I'm not OCD by a long shot, but I do sweat details where they matter to me.  And one of those details is that carrying capacity is not a fixed quantity.  It can go down, and it can also go up.

This has been established already.  Consider the Amazon societies which created terra preta.  This amendment turned easily-leached tropical soils which rapidly become sterile after a few cycles of annual cropping into nutrient-holding soils which remain fertile year after year.  These greatly increased the carrying capacity of those lands.

Could we do the same, in that way and others?  It seems likely.  We have the benefit of broad historical knowledge, depth of scientific analysis and technological expertise to do many things.  We can already build zero-energy homes which slash the non-food footprint of a family to a fraction of an acre.  The question is less "can we?" than "will we?"

Group solidarity is also of extreme survival value to the individual.

You basically have to be a sociopath to begin a discussion about rocking the boat.

Ah, evolutionary psychology. Always full of reasonable hypotheses - but also notoriously poor in evidence.

In my understanding of the evolution of the human species, the "leadership" you talk about is a prominent feature only of large civilizations. Smaller tribal cultures, where humans have spent the majority of their evolutionary existence, did not have the same kind of "leaders" that we do today.

Mythology on the tribal level could not be handed down from up on high, because there was no one in a small group that could maintain the position of being up on high against the will of the entire group. The beliefs and understandings would be arrived at by the group as a whole, in order to maintain group cohesion and survivability.

Dissidents would have been a threat to that leadership, but those dissidents were also necessary to the survival of the group in other ways in terms of skills and knowedge, so dissidents must be dealt with in such a way that maintains the cohesion of the group. Which would mean that even dissidents played a part in shaping group mythology.

I think people go into denial when facing a threat because the threat is a challenge not just to one idea or belief, but a threat to a whole system of ideas and beliefs upon which a way of life is founded, and a threat to emotional experiences attached to those beliefs.

Which goes a long way to explain my drift from cornucopian towards a more doomer outlook. It's not that there arn't a bunch of technical solutions that collectively would offset a 4% annual decline in oil, it's not that humans arn't sufficiently ingenious to come up with solutions.

We, collectively, can't save our collective souls, not because we can't but because we won't - so therefore we can't. Is there any real difference, between "can't do" and a "won't do" that can't be changed?

However, I think it's utterly unfair to talk about sink into hopeless doomerism. Because, while I used to share exactly that perspective, with an element of doomerism has come a really strong sense of empowerment, a realisation that there ARE things *I* can do, changes *I* can effect - and I find I am actually much more hopeful now than I was before - just expecting society to choose a different path. I also believe I'm being more realistic, but then everyone says that of themselves, so I'm not sure it means much.

--
Jaymax (cornucomer-doomopian)

Sterling said:

Whenever you say anything positive about nuclear, there are several people who try to shout you down with insults (not having the facts with them)... It's just harder when we turn to solutions. Many people just sink into this hopeless doomerism. And there are a lot of these environmental and growth orthodoxies that people have trouble subjecting to critical analysis.

I agree with Sterling's comment. It's difficult to get people to not simply bark back pre-canned orthodox responses. Particularly if people are pursuing hidden agendas. Peak Oil demands a meaningful response. Laying on the floor with a paper bag over one's head, moaning about impending doom is not a meaningful response.

I think nuclear energy coupled with coal based synthetic petroleum is a meaningful short term response to Peak Oil. Eventually biotech will have to replace anything that is coal based since coal is close to peaking. What concerns me is this approach probably requires 10-20 years to ramp up to full production. We should have been converting over to nuclear energy and synthetic petroleum when President Carter first proposed it. Now the economic pain will be much greater and we'll have to fight some unnecessary wars in the Middle East that we could have avoided.

Some have even said that the amount of uranium exploration is more equivalent to that which had been put into oil exploration as of the 1900s. --your link

That's before there were any automobiles. I calculated in a post a few weeks ago that potential Uranium bearing volumes of the Earth's crust have received about 1/120,000 the intensity of exploration that have potential oil bearing volumes of the crust. What does this suggest about how much of the resource we should have identified by this point? Those phoney analyses that the anti nukes use all the time suggest that only about 65% of all the Uranium in the accessible crust has not been identified. Is that plausible? Of course not. With the amount of exploration that has been done, it is impossible the we have identifed even a small fraction of 1% of the Uranium the exists in the top three kilometers of the entire land surface of the world. We have to use the general distribution of different rocks and their average Uranium content as cited in my link down thread to get any idea how much resource is out there.

Can you do better than quoting an obviously biased source? Pretending that the URL didn't make the website's bias obvious, their header picture is a collage of the American flag, a bald eagle, and the statue of liberty. That kind of intended appeal to patriots (in the worst sense of the word) has to make one's spider-senses tingle.

Not that I'm saying you are wrong, but that website won't help your case. At least, not here.

It is certainly false to say that an intentionally misleading website has been peer reviewed.

Chris

Linear thinking got us into this mess, and linear thinking will lead us straight off the cliff into oblivion. Linear thinking like "Market forces and technology will create a bridge, get us jet-packs, build a huge pillow at the bottom of the chasm, provide us with new bodies immune to damage and pain, or rearrange the laws of gravity."

Because of receding horizons the price point for breeder reactors, and the price point for mining lower percentage uranium deposits, will never be economical. This is not doom, this is reality.

" ... effectively become infinite ... " The only way out of our energy problems is powering the world on human ignorance and stupidity, the only truly infinite sources of energy.

Can't make him think, or can't make him think for himself?

"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein