393 comments on Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
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One thing seems to get lost in these post peak discussions is timing. IMHO we will not fall off a cliff, like today there is everything and tomorrow there is nothing. Barring a nuclear war there will be a long adjustment period, decades as DavebyGolly suggests, the severity of which will depend on where you are on the planet. What will happen should probably be qualified in time. 5 years, 25 years, 50 years post peak [oil, gas, coal, whatever].
In all scenarios in all locations, there will be choices that will make a difference at a later time for people and the planet.
There's been plenty of reason presented in these pages for thinking we almost certainly will "fall off a cliff", and anytime soon what's more. Simple maths says there has to be massive contraction of population and standard of easy living. Such contraction rarely if ever happens in a planned, harmonious way. This year looks to be exceeded only by the ones that come after it.
By the way - that number of 300 people I found in a book of interviews with successful managers. Perhaps more applicable to organisations than to communities?
Pray, present us with this "simple math" proving the dreaded dieoff.
Ok - this won't be absolute proof, but (pending a better answer) near enough for deciding what to do.
Various estimates have been published of sustainable population of the planet. I've not had time to critically examine them but the general theme is that at most only a billion or two of the current six billion can be sustained. That is compatible with (1) Malthusian overshoot, (2) heavy dependence of the increase on fertiliser and mechanical and unhealthy techs always straining to maximise 'productivity' and so on, and (3) majorly degraded soils in various countries including the US. So much for the planetary level.
Now looking at the UK level, a key part of ww2 was the Battle of the Atlantic. This was the one thing that really worried Churchill, that the Nazis might starve the UK into defeat. Despite the "Dig for Victory" urban jubilee gardens, the UK depended on a huge proportion of importing of its food. The Nazi U-boats threatened to stop the food coming from the US. The world's biggest military machine (the Bismarck) was launched to aid in this and its sinking was a rather major event at the time.
We were able to sink the Bismarck but we have little prospect of sinking the oil shortage which will make today's food imports come to an end. The UK population has since increased, while the quality of its land has decreased due to decades of dis-organic farming.
Then looking at my many decades experience of the Birmingham UK area - 30 years ago there were loads of farms and orchards around Bham, supplying its food (via trucks that woke me up at 4am every night). (Bham also had loads of factories.) Then progress took place as it was discovered that shops, houses, offices and leisure thingys made a lot more money. I could never understand how a city could support tons of luxury homes and shops with no productive work going on, but then no-one was very interested in my views!
I personally know of so many farms that are now commuter homes, and orchards that have been grubbed up, and so on. There are far fewer people with farming skills, and even they are mostly oil-based. A high proportion of the UK's food comes from far away, and very little indeed of Bham's comes from within carting distance.
The Battle of the Atlantic was treated as the No. 1 front page crisis of the time, with every available ship despatched to sink the Bismarck. The Battle of the Disappearing Oil is not being treated as a crisis at all.
Some underdeveloped countries might be thought to have better prospects but again and again they depend on "aid", that is food imported from continents away using tons of oil.
I would like to see a page on ToD specifically to discuss this important question though I regret I'm not in a position to do much towards one myself at this moment.
Oh, the math: (Supply of food)<<(Requirement of food).
Since the UK joined the common market, it has become much more productive in food production, especially grains and meat(due to the very high agriculture subsidies). Thus food prices are higher, but food is available. Same for all of EU.
A lot of the WWII convoys were carrying war materials and oil.
No math there, alas, simple or otherwise. Just more assertions: "We can't possibly feed ourselves without great gobs of fossil fuels."
Which may or may not be true, but has not been shown anywhere. For some reason, the only countries who've tried to be entirely self-sufficient in food in the modern age are the countries with pretty crappy agricultural land.
About half of food produced in the world is produced without any fossil fuel inputs at all - no artificial fertilisers, herbicides, tractors, etc. And we produce about twice as much grains, legumes, fruit and vegetables as we need.
I look at this on a global scale in feeding the world, consider it with less numbers and more consideration of peak oil in relocalisation?, and in the shape of food to come. Lastly, sceptical of the grand claims made by lefty types and the mocking claims made by righty types about Cuba, I had a look at the real lessons of Cuba and peak oil.
I welcome emails on the topic, my email can be found in my profile.
Thanks for the link, Kiashu.
"Cuba is putting in a fair amount of renewable energy; but this is dwarfed by its new fossil fuel using electricity generation. For another view of it all, consider the October 2006 Living Planet report, which says that "sustainable development" must achieve an HDI (Human Development Index) of 0.80 or more while at the same time having its per capita ecological footprint not exceed 1.8 hectares, the average biocapacity available to each person on the planet. On their assessment, only Cuba achieved both criteria."
This is an important and much overlooked point.
Of course it is silly to view Cuba as any kind of paradise. We're not talking about paradise. We are (or need to be talking about) whether there is any remote possibility for humans to live minimally satisfactory lives without compromising the future viability. Any system that comes close, even if they did so entirely by accident, is worthy of closer inspection, IMVHO.
Good stories, Thanks. I'm going to look a little closer at greenwithagun.
Kiashu - thanks for info and links, but I have some reservations about your viewpoints. I think you'll agree that we need to be wary of too much generalisations, as what applies in one locality does not apply in another. Before this page gets too passé, I'll just comment on the locality I know well which is the UK.
You say lots of fruit and veg produced in market gardens near cities. Supposedly 200km is near in your calculations. If you had to cart that food without oil you'd not want to be carting it more than 10-20 miles max.
