DrumBeat: July 7, 2006
Posted by threadbot on July 7, 2006 - 9:45am
Oil prices hit a fresh intraday record high Friday morning, on the heels of a run of record highs earlier in the week.At 8:45 a.m. ET, light, sweet crude was up 42 cents to $75.56 a barrel, after rising as high $75.78 in electronic trading. The previous record of $75.40 was struck Wednesday after the Energy Information Administration's weekly stockpile report.
IGNACIO, Colo. (AP) -- Gas production in La Plata County is falling for the first time since the beginning of the coal-bed methane boom -- a little-noticed fact that will carry long-term consequences for local residents and even the nation.ENERGY IMPACTS: Fuel prices eat up farmers' profitsThe evidence -- hidden in mountains of government data -- is unmistakable: Since July 2003, the amount of gas taken from the county has been slowly slipping, according to a Durango Herald analysis of state records. Despite 270 new wells drilled between 2003 and 2005, the average take per well is falling, and total production has fallen by 3.5 percent.
"I spent $12,000 for diesel fuel in October," said [produce farmer David] Ruhlig, who must power up 18 tractors each day to work the fields at the Ruhlig Farm and Greenhouses in Carleton. "Three years ago, I didn't spend $12,000 for the entire year." ...The 1,000-acre family owned produce farm has seen its fertilizer bills increase almost threefold in the last three years. The price of cardboard packing containers -- because of higher petroleum costs -- rose from $1.25 to as much as $1.65 per box this year.Gasoline Shortages Frustrate Iraqis
Iraqis need the fuel, not only for their cars, but also for cooking and to power generators. With government electricity in short supply across most of the country, generators are essential, especially in summer heat, which can rise above 50 degrees centigrade. At another gas station across town, this one for private cars, Ismail waits. "This is not a life; we do not have fuel, we do not have electricity," he complained.Future scenarios: Peter McMahon lays out four possible outcomes of the global warming crisis.
Tom Whipple takes on Energy and Buildings.
Power Down, Pecker Up. A rather flip overview of the peak oil issue, with links to resources. Might be useful for introducing the topic to newbies.
Update [2006-7-7 10:47:44 by Leanan]: Race to the world's energy hotspots
Money no object as the big players grab what is left of a diminishing resourceThe decision by Sinopec of China to pay $1bn for the right to explore for oil in deep water off Angola has shocked the west, which fears it could be left behind in a global scramble for resources.
Similar oil prospects off the coast of the impoverished African country were selling for $35m (£19m) less than a decade ago, when western oil giants such as BP and Shell had the field almost to themselves.
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I'm also building up stocks of firewood, to reduce oil consumption. For reasons of capital costs, I don't want to go cold turkey on the fuel oil yet. Though that could change pretty quickly... the pain threshold already got passed last winter.
Orientation issues, trees, etc. may hinder this; but worth considering.
In a 11/1/04 Forbes column, Yergin was quoted as predicting that oil prices on 11/1/05 would be at $38 per barrel. Yergin spoke pretty dismissively of Peak Oil concerns. (Note that oil prices crossed the $60 mark prior to the hurricanes.)
I don't feel that Yergin gets sufficient credit for doing so much over the past few years to (effectively) encourage Americans to continue buying and driving large SUV's to and from large mortgages.
When the near month contract crosses the $76 level, i.e., two times $38 (either intraday or closing), I propose that we designate that day as "Daniel Yergin Day," in honor of Dan's encouragement of so many American's descents into future bankruptcies.
I also propose a new unit of oil price measurement, a "Yergin," or an incremental increase of $38 per barrel. So, at $76, we would be at two "Yergins."
Indeed, the mainstream media (and I've noticed this particularly on the Lehrer Report0 appears to have a more or less fixed stable of 'experts' on various topics that they draw upon to comment on various news developments as the need arises.
As best I can tell, the main criteria for becoming such a TV expert is i) experience in a high-visibility position in either government or academia, ii) being articulate and reasonably photogenic on TV, and iii) a committment not to say anything too extreme or too divergent from the current 'received wisdom'.
When there is a panel of such people, the atmosphere is generally very chummy, with very little open discord. I recall one rather well-regarded military expert who was on the Lehrer Report during the early days of the Iraq occupation. He said something that went totally against the grain of the other experts and did so quite vehemently. I have not seen him back on the program since.
When looking at this issue, the only thing you need to know is that, first and foremost, TV is entertainment.
Hence the modern expression "pundit." Yergin is the best example of a mass media pundit, but if you'll pardon a ribald touch, it seems to me the book he recites from is the Kama Sutra.
Forbes seems to be good for absolutely nothing.
How do you get filthy rich ? Ya gotta "climb every Malcom, Forbes every stream....."
Besides, if the MSM saw the reality that you and I foresee, they would know their days are numbered and have to rush to the toilet.
Westexas can write the essay, to be posted here or at EnergyBulletin, and we can link to it.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 47 for danial yergin day. (0.54 seconds)"
Since "daniel yergin day" only has 47 results, I think it can be leveraged.
Me.
This is what it finds:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/5/1/181751/9406
It looks like Dan is safe today. The EIA natural gas report seems to be pulling down oil prices somewhat.
Don't forget CERA's testimony in front of a congressional committee in December, 2005, to the effect that they don't believe that we are near the peak. I thought that the timing was interesting--exactly when Deffeyes was predicting that we crossed the 50% of Qt mark.
Right after that happened, I got an e-mail entitled "Your web site has DROPPED out of the Search Engines!". It was full of multi-colored font, bolding, and lots of emphatic text. They explained that they can fix this problem for $100. It reminded me of a mob protection racket. I couldn't figure out how (or if) they had manipulatd my site, but it would have certainly been feasible using Google Bombs.
Cheers,
RR
I think the "honest" way to do it is to create content (Google likes content, paragraphs of text at the source and destination end), and each of us link to a Westexas essay on "key words" from our own essays (with a different name, but with "key words" in the link).
(There are other ways to change your Google Rank using your own page design. Those $100 guys might be selling a site overhaul. Wikipedia has a good page on Google Rank and how it works.)
They may have also been deploying 301 Redirects against you, though I thought that problem had been solved by now.
I was going to suggest that "Yergin" be made a verb
yer-gin Audio pronunciation of "yergin" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (yr·gn)
tr.v. yer·gin·ed, yer·gin·ing, yer·gin·s
1. To be blithely reassuring but opaque: A great effort was made to yergin the situation.
2. To render complacent: His article yergined the public outcry.
3. (astronomy) To report a UFO.
-C.
http://www.time.com/time/globalbusiness/article/0,9171,1050297-1,00.html
In April 2005:
"And with markets this tight, you'll see a lot more volatility, and you could see prices spike up as high as $65 to $80. How high they go depends on geopolitics and market psychology."
