Dan, I'm intrigued by the notion that "some areas are moving towards solving peak oil and others are already fairly well buttressed against the effects."

Could you (or anyone) specify what areas you have in mind, and what evidence of resilience.

I'd have thought that Pakistan, Haitii, Indonesia and much of Africa (etc?) are already very much suffering the effects. Just because they are poor countries doesn't mean they are not dependent on globalised high-tech and aid from G7 countries.

Memmel: "Peak everything". No. just looking at merely my piano, peak ivory, peak ebony, and peak soundboard pine were all long ago, not to mention peak craftsmanship. Quality buckskin for the keys action has also become scarce. Probably other woods such as pear too. Whale-oil? Furniture used to be rountinely made from solid oak and elm (the latter now extinct in uk). Hopefully peak japanese knotweed but I wouldnt count on it.

Re predictions of civil war - I think many people here continue to severely underestimate just how low-technologically-crippled everyone has become. In aftermath of any breakdown of globalisation, people will be desperately struggling to merely survive (ie find food) to such an extent that they'll have no time or energy for warmongering even on a local scale.

There'll be a huge die-off from starvation/stress/disease. And soon the population will be so much lower that the survivors will have more need to cooperate than conflict.

PS to memm- you do post some(times) interesting ideas but if you could make your posts a bit briefer they might fit better in the limited reading time of myself and many others! (Though I appreciate this can be difficult.)

Food, Clothing, Shelter, Basic Medical Care, Education, Pension.

The first three are well known but the last three are just as true and just as critical if you wish to control population. Large families are formed to ensure pensions in your old age and to potentially cover medical costs and finally as a collective to potentially allow one of the members to be educated.

I could write forever about how to solve these problems but I'll try and give a brief review of each.

Food intensive agricultural methods coupled with drip irrigation can provide enough food
in addition land is often poorly distributed. I'm not saying you should bust up the larger farms by force but you can support smaller farmers in buying more land potentially via collectives. If you think about it for a bit formation of collectives of various sorts makes many of these problems solvable.

Clothing is not a real issue these days.

Shelter can be greatly improved with some engineering work and small factories to convert scrap materials to decent building materials. Probably one of the biggest gains would be to open up small brick factories that use solar kilns for the bricks.
So the idea is that with some light localized manufacturing we can develop ways to create good housing from local materials and scrap.

Basic Medical Care:

The easiest way to start solving this problem is to take in some of the poorest members of the society and train them as Doctors and Nurses if they agree to help their communities in exchange for their education. Over this Doctors and Nurses who receive a subsidized education could pay it back in the form of a tax either money or working in the poor areas. I know from first hand experience that the medical industry is not designed for the needs of the poor regions a move back to renewable supplies robust equipment etc can greatly increase the quality of medical care in the poor regions we have gone to disposable supplies because its easier then using autoclaves.
I could rant forever on this but the bottom line is with some thought medical care can be vastly improved and equipment and supply costs can be minimized. Local manufacturing of medical equipment could play a large role in this. Next of course decent synthetic labs could produce most of the needed drugs. Lab testing can be reviewed and optimized. I'll stop but the medical profession is so far from whats needed by the worlds poor its in my opinion one of our worst sins. Finally of course birth control and sex education come into play.

Education: Like with Doctors but more tractable its a matter of education of people within the community to be teachers and sending them back to their local communities.
Communal communications with new wireless technologies opens up the chance for almost every part of the world to have equal access to mankinds knowledge. This extends into adult education and practical education. The key point and where I differ from most efforts today is that the educators must come from the community.

Pensions:

This is probably the biggest issue and primary reasons for large families. The first and foremost issue is dealing with single people and widowers. I feel that communal monastic like living arrangements open the doors for people to live a single life for as long as they choose. In the past in most cultures these sorts of communal living arrangements where common often tied to the local religions but the point is that we have removed them in all our cultures with our focus on family living. A family is not the only solution and if we can bring back these alternative ways of life then we can create a population of people that choose to have no children or join the communes with just a few. The problem is of course money and a small global pension would go a long way to helping these types of living arrangements. Pensions can be scaled on the number of children you have with zero receiving a healthy pension. You can argue this for a long time but the key for me at least seems to be communal living arrangements that lessen the need for large families. If enough people choose to have zero children it makes a really big difference. Two people choosing to not have children allows a fairly large family of four to exist without causing population growth. So you can see how its in my opinion what makes the difference not just small families.
Certainly with a social safety net in place and education you can then have smaller families. Finally of course with modern birth control methods being single does not mean you have to risk having a child so it all ties together.

You can break these problems down a number of different ways but the core idea is reintroduction of communal living/collective living for people that are not interested or able to form the traditional family. These same communes could readily be the source for doctors, teachers etc and also be the provider of the pension plan. Done correctly it need not even be a cash issue simply a matter of setting aside sufficient land to allow the commune to support itself.

We should have never ripped these out of our societies I think modern manufacturing and economies of scale is what did them in since light manufacturing was often one of the primary ways these communes continued.

Dignified death? A lot of people are going to be driven crazy with negative life-events, especially those who currently have "wealth" and "status". A lot of them are going to be suicidal.

Another high proportion are more likely to die of hunger, shock, and fatal diseases than by violence.

I don't think he is skipping the issue of limits like you saying. The problem is that as you try to come up with any sort of model for the entire system it gets complex quickly and is in general chaotic. Chaotic models while they look cool are for all practical purposes worthless as predictive tools since by definition they are sensitive to the initial conditions. A small change leads to a major divergence in outcome.