As a cyclist I have intimate familiarity with the countryside around Birmingham UK. There's precious little growing of fruit and veg anywhere within 20 miles. Most farms have closed down since the commuter-belt land/property is now too 'valuable' for mere food production. In UK/Europe we can't grow most types of fruit anyway and so most of it is imported from distant continents, even apples.
You appear to consider meat to be an unnecessary abuse of grains. But many people in Northern lands need a high-meat diet to be healthy. I myself have to avoid grains with exception of rice. And livestock can graze on land that cannot otherwise grow food.
Yes there's a high productivity of food in UK/Europe but it is high productivity of unhealthy junk at serious cost to the environment. BSE, foot-and-mouth, TB and blue-tongue plus the constant colds of cattle reflect this unhealthy trashiness.
The Farmer's Guardian newspaper presents a highly mechanised, high-energy system preoccupied with trying desperately to keep heads above the profit/loss waterline. A prime organic farm explain how they take their sheep on an hour's journey to the abbatoir, then back again. How's that for energy resilience? All the small local abbatoirs have closed down and aren't going to reopen anytime imaginable.
Now I shall give more answer to your maths question. Medieval Britain (~UK) was struggling to feed its much smaller population, even though its land was a lot less degraded back then. The whole reason why the industrial revolution started here (nb) was that land-resources were becoming scarce. In particular in this naturally wooded land there was a shortage of wood. Ladywood where I live had ceased to contain any wood 500 years ago, having been burnt as fuel. Coalmining was developed as a reaction to the shortage of firewood. (See also Karl Marx's crucial life-event re shortage of firewood.) The coalmining had to go deeper and so the steam engine got invented and the rest is increasingly-polluted history.
The ChrisMartenson crash course illustrates how the growth of population stayed low for zillenia till there was the sudden growth of the energy supply. From the population history one can reasonably reckon the UK could at best manage 1/3 of present population. But we are very far from an at best situation. We have degraded land; we have farms that are no longer farms; we have huge urban populations living far too far from the fields that will need to be worked. We don't have the cash to do that relocation even if the rural areas weren't inhabited by prickly rich people upholding their property rights and strict anti-development regulations! In short we're rude word beginning with f-'d.
The thing is that as people keep emphasising on TOD, fossil fuels are not going to just STOP. They'll become more scarce. So there'll still be some transport around.
If oil is $500/bbl then oranges from Barbados in London in winter are not going to be viable. But spuds from Wessex will be. You just have to look at history. While there were villages that got only stuff from their own area, there was the occasional town or city that got things from a great distance away.
For this a lot of organisation was needed. But they did go more than 10-20 miles. It was done in the past, so can be done again.
Now, as I said in those articles, we certainly won't be able to have cities of 10+ million people with scarce fossil fuels. Nor will there be the thousand or so cities of over a million we have today. As fossil fuels become scarce, if we don't put in alternatives then we'll see a deurbanisation. But since the fossil fuels won't just stop one day, this will be gradual rather than catastrophic.
We know a bit more about land and water and resources than we did in the Middle Ages. We can do better than we did then, and certainly better than we're doing now.
That doesn't mean we will do better, just that we can. I'm talking about what's physically possible, and combined with that what seems likely given what's happened in the past.
It does not seem likely that fossil fuel supplies will just STOP one day, but rather that they'll decline in availability, and priorities will be set. People will have a very hard time indeed, but they won't starve and perish in an orgy of violence.
I think this is a crucial assumption here, which I find highly contentious. I think there IS a very high likelihood that fossil fuels are very likely to indeed, as near as matters, just stop (come to an end within months/years, in the next few years.
What you overlook is that getting coal and oil is now becoming dauntingly complex. Alaska, drilling under kms of salt, etc. From my window I see Brindley's canal which lowered the price of coal by a factor of 2 the day it opened, and Telford's canal that improved on it 60 years later. But there's no more coal at the other end of those canals now!
Getting that oil and coal now depends on far more than a canal, it depends on a vast globalised industrial-commercial-financial-governmental-socialconfidence complex which no-one fully understands but is clearly vulnerable to collapse due to excessive complexity. Even a failure of credit could kill it dead.
Given that there is so little discussion of this vulnerability, and that societies and institutions are consistently abysmal at managing contraction, the odds look overwhelmingly strong that there is going to be an early collapse of the food supply to cities and from then onwards the whole great show falls apart and the hi-tech energy supply system dies with it (its already creaking at the joints as Simmons keeps pointing out).
Sorry, no shortage of coal here, which is really a big worry.
I agree there isn't a shortage of coal all round. The point is that there is now a total absence of coal easily transportable by canal etc to Birmingham. (And there are still hardly any trees in "Ladywood".) The world's remaining coal is generally lower-grade, far underground, far from where you want it. When people are struggling to merely feed themselves, they won't have time/energy for hiking many miles then digging deep down mines to extract black stuff that they don't have equipment ready to use it in anyway. The lack of affordable oil (and electricity) makes the exploitation of coal vastly harder, especially now the easy coal supplies are gone.
I appreciate the worry about CC but a system collapse would quickly "solve" that worry, like a knife in the chest would cure a headache.
In my opinion Doomers are over-represented on this site; my personal belief is that we're more likely to face a long decline, with intermittent shocks. Tumbling off a hill with varying gradients, if you will.