I think he has made more critical errors in judgement,such as:
"By the time oil production plateaus, he says, ''I think we'll be driving cars that get 110 miles to the gallon, 120 miles to the gallon." To assume we won't be able to adjust in time, Yergin says, ''means you think the technological revolution that began in the 18th century is going to end."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/02/26/oil_futures/?page=full
I think an interesting post here would be for someone to really look at all his predictions vs. current reality.
Dan is a one man wrecking machine. So, when will we hit 3 Yergins? Recent price rises seem tied to nothing but tightness of supply. I believe the "concerns" about Iran are not driving the price. That is not to say I dismiss the possibility of a catastrophic outcome there. In fact, I think it has a probability over 50%. These neocons will be in power for only another 18 months. That's their window of opportunity for ruining the world. If they bomb or allow Israel to bomb, they can trot out Karl Rove's favorite trick one more time -- wrapping yourself in the flag and calling anyone who criticizes you unpatriotic if not treasonous.
Danny boy reassuring us all the time lays out happy scenarios that help pave the way for irresponsible geopolitical actions. Unlike you or me, he is well paid for his statements.
Einstein:
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe".
Bertrand Russell:
"Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do."
and for some examples, from Tom Delay:
"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills. [on causes of the Columbine High School massacre, 1999]".
Daniel Yergin:
"The interdependence of producer and consumer is evident with LNG - the resources flowing out are balanced by the financial liquidity they give companies".
Of this last quote, this is a novel interpretation of the relationship between the drug supplier (Qatar) and the drug addict (America). In mental health programs, they take the opposite approach: cure the addition.
later, Dave
What are we going to do when it turns out our dealer is dry?
"Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.
I know this is an oil site -- but how can anyone take Republicans seriously when they spew out crap like this?
Evolution in school?
Working mothers taking birth control causes crime?
This is what's wrong with America -- abstract, non-empirical, ideological 'faith' trumping reason.
Only the supremely powerful can afford to ignore reality or afford to use faith, secular or religious, instead of reason when making decisions. How much power and how many resources will we waste trying to prove 'faith' is more powerful than reason?
I don't believe Yergin has any influence over American consumption, but histortically low interest rates most certainly did.
We are almost certainly now behind peak production. Global production has been steadly declining about 100,000 b/d every month. I seriously doubt that the new projects coming will be able to exceed declines. The existing field production declines will accelerate as will nationation of oil and gas assets.
Since were are already past the curve is pointless to enlighten the masses of the pending crisis. It would be far better to make your own preprations before time runs out and hell breaks loose rather than gamble on some gov't level effort to address the issue.
Once the world recognizes PO, exporters will almost certainly end or radically reduce exports to save their remain reserves for domestic use or to stretch out exports for trade. To believe that that the US or any country could initiate an manhattan/apollo scale project to address the issue is silly. There no longer remain sufficient resources to make long term preparations. When the crisis begins global stability will fall off the deep end as people and gov't panic over what to do and finger pointing becomes the norm. We have already seen the smoke, Nationalization of energy assets in Russia, and South America, China locking up energy with long term contracts, declining production at all the largest fields. It won't be too long before we start to see some flames.
So the Russian need for hard currency and the Saudi's flooding hte market driving down oil prices had NOTHING to do with the present consumption patterns?
It would be far better to make your own preprations before time runs out and hell breaks loose rather than gamble on some gov't level effort to address the issue.
Standard advice. If you prepare too well, the sniper with a .50 cal can and will take 'em from you however.
To believe that that the US or any country could initiate an manhattan/apollo scale project to address the issue is silly.
Which issue? Production, consumption, the money systerm, government level of spending.....So many issues are tied together, its not as simple as 'cheap money', lack of the currency being backed by anyhting,
thats a tough balancing act.
to be prepared enough to survive but not too well to become a target of not only hungry people but the government needing to get a hold of resources or to dispose of possible threats.
Everything I tell you is true.
But you already knew that.
Every day in every way, I am becoming better prepared. As are all my family members . . . .
This has to be a joke. What percentage of people buying an SUV in the US has ever heard of Yergin or was familiar with his prognostications, even without attaching them to his name? One tenth of one percent? Less?
There are WAY more important things we can be doing aside from chasing people like Yergin in circles.
It leaves me wondering if Yergin is popular because he is believed, or just because he enables.
Please let us bury dead horses rather than beat them over and over and over and over again.
In such a situation, is "attacking Yergin" a side or non issue?
I am reading Lester Brown's "Outgrowing the Earth". It is about food production. One fact that he keeps mentioning is that grain yields drop 10% for each 1 degree Celsius rise in average temperature. Global food production (with the exception of aquaculture) seems to be maxed out, so further increases in temperature will be devastating to crop yields.
http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/2006/05-06/graintoc.htm
From that chart on the right in your link--it looks like Peak Grains has been occuring for sometime--Yikes! Total grains inventory down almost 50% [my eyeballing it] from 98/99 year.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
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Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4824433,00.html
FasTracks faces choice
Denver-Longmont, DIA trains could be diesel or electric
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
July 6, 2006
FasTracks' next big question: diesel or electric?
It's already been determined that the trains serving the Denver-Boulder-Longmont and Denver International Airport lines won't be light rail, but now planners are considering whether they should be electric or diesel powered.
Electric is more expensive to build; diesel may be more expensive to operate.
In the original FasTracks plans, the U.S. 36 Corridor serving Boulder and Longmont and the East Corridor serving DIA were assumed to be diesel-powered commuter trains, which are more like regular railroad passenger cars.
But with diesel fuel prices rising, the electric option is back in play.
With lower upfront construction costs, it seems at first glance that diesel cars - propelled by internal diesel engines - are the way to go.
Though they are more expensive to buy, at $3.6 million per car - compared with $2.8 million for an electrified car - it costs about $2 million more per mile to build overhead electrical power lines for electric trains, according to RTD data.
But committing to many years of diesel fuel use could lock RTD into a system that's more expensive to operate in the long run.
"If I add electrification, that's an added capital cost," said John Shonsey, senior engineer for the Regional Transportation District, which is building the $4.7 billion FasTracks rapid-transit system. "But where you have your biggest difference is in the cost of fuel, and we want to find out how long it would take to reach the break-even point between electric and diesel."
RTD calculates that an electric train car would cost between 55 cents and 80 cents per mile to operate under various scenarios.
A diesel-powered vehicle would cost between 67 cents and $2 per mile to run, depending on various cost assumptions and operating conditions.
Another factor is that electric cars accelerate faster, making total trip time from downtown to the airport 29 minutes, including station stops, compared with 34 minutes for the diesel cars.
The Boulder-Longmont rail corridor is 38 miles, starting at Denver Union Station. It follows the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe tracks along the Boulder Turnpike and continues along the Longmont Diagonal Highway. The airport line is 23.6 miles to the DIA terminal.
