They aren't wrong. We have known about this since our own peak in the 1970s. Of course, by end of the world, we don't mean any sort of actual end, maybe just the end of the USA, but the people will survive, albeit at a lower level of consumption.
Apocalypse Soon?
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They aren't wrong. We have known about this since our own peak in the 1970s. Of course, by end of the world, we don't mean any sort of actual end, maybe just the end of the USA, but the people will survive, albeit at a lower level of consumption.
I'm not disagreeing with peak oil, just the end of the world part. We have already hit the peak of cheap oil; we will never again see $20 a barrel oil. Prices will continue to rise until other alternatives are cheaper. It will be annoying, but hardly the apocalypse that we are hearing about.
It could be bad though, during the transition. Many of our institutions will collapse. It won't be Mad Max, but it might be rather miserable.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Downsizing IS the elimination of waste and excess.
Slavery to the Romans was like oil to our society...it was a cheap source of energy.
Instead of drilling for it the Romans conquered neighbouring tribes and secured prisoners of war as slaves.
When they started losing these wars the supply of cheap energy slowly dried up, and Roman families downsized into smaller digs, spent less money on imported silks, jewellery, marble statuary and lavish orgies.
They didnt die off...they spread out.
I very much doubt that. I remember when analysts were talking about peak oil in the 1980's, they were predicting economic armageddon at least when oil hit $80 per barrel. But during the year that oil was over $100 a barrel, we seemed to do OK.
The pain of the transition will have to do with how fast it happens. If it happens over 25 years it won't be very painful; we will transition to natural gas, coal based oil, biofuels etc for transportation gradually as people weigh the economic benefits of oil vs alternatives. If it happens over 5 years it will be pretty catastrophic. But given that the US is now rapidly increasing oil production - and given that a host of new sources are coming on line all over the world - I am leaning towards the longer of the two timelines.
Kunstler and Orlov are late comers to peak oil. The people who saw it first, like M. King Hubbert and Hyman Rickover, understood very well why peak oil was a very big deal. There is obviously no real solution. This is so disturbing to most people that Groupthink interferes with their ability to see the dilemma accurately. The same thing happened with global warming. The original scientists who saw that were more alarmed than the 2500 scientists that make up the UN's IPCC. They release a forecast just in time to be wrong (optimistically) when new data is released. They then make revisions just in time to be proven wrong by the data again. Over and over, since their inception. Groupthink is very powerful. No one will even look at the data I am trying to present, and instead everyone wants to argue from their preconceived optimistic opinions.
Did you read the David Price paper? It makes a very sound and logical case that a rapid collapse and die off are ultimately inevitable. It is only a question of timing.
I think people are afraid to even look at it.
---Futilitist
Kunstler calls it the "psychology of previous investment". We have such a stake in keeping things as they are that we refuse to confront any new reality.
Oil did not hit $100 a barrel until 2008. Then we had the financial crisis. We will never recover.
Your leaning is not going to have any effect on the timeline.
After 2015, we will cross over into permanent depletion. That means about a 4-8 percent shortfall every year from then on. That is up to 2X as bad as the first oil shock in the 1970's, over and over again, every year. Hypothetically, gasoline will be $12-$24 a gallon the first year, and $24-$48 a gallon the next, except that the economy will completely collapse before that can happen. Alternatives are not capable of replacing oil, and even if they were, we have run out of time to react.
I'll bet you haven't read the David Price paper yet. Why not? Are you scarred?
---Futilitist
The world population is orders of magnitude higher than it was at the time of the Roman collapse. We don't have the option to spread out. This line of comparison is completely invalid. Why didn't the Easter Islanders spread out?
---Futilitist
elte
Valued Senior Member
The world population is orders of magnitude higher than it was at the time of the Roman collapse. We don't have the option to spread out. This line of comparison is completely invalid. Why didn't the Easter Islanders spread out?
---Futilitist
Today, I had a vision of the panic leading to a scenario in which the masses rampage into the countryside, stripping the environment of practically all life. One could call it a daydream nightmare.
It would be good if the world would wake up from it's wasteful slumber. Hypothetically, what Carcano says could happen: we could collectively get reasonable and focus resources drastically. Maybe a world-Gandhi will save us in that regard, though it doesn't look likely. The Dali Lama would probably do it if he could.
As I recall, the world had a good chance of reform with Jimmy Carter's call for conservation. If civilization had changed course then, the spectre of severe decline might not be haunting us now.
And yet we are recovering now. Oil production is increasing and the economy is improving. That must be pretty inconvenient for you.
Hmm. This was originally around 1990. Then 1995. Then 2010 for quite some time. Now you've pushed it up to 2015. How far will you push it back when 2015 rolls around and nothing much changes? 2037 has a nice ring to it.
I have read it. (But you've been wrong on almost everything else, so no need to change your mind.)
Good. So, what do you think of it? Is collapse inevitable? Am I at least right on that? Or do you disagree? Your response is cryptic.
---Futilitist
There was not much chance that we could have ever done what Jimmy Carter wanted. There is absolutely no chance we could do it now.
---Futilitist
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
You say the line of comparison is completely invalid...and then you bring up Easter Island?
You say the line of comparison is completely invalid...and then you bring up Easter Island?
I think it is a better example. Presumably the Easter Islanders had a chance to become "sane" and avoid collapse, but they failed. Why didn't they become "sane"?