There are plenty of reasons we won't fall off a cliff. Historically, there are examples of population crashes occurring in small isolated communities or in communities that had something they depended on suddenly fall away. But we live in a global economy, and it's too vast and complex to all fail suddenly and at once.
There might be a gas cliff coming up, but it will firstly mean third world countries not being able to afford it, then second world countries, and then us. People will very suddenly need to adapt and learn to cope. Similarly for the more important hydrocarbon oil.
There will always be oil, but it will simply become more unaffordable for varying groups, not totally gone. Food riots will occur in countries depending on imports one by one, from poorer to richer; people will gradually become systematically malnourished. Three billion people starving in one year is very unlikely.
Look at the financial crisis: things 'crashed' down, but life continues as usual, just less affluently than before, with slowing economies, slightly more people becoming unemployed, etc. etc.
Perhaps in the comments. I'm pretty sure the lurkers are predominantly 'realists' and 'undecided'. My subjective opinion is that there is POSSIBILITY of fast crash, and equal possibility of sine curve of BAU ebbs and flows for another decade. Too many variables to predict with certainty. But if we have a decade, that means if we wait until then so many more resources will have been used, people will be even more habituated (and probably unhealthier and less happy) and environmental externalities will be manifold. Why must we predict with any certainty 'when' things really deteriorate - isn't it enough to know its a possibilty/probablity and make the social contracts that will make the future better? ('future' and 'better' both also need to be defined)
"..it has to support itself by the surrounding area but doesnt have a modern road transport system?"
- What does this actually mean? -
Nate;
I've been scanning this particular thread waiting to see someone take on that initial question of whether a town or city of some size or other would be the most viable without a 'modern road system'.
This theme comes up in so many 'Car' threads, and needs to be thought through. The surfacing materials will and must change, it seems.. but are roads really the problem? Paths, Trails, Tracks, Avenues.. Pushing people and produce along them on wheels.. dare I say that these wheels might even be allowed to have some stored-energy mechanisms to help with the pushing? It may look a LOT different than our present Rush Hour World.. but it's hardly the 'end of the wheel as we know it'..
I'm asking you this, since you so often focus on our deeper psychological/perceptual games, underexamined assumptions.. and this topic to me seems to be a set of Resentful Scapegoats that are used to sledgehammer our 'daddys' Oldsmobiles', while I can't see for the life of me that paths, carts and cars of a very broad variety will not (< edit) absolutely continue to be part of the picture.
As such, the places where our largest paths converge (often as not at harbors and riverheads).. we will establish and keep cities which will be the routing centers for food, clothing and all sorts of other trade goods, created in diffusion and then channeled and concentrated by our roads, rivers and rails.
The collapse of certain forms of technology seems to get devolved into the 'end of roads', which I see as an understandable, but ultimately erroneous conclusion.
Does that sound realistic?
Best,
Bob Fiske
As to road systems, the thing to remember is that relatively little are required for transport of all necessities and a few luxuries. Most of the wheels on the road are not for freight, nor are they for getting the most people most quickly from A to B.
With more efficiency and less consumption, far less roads would be needed.
I talk about this a bit in the oily smudge on the future of the city-state. My conclusion is that if we're completely without fossil fuels, we won't be able to sustain cities of several million people.
A million is plausible with some good arrangements of roads and the help of animals. But 10,000 and under are much more likely. And in fact that's what we find in history, that peoples like the Incas relying on foot transport never had bigger cities than the 10,000-100,000 range, those with canals like the Aztecs got up to over 100,000, and those with animals and good roads like the Turks or Romans managed a million.
Absent fossil fuels, we're not going to have these great cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles and Melbourne. They're simply too large, requiring too many resources, it'll be physically impossible to bring them enough to keep them going.
Of course fossil fuels are not going to simply disappear. And the Cuban and North Korean experiences both show that when fossil fuels are short, what disappears first is not fertiliser, freight or electricity but private transport. Which reduces the number of roads we need.
Well considering Cuba for a moment then.. have they got fewer roads now? Or just less paving, and less traffic on them? ( While I don't know how much they were paved before.. )
I can see the massive multi-lane freeways going back down to fewer and fewer.. but the 'road' will still be there.. and where rural and unsupportable environments will have Ghost Roads that once led to ghosted towns and their ghosted streets.. those will go.. but the author of the comment alluded to something like 'Roadless towns'. I don't see the logic in that kind of visioning. When has there ever been such a thing?
As I understand it, the Cubans have the same roads, it's just that they actively maintain relatively few of them. The rest are turning into dirt tracks.
Cuba has the same roads they have always had, and none as bad as the I10 from Baton Rouge to Beaumont. :-)
Transport is highly improvised as shown in http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/4678. These jerry rigged buses are called camels and are pulled with everything from tractor rigs to ordinary farms tractors, particularly for farm and factory workers.
Smaller towns like Matanzas and Cardenas have some buses but locally, the transit system consists of horse drawn wagons with benches and small covered carriages.
Post revolution cars are common in Havana; Audis, Mercedes etc., depending on your political status, or if you are the local rep for foreign investors in resorts or petrochem like Sherritt.
So yes Virginia, roads are alive and well in Cuba.
Indeed. Many of the folk who post comments appear to have a predilection for portraying a dismal future. Nonetheless, some of them can have highly salient observations when positive posts (read as non dismal) are made and the comments can bring attention to oversights in such posts.
