sufficiently high. Our big problem now is that the EROI of the entire fuel mix is too low for the economy as it is currently configured. The economy needs to offload some of its unproductive parts, if it is to be “efficient” enough to be able to use the fuel supplies that seem to be available.
Thank you, Gail. After much reflection, I agree with all you say. Mature economies create a lot of institutionalised waste, because while the productive work to sustain the system, the unproductive learn how to game the system. The US educational establishment seems to be preoccupied with producing unproductive gamers, and the cult of “scientific management” creates endless opportunities for them to prosper at others’ expense.
But the question that most troubles me is this: will the coming “long emergency” lead to their elimination, or rather give them even more opportunities to thrive by parasitism? The evolution of the “green revolution” causes me to be somewhat pessimistic.
@robert firth, Taylor’s scientific management has been a boon to mankind, raising the real wages of working men (because of productivity increases) without requiring additional energy inputs. It is one of the few innovations of the Fossil Fuel Age that will survive the demise of that age.
“There must be equal division of responsibility between the managers and the workers. The management should assume responsibility for the work for which it is better suited. For instance, management should decide the method of work, working conditions, time for completion of work, etc. instead of leaving these to the discretion of workers.
The management should be responsible for planning and organising the work, whereas the workers should be responsible for the execution of work as per instructions of management.”
The above is a classic definition of a totalitarian state. The managers decide everything; the workers merely obey. And since the managers are not even remotely “scientific”, but largely plutocrats, they hire a congeries of “experts” to do their scientific thinking for them, so reducing the workers even more to indentured servitude. I am happy to answer you with Taylor’s own words.
@Gail, I totally agree that it is the EROI of the total energy system that matters and not just any one compoenent. Even if liquid fuels fell below 1:1 and became a net energy sink, they could continue to be produced if the EROI of the total energy system remained sufficiently high and if energy from liquid fuels sold at a premium over other forms of energy. However, I don’t think the total EROI is yet low enough to explain our current economic problems. The US and global economies have difficulty growing these days primarily because total debt is too high and demographics in most of the major economies are also unfavorable for growth. These two problems would be noticeable dragging us down even if EROI was much higher. Our system requires a certain level of economic growth for people not to be miserable or at least discontented, but in the absence of breakthrough innovations that enhance productivity, growth requires permanent population growth and permanent debt growth.
Related to these factors, our money, which used to be a proxy for gold or silver, is today a proxy for debt. Very literally, all money today begins as debt, so if total debt were declining, the total money supply would be shrinking, creating deflation, which the system cannot bear because it is excessively indebted and needs to pay some of that debt down–which will make debt repayment even more difficult. John Law invented this system 300 years ago and it ended in disaster. In the 20th century, our economic geniuses decided to go back to it, thinking that they could manage it better. Sure, that’s the only problem with it, it just needs to be managed better. Those old fogies who tried it the first time just weren’t as smart as us. No need to worry that the whole concept might be intrinsically flawed. Nah, couldn’t be.
It is – as always – very interesting analysis. However, one thing does not look realistic to me.
Do you really expect a human population to drop to 2.8 bilion by 2050 (from current 7.8 billion, in just 30 years)? To me such change is so huge, that mentioning this should not be left without a longer explanation.
Reduction of 2/3 of population would mean a disaster exceeding anything that people living today can imagine. Could you please comment on that?
There are lots and lots of people who are aware of the fact that the world economy seems to be running up against limits. In fact, the 1972 book “The Limits to Growth” put together a number of modeling scenarios, looking at when cheap-to-extract resources would run out, among other problems, like too much pollution. Its base model indicated that the world would come to a problem of this type, right about now. The ideas were criticized at the time, but they also received awards.
Since then, there has been a huge amount of work done, trying to figure out ways around the problem. But most of the work is based on wishful thinking. If a person wants to get ahead, a person needs to come up with what seems like it might be a partial solution.
A friend of mine calls the problem one of “Uncomfortable Knowledge.” There are a huge number of people who are aware of the problem, but no one dares talk about the problem, except for a few bloggers. The media wants to tell only “happily ever after stories.” Academic textbooks don’t want to say much about the idea. Governments certainly cannot explain the problem.
