393 comments on Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
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393 comments on Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
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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.