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317 comments on DrumBeat: May 25, 2008
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317 comments on DrumBeat: May 25, 2008
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Robert - The idea of survivalism is no new passion. My best friend in High School was Mormon and they have been encouraged by the church to prepare for bad times ahead going back decades. He still works a regular job (Security Mgr. for a Casino)but from what I understand they are beginning now to prepare for the worst. Globilization cannot survive in it's present form with $10.00 gas.
Perhaps people should be frightened. No?
Rumor you can dispel, maybe.
Safeway Supermarket came out of Mormon stockpiling.
Far out, PeakOil.com picked up by the AP. Maybe that's why the site's down at the moment...
We're much leaner now on survivalists than a couple years ago. Surprising we never had a form your own militia thread.
What bothered you about the story, Robert? In lean times you'll get a segment of the populace locking and loading, sure, but the story also talks about people learning how to make soap and herbal medicines.
Hmm, what's this, "peakoil.com hits MSNBC.COM"? Now that'll do a job on your site traffic!
Yes, PO.com is being hammered, ever since the story came out yesterday. It's even worse today.
I agree - the peakoil.com site is sloooooow. I posted a request for questions for James Howard Kunstler there but the site is not responding.
Very good to see links to these sites on mainstream media!
Can you help me out? Here is my request:
Mr. Kunstler commented on my show in a recent podcast. I provided a video response/request and he has agreed to an interview. I would like to hear the thoughts of this community: what questions do you have for Mr. Kunstler?
I know this oil drum may not be the site for such a request so feel free to comment at http://www.kriscan.com or wait for peakoil.com to come back online.
Thanks for all you do!
Kris
Nice web site. You remind me of Obama girl for some reason. Go Peak Oil Girl!
Ya...are you the woman that did the PO video/strip dance thing not too long ago? Good PR stunt I thought.
LOL, the peak oil strip video was my favorite, I didn't understand a single word she was saying... lol, just kidding, it is nice to see women so passionate about a subject like this.. All the college women my age are too into getting wasted at frat parties to consider, much less understand, such issues. Good work though
Kris,
I run a Peak Oil website (http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net) and am starting a cult . . . excuse me - "post oil sustainable commune" - in the woods here in Northern California. Perhaps you'd be interested in being the cult's . . . excuse me "community's" Alpha-Female. If so, feel free to contact me via the website.
http://tinyurl.com/6mzwkm
Best,
Matt
Ha...Matt,
You have no scruples whatsoever. I think she's a bit too intelligent for your band of monkeys!!
Attn Kris & Matt:
I think you two would make an excellent match--just an opinion from an older guy--hope you two can somehow meet & greet in person.
Why, you dirty old man. Wish I had thoght of that.
I'm 29.
If I was 29, I'd be a dirty old man, too. Now, at 63, I'm just old and dirty.
Dude, you are true visionary!!
Until now, I've been concerning myself with oil supplies and boring stuff like that. The real solution is for the "enlightened" to form cults and let the vast majority of people die.
New Cult Checklist
--------------------
1) need a name (Calgary Cargo Cult?)
2) some land (shouldn't be a problem)
3) cult vision (repopulating the planet)
4) supreme leader (I was just elected)
5) female/male ratio (10:1, 20:1, 50:1 ?)
6) financing (I'll think of something)
Great time to be starting a cult.
After all, somebody has to do it. :))
From page 311 of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen:
"..only in the late twilight ofthe human species, when human society will very likely disintegrate into small packs of humans, will the social factors which produce the circulation of elites fade away, too."
Is NOW the "late twilight" that G-R means?
Anyone else read this book? I found it haunting, interesting, prescient. It was published in 1971, by the way!
I thing you are going to need more than a website and some land.
The culture hasn't yet made the shift to: sustainable lifestyle = superior mate.
During this transition period, you are probably going to have to spice up your offer with some of the more traditional attractants. Diamonds and gold make good bait, especially in an inflationary environment.
Now you just hold on one minute, Matt Savinar! I'm the one that's gonna be puttin' together the post apocalyptic peak oil cult! I'm gonna call it "The Church of Unlimited Credit," and I'm the "All Knowing, All Seeing One Of Great Vision."
Just so we have that understood...
SubKommander Dred
Well, now you've done it!
As a good looking intelligent women in a room full of nerds, it is only a mater of time before the marriage proposals start.
Hey Kris;
Thanks for posting here. Sorry to see that noone really tried to give you any Kunstler Questions.
I don't know what to ask him myself. I don't really find his tone useful.. while he does get a lot of attention with it. There's something to be said for that, I guess.
I've heard him say he lives in, if not suburbia, then a populated area. Aside from his writing, what does he do to get his household AND his community more prepared for what might be coming?
Good luck with the interview.
Many Thanks for your efforts to get the word out.
Bob
What bothered you about the story, Robert?
My fear has always been that the Doomers are right. This story gives a taste of the world in case they are. The suffering will be unbelievable, and I have to try to navigate my family through this. That's why I pay close attention to stories like this. I want to know what people are doing; how they are preparing.
My hope is different. My hope is that we will muddle through this, and while we no doubt have some difficult times ahead of us, we have a massive amount of fat to cut.
In fact, I just posted a thought experiment on my blog:
Coping with Gas at $100 a Gallon
The purpose of the thought experiment is quite simple. I want to find out - in desperate times - just how much people can cut. Interested in your thoughts on that if you want to post them. For me, it's a window into whether the Doomer view is more or less likely. When people say "I just don't have much room to cut", then I am more pessimistic. But in my own life - and I have already made major cuts - I still have a ways to go before I have cut out all the fat.
Robert, lots of people can cut lots of spending and lots of driving. The problem is that lots of people will then no longer have a job. I fear that anything other than exponential growth in energy usage and spending will almost immediately result in a depression or worse in the United States. This country will not cope well with a economic collapse.
i think an additional issue is that people will have lost their financial ability to put alternatives in place to allow themselves to maintain some features of their current standards of living. In other words, most alternatives aren't free. Further, time is of the essence. You can't immediately install a PV system or solar hot water or start to grow a large proportion of your food, much less, preserve it.