RTD may face the same electric vs. diesel choice on the North Metro Corridor through Commerce City and Thornton, an 18-mile line on which environmental study is beginning next month, although light rail is still an option.
-----------------
Dear Editor,
Your July 6th article about the whether the Denver-Boulder-Longmont DIA rail line will be electric or diesel powered underscores truths that we all must understand. The first is that American transportation depends largely on liquid fuels that will be increasingly more expensive, while electricity, coming from many sources, will continue to be relatively cheaper and more available than fuel that goes into a tank. Calgary, for example, powers its CTrain with windmills at the base of the Canadian Rockies.
Dave Dobbs
Publisher, Light Rail Now!
I left out the guts of Dave Dobbs letter.
----------------
The second telling point is that rail cars using the electric grid are faster over the same route because acceleration power is not limited to the motor/energy on board. Electric traction vehicles can briefly and without damage, effectively double their horsepower starting from a stop because the external power is available. The five-minute savings with electric rail from downtown to DIA translates to a 13-minute timesavings from Boulder to DIA.
Electric traction costs more initially, but lower operational and maintenance costs, plus increased ridership on faster trains will quickly recover the difference
What really bothers me is that if things turn bad and resources go scarce, such dilemmas will increasingly be solved in favor of the short-term patches. I've seen that happening in the collapsing ex-socialist countries - one of the most evident being road maintainance. With governments short of cash, the roads get patch almost every other year, which in the long run costs many times more than a if it was being done properly.
IMO to avoid total collapse in the long-term we need to set up the rules for best practices now, while we still can. Any thoughts about how to do it?
And, perhaps, a mark of economic decline due to Peak Oil?
-best,
Wolf
Our genes are not our friends--the collective will ultimately fail, whimpering into oblivion, unless a full tilt paradigm shift begins to optimize the Dieoff Bottlenck:
From Duncan's Olduvai Gorge Theory:
------------------------
ODYSSEY: MY QUEST FOR THE OLDUVAI SIGNATURE
I would rather discover a single fact, even a small one, than debate the great issues at length without discovering anything at all.
-- Galileo Galilei, c. 1640
My Odyssey with the Olduvai theory began thirty-two years ago during a lecture series titled, Of Men and Galaxies, given at the University of Washington by cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle:
*****
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Hoyle, 1964; emphasis added)
***********
I was fascinated--and stunned. His soft-spoken proposal seemed incredulous, bizarre, preposterous--and possibly inevitable. A return to the Stone Age? Deep cultural and material impoverishment? However nobody else in the audience seemed the least concerned. Perhaps Hoyle was just giving a lead-in to his next science fiction thriller. So for the next decade I went about my way: raising kids, building airplanes and teaching engineers. Haunted by Hoyle's hypothesis.
-----------------------
http://dieoff.com/page125.htm
My theory is that Foundation might give us a chance. Time will tell.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
personally i think this chance was thrown away after Apollo was stopped due to lack of public interest. though that was caused because we went into space for the wrong reasons.
Sorry Steve we can't do that.....
Humans will continue to kill each other on a mass scale that made the 20th century look like a walk in the park. And as for the space delusion, there is alot of radiation out in space or on the surface of moon and that is a big problem, OK... , we can live in caves on the moon, brilliant.
Where are all the predictions of the BS futurists from the '60s, '70s ' & 80s... ?
TOD is a multi-generational site.
We seem to have here:
1. 1940's-born geezers (like Sailorman) who's childhood years were deeply molded by the end of World War II,
2. 1950's-born geezer wanna-be's (like me) who formed the bulk of the 1945-1955 Baby Boom generation and who's childhood years were deeply molded by JFK's race to the Moon, the cold war, the Bomb, the Vietnam War
3. 1960's-born Generation Xers (like ... 40-something TODders, identify yourselves) who seem to have been lost in the shadow of the Baby Boomers but whose childhood years nonetheless were deeply molded by the dawning of the microcomputer age and by the actual landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong in July 20, 1969, (Conjunction junction anybody? wha?). It seemed back then that "progress" would be perpetual, that we would keep going and going, beyond the Moon, to Mars, to the Stars, on a glorious Star Trek ride
- 1970's-born and current 30-somethinger's who are probably too busy struggling with raising families and making a buck to have time to pay attention to PO,
- 1980's-born and current 20-somethinger's whose childhoods were governed by that City-on-the-Shining-Hill happy face Raygun Guy, by the rise of He-Man and the Cabbage Patch Doll take over
- 1990's-born and currently teenagers or early college --any of you actually visiting here? If so, what do you think about all these geezers and subgeezers yapping about End-o-Oil?
So to talk about the "BS futurists" of the 1950's, of the 1960's, and of other eras does not make sense unless one knows what generation these futurists were talking to and how the audience received the messages.I suspect that the current 20-something generation is more into foreboding Matrix mentality than into happy George Jetson day dreams. The world is so much more crowded, so much more "competitive" for current 30-something and 20-something folk than it was for us Happy-Days 1950's-1960's hoola-hoop rotaters.
Everyone here has seen a different Happy-Future forecast.
As for myself, growing up in the triumph-of-science 1960's it seemed that progress would stretch out forever. Each space mission: Gemini, Mercury, Appolo, the Moon, communication sattelites, transistor radios, color TV, etc, was another leap forward toward that utopian future. There was no holding mankind back now, we had conquered Nature itself. Yes there was some noise in the 70's from those gray-haired Club of Rome doomsters --but what the heck could they know? They were so old school, so not cool. Malthus had been wrong all this while.
Where's my air-car, goddammit!?
Now quit complaining. Shucks, you even have the Internet, which can be a good substitute for lack of a social life;-)
One can imagine an alternate history in which polymer chemistry, not metallurgy, is developed early. One could even more easily imagine a post-collapse civilization, having retained knowledge of atomic theory and the scientific method, rebuilding with carbon fiber, and perhaps buckytubes, instead of metal.
Chemistry might also be useful for energy storage; less need for fossil fuel if you can store intermittent natural sources at high density.
Chris
With alloys, aluminum can perform MANY tasks. A polymer, ceramic & aluminum technology is very possible.
Hydroelectric power alone could sustain a lower density population. Add wind and/or solar and the upper limit increases dramatically.
To be honest - I'm on the salmon's side. I don't trust their accounting but admit that NOT killing every last living thing is more expensive than total disregard for ALL ELSE.
I don't disagree that hydroelectric alone could power a 'powered-down' civilization, but if another segment of the population is killing all the fish, to me, it just demonstrates how we take two steps back for every step forward, or, perhaps more appropriately, how everything is attached to everything else, or some such, as John Muir said a while back.
We would either need to have a drastic population cut (a nuclear war?) and/or return to an end-of 19 century lifestyle for this to happen. Yes, theoretically wind and solar can provide for the rest of our current needs, but theoretically we can also conquer the space, right?