The problem of modeling the global economic response to peak oil is, as Nate points out, highly under determined. As many others have pointed out, peak oil does not mean the end of oil, just the likely end of a situation wherein supply growth can keep ahead of demand growth. The economic consequences will be alarming to many. Fortunately, humankind has a demonstrated ability to adapt to a wide range of environments. I have faith that it will continue to do so.
Nate, a ways back you posted a survey on TOD readers. Perhaps I missed it, but when are you going to be posting the results?
Cheers!
when i get some time!!!
Some of the questions in that survey puzzled me a little, am waiting for your response to figure out where they came from. No rush.
Self-reporting tends to result in bi-modal distributions. The extremes of the universe of opinions report because they feel most strongly. The middle, which tends to be the bulk, does not feel strongly enough to make a post either way..
WeekendPeak
Pray, present us with this "simple math" disproving the dreaded dieoff.
Airdale
PS.Asking for 'sourcing' on such a topic which can be mostly empirical
and of personal knowledge is hard to do..almost impossible IMO.
So I liberally lace most of my posts with IMOs,since most of what I post is what I personally observe and draw conclusions from.
This being CAMPFIRE and closely attune to shared experiences and other aspects dealing with the assumption that we WILL experience a major change in lifestyle and would be wise to start building a knowledge base instead of constantly debating whether or NOT this is what will happen.
I think Campfire is therefore considered to be dealing with that assumption already as a foregone conclusion. Or perhaps its purpose is to engage in just that debate but for me that debate has long long ago passed away.
We absolutely know , from all previous discussion technically given that the end of oil usage due to environmental issues will occur. We are pretty sure that other forms of energy will not save us since the ramp up time is too short and for other reasons explained in other essay topics.
But even if other forms of energy can be effected still we will have a huge problem with the number of inhabitants of this planet and what the earth can 'sustainably' provide for economically.
Many will die in other words. I had thought this was pretty much agreed upon.
Airdale
Nup.
Die of what, exactly? People don't just drop dead, something or someone kills them. So if you want to say that "many will die", you have to describe the causes, and then we can talk about how likely those causes are to come up.
"Of what?" Kiashu asks.
Well its just the doomers mantra,no?
Of starvation due to loss of soil fertility,lack of I-N,P,K, over population,lack of medicines, and much more...which has been hashed over again and again on many DBs.and therefore at least to me a foregone conclusion,,hence my comment.
I am not going to defend it. I just made it. This is not really a debating match in any case for the rules are not in force.
And going over old ground is a waste of bandwidth and time.
You should have read enough of my posts to know my beliefs and opinions.
As Chris Martenson puts it.
Opinions,beliefs and facts.
Of course fact are sorta hard things to pin down sometimes and one mans facts are not always anothers so the debate begins. ala Eric Blair, my nemesis who of late seems to have taken the axe out of the post and started to track me again. I never respond to him for that reason but do respect Kiashu however I am not going to enter into debate on it.
IMO then...many will die.
Airdale-I refuse to waste time scouring the net for sourcing unless I am keying up a Essay type Key post for TOD and I have never reached the sacred ground of that type of endeavor as yet,,and probably never will....so I post my Opinions and Beliefs in hope that they may help some others who might go in my footsteps to the outback and farm country and be forewarned......etc etc yada yada....
Best to you,
Airdale
See, you call it "debate". The idea you have is that there are two people or groups of people with fixed opinions, opinions which never change. Because that's what an official debate is.
Whereas I see it as a discussion.
Debate:
"I think X, and Y is wrong because of Z."
"Z is nonsense because of A, and you've misinterpreted Y anyway because of B."
It's like the Western Front, we send our facts up over the top into the machinegun fire of critique, the field illuminated in the ghostly light of flare shells of opinion.
A discussion is different.
"I think X because of Y."
"But what about Z?"
"Well Z does moderate X somewhat, but if you bring in A then you get where I am."
It's an exchange of ideas where each person's opinion is changed slightly. Not necessarily towards each-other, discussion doesn't mean eventually everyone will agree. Sometimes your ideas move, sometimes they're fleshed out and become stronger, and so on.
A discussion. Only fools hold opinions based on nothing. By asking for sources and facts a person is showing respect for your opinions. "Well obviously you're not crazy or stupid, so you must have a rational reason for believing that. What is it?"
"Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks." - Harlan Ellison
If you don't think your ideas are worth explaining or justifying, then I don't see why anyone else should be expected to take them seriously.
Reply to Kiashu,
Debate? Well around a campfire no one has access to encyclopedias or books. We just have 'viewpoints' perhaps and discuss them in a hopefully friendly manner. One shares one's views and others gain from deciding whether its worthy or not and if so adapting it or not.
Scientific discussion is more onerous I would say. But again there are the daily DBs and the Key posts to engage in real debate.
I believe most farmers and those who work close to the soil wouldn't care to 'source' what they state as knowledge gained from actual 'doing' the work. That is reserved for more formal venues.
All of course IMO.
Like I said before. One could enter into endless discourse on each and every statement anyone makes. Causing thereby undue acrimony.
If you like to really debate? Don't reply to my posts for I won't debate you. I will state what I believe that experience teaches me and why but to go scouring areas in academia or in the world of GoogleVille? No.
The world of the internet is useful but one, such as Kiashu, needs to sift and filter with a fine sieve to discern truth from fiction. I won't be that sieve for you. You can agree,disagree, or dismiss and insulting language is not called for. Just simply move on.
Airdale-I could be wrong, I have been wrong before, but hopefully learn more each time.