A lot of work seems to go into models that would suggest we have the opposite problem. The climate models assume we can extract far more fossil fuels than we really can. The fact that so many people work on only tiny portions of the problem lead the overall problem to be hidden. Governments grants are given to prove that some tiny piece of the problem can be solved.
Economists have their models that say “running out always leads to high prices,” but they have not stopped to look at what happens in practice with energy shortfalls.
Thank you for all the replies, and clarification that this was not a mistake (since no further explanation was in the article). I am aware of the ‘Limits to Grow’, and the fact that we are in the overshoot zone right now – from many perspectives: dependency on the resources, ecological footprint, carbon footprint.
However, I wanted to highlight that point, because the scale of such sharp population decline dwarfs any other disaster that happened to humanity in the last centuries. Eg. WWII caused about 60 – 80 millions of deaths, during 7 years, if I remember correctly. Such scale of additional deaths even did not stop the population growth in that period, but it is one of the most tragic periods that people are aware of.
I can imagine that people would become very poor because of decline of energy supply and population would significantly drop as the result, but to me it is still difficult to imagine that it may happen so quickly. I rather expect degradation of living conditions due to lack of food and resources, but with slower population decline. I may be wrong of course. My hesitation comes from the attempt to imagine the scale of chaos and drama that would cause such a drop in the global population.
hi Zbiggy.
I can imagine a less probable and more awful scenario where the population crashes below 1.0 billion in the next few years.
it’s not hard to imagine.
and it makes 2.8 billion in 2050 look great by comparison.
Zbigniew> Simply, look at the predicament at hand from macro zoomed out perspective on large historical scale (say thousands of yrs). Similarly at certain thresholds large civilizations suddenly and quickly lost the complexity, depopulated, dispersed “into the wild”..
To paint it on today’s world with so many people and so much material stuff (and less biomass to return) around is not easy at all, our minds can’t compute it, it’s normal, don’t stress yourself.
It took just two years for the reindeer population on St Matthew Island to crash from 6000 to 42, which I think is a collapse of 99.3%. If indeed we fall off the Seneca Cliff, I give us about 200 years to achieve a similar result.
Island populations are a poor analogue for populations occupying on major land masses. Population will certainly fall a lot, but it is impossible to know how fast, because man is more adaptive than reindeer, and some countries or regions of the world will cope better than others for various reasons. All I can say is that even the rosiest scenarios look pretty dim. I think that is why the MSM and politicians don’t mention it publicly. Back in the 1970s, they would deal with the question publicly sometimes because they thought there were solutions. Maybe their solution now is to hop on a private jet and fly off to remote hideaway in New Zealand or Patagonia.
By 2050 it is going to be difficult if not impossible to grow crops in many parts of the world due to extreme heat.
Or extreme cold.
or an extreme shortage of fertilizers and powered farm machinery.
or the dreaded 2050 problem when all the clocks in all the microchips revert back to 1850?
David> draft animals and ground driven implements are good enough for quality civilization living standards, basically pre <<1900 technology. The problem remains there is not enough specialist trades / skilled people to revamp it reasonably quickly (both animals and lowtech). Or not possible at all in darker scenarios "all lost" when eventually people are dispersed – hunted down for calories..
Reminds of what happened to the Titanic. It couldn’t possibly sink, just because it was too bad an event to occur. At least, that is what everybody thought, until it did sink.
In fact, people celebrated by throwing bits of ice at each other, or (in first class) chilling their cocktails with iceberg. As documented in Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember”, later made into the only watchable movie about the Titanic.
Humans have overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth to support us, by a very wide margin. Overshoot, sooner or later, leads to a collapse in population. The greater the damage done to the environment by a species in overshoot, the greater the resulting collapse.
https://www.paypervids.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Population-limits-consequences-of-exceding-carrying-capaicty.jpg
At least this is the way we think of the situation.
