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125 comments on Back from the future collapse
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125 comments on Back from the future collapse
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This is probabaly right however it gives me no comfort to hear it even three years after becoming peak aware. We cannot stop peak oil or it's awful consequences but we can prepare ourselves to avoid what is described in the post as the personal depression which will haunt many of those who really won't understand waht happened.
To that end, spreading the word through TOD and other websites, personal talks to friends and family, becoming part of a local community movement and having the courage to drop-out early from the industrial-consumer treadmill, may make the transition at least a little more secure. The greater the number of peak aware in your local community, the less likely you are to see violent outbreaks in the serach for scape-goats.
The real estate/mortgage market inthe US is beginning to 'price in' peak oil. Most of the foreclosures have taken place in the 'edge cities' and exurbs that require two and three hour auto commutes.
I suspect the Soviet Union was a mess long before the collapse. I recall an article written by a US military officer who went to Moscow as a part of an arms treaty negotiation. He had to meet an official outside of the city. He noted that the road to the meeting place was a single lane dirt road. He remarked that the US fear of 'Soviet Might' was misplaced; the USSR was a third world country.
The best place to experience the post- peak world ... and get drunk too ... is to visit New Orleans. Some parts are nice ... some parts are really hellish. It's a peak oil study, too. When the 1980's Gulf of Mexico oil boom ended, that's when NO went into terminal decline.
As for our current economic crisis ... I don't think it has an oil component, more of a 'long- term return on investment' component.
Don't read my blog!
http://stevefromvirginia.blogspot.com/
hi Steve,
It's a deal ...... you don't read Orlov, and I won't read your
advertized blog.
That way we'll both remain ignorant and can continue with undocumented hearsay like:
*He had to meet an official outside of the city. He noted that the road to the meeting place was a single lane dirt road. He remarked that the US fear of 'Soviet Might' was misplaced; the USSR was a third world country.*
Whether "we" should continue to choose our "fear" targets by means of the guidance of the US military is doubtful ... given the high cost and low return of so doing in the recent past.
Fair enough, nobody knows everything. Ignorance is relative.
I don't think much of US military policy but that doesn't mean individuals who are in the employ of it have no senses. Official US policy up until 1989 made the USSR into an all- powerful bogieman.
Reports from the Soviet Union - by a lot of other individuals - usually remarked on shortages of basic items, such as food. They also mentioned a social order that was defined by alcoholism and paranoia. Development in the USSR was well known to be shoddy and unimaginative. The economies of the Soviet republics were undeveloped. The remark that best dercribed Soviet- style economics was, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The Ruble did not trade and exchange outside of the USSR was an outflow of military hardware and inflows of commodities such as wheat. If a country can't feed itself, it has problems, no matter how many nuclear weapons it has.
The Soviet balance of payments was effected by low oil prices in the 1980s, but their command economy was bankrupt long before. Because the ruble didn't trade, there was no way to measure, so the Soviets could maintain the illusion of solvency.
The Soviet government was fatally affected by the debacle in Afghanistan. The satellite states of the Empire, particularly Poland, the Baltic states and Czechoslovakia, noted that the invincible USSR could be defeated on the battlefield by small forces and simple weapons. The Red Army was demonstrably a hollow force. For an empire held together by arms and the secret police, the failure in Afghanistan was the end of the USSR.
A second great failure of the USSR was Chernobyl. The reactor failed because it was a poor design and the management idiotic. The lack of accountability in the Soviet government was exposed as a weakness. None of this had anything to do with oil prices.
As for the roads ... things don't seem to have changed much:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXYagU_SnmI&feature=related
If someone wants to claim that the Soviet collapse was PARTLY peak oil episode, I'll agree to a point, but the context of that failure is important. Many of the same social ussues exist in Russia; rampant alcoholism, a non- productive economy (outside of energy) and a thinly traded currency. Their government's exercise of military force in Georgia is troubling. It makes them unpredictable. The next step is unreliable. Russia could fall into serious trouble, still possessing considerable petroleum resources.
Finally, the American financial crisis has little to do with Peak Oil. It is the cumulation of decades of small return on investment. This has reduced the savings rate to zero and made investors into gamblers. Right now, the speculative CDS market is pushing down the values of underlying securities - the mortgage based bonds that are corroding bank balance sheets. Intermediation speculation (swaps between banks) is doing the same thing to money markets.
This is my opinion and should not be the basis of investment decisions.
The thing is though, as an individual it can take years to prepare for peak oil. Part of it is that it takes time to eliminate debt, part is that it takes time to mentally prepare. It takes time to get yourself in a position where your transportation needs are minimized. It goes on and on..