To me, the word "doomer" prevents/puts off many people from taking needed action from a risk management perspective. It biases discussions in much the same way that "peak oil theory" is used to deflect the serious issues raised by reduced energy supplies. I feel self-reliant is a better word without the baggage that doomer carries.
Todd
"i think an additional issue is that people will have lost their financial ability to put alternatives in place "
I think this is a hugely important point that the technocornucopians seem to willfully ignore.
And not just on an individual homeowner basis...
nobody ignores it. if anything the doomers ignore the fact that you need peak oil to make these new energy sources viable.
there will always be people with money. think how many cars and homes will be bought this year even though there are high gas prices and the worst housing market in forever.
there is always the old technologies of conservation, car pooling, cutting back and etc.
If they are not able to replace fossil fuels now, they will be even less viable once the full effects hit.
In my 2006 Net Oil Exports Revisited article, I talked about "tiny houses," as small as 100 square feet, along mass transit lines, as huge swaths of the 'burbs are basically written off:
http://www.energybulletin.net/19420.html
I see the future for Mr. and Mrs. Westexas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lomy7xAVDKE
That was pretty much the response when I first raised the subject in 2006, but I somehow suspect that super efficient small, low cost, houses are looking more and more attractive now.
Having said that, what is preventing us from downsizing is what the commercial showed--SNS, Spousal Nesting Syndrome. The cost of admission to a New Urbanism community, where I could walk to my office is a townhouse which costs twice what our current abode costs, so we have a stalemate.
I was recently chatting with a senior petrochemical executive and his wife, who live in Detroit. They bought a McMansion in 2005. When I suggested that they sell now for whatever they can get, the wife almost screamed (I am not exaggerating) "House prices will recover!" Cognitive Dissonance in full force. Two problems: they would have to take a huge loss and it would be a loss of social standing, to move a smaller house than their peers.
Yeah, we can all live in tiny super efficient housing and mine oil shale/sands for a living just like 1750's London when coal mining/burning was the trendy thing to do. I think when people look at the tech fixes such as super efficient housing ect they underestimate the amount of people that are going to be unemployed in the future. I know people can't predict the future, but I wouldn't think it too much of a stretch to say that. Think of all those people working at the hordes of restaurants, spa's/salons, coffee shops, car dealerships, advertising, retail sales and a plethora of service/luxury jobs that encompasses the entire American economy. With the Fed building up the debt and altering interest rates and keeping economic downturns since the 1930's rather small by comparison, we have taken out the natural selection of the economy, meaning the businesses that shouldn't be there have been aloud to prosper because of a huge debt build-up. The economy works a lot like an ecosystem when hard times happen those that are most fit to survive will and keep the population lean and smart, but all our businesses have fattened up just like our people. When the inevitable down-turn starts like it has, recession, much more businesses are going to be weeded out and more people laid-off, because their are too many restaurants and coffee shops. People are not going to live in ultra efficient housing because they can't afford any housing cause they don't have jobs. They won't be able to afford PHEV's either, so those won't be saving the day anytime soon. I think perhaps a government CCC or something might help where people can work decent probably hard jobs building new energy infrastructure and can live in government small ultra-efficient housing. I don't know if I like that proposition but that's better than nothing. I wasn't directing anything towards you westexas, just speaking in general.
What do you guys think?
No, ultra efficient housing will not be stopped by a weak economy-a weak economy will kill large, energy inefficient houses of low property value, i.e. once the cost to heat and/or cool a dwelling exceeds a certain % of the dwellings value the dwelling value quickly spirals to zero (Detroit has more than a few of these buildings).
Maybe there is a good employment opportunity in converting all of those wasteful "cathedral ceiling" spaces into accessory apartments.
I think you don't make enough allowances for human ingenuity.
You don't need to insulate the whole darn house - if money is tight then people will live in single rooms, and insulating those will not cost a fortune.
So there is a job - insulating properties.
If EV cars are not affordable then electric bikes and scooters will lead the way.
There are jobs there.
So there is some chance that not everything will be kaput, and so maybe we can move on form humble beginnings to EV cars and efficient houses.
We had massive unemployment in the UK in the 80s - on the whole people cope better with adversity than prosperity.
I think that last sentence is profound and very true. It's the waiting thats killing me....
You had massive unemployment in the UK in the 1980s while at the same time global oil prices were collapsing and oil availability was increasing. Given the incredible reliance our entire civilization has upon oil, you might want to ponder that fact a bit longer.
I don't believe that I indicated in any way that the high unemployment in the UK was caused by oil.
The reference was simply that people are quite ingenious at getting by, and that some of the thought processes of an informal economy took root at that time, and may be helpful in any depression caused on this occasion by peak oil.
So you might want to ponder a bit longer on making your post relevant to the discussion at hand.
And you miss the point entirely. The unemployment was not caused by oil but the entire scenario was softened by a rising global energy profile. Will the ingenuity you saw be possible in a world of shrinking energy availability?
The key question is "What is the decline rate?" And we do not know. A very low decline rate and the world has time to adapt. Above some threshold though, adaptation cannot occur rapidly enough and the result is disaster. You cannot simply assume that everything will be ok, which is exactly what you are doing. You are whistling as you stroll past the graveyard, hoping, praying, believing any belief-based thing you can grasp that it will all turn out fine.
That's not exactly a heartening prescription for adaptation now, is it?
If you would address what is actually written rather than continually re-interpreting my statements into something else then the discussion might be more productive.
In no way did I imply that anything would be easy, and in no way do I predict outcomes, as they are dependent on a lot of choices which we don't know how they will be made in the future.
In fact we don't even know for sure such basic parameters as how expensive or cheap solar energy is likely to be in five years time or what price great new insulation materials such as aerogel will sell for.
I am at a loss to understand why you conceive that ingenuity will not be important whatever the future holds.
In five minutes in the local pub I got more sensible responses - an older couple when I said that their pensions might not be worth very much and heating might be dear said that in that case they would have to wrap themselves in their duvets in the evening, and do more on their allotment.
I did not say that oil caused previous unemployment nor am I saying that adjustment will be easy or predicting how successful it will be.
If you actually want to address what I did say, fine, but please don't simply invent things I haven't said.
I never once claimed that you said that the unemployment was caused by oil. That is your interpretation of what I said and how you are getting that I have no idea. What I have said twice is that the unemployment of that era occurred during a period of rising global energy, not during a period of declining global energy. That is a very different situation, one in which simply ingenuity may not be sufficient. The general assumption that we can just tighten our belts a bit and all will be fine is one that should be challenged. Without active mitigation, including the adoption of new energy sources at least close to the quality and volume of fossil fuels, just tightening out belts may not be sufficient at all.
However, it appears that we're not communicating here, for whatever reason. And rather than waste your or my time further, I'll leave you to your assumptions.
Hmm, you certainly said:
and that was based on nothing at all that I said in my post, merely your interpretation of where you thought I might be coming from.
In actual fact I make no predictions on whether we will successfully adapt, I do however think that there is scope for actions which will mitigate whatever is coming down the track.
I'll leave you to your assumptions, unless they involve entirely misrepresenting what I have said.
Another website I comment at is CommonDreams.org, and they've started to pick up more items about Peak Oil as more are published. I view these as an opportunity to educate and direct others here for more data and discussion. This and this are the two most recent articles and associated comment threads. There's also a very important, IMO, speech transcript by David Korten, author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule the World that references Peak Oil as a catalytic event for change. I wholy agree with that point-of-view and elaborate on how it could be used politically in the second link's comment thread:
"When will folks storm the castle? I expect the oil/energy/economy crisis to continue escalating as we get ever closer to November and await its being linked to the Iraqi Holocaust during the debates between Obama and McCain, if not outright in the Democratic Platform. Obama certainly will be pushed by activists to articulate how he proposes to Change our way out of what is the USA’s Achilles’s Heel. My advice to Obama, posted elsewhere already, is for him to come clean to the country about Peak Oil, its challenge, and how it can be mitigated, as it cannot be solved since oil is finite and will eventually become uneconomical for most usage.
"Peak Oil can best be mitigated by electrifying rail-goods transport, rapidly building up rail-based public transit, and the associated electrical generating capacity comprising wind, solar-thermal, wave, tidal, and geothermal; by legislating the internal combustion engine out of existence for personal use and replacing it with electric cars; and by redirecting human and animal waste streams to replace fossil fuel produced fertilizers with Organic-NPK (one of the most hidden/forgotten aspects of Peak Oil is the unsustainable dependence of farming on what is being termed Industrial-NPK [nitrogen, phospate, potassium, I-NPK], generated soley from Natgas and rapidly depleting, mined natural feedstocks). The only feasible method of financing such a massive and absolutely needed project given our over-extended deficit-depleted financial condition is to comepletely rollback the US Empire and use the Trillion dollars in annual savings while reinstating the progressive tax structure put in place by FDR during WW2. Such an endeavor will also drasticly reduce CO2 and other greehouse gases, which also must be done. The third benefit from would be the establishment of world peace as the main driver of war–the US Empire–will cease to exist. The fourth benefit would be to promote greater equity both in the US and worldwide as the culture change needed to fuel the Great Turning envisioned by David Korten, and called paradigm change by myself and others, would gain traction as the forces of reaction and Empire are put in their place–under the collective heel of the world’s people.
"Is this idealistic? Yes, but it is also pragmatic. It also provides a comprehensive answer for the ~80% of Americans who want Change in the country’s direction. Furthermore, it MUST happen if we want any sort of viable future for ourselves and our children. Such honesty and vision would ensure Obama’s election and re-election. And it would provide a start at removing the dark stain on us as Americans responsible for our country’s Imperial depredations that have gone on for far too long."
Other things unmentioned but related to energy consumption and climate change are the need for greater population density/smaller housing spaces. But in returning to the fear at the head of this thread, I must really insist that folks read Korten's speech. IMO, which RR seems to share, is that Doomers only point to one possible future scenario, but there are too many variables and thus many potential scenarios containing hope exist. Yes, I agree that our current lifestyles must be sacrificed, as I've posted on before, but that also opens up vast new opportunities.
As I imply above, we are writing our future now more than ever before. The timeline between our present actions and future outcomes is quickly shrinking. Change must happen ASAP for any hope of a smooth mitigation of Peak Oil to occur.
Since America doesn't make its own stuff anymore, the big challenge with quick economic restructuring is finding secure suppliers for the tools. Can we realistically import wind turbines from China if we don't know if the ships will keep bringing spare parts?
Another thing is that while I would rather just cut the military budget 90% tomorrow, doing so would put the US into a depression and wipe out many of our remaining manufacturers overnight. We know what Americans would do with such a big tax cut; they'd just try to get more imported gasoline and keep making mortgage payments to the Wall Street parasites.
However, I don't think most Americans trust the government to do anything except kill; they won't reroute the defense budget into a central coordinating agency for economic reconstruction. They will feel different once unemployment hits 30%, but if we wait that long we will face other obstacles to organized reconstruction.
There was a concept I have been working on for many years for a novel I wanted to write, but it is a dire alternative since I intended for it to be the prelude for a civil war. The idea was that African-American militants, unable to stop the white majority's drift into privatization and right-wing extremism, would pretend to cooperate with the religious right's crusade to stamp out public schools by starting their own schools under the cover of local radical black churches. But these schools would be military academies. This cleverly exploits the culture of the white Southerners who dominate the far right; military schools are revered in their culture for slavery-related reasons that have officially been forgotten, now defined as instilling "discipline" and "honor" into their own yahoo spawn. How could they say no to the same for blacks?
But these New Schools would not operate like any military academy seen by man. They would function as vocational schools by actually running stores, repair shops, radio stations, etc. Business writes off inner-city locations as being too big a security cost. The New Schools would have the advantage of their own unified militia to defend all their properties at once, while the capitalist enemy pays private guards to defend only their own scattered properties.
In recent years I've expanded the idea of where this militia/industrial complex might go to include energy and food production. So I've tried to find out about energy sources that might be available in cities like Chicago and New York, like wind and dry-rock geothermal. Also I've read up on aeroponics. On the political side, since I started working on the project we've seen the extraordinary rise of militias in Lebanon and Iraq, which indeed are the only organizations willing to govern the poor while the regimes of the rich become irrelevant American toadies.
Now who do you think is going to care about sustainability, conservation and localization; a surrounded ghetto militia or a regime floating on Saudi loans? That's getting to be what our future choices are narrowing to.
Anyway my urban energy bet is on a network of tethered flying wind turbines which also perform air defense functions; by the time the American mainstream is willing to hand over its cities to militias just to save on taxes I don't think anyone will be worried about the disruption of commercial air travel by arrays of barrage balloons.
You should be envisioning our remaining manufacturers, who are almost entirely in defense, retooling to make wind turbines, various solar gadgets, and so forth.
Wouldn't it be sweet if we saw major defense contractors turning out wind power gear and floating platforms so we could "mine" the Arctic for ammonia while simultaneously replacing the sea ice cover?
We'll have to go on a war footing eventually, the question is if it happens at a national level, or if we wait until it's regional post serious collapse. Sooner rather than later is better.
"We'll have to go on a war footing eventually"
i think we are supposed to be on a war footing now and if we were paying for it with real hard earned tax dollars instead of running up the credit card, we could call it an actual war footing.
imo, major defense contractors will continue what they are doing now - looting the treasury.
huh?
2007 U.S. Exports Reach Record Levels
http://blogs.officialexportguide.com/news/?p=516
A raw dollar figure is irrelevant unless it is adjusted for inflation and also addresses per capita production versus consumption. Pulling a number out of your ass like that is about what we've come to expect from you, john15. And it's why no one here takes you seriously.
Tell me, what percentage of goods sold in the US are made in the US today versus 1950? Do you even know? What percent of GDP does manufacturing represent today versus 1950? Yet we consume more now than we did then, thus all that has occurred is that we've offshored the heavy industries and the pollution which they produce to poorer nations where corporations have sufficient money to run roughshod over local authorities (usually via bribes).
Yep, lots of unemployed people will become employed in government programs and live in camps or dorms. Maybe they will work on salvage crews, tearing down all of the vacant, gutted and maybe torched suburban McMansions and converting the suburbs back into farmland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN3rN59GlWw
really? so where is 40% of the population going to live. you've got to be kidding me.
Many/most will move.
Build-up TOD, increase density in existing housing, convert existing commercial space to housing, etc.
And some would sleep in their cars as our economy contracts.
Alan
If most people move, then the suburbs will be "out in the country" again, and the peak oil cults being formed above will move out to the new country in such numbers that it will begin to look like some kind of sub-urban community.
Then they'll have to move all over again.
Don't you think the math involved with doubling the size of the cities will essentially eat up even move oil than just staying put and telecommuting? Won't one need a job in one of those commercial spaces in order to pay for this exciting new home in the city?
Lastly, where are all those electric rails going to go if there is no other place.
I guess it's not last after all. Why would anyone sleep in a car when there are two million empty houses? I've always assumed anarchy included trespassing.
The suburbs will become housing for sharecroppers. Houses abutting the agricultural fields they were built on will certainly be used.
Don't you think the math involved with doubling the size of the cities will essentially eat up even move oil than just staying put and telecommuting?
No. Not even close.
Alan
I suspect that many of those RVs and Airstream trailers are going to be finding permanent homes in the parking lots of major employers, and will become housing for workers that can no longer afford to commute to work.
That is an excellent interim suggestion!
So where is 40% of the population going to live.
The same place where 80% of the population will live as seawater rises. Or get their fresh water as the water tables shift.
Famine killed 7 million people in US Great Depression
Another online scandal has been gathering pace recently. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, deleted an article by a Russian researcher, who wrote about the USA’s losses in the Great Depression of 1932-1933. Indignant bloggers began to actively distribute the article on the Russian part of a popular blog service known as Livejournal. The above-mentioned article triggered a heated debate.
The researcher touched upon quite a hot topic in the article – the estimation of the number of victims of the Great Depression in the USA. The material presented in the article apparently made Wikipedia’s moderators delete the piece from the database of the online encyclopedia.
The researcher, Boris Borisov, in his article titled “The American Famine” estimated the victims of the financial crisis in the US at over seven million people. The researcher also directly compared the US events of 1932-1933 with Holodomor, or Famine, in the USSR during 1932-1933.
In the article, Borisov used the official data of the US Census Bureau. Having revised the number of the US population, birth and date rates, immigration and emigration, the researcher came to conclusion that the United States lost over seven million people during the famine of 1932-1933.
“According to the US statistics, the US lost not less than 8 million 553 thousand people from 1931 to 1940. Afterwards, population growth indices change twice instantly exactly between 1930-1931: the indices drop and stay on the same level for ten years. There can no explanation to this phenomenon found in the extensive text of the report by the US Department of Commerce “Statistical Abstract of the United States,” the author wrote.
Analyzing the period of the Great Depression in the USA, the author notes a remarkable similarity with events taking place in the USSR during the 1930s. He even introduced a new term for the USA – defarming – an analogue to dispossession of wealthy farmers in the Soviet Union. “Few people know about five million American farmers (about a million families) whom banks ousted from them lands because of debts.
The US government did not provide them with land, work, social aid, pension – nothing,” the article says. “Every sixth American farmer was affected by famine. People were forced to leave their homes and go to nowhere without any money and any property. They found themselves in the middle of nowhere enveloped in massive unemployment, famine and gangsterism.”
The then state of affairs in the US society can be seen in Peter Jackson’s movie King Kong. The movie starts with scenes of the Great Depression and tells the story of an actress who did not eat for three days and tried to steal an apple from a street vendor. There is food in the city, but many people had no money to buy it in unemployment-paralyzed New York. People starve in the streets against the background of stores selling a variety of foodstuffs.
At the same time, the US government tried to get rid of redundant foodstuffs, which vendors could not sell. Market rules were observed strictly: unsold goods should always be categorized as redundant and they could not be given away to the poor because it could cause damage to businesses. A variety of methods was used to destroy redundant food. They burnt crops, drowned them in the ocean or plowed 10 million hectares of harvesting fields. “About 6.5 million pigs were killed at that time,” the researcher wrote.
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/105255-famine-0
Mother F****rs, you know it's true too. It's exactly what they would do - did - will do.
I have no reason to expect the political classes here in the UK/EU would treat the dispossessed any differently. The MSM is gagged and would be told to spin out faster its daily mindwash.
Bad as the agricultural policies were, I think it's a bit too much of a conspiracy theory that they managed to sneak away 7 million people from the historians.
Read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath which was required reading in my U.S. public high school.
Pravda = truth = propaganda.
A lot of those "tiny houses" could actually be accessory apartments in garages or attics or basements.
Or "just trying to cope" might be even better.
To some extent, yes. It might also mean though, that people will just have to apply more brain power and muscle power. Instead of buying a shiny new GEM NEV, they might have to team up with the neighborhood shade tree mechanic and convert the old Honda Civic into an Electric car. Instead of a shiny new manufactured solar oven or solar space or water heating panels, they might need to make their own with cardboard and wood and metal and glass and aluminum foil and insulation, all scrounged and recycled. Instead of replacing their old inefficient windows, they might need to build their own storm windows and insulating shades or shutters out of whatever materials they can find.
And some of it might just be a matter of adjusting their expectations. The person who hoped that they could replace their car with a PHEV might have to settle for an NEV instead. The person who wanted an NEV might need to settle for an electric bike. The person who wanted an electric bike might just need to walk.
Much of it though, is just going to have to be curtailments - doing with less, doing without. Instead of heating at 65 or 62F, you might have to live with indoor temps down in the 50s. Instead of bumping the air conditioner up to 78 or 80 or even 85F, air condition might just be something past tense, with open windows and fans being all you have in the summer time. Instead of lighting the whole house with CFLs instad of incandescents, you might have to live in a house that is mostly dark at night, except for one bulb in the one room that you are in at the moment. Instead of drying clothes in an energy-efficient dryer, you might just be using a clothes line. Instead of switching vacation travel from air or car to Amtrak, you might just have to skip the vacations and stay home.
Somehow, in millions of little ways, people will figure out how to cope, whining all the way.
Part of the answer is that we are going to have to take a page out of FDR's book, and redirect that idle productive capacity into producing public goods rather than unwanted private goods. We'll need to revive the CCC for a start, and put people to work on a wide range of conservation projects. There will be lots of bike paths and walking trails to be built. We can also put them to work helping on energy retrofits of older buildings, especially for those too poor to afford to do it themselves. We're also going to need to employ a lot of idle manpower in a massive ramp-up of renewable energy production. The list of things that could be done and need to be done is almost endless.
It is still not clear to me what you mean by "the Doomers are right". Is it:
A) that declining oil production must of necessity cause the industrial revolution to unwind, meaning people must either starve to death (due to declining food production) or freeze to death. Or,
B) that human mass psychology will lead to societal failure as fear grips large groups of people (regardless whether their homes can still technically be heated, or food delivered to them) and the resulting chaos leads to collapse of governments?
On the $100/gal mind experiment:
Afraid I may not help your mood much here, as I've already eliminated virtually all automobile use (thus reduced my gasoline consumption to a few gallons per month.) Plus, since I live in California now I do not do any cooling in my abode, thus my electricity consumption is not very large. Part of this is purely choice of lifestyle (and being single allows such), part is due to force frugality in order to plan my future better.
If gasoline be $100/gal I'd be much more concerned about the social fabric around me falling apart enough to greatly increase crime. Also that commerce around me would fail. For example, I don't live too far from a small produce market owned by a farmer who hauls in the produce three times a week, from his farm some 30 miles away. I doubt he could continue to do that if gasoline rises to $100.
A) that declining oil production must of necessity cause the industrial revolution to unwind, meaning people must either starve to death (due to declining food production) or freeze to death.
Yes. I am inclined to the view, though, that economic collapse is probable.
It is possible to separate out the clauses above. 1. That declining oil ability will make the industrial revolution unwind
And
2. That many people will then freeze or starve
Can be seperated from one another - 1 does not inevitably lead to 2. That is, it is possible to conceive and to create a non-industrial, non starving and freezing scenario. IMHO, part of the danger of mass death is created by the fact that we have yet to really sit down and fully explore the degree to which 2 is not an inevitable consequence of 1. As long as we imagine that we have to keep industrial society going in the face of lots of energy infrastructure, we can't really get into the mitigation scenarios for 2 - or to asking ourselves *really* how far we can cut. The answer, I think is very, very, very far. But that goes much better if we get to work on making it easier earlier - but it is difficult to keep a two pronged solution going, with most of our efforts directed at keeping industrial society going. Thus, the direct mitigation of suffering gets short shrift.
Sharon
I was going to add a PS to my entry, but unfortunately the editor would not allow.
What I would have added is that if I were still living in Japan I would have greater confidence in the "muddle through" part, as the Japanese have had to work out over the centuries many times how to "muddle through."
I agree with you that starvation and freezing don't have to necessarily follow from a decrease in oil, but I was trying to flush out RR on whether his fears were due to the physical requirement for energy or due to the social instability due to human self-centered-ness (of which I see "survivalism" being one form.)
If I have any doomer tendencies they tend to arise out of my belief that humans have a difficult time living along side each other without killing each other. Our base nature is to be strongly territorial and moderately aggressive primates.
However, all is not so bad, I think. If I might share an observation from the gym this weekend: I overhead two guys (in their 30's) talking about gasoline prices, and evidently they saw the newsclips showing the executives from the oil companies being grilled by Congress. The two weightlifters didn't express any sympathy for the execs; however, they both agreed that the two of them would be subject to the high prices (in their view mainly the responsibility of the oil co's) until they were able to buy electric cars or somehow get off of gasoline.
I guess I was encouraged that both of them realized that they needed to find a transportation method that didn't really on liquid fuel from oil.
Absolutely, but the mindset in the average first world consumer has to change, the traffic on Peak oil dot com is a good start, but just a start.
If industrial society gradually slows down and there is a soft landing per say then adjustments can be made in mindset and in human activity. 1 does not equal 2
If the mindset is not changed what will happen is that economies will go all out using up natural resources in general and energy in particular until there energy availability falls off a cliff, and perhaps this is what is happening. this will result in a hard landing.
The outcome of a hard landing, i.e. energy crash will be that 1 leads to 2.
I would argue that the outcome is not certain, but that the longer that mitigation is put off the greater the possibility that the worse case scenario will result.
Currently the efforts are concentrated on keeping things going BAU. And the longer and harder to keep things going BAU will result in an outcome where we are further away from BAU than if we would mitigate and cut because there will be a hard crash and then society itself will unwind like a watch spring, where if society mitigated its economy, life would be different, likely far different but perhaps our social fabric would stay intact.
As time goes by I feel less and less sanguine.
Sharon,
While it would be nice if the majority of humanity could plan ahead and cooperate, history doesn't seem to favor that outcome.
American 'doomers' didn't build the walls around Jerico, Troy, Celtic villages, or London. Nor did they influence the Anasazi to build their dwellings in a location that required a terrifying, dangerous commute.
When something (drought, AGW, PO, take your pick) disrupts food supplies for a large population, any community that wishes to survive had better have walls. I'm thinking interstate highway slabs, tilted up, might be the quick way to accomplish this.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
I'm thinking interstate highway slabs, tilted up, might be the quick way to accomplish this.
Yes. Brings to mind the guy that was moving huge blocks of rock around in his back yard to demonstrate it could be done with just block and tackle.
There is a popular tourist site in Miami called "Coral Castle"; it was built by a lovesick man, working alone with simple machines. While coral rock is pretty porous, I would guess some of the blocks weigh a couple of tons.
Errol in Miami
The International Harvestor/McCormack Magnate.
While it would be nice if the majority of humanity could plan ahead and cooperate, history doesn't seem to favor that outcome.
Don't we believe in Darwinism when it predicts something we don't like ? If energy crashes massive numbers of people will die. About 40% (there's a cool theorem about that with the nice name the "birthday problem"). It won't be pretty and it will involve a lot of wars, and you won't know in advance who will survive and who will die.
And it won't be a war for dominion, or for territory, it will be thousand little wars to extermination. People will fight, not for land, not for money, not for islam, hitler, stalin or communism (althoug some certainly will) like they do today, but they will fight to kill, fight to remain alive by killing enough others. Fight like they did a long time ago.
Moreover, if even small problems start manifesting, all the rulemaking, all the UN tries to do, will be for naught. Once the choice becomes "the law or my TV", it will be the TV, even if they have to steal the electricity. Once it becomes "the law or children", or "the law or a wife" (or in the xor interpretation), what do you think will happen ?
If you don't like this way of history, go to the church. And work to maintain the status-quo even against your own intrests. Vote for Bush, McCain, or whoever you think will maintain the status-quo until fusion works. Economy says that just *might* work. It will work, to be exact, if enough people do that, and if they stick to it, or if they manage to isolate themselves. It is truly remarkable what some communities have achieved this way.
Obviously the second option requires belief in the goodness of God, or of the world if you will, a willingness to make sacrifices. Today not that many. Tomorrow maybe more. If you don't have the faith for that, it is doomed to failure.
The population curve of homo sapiens, from its hunter-gatherer origins to now, is so extreme that comparing it with any other mammalian species which has seen similar population overshoots, you find an extreme bias towards massive dieoff in the 97%-99% range.
yeast is the model.
Sharon, sorry for the late reply - it's a West Coast thing.
It is my projection that we will see the first of the starving and freezing this winter as diesel and furnace oil climbs above $5/gal in the U.S. The N.E. U.S. is far removed from the food sources on a mass scale and approx. 40% use furnace oil for heating.
Compounded misery. Watch the fuel supply stocks leading up to October and that will tell all.
Will we as nations (U.S. and Canada) stop and rethink this thing? That is the interesting question.
A lot of it comes down to rate of change. $100/gal by 2025 is one thing, by 2010 is quite another.
Right now, too many people still think that the recent increases are temporary. We are still waiting for the paradigm shift to become widespread, for the majority of people to "get it" that rising gasoline prices are not something temporary, but are the new normal. Once that change of mindset happens, people will begin making adaptive changes in earnest, and will begin actually anticipating future increases and acting accordingly. If they have enough time, that is. The real trouble starts when the rate of change overwhelms these adaptive changes. That's what we really need to worry about.
At $100 per gallon, gas powered chain saws might not make much sense. Or maybe one will use the big gas powered saw to fell the tree and finish up with an electric saw running off PV panels like John Howe has on his golf cart. PV array, inverter, winch, saw and log splitter. Doesn't work all that well deep in the trees, though.
cfm in Gray, ME
I don't think a hundred dollar a gallon gas an diesel would slow those with wood lots down - the alternative is using nothing but $100/gallon fuel for heating ...
Further to my comment to Robert below (PDT is a disadvantage), don't worry about $100 gas. It will all be over by then. And I'm not even a doomer. This is self-apparent.
All the food systems - kaput!
All the petroleum energy expansion - kaput!
Nuclear power plant construction - kaput!
Just the uncertainty of the price of transportation fuels is enough to kibosh these these systems and projects. How do I know? I'm dealing with it right now.
I just bought a big one-person crosscut saw this weekend. I probably ought to get a two-person saw as well.
People DID cut wood before chain saws, you know.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "muddle through," but one of my greatest fears is that we do just that, muddle through. For me that implies doing just enough to get through without actually collapsing. But that would imply that fossil fuels continue to be burned and that CO2 keeps rising, even if more slowly.
And that is a recipe for disaster if the new thoughts on climate sensitivity are correct. We'd be looking at a world minimally 3C warmer than pre-industrial days. And that would look like this:
3C Warmer
What people need to realize is that we really don't have a choice, even if you discount Peak Oil completely. No matter what, we have to transform the world economy, and that almost certainly means eventually arriving at a new paradigm not driven by growth. And *that* means an end to fractional banking, conglomerates, etc.
I do think we can downsize and keep connections alive, thus avoiding a New Dark Age, but it will require cooperation.
And that thought sends me into waves of despair. I don't see it happening if it must rely on human cooperation on massive scales.
Cheers
What "muddle through" means to me is that a) no one knows just how things are going to shake out and b) therefore there is no way to develop some sort of master plan to make it all happy and easy.
Muddling through to me means a decentralized approach, different solutions making sense in different places. Taking advantage of opportunities and technologies as regionally appropriate.
It is the opposite of believing that some top-down government "energy policy", or one-size-fits-all techno-fairy, is going to shield us from reality.
I agree with RR. Best hopes for muddling through!
Wow. Someone must have taken a LONG damn time to write this. This is worthy of being over here in full.
Anonymous post over at R^2's blog in response to $100/gal gas
Substrate,
I think the bit about bicycle seats harming 50% of males is a strawman. I have one of those bike seats that consists of two hinged pads that rest under each buttbone, completely open in the center.
If this guy can't find or figure out a technofix for something so simple, his entire output is questionable.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
[edited by Leanan. Please don't post other people's work in entirety without permission.]
How do you get permission from Anonymous?
If you can't get permission, don't post it. Post a link.
I wonder how far down the energy depletion curve we have to go before we realize that if you don't want your information shared, then it must begin with the person possessing that information in the first place.
Or, in other words, there is no such thing as intellectual property once you open your big fat mouth.
A person who posts anonymously, say like a person with a number for a moniker, retains no rights to that information, regardless of what is proffered by a system of laws which rests on a foundation which has been broken since its inception 4,000 years ago.
Yeah, well, in the mean time, we want our intellectual property rights respected, so it's only fair that we extend the same courtesy to others.
The right, excuse me, the privilege to anonymity negates the privilege of "ownership" of what was said anonymously.
Be sure to tell Joe Klein that he needn't have been paid royalties from his publisher for the first year or so Primary Colors was available, as well as many other works with obvious pun nom-de-plume's that they are obviously anonymous.
Well, Mr/Ms "710", your indignation at being caught stealing is doubly ironic.
The "no one owns it, so I'll take it" attitude is a big reason why we are in such a mess. People here normally understand that better than most.
The poster who had the insight and information owned it when it was in his/her head, and then voluntarily gave it up to the online public in a voluntary anonymous post.
Did I miss where the information was plagiarized or unlinked?
What worries me from a UK perspective is the casual violence and vandalism that is virtually endemic in our society. When this is happening in the 'good' times what the hell are things going to be like when times get tough?
As an example of the mindless society we now have, in this city on Friday night in one area thirty youths went on a rampage and slashed one hundred cars tyres. Just another typical nightly 'monor' incident in England.
The analysis I read a few years ago by MI5 that the UK is 3 meals from anarchy I believe is very true. I think it is inevitable that things will get bad.
"...things will get bad"
Things are already bad and getting worse, even inside the ultimate bubble, the "Belt Way" of D.C.
Firefighters Find Water Gushing From Vacant House
E. Swanson
In similar vein, my mother rang the other night to warn that one are of our city had over eighty man hole covers stolen and to take care when walking. (Ironically a lot of UK manhole covers are supplied by a local company that now has them manufactured in China - guess where the scrap is probably going!)
Since last December the local news has reported three incidents where whole villages have been cut off the telephone network as thieves have stolen hundreds of metres of copper underground cable.
And this is only the tip of an iceberg when times are supposedly still good.
Interesting about the manhole covers. Dmitry Orlov writes about the disappearance of these in Russia during their collapse:
" Post-Soviet Lessons, Part II: Differences Between the Superpowers
That's not very PC, it has to be personhole covers.
Nope. "Personnel access shaft." I kid you not.
Coins of the future?
On the island of Yap, the coins were even bigger than that.
Yap Money
Here in the Bay Area of California we have approximately 3 1/2 to 4 days of food, according to our disaster preparation officials. Very likely most areas of the country are in a similar situation.
More interestingly, we apparently have just one day of fuel. The earthquake recovery plans spend a great deal of time on moving fuel into the Bay Area after The Big One. I'm not very confident the fuel will be available.
(I recently completed the Neighborhood Emergency Response Training and am a registered volunteer FEMA worker.)
-André
Pandemics, even a middling serious flu outbreak will put society to the test. What will you do, go to the supermarket to stock up? Supermarkets will be vectors for the spread of the flu; bad place to be.
cfm in Gray, ME
I couldn't agree more. Your worries are also shared by a large proportion of my farming neighbours in West Wales. We may take comfort in the forty or so miles of road that separate us from the nearest city with known large numbers of potential thugs (Swansea), but one can envisage circumstances in which even that safety zone might not be enough. Although most of the pessimists on TOD seem to hale from the USA, I think the likelihood of complete social breakdown is probably higher for the UK, given our much greater overpopulation and dependence upon international trade (in a weakening currency) for our staple necessities.
Oh, I don't know! I once had a night out in Swansea, it was all very civilised until the mini-buses arrived from the valleys :)
I agree about the UK though. When I assessed my own plans for our peak oil/economic collapse/climate change future back in 2003, it was obvious that the UK was not the place to be. I sold everything and left (and haven't been back since).
Regarding security issues, I think people should be more afraid of the State, rather than specific social groups. When it comes to causing physical harm and problems for the majority, the State wins hands down.
As for planning for the future, its really quite simple. The less reliance one has on the System (especially economic) and its services, the better chances of surviving its collapse. My conclusion was that to do such a thing in the UK was/is almost impossible. Also, the first thing that people will lose as the collapse commences is choice.
Gernos, Sut Da chi?
I live in North Gwynedd and hope to create a more or less self sufficient lifestyle somewhere in the hills, away from large populations.
I would appreciate any thoughts and conclusions of you and your farming friends regarding this. How do you see events unfolding in Wales? What are your thoughts on, ahem, defensive measures?
Diolch.
It's good to know the numbers, and TOD certainly provides that. The only relevant facts are those which can effect us personally, and a large detailed scenario driven map allows us to plan more effectively.
The worst case scenario for me and my family is to become homeless and destitute. Of course we don't need PO to cause that, but that scenario firms up 2 - 3 years ahead.
So the issues of population, industry, and national energy tend to pass beyond my horizon when one accepts that; people will kill you for no reason, let alone a bite of food; industry is virtually non-existent; and the electricity and gas is off. WTF do you do then?
My current endeavours are totally geared toward making enough money to be able to afford to buy a smallholding and become as self-sufficient as possible, I admit to a twinge of jealousy of those who have that lifestyle already, and I wish them fair fortune, they'll need it.
My view is powerdown voluntarily before being powered off in-voluntarily.
regards
I think people are overestimating how difficult it would be to remove 90% of their energy consumption.
I use no gasoline, no air conditioning, no heating, and no incandescents, and yet I could reduce my energy needs by 90% without much trouble. If I, who already have a low-energy lifestyle, can do that, almost anyone can by accepting similar levels of inconvenience. Here's how it works:
First, about 1/4 of my raw btu usage is due to flying; in this scenario, teleconferencing and local vacations would take that to zero.