Humans need cooked food. If they live outside of very warm areas, they need some heat to keep warm. They also need crops that they can store from summer to winter. It is the intermittency of food supply that kept humans as hunter-gatherers for many years.
Once human population grew above the level that could be supported by burned biomass, wind energy, energy from animals, and energy from the flow of water, (a population of about 1 billion), then humans were forced to use fossil fuels, plus whatever other modern devices could be added (hydroelectric and nuclear, in particular). These devices, as well as transmission lines, depended on fossil fuels.
At this point, not very many of us have the knowledge to live using only local resources. I expect some people in central Africa do, for example, and some people in India and Indonesia. But most of us would have a very difficult time putting together a complete food and water supply, plus fuel for fires and a way to start the fires, with only local resources.
The question is how much above this level that we could figure out, for the longer term.
With Joules being such a small unit, I find it easier to convert to kWh. For instance, 28 gigajoules = 7,777 kWh. Besides people are used to kWh because of their electricity bill.
The thing to remember is that governments and businesses are likely to get the majority of the 7,777kWh per person. Farmers and the chain of businesses that process and transport food to market it will need quite a bit of it. If there are schools, restaurants, stores, factories, and road paving, all of these things will take energy
Individuals cannot count on using much of this to heat and cool their homes, or for their transportation needs.
First, great conference with some real heavy weights!! Thank you to Chris and Adam at Peakprospertydotcom!
Gail, we’ve had this conversation before. We need to have some kind of shelter based on passive solar design, which means partially underground. Underground housing is the most energy efficient housing – and has been for centuries – where the indoor temp stays the same year round no matter what the outdoor temperature is. It’s not like living in a cave, either.
It’s on my list of personal preparations; I want to build a passive solar green house that can serve as emergency shelter in the Florida heat. We don’t suffer from cold, but the heat and humidity are terrible. If/when it gets done, I will share the photos with you.
I think we have to take the two track route; TPTB will continue to try to keep the economy going, hopefully by raising energy demand and the Mainstreeters will make the most of what we have to build resilience into our lives in case we don’t get another economic growth spurt.
This is my fourth business cycle now. I’ve been here before, and I’ve known this was coming – just not this bad this fast – and I never recovered back 50% from my 2007 gross revenues.
Personally, I’m trying to scale my energy needs way down with a “collapse now, avoid the rush” mentality.
In Florida you’re probably going to be underwater
But if all global systems are tottering at the same time, you probably don’t want to go digging up the earth (releasing carbon too) with expensive tools.
I have known Chris Martenson, Richard Heinberg, and Art Berman for over 10 years and have talked to them in person many times.
I wasn’t really part of the Peak Prosperity regular conference. I just helped with the video that was sent out to attendees and now is being shown in my website.
I would be concerned about sustainability solutions that depends on glass, like greenhouses. One a window breaks, you will need to substitute whatever might be available, I am afraid.
I’d agree with Lorraine that passive solar dwellings in combination with sheltered structures is that way to go in ideal world. Yes, one of the best human inventions – season extension greenhouse – sadly also prone to easy vandalism from a distance by primitive means.. In messy type of scenarios, most of them will be gone in short order.
There are other ways how to tweak and boost solar input or reflect that cleverly on the farm or garden site, but it’s not that powerful vs glass / plastic greenhouse. And again could be also demolished by “barbarians” in few hours if they storm the place..
Fear the humanoids around!
I’m hoping plexiglass will work better than regular glass. I’m also curious about the supply chains for various materials. I’m hoping that production of some uses that can be done without can be halted in favor of production of what’s more useful. For instance I set myself up to perpetually maintain 50 yards of dirt road near my home.. After it rains or snows, nearby ground is soft to dig up to cover the very earliest sign of road erosion…and passing cars compress the fill further. The asphalt you divert from roads like that can be used in building in cold places, and can be shaded with bamboo screens when it gets hot.
For now, you could use plastic rather than glass and switch to glass in the future when the population has crashed and things have stabilized. My theory about it is to build in redundancy wherever you can. Don’t let your survival on any one technology or supply source. Have more than one way to heat your home. Keep the electricity going while you can, but be able to live without it if you must. Have a car or truck, but be able to get by without it. “Fast” from electricity one week a year just to see how you function without it. Have two “get out of Dodge” plans and not just one.