Abandoned water mill sites are ripe for redevelopment. IMHO Last I checked the electric companies were fighting to stop this from happening. Evidently if they don't own the asset they don't want it hooked up to their grid.
A silted up reservior will still have water coming down, but no place to store it i.e. a run-of-the-river scheme. So we get more energy, but not when we want it.
The US has developed large storage schemes but not large run-of-the-river schemes. We still have the Qatars & Iranian gas fields.
I think that we could several percent of US electricity demand from small hydro.
Conventional wisdom dictates you are wrong - the power produced will be the same at best. Given that this best case would mean reducing demand following capabilities, the net result I think will be definately negative. After that if/when the silth reaches the valves, then what? (just guessing here we need somebody in that business IMO)
Seasonal shifting of power is very common for large reserviors. Water may fill the reservior in the spring (maximum head) and then drawn down (lower head) during the summer (or following winter). The cubic meters of water that go through the turbines at lower head generate less electricity (directly proportional to head, ignoring any effects from suboptimal design; turbines have a single point of highest efficiency; lower heads often drop efficiency by 2% to 3% or even more).
More energy would be generated (a larger power plant might be required) if the reservior was kept full at all times (some reserviors in a chain of storage dams on a river are kept full at all rimes except dire emergencies).
The economic value of "run-of-river" power is less than storage "on demand" hydroelectricity, but there would be more of it.
This dam will displace Argentian natural gas. Since NG is used pretty much 24/7 (AFAIK) to generate electricity in Chile, it matters little when it is displaced.
This scheme drills a tunnel between a high point on the river and a lower point with a power plant. Mhttp://www.norfund.no/article_news.asp?id=137&infoid=84inimal environmental impact.
This dam will displace Argentian natural gas. Since NG is used pretty much 24/7 (AFAIK) to generate electricity in Chile, it matters little when it is displaced.
This scheme drills a tunnel between a high point on the river and a lower point with a power plant. Minimal environmental impact.
http://www.norfund.no/article_news.asp?id=137&infoid=84
In the years before silting up, the turbines saw :cleaner: water because some of the silt load had been deposited in the reservior. The silt load would increase to what came down river, without any reduction.
Is it still true?
Will it be true when we have a lot more wind and solar power on the grid??????????
I said " if we got cut off from all the fossil fuel right now, would civilization survive?" and then went on with Fred Hoyle's ideas about the one-shot try per planet.
She said " Hoyle is wrong. look at the Incas, Chinese, Greeks, and so on, they had none of our energy stuff, but had astronomy social structures, ag, roads, and so on. If we started from there, with everything we know (she was a physics and chem major and grows most of our food), we could do windmills and solar thermal and biomass, we could go on just fine, after all, if you have science and electricity, you can get all the hardware you need by reworking the trashpiles. But a lot of people would have to die off right quick."
That sums up my feeling too, and same with a lot of my friends. So around here the collective wisdom seems to be pretty solid- way too many people, not anywhere enough wisdom to apply what we already know, and just a heck of a lot of plain lazyness --probably induced by cars and TV.
But we have another consensus that is almost never spoken but is solidly there- dogmatic religion of any stripe is a very serious threat to the life of any sane society. Read "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.
BTW, most of us are pre-WW-2 types who think the 50's were just yesterday- and not all that bad either.
none of the alterntives can be made or even maintained past one life cycle without what we have in place right now.
Hydroelectric powerplants need major overhauls every 40 to 50 years, but they can get by without them. Witness, Albania, North Korea and Zaire, where hydroelectric facilities are their most reliable source of electricity during decades of neglect & isolation. Their life cycle is multiple centuries.
Wind turbines are fairly easy to build & maintain.
Geothermal, biomass and landfill gas plants are not terribly difficult to build with the installed technology base. Nukes are.
with reduced power output no less.
they are now because they depend on cheap energy to be made, there is no guarantee they will stay that way. much smaller scale wind power which is too small to generate electricity but useful for mechanical uses such as pumping up water for consummation or grinding stuff for flower
geothermal is region specific.
biomass fed eclectic plants will rob people of food, and destroy our soils by proxy by robbing the topsoil from nutrients better recycled into the soil rather then burned for power.
landfill plants are limited to a even more limited resource, our own throw away waste. it will also have to deal with any rise of recycling no doubt there are many things in those landfills that will be worth more then the amount of methane they release.
it cut off. "is sustainable"
from this sentence.
"much smaller scale wind power which is too small to generate electricity but useful for mechanical uses such as pumping up water for consummation or grinding stuff for flower"
When Albania rebuilt theirs after decades (since 1930s) of neglect. by 8% to 12% per conversation with poster at a Hydrovision confernce.
One can project the costs of windmills into a higher cost energy but lower economic activity future. Thw costs should stay competitive. Recycle titanium from aircraft for "forever" blades, recycle copper, steel, etc. from other sources to first generation wind turbines, and then recycle them again for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, generation WTs. Electricity is often used today for recycling even when not used (today) for primary production.
Landfill methane comes from stuff that is not easily recycled (except, perhaps, paper) like spoiled/waste food. Perhaps less of that in the future.
If you get tired of stirlings, try steam. Lear gave up, but I think that was because he was trying for too much efficiency.
I say . . . go back to the Stanley Steamer! Or the Doble! Now there were a couple of fine external combustion-engine
cars. No transmission needed.
Oh, and bring back steam locomotives and steamships with auxilliary sails.
Back to the future . . . .
anyhow, no harm. There will be a stirling guy and a steam guy and lots of others, and the best will win, just as it should be. Most likely, one kind here, another there. Where I happen to be in the hills of appalachia, stirlings running on the cast offs from whisky stills, the whisky going into rebuilt fords and their drivers.
Sailboats are great. How about a boat with one of those 3 megawatt windmills on it??? think of the photo opp!
Did you know that Columbus's ships were so well designed and built that vessels of this type had somewhat better than a fifty percent chance of surviving a hurricane? Those that did not survive frequently were blown onto an island or coast that destroyed the ship.
There are three things I look for in a sailboat:
Only kidding, sweety already found...
If I were going to edit a book of Oil Drum posts, that one would be on it. Pretty well sums up everything I believe as well. Of course there are some wild cards, one that greatly concerns me is that some people will still have oil and can use it to upset your survivable location, if you have one (not to mention global warming). I also believe that the further out we go without fossil fuels, the lower our standard of living will become. Keep up your work on the solar powered stirling engines, too!
Smaller sites are actively discouraged by US licensing requirements (less than 10 MW, the papaerwork costs more than the electricity it can provide).
Run-of-river schemes are almost unknown in the US. We could get another 5% to 10% from existing hydro power plants. TBMs make run-of-river MUCH more practical today.
India has found sites for 60,000 MW of hydro and wants to build many of them. Over half run-of-river schemes in the Himilayas. Canada had many hydro sites left, etc.