The rest of my energy use is overwhelmingly electricity. The major components (including work) are:
1) Refrigerator
2) Washer/dryer
3) Hot water heater
4) Cooking
5) Computers
What would I need to do?
1) Switch to non-perishable foods and turn off the refrigerator. Canned meat instead of frozen, canned or fresh vegetables instead of frozen, water instead of milk, olive oil instead of butter, etc.
2) Handwash clothes in cold water.
3) Heat water as I need it, and only for 3-minute showers.
4) Lots of healthy, tasty recipes can be prepared in a short time on a single burner. I'd miss tea, though.
5) One laptop instead of multiple desktops.
Given those five changes - none of which would be all that painful - my electricity use would go down by around 90%. It'd be a sacrifice, certainly - there's a reason I haven't made those changes already - but I think people enormously underestimate the scope of relatively painless changes that are possible (or maybe people trivialize what "suffering" actually is). The six changes above would leave me much, much closer to a modern lifestyle than to how my grandparents grew up, and they didn't do that badly.
Using drastically less energy would be a hassle, but it just wouldn't be as big of a deal as a lot of people are making it out to be.
Anyone who says people wouldn't make the above changes and also move to a small apartment close to work or spend twice as long to bike/transit/carpool, give up most of their hobbies, stop travelling, and deal with almost all temperature by sweaters or sweating in order to survive a serious energy crisis is simply fantasizing that they're somehow better and more knowledgeable and more noble than "those people" are. They're not.
The thing is, it's not even a matter of whether people will want to make these changes or not; they wouldn't be able to afford not to, if energy prices started rising to $100/gal. The massive amount of merely-inconvenient demand destruction that would ensue from these measures would keep plenty of energy for truly necessary parts of society, and would hugely accelerate the buildout of alternative energy sources. $100/gal-level prices simply aren't sustainable, not when current technology can give us wind/solar/hydro baseload at 20c/kWh.
In the West, at least, enough alternative energy sources already exist and enough demand can be removed without real pain that there's no plausible scenario where critical functions like agriculture wouldn't be able to get energy. Moreover, fossil fuels are currently abundant, and their production is large enough that their availability has a limit to how quickly it can decline; getting down to 25% of current availability for the West will be a period of decades, not years, and it's again fantasy to think people won't spend those decades building replacements.
A near and rapid peak wouldn't be much fun, but even tiny apartments and no cars or AC isn't "unbelievable suffering". The worst plausible scenario is a return to the economic malaise of the 70s.
But hopefully not bellbottoms. *shudder*
Hardly.
Jeebus. The worst plausible scenario, given that we are a biological organism in severe planetary overshoot, is a 99+% reduction in our population.
An implausible, though not impossible, scenario is near-term extinction.
I'm not worried about the extinction of the human race.
I'm more trying to avoid the breadlines.
The UK manages to effectively kill the incentive to economise, preferring to go for high cost and fancy prestige projects with urban wind turbines and so forth.
The kill it by the simple expedient of allowing the energy companies to charge low users differentially more,often much more, as they are incentivised to sell energy not conserve it, and low users still cost them connection fees and so forth.
Obstacles to economy here are political rather than technical and a result of totally uncordinated Government policies.
2) Washer/dryer
Dry on clothesline. Washer - top loading Sauber (see my profile for link) 8 gals of water, 300 watts max (if my memory is correct.) A really big pully on the drum end. Should be adaptable to a bike pedal if you got really energy starved.
3) Hot water heater
Evacuated glass tube hot water heater
4) Cooking
Solar oven - see my profile for a shaffer dish style.
5) Computers
PV.
The worst plausible scenario is a return to the economic malaise of the 70s
I'd say the Jay Hanson/Chimp who drives global thermonuclear war. But if you want to worry about malaise....
Well Robert, I won't partake in your exercise for gas at $100 per gallon because it is a non-sequiter. We should be focusing on gas at $10/gal or $15/gal, or more importantly in N. American anyway, diesel at $8/gal.
After all, for many parts of the country diesel = food.
(Hope some journalist picks this up, it is simple and poignant)
Diesel=Food
I can't imagine for all of you that live in densely populated areas how you must feel? It must be disheartening to take a look around in your every day life and ask yourself, "Just how is this going to continue?"
Do you feel like you are watching the build up scene in a horror movie? "Don't go into the room innocent and attractive young lady!!"
So PO hits the mainstream and we find out we are not delegates for the short bus anymore - now what?
P.S. I hate being on the West Coast because by the time I get involved the cocktail party is long disbanded. Makes for some tragic artsy film construct really...
You are three hours late to the party. Try being 13, then you can complain.
Siwmae Robert,
If you and spouse are carrying small children, can I suggest that the Archdruid is very comforting for people's Worst Fears.
JM certainly thinks that industrial civilisation is probably doomed, but that we will by declining in a series a steps, with respites, and even rallies, in between.
Dmitri Orlov is quite comforting too about the chances of holding the decline at not worse than the third stage of collapse -- though I have to say that my intuition has been for some time that the US's collapse will be quite a bit worse than the SU's, and might go deeper down the five stages.
My only dependents are my dear dogs, so I sympathise with younger people caught in this mess with small children. Best wishes.
Too bad they didn't mention TOD since it is a better and more informative site than peakoil.com.
Yeah, we spell better on our LOLcats.
I think it's just as well they linked to PeakOil.com instead of there. The traffic is killing PO.com. There's a flood of newbies asking things like what kind of gun to buy to hold off the zombie hordes, or saying peak oil is nothing to worry about, we just need to buy Priuses or stop drinking bottled water.
And there's a truly unbelievable amount of spam today. Fairly on-topic spam, like ads for wood stoves, renewable energy stock tips, and perpetual motion machines, but still...holy crap.
Oh the irony!
Years 1996 - 2008 :Why dont the MSM pick up on Peak Oil!
Years 2008+ : I wish they had not published our Web address, they have brought it crashing down.
Time to start another site:
www. i told you so but you wouldnt bloody listen would you? dot org.
:-)
Surprising we never had a form your own militia thread.
Naw, there have been. Shouted down or deleted.