Yet the world is still filled with people who are still on that treadmill.
Slightly OT, but I think that all Americans should send a strong signal to our elected leaders that we don't want this so-called Bailout for big fat cats on Wall-mart St. by calling our respective Parties and telling them that we will vote for an independent candidate this year if any of them go along with this utter travesty. Let's start a poll here on TOD to determine who we could all agree to write-in on election day and actually change something! To me this all stinks of just another "Creature from Jekyll Island". I am now having serious doubts about not only McCain, Biden and Palin but Obama as well. We can not just sit back and allow this to happen.
I have been trying to alert and prepare people for about seven years. I first heard of peak oil on the afternoon of Sep 11 2001, when by chance I picked up a book by Deffeyes in a bookstore in Berkeley (a date that I remember very well). I did some work on that, I think: setting up ASPO-Italy, publishing more than 500 articles and posts (most in italian), participating, I think, to at least a hundred meeting and conferences, appearing in TV (in Italy) dozens of times.
Very often, all that work was personally rewarding but, apart from my personal satisfaction, it was mostly useless. The concept of peak oil just doesn't "stick" in people's minds. We had 10 years, at least, to prepare; from the time when Campbell and Laherrere published their first article on peak oil in Scientific American; in 1998. And we are still moving blithely onwards. What is being done is too little and too late. At this point, I think that collapse is unavoidable, we can't avoid it. We can only try to cushion its effects, as individuals and as members of local communities. But it is still a shame, it is an epochal failure because we had been warned well in advance and we could have avoided it. But nothing was done, it is like one of those nightmares where you are chased by a monster but you can't run away.
What I can suggest is to read Orlov's book. I read it twice. It is very rare that I find a book so good and so interesting that I want to read it twice in a row, from cover to cover. But it had on me an effect similar to that of that first book by Deffeyes that I read in 2001. People say that wisdom comes from experience, and we have no experience of an actual collapse. But that book tells you of a collapse that really happened. That knowledge comes from experience and that is the way to gain a little wisdom. We'll badly need it in the future.
I first brought it up in 1988 in high school. We were having a physics lesson all about the internal combustion engine. The teacher said there were 500 million cars or something in the world. I said, "But they all burn oil."
"Yes."
"What happens when it runs out?"
"We can use hydrogen."
"Where do we get the hydrogen from?"
"Natural gas."
"Why wouldn't we just burn the natural gas? Why bother making it into hydrogen? And what about when the natural gas runs out?"
"Well, we can electrolyse hydrogen and oxygen from water, but that's a chemistry lesson. Anyway the oil will last for centuries."
"Will it? How much do we have?"
"I don't know."
"If you don't know how much we have, how do you know we have enough for centuries?"
"We have to get back to the class."
It stuck with me. Only this year did I get a driver's license - a condition of having a family, unfortunately. It always seemed a terrible waste to me.
Likewise, three years ago I was talking to a friend about his huge mortgage, and he said, "but that's okay, because prices always go up, so if it gets too much we can sell."
"What if prices drop?"
"What? Prices can't drop."
"Why not? The price of other things goes up, goes down, that's how an economy works. And they can't jump up forever, they used to be three years' wages, now ten, where to from here? Twenty years' wages? Fifty? Eventually the one richest guy in Australia will own every house in the country, nobody else will be able to afford them. So at some point the price will drop."
"But they can't drop."
"Why not?"
"Because then we'd be fucked."
"Hmmm."
Now, they've not dropped in Australia the way they have in the US, but in many places they've plateaued and in others dropped slightly. Where we used to see 75% sell after 30 days on the market, now we see 40% sell after 90 days. So the only reason prices aren't dropping heaps is that people just aren't selling.
Things like climate change and ozone depletion, these are not really foreseeable to a layman. You have to know the science. But things like having a debt 300% your GDP and eventually going bust, housing bubbles bursting, resource depletion - these are all common sense.
But people don't like to talk about them. A thought I had recently was the people saying, "well of course the Federal Reserve Chairman has to say these positive things, if he said negative things that could hurt the economy." The thing is, if the economy really were strong and stable it wouldn't matter what anybody said about it. I mean, if someone walks up to my tomatoes growing brightly on the vine and says, "they're doing badly" - that person's words have no effect on the actual growth. The only reason I need to fear their words is if they're true.
So people think that the economy is weak, and if we speak about that it'll burst the bubble and everything will fall apart. What we have then is an implicit agreement to pretend everything's okay and we can go on like this forever. We have to go on with the class, and things can't change because then we'd be fucked.
"Lalalalala I can't hear you!"