India might be unpleasantly surprised if it bets on hydro in the medium term. Himilayan gletchers are retreating and unless we stop GW tomorrow I expect a very poor future for Indian hydroelectricity.
Overall USA and Canada are blessed with quite more hydro resources than the world average and still hydro is even behind nuclear in the energy mix (in a tie in Canada, but far behind oal, coal and NG). Now consider Africa, most of Europe, central Asia etc. etc. - what are they going to do?
(Though oal sounds like a good synthesis of what our civilisation runs on :)
But local rain will coem down the rivers.
GW will change the distribution of rain (those with more will need larger power plants), but in toto rain should increase with GW.
If water falls in early November in the Himilayas as rain and not snow, it will still generate power, just in late Novemenr and not April or May of next year.
The question for Indai is total annual rainfal (and not just in the Himilayas).
Regardless, Diesel doesn't seem like the way to go. Thinking long term, they may be forced to replace it because of future oil shortages. Better to bite the bullet now with higher capital expenditures.
I have been wondering what consumption looks like if viewed in the price domain, rather than the time domain as is mostly done here. Seems this sort of thing might be helpful in modeling post peak outcomes vis demand destruction
From "This Week in Petroleum page" (thanks to Oil CEO for pointing me to the data) I did a scatter plot and trend fit (Least mean squared error polynomial of the 3rd order)of retail gasoline price vs barrels supplied, from Feb 1991 to present, to try and derive a simplistic "consumption curve" for US Gasoline.
The idea as I understand it is that up to some point higher prices encourage increased supply from producers i.e. they move the supply curve by bringing more gasoline to the market, but beyond this point consumer resistance to price becomes dominant i.e. demand is "destroyed", or at least surpressed, in the face of the high prices.
This is not new by any means, but what I was able to find out there imposed large amounts of presumption in the form of elaborate "market model" equations on the data, and I think if nothing else there is merit in going back to raw as a starting point for getting ones head around such things...
As a means of evaluating the predictive utility of the fit function I extended it to the realm of $4 / gal gasoline... Time will tell?
Here's the graph:
IMO you could be right that up to 2-2.50$ price was essentially irrelevant to the the demand side of the equation. Consumers just filled up without giving much of a thought. But you are probably wrong that the upslope was due to suppliers interested in bringing more gasoline to market - basicly what they would want hardly matters if the product they try to "push" is not demanded at such prices. They could do sime advertising, lobby for bigger cars etc. but in the case of gasoline I don't think this has a great effect.
In this timeframe I see the other factors affecting demand (e.g. population growth, income growth, shift to SUVs) coinciding with the price rise and that's why you get the upside of the curve. Now that we are on the downslope I would suggest that it is too early to estimate and/or model how demand responds to the price - the data points are too few for that and price need to be rising significantly more.
It is a graph of the actual gasoline supplied to US market plotted towards the price and nothing more. By definition demand and supply curves represent what consumer and producers would want buy and sell at a given price. The graph shows where these curves have intersected over time and I translate it as follows:
- Up to 2-2.50$ demand has been essentially insensitive to price (low price elasticity at these prices implying a flat demand curve)
- Higher elasticity above such prices, implying that consumers already feel the pain and change behavior.
Again as always the suppliers are in a "demand-following mode". They can not bring more to the market than the people are buying - where would that store that extra gasoline!?Right, if we think of the classic 2 line supply demand graph from micro-economics the points scattered on my graph are the intersection values of those 2 lines since '91 in the US gasoline market, and as such refect both supply and demand side factors. To the extent that it sucessfully models anything it models the market behaviour as a whole, not the seperable responses of buyers or sellers IMO
"I would suggest that it is too early to estimate and/or model how demand responds to the price - the data points are too few for that and price need to be rising significantly more."
I agree very much, given that there are very few of the data past the inflection point, and the fit is very noisey, that end of the curve is very loosley constrained by the regression equation. "The data is what the data is".
I was mainly just trying to get the idea out there for discussion, a 3rd order LMS polyfit might well not be the equation to use... just a first little more than guess on my part, like I say I'm out of my depth here...
As to the other points in the prior comment I'm "black boxing" the system, and not speculating as to "driving" (sorry for that pun) factors beyond what I said in my original post
Also, the concept of using inflation-adjusted vs. non-inflation adjusted data for the price.... perhaps instead of nominal prices using a ration such as nominal price/average hourly wage might be more enlightening.
Yeah... things of which Economics masters theses are made....
Right, which is what I'm NOT trying to do. I'm not an economics student, nor do I aspire to become one :) In the Humanities I find mythology, and symbolic logic much more to my liking than solving pages of simultanious linear equations...
Humans love to see clean lines in deeply noisey data. I know this from years spent writing numerical methods software for scientific researchers, and more recently from reading this blog ;) There is no such thing as "too smooth" and when you set off down that road you can "smooth model" just about anything. The predictive valdity of those models however....
I'm black boxing the system and seeing if it will yield a useful huristic property or 2, thats all that curve is meant to be is a description of the box from the outside, not of the systems within it that create its behavior, using a simple and replicatable method with no "magic number" co-efficients in it. You might have guessed by now that I really really hesitate to put a magic number in a systems model to make it do what it needs to, though I have and will again if needs be.
I will say though that there has been a LOT written here about how "everyone just keeps driving their SUV regardless of fuel price in the US" etc etc and maybe this is a way of suggesting to those writers that there is more than that going on with regard to price signals even within the US where you will need to "pry my cold dead fingers from the steering wheel" (Gotta love that one). As the "Bug" said in the movie "Men in Black": "The terms you propose are acceptable!"
While I'm thinking of things "Numerical methody" Has anyone here run any spectral methods i.e. FFT or some such on the monthly production curve that we keep seeing to see what it looks like in the frequency domain? I was wondering if the choice of a 13 month avg was just a "seasonal" guess or if it was a designed choice. If you want a smoothed line why not run a designed digital filter across it based on the spectra rather than just an average?
The problem isn't so much doing it, as spending the time putting it in a form that can be presented here to everybody else. Stuart, Khebab, and I are the only three that do it on a regular basis as far as I know. My offer stands, and I only speak for myself. If you have specific data and a plan, you can send it me in Excel spreadsheet format only. The best way is to learn Excel charting yourself and learn where to get the data.
I'm waiting for some turbulence in the gasoline market before updating some stuff I've done before on that subject. Much will be revealed.
Is this site now going to be "R" rated? "X"????
- Time trend effects. 15 years ago, gas was cheaper, there weren't as many people, and cities were smaller and didn't require each person to drive as far. So a lot of the lower left corner of your graph is probably that.
- Seasonal effects: on average, in the winter, gas is cheaper and people use less of it.
So I think you need to de-trend and seasonally adjust the data somehow before we can understand what the situation is now.This is why economists use multiple regression models so much.