You can look at parts of the problem geopolitical feedback, predator/prey, export land etc and show fairly convincingly that almost all the influences are negative and worse capable of fairly rapid large magnitude changes generally for the worse. The predator/prey model is important since it shows that short term price drops from demand destruction don't help even in the medium much less long run.

We have had numerous posts looking at the wedge effect of conversion our economies and all of them point to a 10-20 year time period at most to change with a fairly concerted effort. Add in the required political consensus and you get the 20-30 time for change common. Look at pollution issues and global warming as examples of the timescales for group change.

I think the intrinsic problem and it seems prevalent even on the oildrum with fairly enlightened readership is that people have a real problem with this sort of meta-analysis that cannot be easily reduced to some predictable simple graphics. But the whole point is thats the problem we actually face once you put everything together your looking at a highly unstable and unpredictable situation with the vast majority of potential outcomes being bad. Although we don't know the real outcome for sure without action its pretty obvious that its certain to be bad. Conveying this message to the public seems to be a hopeless task. The problem is that if you drill in on one detail lets say shale NG production then you can have a difference of opinion since it boils down to if we can drill enough wells. However if you put shale NG production into the global problems we face its obvious that we probably won't keep production up. For example consider a Gulf coast hurricane having a big impact on GOM NG production. Lets say a lot of production goes offline for 1 year. This will put tremendous pressure on shale NG plays and they will be extracted at the maximum rate and probably our ability to create new drilling rigs will be impacted by problems in the gulf. The point is one reasonably probably secondary event coupled with the rapid decline nature of shale NG production is sufficient to ensure that future production will always be less than todays. A fall in prices below the economic level that slows the drilling rate is another case. You can do this for a while and the consensus outcome is that we probably will see high NG prices in a few years as external and even internal factors result in overall declines in NG production. You can do this across the entire energy industry include EROEI etc etc.

So what you see time and time again is that as you try and understand even the simple complex cases the result is always worse then would be predicted by not including them. In fact it becomes obvious that in the case of Shale NG plays the ability to make up for conventional declines is a one time event early in the extraction effort that cannot be repeated.

We face thousands of export land like scenarios and as you dig you find more and more cases.

I found a big one just the other day for example. I was puzzeling over tanker traffic this year and thinking about WT saying that with declining VenMex production more traffic would have to come out of the ME to compensate. But one thing I came up with was that the density of crude varies by 40% so if your shipping more heavy crude oil you literally cannot ship as much by volume as you can light sweet crudes. So paradoxically you can see higher traffic with less total volume if the mix of crude being shipped has moved significantly to heavier crudes. This ties into my NG/Heavy problem.

What this would probably mean for the ME is that if you consider my NG/Heavy coupling and the price and the fact that tanker traffic is close to 2006 levels that Ghawar production probably started into rapid decline this year.

This highly probable solution requires a complex analysis approach since you have to put together a lot of events. For me the last piece of the puzzle was recognizing that less heavy oil can be shipped by volume leading to higher tanker traffic and less real oil.

But try explaining all this to people esp since these complex interaction models would require extensive correct data to refine and prove which we simply don't have. If anything transparency has declined dramatically along with data quality the last few years.
Anyone thats willing to spend some time understanding the problem using the approach of full systems analysis and considering some basic models most from the life-sciences can comprehend the whats happening. Taking a message to the masses that requires them to educate themselves to understand the problem is a hopeless task.

Silver bullets simply don't work when your playing a game of whack-a-mole.

Right on I'm not surprised that a economic focused treatment would also not result in the Peak Everything effect as net energy declines.

I suspect that the some more fundamental model starting from Maximum Power concepts is the right one.

However these don't capture the essence of how fragile the system becomes to breakdown as it reaches this decline phase. We of course know from the historical data that TSHTF more times than not when the system becomes strained like this.

What we don't seem to have is a good way to "prove" this it must collapse. The underlying problem can be explained by looking at the export land effect. As long as oil was cheap it was not a major factor but as oil supply becomes constrained and expensive the flow of money into the exporting nations result in increased consumption lowering next exports. We have many potential other feedback loops that can grow exponentially or even hyper-exponentially that swamp the primary decline. In many ways these could well be black-swan like events that know one ever conceived of.

The interaction of peak NG and Heavy source the chances that finished products exports of diesel and gasoline may drop faster than oil production to stave off local shortages in countries with refining capacity. Etc etc any one of these secondary issues is a candidate for the one that causes real problems to start.

And I stress we have others that no one even recognizes that could be as bad or worse then what we have thought about.

In a lot of ways these can be treated as 1/f noise or spikes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

But consider the case of limits of growth with and even this predator prey model with the addition of some sort of spike say a virus that kills half the prey.

The point is the stressed system is both highly unstable to strong random like perturbations and it friggin generates them naturally. A stressed complex system generates anomalous events that cause significant short term stress generating further anomalous events ... We can identify some of these but the reality is your getting spikes at all frequencies that are causing the system to generate more spikes.

Like a bad bearing in a motor as the bearing goes bad it generates vibrations that destroy the bearing.

Maybe this can be called the monkey wrench effect.

As non-renewable resources become harder to obtain in Scenario 1, capital is diverted to producing more of them. That leaves less industrial output to invest in sustaining the high agricultural output and further industrial growth.

That's also the argument Hall made some months back where he had graphics showing the energy infrastructure expanding to take over ever increasing portions of the economy. Ultimately the economy has to collapse - you can't keep doing lower and lower EROEI work if you can't feed the workers. It will collapse well before that because all sorts of other ancillary services will fail - and they will not fail uniformly across classes in society.

I'm really looking forward to the Smart Growth forum tomorrow night in Portland Maine. I'm sure they will set me right.