393 comments on Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
393 comments on Radical Retrenchment - A Reference Model
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
User login
Contact
- campfire at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
Archives
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
The Oil Drum: Local archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
The Oil Drum: New York City archives
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
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.