For much of Airdale's perspective, he is a fundamental source -- a personal case study. I tend to enjoy his opinions and perspectives on topics other than subsistence farming as well, as a long and varied life yields a basis for opinion as a gestalt of distilled experiences regardless of annotated external references.
I think there is room around the campfire for scientific-style debate (where references for explicit assertions would be the norm) and informal philosophy and opinion (where external references may not always exist).
One man's "cherry picked testimonial" is another man's "scientific case study". Much of what we're going to deal with will be driven more by popular beliefs, emotions, religion, and whatever else we do to make it through the day than by physical absolutes. I think how we look a the world is going to change as much as our actual conditions will, probably more-so.
Airdale is a fairly unique individual, with a long-ago history of subsistence living, a fairly high-tech and mobile mid-life, and now a return to Internet-connected subsistence. There probably aren't a lot of blog-savvy 65+ farmers who are able and willing to not only share the details of what they're doing but to share their perspective on life as well. To me, both types have value, and I'm always happy to read his posts. I hope he ignores his detractors and continues to post as he sees fit (within the rules of the site, of course).
Paleocon,
I am too old now to change much. What you see is what you get.
I know that some are not too engaged by my style. Some folks around my farm tell me that as well but we are still raising our hands to each other as we pass, as is the custom hereabouts.
I am not making much headway though with my mantras here in the wilds of W.Ky but I keep trying.
Unless its programming or IT work I usually do not go in for long debates.
I think many are not privy to the experiences I have had and so I speak of them...and they 'old' ways we did things , which might soon become the 'new' way we do things.
Sometimes though I hit a vein of 'stream of consiousness' dialogue and can't help myself...for that I will offer pre-apology to those who it falls upon.
Thanks for the bouquet , as we used to say long ago in ITland at my late alma mater.
Airdale
We can assert with some certainty that everyone will die...eventually. What may be a more interesting question is waht peak oil would do to the birth rate.
Perversely, at least in the West(TM), I think there is a strong possibility that it would increase rather than decrease. The current trend of fewer children, later in life is a genetic dead end which could prove to be fatal (at least for a genetic line) in an energy depleted world.
If indeed the populous needs to revert to an agrarian model of sustainability, one of the success traits is to have a large family which cooperates to gather/grow/hunt/farm for food. For amny it is too late to satrt having children and others will make an ideological decsion to go childless to save the planet bu the survivors may actually be those that choos to populate and then hang together through thick or thin. Being a self sufficnet indiviudal may be one of the riskiest paths as it becomes harder to defend your patch against larger groups, particularly wher those groups are organised along family hierarchical lines which are not subject to democratic or revolutionary overthrow (not too many people willingly conspire with their cousins to knock off their grand mother just becasue she is an extra mouth to feed).
Termiol:
I agree with you, but can you please take more time to to spell check and parse your ideas? To be reading your views is valuable, but it makes for some pretty tough sledding.
No slap, just a suggestion.
Noted :)
"What may be a more interesting question is waht peak oil would do to the birth rate.
Perversely, at least in the West(TM), I think there is a strong possibility that it would increase rather than decrease."
I agree - for the reason you state (return for many to agrarian lifestyle), and for other reasons as well. The liklihood of increase in the child mortality rate is one. In recent history, in many Western countries, we can take our chances with one child - that is, reasonably expect that child to grow up and live out a normal lifespan. With reduced access to heroic medical care, and the general poor health of many of the population (here I refer to poor diet (junk food) and lack of exercise) many more children might be expected to die before adulthood.
Also, if social safety nets erode significantly, it may be desirable to have children to take care of you in your old age. Children become "social security." Provided you have good relations with them. :)
lilith
And to add to that almost ANY statement anyone makes on TOD can be asked for proof or sourcing or whatever!
Its I think just how the reader of that post feels at the time.
I could spend endless hours doing just that and accomplish nothing except to piss people off.
If you write an essay and do not do your homework and make odd statements you will surely be held to a higher standard.
This I do not do.
Airdale
Hi Kiashu,
It is given that at some point zero population growth will occur, or stated another way, we'll reach "Peak Population." There are limits to perpetual increase. That is an ecological reality. When? That depends.
Up to and after the peak what kills could be disease, war, starvation, dehydration or other "negative" causes. Peak population could theoretically be achieved without die off if we choose birth control, abortion, statutory limitations to family size, etc. The longer we delay the more palatable population controls the more likely the less palatable will occur.
Perhaps at this juncture we don't know "of what" and maybe it doesn't matter.
If you believe that population growth can continue infinitely - well then - likely no excess deaths. If population growth is becoming neutral, or is becoming negative then something is happening. If the change in population growth occurs slowly, then supposedly fewer births will occur over time. If, however, we are actually in an overshoot situation, the reduction in population will be more abrupt and the number of deaths per year will increase.
If the availability of fossil fuel is seen to be a critical factor in the maintenance of the enlarged carrying capacity supporting our population, then it follows that the reduction in availability of those fuels will stress the system and decrease the carrying capacity. It might be the event which tips us into crash.(rapid and extreme reduction in population following overshoot)
If population does crash to a much lower number than present, there will be a "lot" of excess death. How those deaths occur depends upon how each area of our planet is stressed in response to the lack of fossil fuels.
This belief in the importance of fossil fuels seems to be prevalent here at TOD. So most discussion of dieoff relates to the stresses caused by lack thereof. We are positing large scale systemic failure due to critical resource limitation. If, on the other hand, you don't believe that FF are essential to maintain our enlarged carrying capacity, then it follows you don't believe that population crash will occur in response to peak oil.
In any case, I think that discussing each mechanism of increased death is pointless. Each area of the earth will be stressed differently by the lack of fossil fuel and each will reduce population accordingly. What we have to decide is whether we accept that fossil fuel use creates our increased carrying capacity. If we accept that, then we accept that lots of people will die when the spigots are turned off/down.
So to be meaningful, we have to back the argument up a bit - does the use of Fossil Fuel increase the earth's carrying capacity for humanity? If it does, then when it is gone "a lot" of people are going to die. You will have to look out of the window to imagine how they will die in your community. (in my area we will kill each other, freeze, and starve - not necessarily in that order)
My opinion
(but you might want to check out J. Hanson, W. Catton, C. Ponting ;^) )
Al
It matters a lot "of what", because then we can see if the deaths are preventable, and if your scenario of the dieoff is even plausible.
People don't just die in their hundreds of millions overnight. Something or someone kills them. So when the doomers say "there'll be a dieoff!" it's an entirely valid question: "what's going to kill the people?"
Of course population growth can't continue indefinitely. But it won't, nobody who knows anything believes that. The World Health Organization forecasts that world population will plateau at 9-10 billion around 2050, and decline after that.
But we don't need plagues or famines or nuclear wars for population to stop growing or decline. Japan's population is declining, ain't no catastrophes going on there.
Basically, when the women in your society are prosperous, educated, and have political power, the birth rate drops. When your women are poor illiterate and oppressed they have lots of babies. As countries become developed the birth rate is dropping.
This is not a "dieoff", it's just women getting better off and having less babies. You don't need miserable catastrophes to have population steady or drop - quite the opposite.
Not at all. Whenever someone makes a strong and startling assertion, it's always good to discuss it. If we don't discuss it, all that leaves is either saying "bullshit!" or saying nothing and thus letting the idea spread. Now, I don't want ideas which might be wrong spread, so I ask for explanations - none have yet come. And I won't simply say "bullshit!" because that's stupid.
If people aren't willing to back their startling assertions, then they ought to keep them to themselves.
"when the women in your society are prosperous"
I hesitate to step into this fray, but all women in the world cannot be as prosperous as women in developed countries. There is just not the resource base to support that level of consumption (unless, perhaps they get rid of all the men first and share everything equally then ;-)
There are already food shortages around the world, so that is already killing people and leaving them susceptible to disease. Global Warming is killing people directly through heat waves and indirectly through conflicts inflamed by diminishing capacity of environments to support the local inhabitants (Darfur...). Human flesh is one of the largest relatively homogeneous food sources and so will doubtless be exploited by some successful organism at some point. Thinking it won't goes against biological probability and the well studied behaviors of monocultures. I see no likelihood that any of these will diminish and every reason that they will increase in the near future.
Am I way off here for some reason in your opinion, or do you think there are other mechanisms more likely to lead to die-offs.
But maybe it will all work out just fine. Who knows?
It's all relative, mate. They don't all have to be PhDs living in a Manhattan apartment, but they do have to be something better than an illiterate subsistence farmer who has to hike two miles to get a bucket of clean drinking water and whose husband will throw acid on her if she disobeys him.
Income, energy, education and so on, when measured against more or less objective measures of quality of life such as longevity, tend to follow a shoulder-shaped curve. That is, when you have nothing getting something really improves your life. When you have a lot, having more doesn't make much difference.
For example, one measure of quality of life is the Human Development Index, which is a mixture of one-third each per capita income, education (two-thirds literacy, one-third educational enrolment), and life expectancy. They put it on a scale of 0.00 to 1.00. When you graph available electricity per capita (with one-third going to domestic use, two-thirds to the rest), what you find is that a country's people are "highly-developed" (HDI0.8+) at 2,000kWh/capita, and while 4,000kWh each boosts it to HDI0.9, more electricity after that doesn't improve people's lives. So that the 8,000kWh of France and Germany, the 12,000kWh of Australia or the US, and the 24,000kWh of Iceland and Sweden, most of that is superfluous. A waste.
Access to clean drinking water, being able to read the newspaper and write letters to it, access to preventative healthcare to stop your children dying of diaorrhea, having a reliable electricity supply of 2,000kWh annually (so, 700kWh or so domestically), these sorts of things are by world standards "prosperous".
And it's well within our powers to have the whole world have them.
"It's all relative, mate. They don't all have to be PhDs living in a Manhattan apartment, but they do have to be something better than an illiterate subsistence farmer who has to hike two miles to get a bucket of clean drinking water and whose husband will throw acid on her if she disobeys him."
Fine, but then you should not have used Japan as your comparison point. Another island such as Cuba, the only country that exceeds minimal standards of the Human Development and the Sustainability Indexes, according to a report by WWF a couple years ago.
Unfortunately, I see no Castro in the wings ready to lead us to a world revolution that would equalize incomes, establish universal literacy, empower women... If you want to assume that such a future is likely, more power to ya, mate.
Meanwhile, in the real world, ecological and economic systems are coming apart at the seems, and the carnage is likely to increase greatly before we get to a steady state.