Unless the grid goes down (a few ways that could happen) or there is a major war or thermonuclear attack, I don’t really see the cities falling into chaos all at once. Decay over a period of years or decades is more likely. Unfortunately, even the best plausible outcome looks dismal.
I’ve finally had an idea of my own. I’m not claiming it’s original, but at least I didn’t read about first!
Money, laws, the economy, and other fabrications of the human mind have one major purpose: To convince people to do things. Whether that’s grow food, make tea cosies, or pump oil out of the ground.
So the notion of something not being “affordable” doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, if extracting oil isn’t “affordable”, there are a myriad of ways to convince people to pump it: giving them more money (printing it if necessary), promises, volunteerism, bribery, trickery, force, coercion, violence.
The important thing is that it gets done, and belief on the part of the workers is what makes that happen. If one way stops working (ie. money), another thing on that list might work.
If its not affordable, you eventually run up against the laws of nature and everyone starves to death.
I have pondered this problem and come to the conclusion that the value of a resource is not necessarily equal to its market price. In the case of energy resources, their value is related to how much economic activity they can facilitate.
Raising energy prices for consumers in order to pay producers would tank the system as many consumers would be unable to pay higher prices and so demand would plummet and consequently energy production would fall.
However, if governments would tax the proceeds of economic activity facilitated by energy resources more heavily in order to subsidize producers, this might help keep the economic engine firing on all cylinders for a few years longer.
Call it a winners tax—90% of all the wealth of all individuals above the first billion dollars annually and 75% of all the wealth of all individuals above the first 100 million dollars. After all, who seriously needs more than 100 million? All they do is play Global Monopoly with other people’s lives. It would be worth it just to watch Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos wince.
The reason I do not seriously propose such a tax is that governments would undoubtedly spend the stash even more antisocially than the mega-rich do.
That tax will only be used to destroy competition of the plutocrats. Nothing more.
Problem is that it is not real wealth, it is just on paper. As soon as you actually tried to use that wealth, you would tank the entire system.
No matter the tax rates, governments never collect more then 20% tax anyway.
quote: “Raising energy prices for consumers in order to pay producers would tank the system as many consumers would be unable to pay higher prices and so demand would plummet and consequently energy production would fall.”
Do you realize that you have just described the standard operating cycle of the market for any commodity? This is not a prediction, it is an accurate description of the past and the present. But prices never get stuck at a permanently low or high level, and for very logical reasons.
You have probably seen this?
“our best estimate is that the net energy
33:33 per barrel available for the global
33:36 economy was about eight percent
33:38 and that in over the next few years it
33:42 will go down to zero percent
33:44 uh best estimate at the moment is that
33:46 actually the
33:47 per average barrel of sweet crude
33:51 uh we had the zero percent around 2022
33:56 but there are ways and means of
33:58 extending that so to be on the safe side
34:00 here on our diagram
34:02 we say that zero percent is definitely
34:05 around 2030 . . .
we
34:43 need net energy from oil and [if] it goes
34:46 down to zero
34:48 uh well we have collapsed not just
34:50 collapse of the oil industry
34:52 we have collapsed globally of the global
34:54 industrial civilization this is what we
34:56 are looking at at the moment . . . “
This “thermodynamic” smoke and mirrors was started years ago by “the Hills Group,” which may have been just one guy in a basement somewhere in the Dallas area I think. (Just kidding about the basement part, but not the rest.)
SEE THIS:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-03-01/debunking-hills-group-analysis-future-oil-industry/
AND THIS:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/on-the-thermodynamic-model-of-oil-extraction-by-the-hills-group/
Strangely enough, war is a great way to drive up demand, especially if there are a lot of unemployed young people and if war will give them jobs. Also, war seems to look like a legitimate reason to increase debt, especially if a neighbor has more energy resources than you do, and you have a good chance of getting the supply up.
Maybe war should have been on my list of ways to get oil prices up.
Okay, perhaps that idea could be conducted in Atlanta and Minnesota could see how it works from a distance.
Dennis L.
War is like herd immunity. It is not easy to find volunteers down the firing line.
When a lot of people cannot find a job, and there isn’t a good safety net of government programs, then working as a soldier starts to sound pretty good.
The military mostly does not do war. The whole point of it is to be scary and formidable.
Never show your hand to the opponent and be confusing as F while gaining an unfair business advantage using the compute and information path.
In an energy poor world, it is likely that a giant war machine like ours will have to be downsized. It uses a lot of energy, especially liquid fuels, even in peace time. Of course, we could return to infantry and cavalry, but men and horses have to be fed, so still a lot of energy. The US military is only partially used for national defense. Most of it exists to maintain a more or less peaceful world, to intimidate weaker powers, to keep shipping lanes open for world trade, and to keep the oil rich areas of the world safe and producing. The global trade system needs a global cop to operate without interruption, and the global cop needs the global trade system to operate without interruption.
Once money stop working, the rest of the items on your list is more or less slavery. We will probably have slavery again, but I doubt highly skilled workers would accept slavery terms to man an oil rig.
the business of work means converting one energy form into another
slavery is merely a means by which work is done without the intermediate problem of wages
that cannot work on an oil rig because you can’t reach the oil without machinery
Are trying to tell us we might reintroduce slavery? O wait, isn’t it what men did everywhere everytime on the planet before fossil fuel? How would one decide who would be slaves : would it be based on other beliefs : religion, racism, political doctrines?
People might volunteer to be slaves (or perhaps “interns”) if they could get food, a few clothes, and a place to sleep. The pay might be better than what most people can get.
Yes, this particular form of “(post)modern internships” you described also fills most of the check boxes for past feudal arrangement at least where (at times) the lord had some genuine interest in his dominion to prosper in perennial fashion..
Under the US 13th amendment, “involuntary servitude” is still a legal option for persons who have been convicted of a crime. Leasing many of those prisoners out as unpaid labor would save our extensive prison system a lot of money.
gbell12> Exactamundo, if the per capita spendable prosperity for common folk is dropping ~20% per decade (~linear run, perhaps more on exponential section of the path) – it’s obvious the system will have to snap at some threshold into another reality aka select another mode from the myriad of ways how to convince people “to obey” and provide work/utility for the system (owners) as you wrote.
However, as we witnessed in history these snapping / phase shift changes are usually pretty unpredictable in the near/mid term. So, there is no guarantee the system will settle easily in the new mode and run smoothly, especially after such a spectacular run of past centuries aka severe discontinuity ahead is very likely nowadays.
Right! A person expects severe discontinuity, unfortunately. It could come from the financial system or the world trade system. It already has come from the world’s response to COVID-19. The world economy needs to be getting more and more efficient. Putting into place all kinds of social distancing requirements is similar to putting into effect inefficiency requirements.
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Whew. Gail is back!
Never fear. It sometimes takes me a while. Also, problems with a new WordPress editor didn’t help either.
“Norway and Canada have both oil and gas supplies, besides being producers of hydroelectricity. With abundant fuel supplies and a cold climate, both countries use a great deal of energy relative to the size of their population.”
My name is Jarle and I come from Norway, a country so spoiled that we heat our houses with electricity …
The people who want the economy to be 100% renewables think that we will all heat our homes with electricity, perhaps using heat pumps. I sure hope that they don’t think we will use solar electricity to operate those heat pumps in the winter, however. Norway could never heat its homes with solar electricity in the winter.
Norway heats their houses with water. Yes, that also involves rather large dams and turbines down the flow path of the water droplets and melting snow flakes.
The FF production is energy intensive, I guess that is why the energy consumption per capita is rather large in Norway.