On my graph we are at june 28 / 06 at 287 cents per gallon and 9645 Kbbls/day (its the rightmost of those 3 points up at the top of the scatter)
In the big picture I think we are at or past peak more or less now based on Hub. Liniar. method but that there is too much deep noise to say much more than that, this does not concern me because for any practical reason I can think of other than perhaps speculative investment high precision is not really required. I prefer poker to the stock market (Dealers Choice, not that Texas Holdem stuff which I think could well wreck a good game!)
Big Oil's Big Profits, and the Big Lies They're Telling to Maintain Them
No need to worry, because ethanol will cover our future energy needs. These kinds of comments, from someone many see as a visionary, are going to be incredibly damaging in the long run. What is he going to say when we delay serious conservation efforts due to these kinds of comments, and eventually he is forced to admit he can't deliver? His empty promises will end up having devastating effects.
Cheers,
RR
But it's interesting that the ethanol producers have been driving the molasses market in Louisiana:
Fuel Alcohol Plant - Cost Study Cases - Grain Based Feedstocks - 1986 Dollars
The economics change above the level of production that depends only on molasses as input, although Brazil converts 50% of sugar to ethanol on market-based terms. In other words, they do canabalize their dugar production and find it makes economic sense.
I don't see how the LA plants would find it profitable to switch to grain unless it is cvaused by market imperfections - i.e subsidies, etc.
However, they've got the pages for the August issue set up already. I can see where the article will be when I search the site, but it's not accessible yet.
Haven't gotten my issue yet; hopefully, it will arrive today. But here's the snippet that searching the Discover web site gives me:
Sadly too there are many like Khosla who, once achieving some success and notoriety in one field, turn to polemics rather than science when discussing the viability of technical issues, in this case ethanol and oil.
The need to demonize oil companies stretches as far back to JD Rockefeller, and the need to present any private company as the enemy of the people is standard Bolshevism.
In a recent trip to the US I stood in a grocery store line behind a women who was complaining to the cashier about oil prices and oil companies. I was tempted to ask her about how her horses were handling the heat and humidity, but I kept quiet...
But the response comments made my day. Every single one of the 20 or so I scrolled through are flagged as "abusive." Haha. He had to be super-pleased with that. Think he'll give up after the feedback? Tough crowd over there at The Huffington Post. Think I'll go back and read some for a good chuckle. Thanks again.
IIRC consensus is growing we are talking several feet.
Inputs anyone?
As a side note, 15-35 cm sealevel rise, combined with energy depletion, is probably to much to cope with for Holland anyway
I don't think there's a consensus yet. However, the new data coming out suggests that global warming is happening a lot faster than we thought only a year ago.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth says global warming will raise sea level 20 ft. (Goodbye not only to Holland and New Orleans, but probably Houston, New York, Honolulu, Washington DC, Boston, and a lot of other cities, too.)
I was bemused to read a right-wing rebuttal of Gore's movie this morning, claiming the scientific consensus was that sea level would rise "only" 35 inches (almost a meter). Wow, that makes me feel better.
James Hanson, the NASA scientist the Bush administration tried to muzzle, thinks we could see an 80' (24 meter) rise in sea level before the end of the century. He argues that glaciers are melting much faster than the models predicted, because meltwater and mud underneath them are sort of lubricating the slide into the sea. That was not anticipated in the original models.
Sea levels rise for two reasons.
1. thermal expansion due to increased temperature of the water in the
oceans. This will be about proportional to and concurrent with the global
average temperature rise. For this a figure of 15-35cm by 2050 seems
reasonable. Only the top layer of the oceans will get warmer, the
deep ocean will stay cold.
2. Ice melt from icecaps and glaciers. This is the big unknown. Almost
all glaciers in the world are retreating, and melt rates have been measured
to have increased three-fold in recent years, because the melt-water acts
as a lubricant and accelerates the flow of the glacial ice down the mountains
to warmer, low altitudes where they melt. If the entire greenland icecap
melts, sea level rises about 20 feet. That is enough to flood most of the
mega-cities in the world and reduce fertile agricultural land by a large
percentage.
For greenland to melt, global temperatures need to be about 5 degrees C
above current (IIRC), which is well within the range of global warming
forcasts for this century, if not by 2050.
The ice will not melt overnight! The ice sheet is miles thick in places and may
take up to a century to melt completely (but given recent findings, it
could be much quicker). The thing is, once the temperature rises, the melt
is set in motion and cannot be reversed. The sea level would rise by 20 feet
eventually.
Of course, there is also the antarctic ice sheet. This is an order of magnitude
bigger, and until recently, did not see an obvious net melting. Latest results
are less clear. If that does melt in future centuries our surviving descendants
will be living in waterworld...
http://www.realclimate.org/
Where would it go? Some of it would go to refilling Lake Chad, some of it would rain out locally (the Sahara used to be much greener than it is now), most of it would probably contribute to rain in the tropics, since the Sahara is in an atmospheric subsidence zone.
There could be other places more suitable for the idea - central Asia, the Nevada or Atakama deserts come to mind. We could use nuclear or wind power to pump the water.
The Greenland ice cap is 2,930,000 km^3. If we are going to compensate for 1% of it annualy (29 300km^3) - this translates into 929 000 m3/sec. Pumping it 100 m ablove sea level will require... hm 929 GW of power. Ooops.
On the bright side I find it great for people to keep on dreaming - sometimes unexpected results come even from the wildest ideas.
I always thought about filling up the Qattara Depression made famous by Rommel. It would create some new farmland with desal.
-best,
Wolf
One question that struck me the other day: If ice takes up more volume (is less dense) than water, will the melting of floating ice-sheets not reduce the volume of the oceans?
According to Wikipedia a cubic metre of ice only contains 917kgs of water (as opposed to a cubic metre of water which contains 1000kg ). Thus when that cubic metre of ice melts, it will only be 0.917 (or 91.7%) of a cubic metre of water. This seems like a significant loss in volume.
Mind you, since ice floats in the water and sits slightly above the water's surface, then maybe the difference in volume is compensated.
Anybody got a definitive answer?
The problem is the ice that's not floating. The glaciers that are on land.
Yes, of course the glass will not overflow, because the ice actually takes up more volume than the water it 'contains' when melted.
And yes, I know that the melting on-shore ice is the main problem, I was just trying to find out if the reduction in volume of the melted floating ice may help to reduce the effect of the melting land ice.
However, I think it comes down to the fact that the ice is floating 'proud' of the water. As we learned at school, 9 tenths of an iceberg is under the surface, so if it melts down to (about) 9 tenths of it's original volume as water, then, as you say, it's a wash.
When the Industrial Revolution began, the atmospheric CO 2 level was roughly 270 ppm. The 377 ppm registered for 2004 is not only far above any level over the last 740,000 years, it may be nearing a level not seen for 55 million years. At that time the earth was a tropical planet. There was no polar ice; sea level was 80 meters (260 feet) higher than it is today.
Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
(NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
Also GW does not seem to follow the 11 year solar cycle, variation in solar radiation is small enough to get lost in the noise.
OTOH, humans ARE making a profound difference in the chemical composition of our atmosphere. See graph below with annual spring/fall variation. Mauna Loa was chosen for the first CO2 sampling station because it samples high elevation (11,000+', 3,397 m) air that has just blown accross thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm
Then hit graphics button in upper left.
Care to try again?
What about the "global cooling" which took place from around 1950 into the 1970's?
Yes, it is a complex topic but 10 years ago people like you denied global warming was even occurring. Now you argue that it is caused by anything EXCEPT humans. Do you even realize how obvious you are in your methods?
FWIW you can make a very strong case humans are not the only cause of global warming.
However you'll never be able to prove how much of the warming is man-made or "natural".
The real question is: what are you going to do about it?
It's kind of like carbon 14 dating an artifact.
CO2 levels higher than anything since millions of year past (when, coincidentally, this was a tropical planet).
Hansen's wealth of earth data at Goddard Space Flight Center showing increasing melt rates, loss of ice, and warming as much as 6 degrees average in the far northern latitudes.
The continued slow collapse of the thermohaline circulation.
Watching warming model after warming model fail in short term predictions by being far too conservative.
One could go on and on about this for years because the volume of science proving warming is overwhelming. The volume of science implicating human emission of greenhouse gases is large and growing daily. In fact, the standard method of operation by the right wing now is to admit warming, since they can no longer deny that, but to question whether we "tiny" humans can ever possibly have such an impact. They forget that with modern satellites we can clearly document that we've deforested large percentages of the earth's surface. Not some tiny fraction of 1% but much more. These same shills ignore that we "tiny" humans have destroyed fisheries around the world, destroyed entire habitats by draining great rivers nearly dry and lifeless, and have created heat islands (cities) that can be monitored from space through their widespread effects. So yes, homo sapiens can and has caused widespread change to the entire planet already. Denying that is denying the very evidence in front of one's nose.
So yes, Oil CEO, I will debate someone who wants to argue what percentage of warming is man-made but I will call a shill a shill when they pop up (here or anywhere else I frequent) and claim that all warming is due to some other natural cause like solar radiation flux. In multiple posts, "oil" has used phrases like "global warming fear mongering" and "human-kind is a blip on the radar of worldwide warming" in his writings. I can look at the sum of his posts and see that he is writing exactly as I have seen other right wing deniers write in their efforts to debunk anthropogenic global warming.
If the volume of data supporting WMDs in Iraq was as large as the body of data supporting anthropogenic global warming, we'd have found a nuclear arsenal larger than the former Soviet Union's arsenal. In other words, the right wing only pays attention to large bodies of data when it suits their agenda and when it doesn't, they fight it. Now mind you, the left wing is just as bad in their own way, which is why I watch both sides merrily trying to piss in the same boot, missing, and doing nothing useful except getting each other wet and smelly.
Solar output has been increasing very slightly over the last century at least, but the contribution to global warming is small. The thing to note, however, is that as surface temperatures are increasing, upper tropospheric and stratospheric temperatures are not, and are in fact decreasing. If an increase in solar output were the main driver in global warming, the entire atmospheric column should be warming. What appears to be happening instead is that more heat is trapped near the surface, which is why it's called a "Greenhouse effect".
I guess you could also claim that we're releasing millions of barrels a day of stored solar output -- I won't argue with that!
One question for you, how certain are you, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being absolutely convinced, that human activity is responsible for global warming?
I have read that the surface temperature of the earth was a few degrees warmer 1000 years ago, which led to plagues and other catastrophes. Obviously the human presence and our attendant carbon releasing activities couldn't account for this.
For me, 9.9 and 44/100 % sure.
I am 93% convinced that human activity is causing most (>50%) of GW.
I am 60% convinced that human activity is causing all (or 90+%) of GW.
The evidence of human effects is overwhelming. The evidence of a coincident natural rise (your theory) is quite weak but possible.
It is not coming from the sun (very good data from ~1960 to prove that).
However, we may have had an unusually quiet time with volcanos in the last ~100 years and fewer massive volcanic explosions. This could be a small effect long term (large effect for 1 or 2 years then it fades).
But man is the largest effect. We use 1,000 barrels/second of oil + massive amounts of coal & natural gas.
Sick though it is, I would accept such desperate methods if the probable alternative was a billion or so unneccessary deaths. Please note that I consider 3 to 4 billion deaths almost certainly neccessary and would not support such methods until the probability of that reduction was high.
Increasing the carbon content increases the soil's ability to hold water, sometimes up to 20% more. More water in the soil and less in clouds is the way to go.
The way to achieve the carbon increase is to use organic or relatively sustainable practices such as keeping the corn stover in the field and recycling animal wastes. Organic agriculture pretty much does the same trick using multiple ways. In addition, we could recycling more of our organic wastes from processing, retailing and preparing food. And let's not forget our own wastes, properly handled.
The recycled wastes will also reduce our need for mined or chemically reated NPK. We haul tons of this stuff around all the time. Surely we can move wastes around at least regionally with a combination of truck and short haul rail.
If we do this, we may be able to move the various crop and pasture belts here in the U.S. to the east where moisture is more prevalent but still have food at least for a good=sized population if no one is obese.
Remarkably, carbon in the soil is carbon that is not in the air, helping to limit warming somewhat.
I never cut my grass.
Some of my neighbors complain.
Too bad for them; I'm zoned commercial and am in the business of saving the world;-)
However, because I am zoned commercial and because farming is a business, I make it my business to grow whatever comes up:
- mostly maple trees, including dozens of mature ones excelllent for maple syrup and sugar
- some grass
- some ferns
- Lots and lots of perennial flowers that were planted years ago and that I do nothing to water or fertilize or weed.
- Quantities of hyper aggressive jerusalem artichokes that I planted as an experiment and that show indications of taking over. Again--never watered, never fertilized, never weeded, and they flourish and spread faster than creeping charlie
- Creeping charlie and most varieties of "weeds" known to North America at my latitude.
- Diversified wildlife too numerous to list. I photograph but never kill. For food, though, I've heard that prarie dog stew is all right, and on prarie dogs alone I could probably fill my 22 cubic foot freezer with little effort. They are so tame they come right up to my sliding glass door, as do wild turkey and pheasants. Oh, there are mass quantitities of Canada geese in the field just to the south of me, not to mention ospreys, eagles, etc.