However this may or may not be, I question whether this leaves much room for other species. Is there some body of research that you are basing your claims of universal sustainability on? I would be most interested in reviewing it. Do you think it is prudent, even if you don't care much about other species, not to have the human species living at or quite near the very edge of absolute viability. Right now we are passed that level according to Redefining Progress (and they are among the least doomeristic, most progressive groups looking at this data seriously).
They weren't. It was simply to say that a declining population is not necessarily a sign of hideous misery and bloodshed. Which is what the doomers tell us.
If you want an example of a Third World country which has achieved a lot with very little - improving quality of life while keeping population under control - take a look at the Indian state of Kerala.
Population growth is 0.9% - half that of India as a whole. The Hindus and Christians there have about 1.7 children per women, and the Moslems 2.97. Not coincidentally, the Moslems are the poorest in Kerala, and the women have the lowest literacy rate. They have very cheap healthcare and free education for Kerala residents. Newspapers are published in nine different languages - evidence not only of the high literacy of about 90%, but of people making use of their literacy. The state is rated as the least corrupt in India.
Access to clean drinking water remains a problem, with a high rate of low infant birth weight, diaorrhea and so on. Again that's a solvable problem. While the state is dependent on people who move away and send money back home, yes that's a bad sign - why doesn't everyone want to stay? - but it's also a good sign - Keralans are able to find employment in distant places, usually a sign of most of them having good health and education.
Lord protect us from Great Leaders! I prefer the muddling along we have in democracies. And we don't need a single leader to direct the world. We've had international treaties before.
Just consider treaties about war crimes - yes, horrible things still happen. But we don't see death camps killing thousands a day for years on end, we don't see firebombings destroying a city of 100,000 people overnight, and so on. Yes, horrible things still happen. But far less than there used to be, or could be. And that's because of a few treaties. No Great Leader was necessary, just that a few countries agree to do it, and others went "oh alright then" and followed.
What I think is likely is as I said earlier, gated ecotopias with masses of slums outside, the ecotopians living off the labour of the poor.
What I want to happen is something more equitable. And it's quite possible. Kerala manages it with a per capita GDP of just a few hundred dollars - more than most of India, far less than most of the world. What could we do with $30,000 or so? More than we're doing now, that's for sure.
Things happen because people choose for them to happen. That's both good and bad things. If the world turns shitty it's because we choose for it to turn shitty. If it does well, same.
I agree that Kerala is another great model. Note again that most of these advances were made when they had communist leaders. Note also that both of our examples are from tropical climates with plenty of solar inputs available and little or no winter heating needed.
So I say again, are we all moving closer to the equator? Is there lots of empty space down there with good fertile soil that isn't being used by other species?
Are we ready for world communism or something similar?
These questions aren't all completely rhetorical.
I think people are going to realize pretty quick that when the pie is shrinking quickly, sharing what is left, with the restrictions on freedoms that that entails, is a much more positive outcome than hording by a few, starvation by the masses, and constant instability for all.
I was about to comment on this statement and why it is not true. I see that Nate has already done so and more eloquently that I could have. However it worries me greatly that this seems to be a prevailing view. As someone who implements complex systems,(albeit much less complex than our global economy) I can attest to the fact that even the best planned systems can and do fail catastrophically due to unforseen events. Our current global economy was not planned or built up in any well thought out manner, it is more like a complex evolved organism. Its life blood is fossil fuel and if it gets cut off from it it will suffer a massive aneurysm that will lead to rapid cascading organ failures from which it can not recover. Judging from what we are seeing happening around the world it looks like it is already on life support it might not take much more of a shock to make it flatline once and for all.
An excellent recent example is the problem with the Large Hadron Collider. One small error, probably a poor solder joint, cause the breakdown of this hugely complex system. Months of effort and millions of $ expenditure to fix the problem.
A super Ice-storm taking out the electricity grid in NE USA in mid-winter could easily result in millions of deaths thru freezing and starvation.
Whereas a few months inoperability of the collider is an expensive nuisance, it merely causes delay.
Even a few days without heat, light, cooking facilities, could be fatal. People just don't start up again after they have been switched off.
Large Hadron Collider. You'll spend a lot of time and money PROVING the existance of NOTHING.
Hmmm, that could be usefull.
Hmm, maybe you should change your moniker to Insincere Umbra. Earnest Lux you obviously aren't.
Insulting value judgement, let's try to keep on topic.
Try watching movie "What the bleep would we know"
I find this thread interesting. For a start, the movie is called "What the bleep do we know?
A significant portion of the credible participants disavowed their scenes after the movie was presented and most had an agenda to promote their own pseudo science.
Many were investors, financially or emotionally in the venture.
The basic premise of the the movie was that quantum phenomena could transcend into the Newtonian realm, or in simpler terms, if it could happen there it could happen here.
Apart from the fact that there is no evidence that this is possible, this is simply another "New Age" movement wrapped up in (pseudo) science which is impenetrable to all but a few people.
IOW, it is possible for me to win the lottery if I buy a ticket, but impossible if I don't. In either case the odds are about the same. It is an exercise in wish fulfillment.
Apart from entertainment, don't waste your money. Go out and buy a Q-Ray bracelet and cure your arthritis. ;-)
Earnest, if you can't parse this crap, perhaps you should just lurk (and Google) for a while.
No I'm cool with parsing.
This sort of thing happens with me all the time. Perhaps it has something to do with different peoples observational skills, or what different people consider "phenomena". I am a Magician, that movie taught me a lot.
I realise now that FMagyar thought I was being "sarcastic", which I was not. From my perspective proving the existance of nothing would be rather helpful to my agenda.