Norwegians are so obscenely rich that perhaps significant (%%) part of their population can afford very large addon house battery storage, say on the order of 200-500kWh capacity (~3-6x cars equivalent), so they could tap into it in case of malfunctioning or reduced output (lack of spare parts/maintenance) of their hydroelectric system in future uncertain winters. However, as “jolly good consumers” they blown much of the money of different things from frivolous consumerism to soon to be vanishing global fin investments.. Also the windy conditions allow for smaller scale (metal only) wind generators, slowly charging the bank.
/wild theories off
the Swiss, a people one would have thought to be sensible and level headed in matters of finance, have supplied us with the answer (not the solution) to the problem.
put to a referendum, the Swiss were asked if they wished to vote themselves a minimum wage of 4000 eur a month
surprise surprise—they did
and surprise surprise, they now find that the price of everything has risen pro rata to pay higher wages to everybody.
It is a staggering revelation to find that the Swiss (like most people) are convinced they live in a money based economic system, (and can just vote themselves more of it) when in fact we live in an energy based economic system.
The Swiss are about to find they cannot print money to run their economic system
Norman, wasn’t that just Geneva rather than all of Switzerland?
could be
i confess i didnt check it through thoroughly
if thats the case it would just act as an economic magnet
I expect that they find that outsiders find their goods more expensive as well, now. The printing money idea seems like it would work, but it doesn’t really.
I just bought some treated lumber at Home Depot. WOW! The prices are 40-60% higher than around a year ago it seems. A sheet of plywood for $45-$55. Pretty soon they will be too expensive to buy. If you need it, get it before it becomes unobtainium.
Borrowing money is easy and cheap. People who are well off find it hard to go on distant vacations. They don’t need to spend money on commuting or fancy clothes. They choose to add on to their homes or buy new homes, since they now need a dedicated home office. But there is only so much lumber available. (There may be bottlenecks here as well, related to different tax levels in the US and Canada for lumber growers. Also, US tariffs, in an attempt to even out the tax differences.)
I do a lot of experiments around building. I think less lumber can be used if it’s used mostly for framing, with other less demanding materials used for wall panelling. Particle board that uses remnants of wood would be a possible candidate for cheaper, denser and less environmentally destructive. Industrial production of building materials (and their supply chains) have to be synchronized with the environmental and building communities.
It would seem that small communities need to form some kind of alliance (if possible) with building supply stores. Latex paint is a great adhesive, and mismatched paint is often discarded. Builders and home improvers discard paint in great amounts, and all this could be useful if systematically distributed. But we have to pay something to the distributers too.
distributors
Figures 3, 4, and 5 are frightening.
I agree. This is why you don’t see much of them in Main Street Media or in text books.
You do see images showing only the rising use of fuels of all kinds in text books, however. I know, because I keep getting requests to use my images for this purpose.
In view of the above article, what skills should we be teaching the young?
Gender studies or danger studies?
Computing in the cloud or commuting by foot
Politics or self defence
Budgeting skills or gardening skills
Interior design or permaculture design.
We are going to hit the energy descent cliff just like the herd that we are.
Brace for impact.
We might teach the young to be ‘As tough as leather, as hard as steel, and as fast as a rat’?
I still harbour hopes (almost certainly in vain) that my two grandsons will be of the right material to join an elite regiment where, in the company of like minded individuals, they will learn to, shall we say, deal with unfriendly elements quickly and efficiently if it should prove necessary.
Those skills have always and will always be in demand. Apart from that I’m struggling for any other suggestion.
Sir John Hawkwood (1323 to 1394) had the same idea. He became one of the most famous mercenaries of his time, His victory in the Battle of Castagnaro was much celebrated.
I think I would look at the history of what early people did in the area where you live to feed and support themselves.
There is a problem with “solutions” put together by sustainability people, because they tend to assume the existence of the current economy. The assumption is that we simply will need to use less fossil fuels, because they are high priced. Or they are looking for efficient ways of doing things locally, again using our current systems. Maybe for the near term, these sort of make sense because we will continue to have solar panels and batteries, hoses, tires for vehicles, and all kinds of things that we have come to expect.
The big issues in the past have been:
(1) Having an organized storage system for grains, so that a temporary shortfall in grain production is not a huge problem.
(2) Having a way of doing all of the processing and cooking necessary for grains.