Here is why Easter Island is a better example for comparison to our situation:
1. The Romans did not face a severe collapse and die off. They had a relatively slow decline.
2. There is no evidence that they became "sane" and thus avoided collapse. Instead they adapted quite naturally to decline.
3. The Easter Islanders faced an actual collapse and die off. The evidence for that is that they did, in fact, collapse and die off.
4. They failed to become "sane" and thus did not avoid their fate.
5. We are more similar to the Easter Islanders in that we face an actual collapse. We similarly will not become "sane". We similarly will not avoid collapse and die off.
---Futilitist
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Your scholarship is a little lacking. Even a quick reading of the Wikipedia article on Rapa Nui (the island's traditional name which is still in use) would correct some of your inaccuracies.
While it's true that the Polynesian settlers were extremely poor stewards of their homeland (their worst act was the ignorant and innocent introduction of rats upon first landing, which eventually destroyed the forest, making it impossible for them to build fishing boats and drastically reducing the protein in their diet), it did not collapse and they did not die off. There were still several thousand of them on the small island when it was discovered by the Europeans in the 1700s, and they had a meager but adequate farming economy. It was the Europeans who nearly destroyed their community in their usual ways both innocent (introducing tuberculosis) and deliberate (seizing slaves). The population was reduced to 111 and they lost their connection to their ancestral culture.
Yet they survived. In the 1960s there was a stable population of Rapanui living on one corner of the island (now part of Chile) while the rest was a commercial sheep farm, originally purchased legally (and perhaps even more-or-less fairly) from the natives who no longer needed so much land to live on.
Today the Rapanui people still exist and the post-Pinochet Chilean government is more sensitive to their unique status. The descendants of their ancestors on the Gambier and/or Marquesas Islands can help them restore the link to their past.
Comparison of Rapanui to global civilization is tenuous, and difficult to justify as more than an ominous metaphor.
More ominous than an metaphor...
The population of Easter Island is thought to have collapsed from 15,000 down to 2,000-3,000 in less than 100 years. That is a die off.
Here is something more ominous than a metaphor...
http://dieoff.org/page137.htm
What do you think of the ominous reality? The eventual collapse of industrial civilization is inevitable. Why, in your view, is this logical conclusion incorrect.
---Futilitist
The population of Easter Island is thought to have collapsed from 15,000 down to 2,000-3,000 in less than 100 years. That is a die off.
Here is something more ominous than a metaphor...
http://dieoff.org/page137.htm
THE POPULATION EXPLOSION
The cost of energy limited the growth of technology until fossil fuels came into use, a little less than three hundred years ago. Fossil fuels contain so much energy that they provide a remarkable return on investment even when used inefficiently. When coal is burned to drive dynamos, for example, only 35% of its energy ultimately becomes electricity (Ross & Steinmeyer, 1990, p. 89). Nevertheless, an amount of electricity equal to the energy used by a person who works all day, burning up 1,000 calories worth of food, can be bought for less than ten cents (Loftness, 1984, p. 2). 3
The abundant, cheap energy provided by fossil fuels has made it possible for humans to exploit a staggering variety of resources, effectively expanding their resource base. In particular, the development of mechanized agriculture has allowed relatively few farmers to work vast tracts of land, producing an abundance of food and making possible a wild growth of population.
All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up. In wine making, for example, a population of yeast cells in freshly-pressed grape juice grows exponentially until nutrients are exhausted-or waste products become toxic (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Growth of yeast in a 10% sugar solution (After Dieter, 1962:45). The fall of the curve is slowed by cytolysis, which recycles nutrients from dead cells.
An example featuring mammals is provided by the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, in the Bering Sea (Klein, 1968). This island had a mat of lichens more than four inches deep, but no reindeer until 1944, when a herd of 29 was introduced. By 1957 the population had increased to 1,350; and by 1963 it was 6,000. But the lichens were gone, and the next winter the herd died off. Come spring, only 41 females and one apparently dysfunctional male were left alive (Figure 2). 4
Figure 2. Growth of reindeer herd introduced to St. Matthew Island, Alaska (After Klein, 1968:352).
The use of extrasomatic energy, and especially energy from fossil fuels, has made it possible for humans to exploit a wealth of resources that accumulated before they evolved. This has resulted in population growth typical of introduced species (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Growth of worldwide human population (Adapted from Corson, 1990:25).
Around 8,000 BC, world population was something like five million. By the time of Christ, it was 200 to 300 million. By 1650, it was 500 million, and by 1800 it was one billion. The population of the world reached two billion by 1930. By the beginning of the '60s it was three billion; in 1975 it was four billion; and after only eleven more years it was five billion (McEvedy & Jones, 1978; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1990, pp. 52-55). This cannot go on forever; collapse is inevitable. The only question is when.
What do you think of the ominous reality? The eventual collapse of industrial civilization is inevitable. Why, in your view, is this logical conclusion incorrect.
---Futilitist
This thread has already received 25,426 views in only 12 days. But for some reason, no one but me has made a comment in the last 3 days. This seems strange. What's going on?
---Futilitist
---Futilitist
This thread has already received 25,426 views in only 12 days. But for some reason, no one but me has made a comment in the last 3 days. This seems strange. What's going on?
---Futilitist
The thread seems to have run its course. Don't bump it for the sake of bumping it.
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