I am not posting, I'm chatting round a campfire due to an open public ivitation by TOD to do so.
Let me remind you, this is not your site, perhaps I should teach you how to be polite and show some manners with some of that Quantam stuff manifesting in your Newtonian Life life somewhere, got any goats, I hear that goat polio is going around.
I'm going to assume that you are, like me, a computer programmer. As a programmer, I understand what you mean by implementing complex systems and how they catastrophically fail. However, an important difference between a computer program and the global economy is that one is made up of a rigid set of instructions while the other depends on the actions of reasoning entities. Granted the depth of their ability to reason isn't great, but given the right person and the right circumstances, big leaps are possible.
Just something I like to keep in mind...as I prepare for a hard and fast collapse.
Re Earnest:
My bad, yes, and I was too... I do that a lot.
Re Markincalgary: close, I work for a software company and my job is implementing the software in the real world, which is where the rubber hits the road and all different systems and processes collide, ( no reference to Hadron collider ), with inputs from the end users in various departments. Debugging the code is a picnic compared to what often happens at this stage ;-)
It depends on what you are referring to that falls off a cliff.
The worldwide monetary system could seize up at any time once it becomes generally known that the debt on the books will not be repaid because there isn't the energy for the businesses to make profits.
Edit: This sort of seizing is happening right now (for different reasons) and the world central banks are doing everything in their power to keep the money supply up. In my view, another seizing is all but assured. To me, it seems to be a property of the system when contraction occurs.
IMHO we will not fall off a cliff, like today there is everything and tomorrow there is nothing. Barring a nuclear war there will be a long adjustment period, decades as DavebyGolly suggests, the severity of which will depend on where you are on the planet.
The problem, though, is that a long period of adjustment requires that governments and citizens accept that adjustment strategy. How do you get people to accept a no-growth economy and the abandonment of all their assumptions of, and aspirations for, the future?
A lot will depend on how people react to the message, assuming the message is given. If no message is given, then we may well drop off a proverbial cliff, when societies and economies can no longer hold on by their fingernails to what they thought the world was all about.
You're assuming top-down adjustment. Bottom-up adjustment is also possible and useful.
For example, government subsidies for wind farms is a top-down electricity adjustment away from fossil fuels. If a small town has a council meeting and gets a thousand bucks from each resident for a concentrated solar thermal with thermal storage, that's a bottom-up solution.
Bottom-up solutions don't require national change, people just muddle along.
Assuming that only grand government programmes in partnership with large corporations with overwhelming public support can get things done pretty much ignores a good part of history.
Kiashi and bottom-up solutions - I've indicated elsewhere on this page the near total uselessness of the major bottom-up aspiration that is the Transition Towns movement (search for Hopkins to find it). Bottom-up solns aren't going to adequately happen any more than top-downs will. That's not least because the bottom-ups would need to be released from the severe constraints of land-ownership and planning and bureaucratic rules of farming, which can only be done top down. At best only a few small-community lifeboats are going to securely make it, without too much dependence on sheer luck.
That's not least because the bottom-ups would need to be released from the severe constraints of land-ownership and planning and bureaucratic rules of farming, which can only be done top down.
Define your terms. Top-down means... what? Fed to state? State to county? County to city? Zoning is a city and/or county issue, so is potentially quite responsive to transition/relocalization input. Not all will succeed, but some already are. Portland's energy task force, Oregon's Rogue River area...
Cheers
That's yet to be demonstrated. We just don't know.
Whether Transition Towns is any good or not I don't know. The point is that people are trying.
I was replying to sofistek, who was telling us that nothing productive would happen because the government is needed for things to happen and that only acts when everyone wants it to. None of which is true historically, but even if it were, that's assuming top-down is the only way to get things done. And it's not.
It's amazing how often people manage to muddle through really quite terrible things. That doesn't mean they automatically will in future, it just means it's not impossible.
History does not show us that when confronted with great crises our doom is inevitable, nor does it show us that our paradise-like joy is inevitable. It shows that we muddle along, sometimes doing well, sometimes badly.
I have explained in the cited locations why we do know, and why the trying is not to be commended.
You can do better than this sloppy stuff Kiashu! You appear to be developing denialist's fudge disorder.
I don't think bottom up can work because people (at least those in developed nations and, increasingly, those in developing nations) have become used to growth and the messages that promote growth. Governments and corporations will try to continue pushing that message; I'll bet Obama tries to push that message. People, in general, don't want to move from a fairly comfortable existence, with lots of aspirations for their future, including an active or leisurely retirement, to what might be seen as a more austere existence (though it need not be). Many have found a niche in "careers" that are fairly superficial or profit from the wastefulness of others.
I think, in the present societies, top-down is essential. Even the bottom uppers have to live in a society which may be the reverse of what they'd like, but they will make use of unsustainable services and products because it's easier to do so (I know even some eco-villages that do this).
Significant change will not come quickly enough from the grass roots, even though I applaud those with the strength of will to follow their own convictions on sustainability. Massive re-education is needed, and the elimination of counter messages, in order to get people round to thinking in sustainable ways and to abhor the unsustainable.
I don't see any evidence that enough will be done from the top and little evidence that enough will be done from the bottom. There will be projects that address part of the problem but will the hope that current lifestyles can be maintained in some way. But not addressing the whole problem of unsustainable lifestyles and of economic growth at all costs, will surely likely lead to a cliff. And over the edge.