(3) Protection against bandits and others who who want to take away what you have.
If (1) and (2) are not available, then root vegetables need to be the primary basis for calories. In cold climates, there needs to be a way to store these root vegetables so that they don’t freeze.
There is also the issue that “It takes a village.” You have to have backup. Not every person can do everything. Even hunter-gatherers seem to have specialized in something. Historically, these groups have been organized along religious lines. It doesn’t really matter what the religion believes. It is more that a cohesive group is needed who together can fight off invaders. The group needs to follow the leader’s orders.
Gail
we were concerned that you had become a dissipated structure
Fortunately, no.
Gail, just a brief evening comment on your “musical chairs” analogy. There seem to me to be three ways out of this predicament. (1) Bring in more chairs. But that, of course, is what our energy decline makes infeasible, unless we can find ways to make less energy do more work. Public transport? Community level heating and cooling, instead of equipping individual homes? These are perhaps scientifically feasible solutions, but it seems politically impossible.
(2) Fewer players? That discussion is absolutely taboo, and anyway it would not work, because it would fall most heavily on the poorest energy consumers, and so do the most harm for the least benefit.
(3) Downscale. Replace the chairs with three legged stools, and we can accommodate more players at the same cost. Perhaps feasible in a small, cohesive economy, but not globally. The current chair owners will (metaphorically) cut off the legs of the lower orders, so as to preserve their dominance.
To let my pessimism come to the fore, it again seems that any solution has one ineluctable prerequisite: the collapse of the global economy and the removal from power of the elite who currently control it. Thank you for listening
Robert,
Assume it is a self organizing system, what are likely scenarios in various locations?
It doesn’t seem possible most of us can determine our own fate. A guess is the truly wealthy ride the waves better than most. Bill Gates began with what was basically Dartmouth Basic, he did not invent it.
Central heating systems were the norm in 1950’s central La Crosse, Wi, the issue came when the pipes under the streets corroded and leaked, a fireman was killed when he fell into a sink hole and was scalded to death. Natural gas came along at that time and “city” heat was history – it was actually coal heat.
Dennis L.
I heard that someone in Uganda is going back to growing cassava in the forest, as their primary food supply. I expect that people in warm parts of the world will have an advantage in being able to come up with year around food solutions, for at least a few people. Family knowledge of how to do this is close at hand.
Yes, we will absolutely have to transition from globalism to localism. A pity we were unwilling to do this voluntarily in an orderly fashion. The elites can obstruct tariffs, but they cannot obstruct rising transport fuels costs.
Nice to hear from you again, Gail. I was already afraid that you might have been arrested by the Thought Police.
Fortunately, not. I am not always very efficient at getting a new post prepared.
It’s just good to know that you are well, Gail. Thank you for the post!
Fortunately, my health tends to be very good. Part of my inefficiency comes from spending quite a bit of time walking and also cooking food at home for my family, so I know what is in it. The first idea I have for a post doesn’t necessarily work out as well as planned, either.
Nice to see you back, Gail.
Re conflict:
“The global riot control system market grew at a CAGR of around 6% during 2014-2019 [oil prices plunged in 2014]:
“Riot control systems consist of various agents, such as irritants, lacrimators and tear gases, for controlling, dispersing or arresting the individuals involved in protests and riots…
“The market is primarily driven by increasing instances of communal violence and protests across the globe.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201106005195/en/Global-Riot-Control-System-Market-Report-2020-2025-Focus-on-Irritants-Lacrimators-and-Tear-Gases—ResearchAndMarkets.com
Riot control sounds like a business to invest in.
Another business I suspect people around me are investing in is fixing up houses to rent them out as AirBnB houses. The Center for Disease Control says that staying in one of these houses is better than staying in a hotel, from the point of view of not catching COVID.
I expect that the investors are getting low interest loans. If it doesn’t work out, it would be the lender who is stuck with the big loan on the property.
The Amish are going to make a mint in the buggy building business.
Back at last! I missed your blog so much, I am fining you USD 8000 for loss of pleasure, Gail. 🙁