Lawn mowing is an environmental crime in my book.Back in 1998, Mike Mann et al published a temperature record now better known as the "hockey stick", or the MBH98 hockey stick (note that the figure shows the temperature anomaly from the 1950 mean global temperature -- it's been updated over the last few years.) The business about "the surface temperature of the earth was a few degrees warmer 1000 years ago" actually refers to the high values within the uncertainty of the reconstruction. Anyway, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick (M&M) published a skeptical paper in Energy and Environment showing that MBH were all wrong. In the event, M&M made some really fundamental errors (here's a place to start) that rendered their conclusions just plain wrong. That neither is a scientist, and that E&E isn't exactly a climate journal don't necessarily mean they're wrong, but in this case meant that they hadn't the expertise and that there was no system of peer review to catch obvious errors (the paper had been turned down by Nature)
That should have been the end of it, but Senator James Inhofe (the guy whose idea of a science advisor is Michael Crichton) and others seized on it to dismiss the whole idea of AGW (anthropogenic global warming). House member Joe Barton tried to intimidate Mann et al., until finally the Chair of the House Science Committee (Sherrie Boehlert, who will be sorely missed) got so fed up he called for the National Academy of Sciences to review the whole thing, taking into account M&M's criticisms (mostly it's McIntyre these days; he runs a website called climateaudit.org where he is mastering the art of obfuscation). The NAS report just came out 2 weeks ago, vindicating MBH98. There were criticisms of some of the original methodology, but the temperature record stood.
There are many things to take from this story, such as how easily science gets politicized, how difficult it is to accept that you may be wrong, and how badly people hear what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear (in this case M&M's results) doesn't make much sense. Yet in the end M&M have increased our confidence level in the temperature reconstruction, so some good did come out of it. It's a shame it took so much time and energy that could have been better used, but if that's what it takes to convince us, perhaps that was time and energy that had to be spent.
Anyway, my take on AGW? I'd put the confidence level on that as very high.
Mann's been verified by lots of studies
Global Warming Skeptics: A Primer
Guess Who's Funding the Global Warming Doubt Shops?
Posted on: 10/26/2005
In 1998, Exxon devised a plan to stall action on global warming. The plan was outlined in an internal memo (see the memo [PDF]). It promised, "Victory will be achieved when uncertainties in climate science become part of the conventional wisdom" for "average citizens" and "the media."
The company would recruit and train new scientists who lack a "history of visibility in the climate debate" and develop materials depicting supporters of action to cut greenhouse gas emissions as "out of touch with reality."
While there is no indication that ExxonMobil paid the climate skeptics directly and the scientists may have their own motivations for participating, the company poured millions of dollars into spreading its message worldwide. Here's where some of that money went.
The information below is from Exxon documents and the organizations' Web sites: Exxon's 2003 contributions [PDF] and Exxon's 2002 contributions [PDF].
Sallie Baliunas
Member, Board of Directors
The George C. Marshall Institute
Enviro-Sci Host/Science Roundtable Member
techcentralstation.com
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
------------------------------
Stephen McIntyre
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
George Marshall Institute Expert
According to the GMI website "Stephen McIntyre has worked in mineral exploration for 30 years, much of that time as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He has also been a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and of Canada."http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1007
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
==============Willie Soon
Science Director/Science Roundtable Member
techcentralstation.com
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
Chief Science Researcher
Center for Science and Public Policy, a project of Frontiers of Freedom
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
The Frontiers of Freedom organizations received $282,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
=========Ross McKitrick
Senior Fellow
Fraser Institute (Canada)
Writer
techcentralstation.com
Contributing Writer
The George C. Marshall Institute
McKitrick is an economist.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
The Fraser Institute received $60,000 from ExxonMobil in 2003.
The Tech Central Station Science Foundation received $95,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Support" in 2003.
The George C. Marshall Institute received $185,000 from ExxonMobil for "Climate Change Public Information and Policy Research" in 2002-2003.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=3804&CFID=21084385&CFTOKEN=2988883 ...
=======I find it interesting that Michael Mann, in his letter to the House Committee, describes Steve McIntyre as a "mining industry executive" and McIntyre's own biography (www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/stevebio.doc) describes him as working "in the mineral business". Both descriptions are pretty euphemistic. Around the time of the writing of McIntyre and McKitrick (2003; the Energy & Environment paper) and of the above biography (dated in October 2003), McIntyre was actually a "Strategic Adviser" to CGX Energy Inc. who describe their "principal business activity" as "petroleum and natural gas exploration" (cgxenergy.ca/investors/CGX_AR03_part2.pdf). CGX Energy Inc. occupy the same Canadian address given for McIntyre in McIntyre and McKitrick (2003), an address which is also occupied by Northwest Exploration Company, another business which apparently engages in oil and gas exploration (or at least a company with the same name does). McIntyre was also President of Northwest Exploration Company.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=172
=
====The non-peer reviewed article was published in Energy and Environment, a non refereed policy magazine (not science journal) whose right wing editor admitted she didn't send it out for peer review and that it was her right to print articles which reflected her bias.
I can't find my link to this; might be realclimate.
RR, what a great question you posed, in the face of uncertainty can we afford not to act, to modify our behavior? I imagine it depends on what you want us to do, lol? If the purported changes were to include driving less, the teenies having to ride the yellow bus, and we adults ponying up for a hybrid, the answer is an unequivocal no!! Just kidding. I would love to see the results of such a poll.
Off to do more research.
This has certain implications...
A single brain must be capable of understanding and knowing the critical essentials, it is in that brain the 'click' must happen.
One must know for certain that the click has or not occurred, that is a function of the individual, their honesty, integrity, truth, perception.
One must be able to find things to develop within the system while waiting for the click. There are almost always plenty of these things which are clear requirements yet peripheral to the core logic. Often their development enables the click.
Systems do not truly work until they click. I have never developed a system that hasn't, almost all systems written by others (particularly the bigger ones) that I have seen lately just don't click, the users see / know this too.
I suppose what I am saying is: parts of the solution can be worked on and out linearly. Trying to do so often helps fundamental understanding. BUT real understanding, the knowing of truth, is a separate function. Do the linear bit on the mechanical aspects, mull over and toy with ideas that are shaping what you see, read about others' thoughts - particularly the stranger ones. Let these things percolate your waking and sleeping mind, consciously and sub-consciously. If you have not done this before be prepared to be surprised ;)
The problem with AGW is not that it will "kill the environment" -- Nature's far too resilient for that, and doesn't care whether the dominant life forms are people or beetles or jellyfish. The problem is that it's disruptive to our society. Just like the problem for our economy isn't that oil will run out, it's that cheap oil will run out and we are not prepared for the consequences. We're not even prepared to accept the possibility.
This is a very important point, and one that I think many people don't understand. I have argued that we won't see some runaway Venus-type global warming. It won't even wipe out humanity. But it will be incredibly disruptive. Billions could die as productive areas are turned into deserts. We could see Florida disappear under water. We could see devastating worldwide effects. The possibility of this is much too serious to be ignored.
Even for those who don't accept that global warming is caused by humans, they have to admit their uncertainty. So, what are the consequences if they are wrong? Is this global experiment something we can afford? No.
RR
though that does not mean nature can't do it herself look back at the Permian extinction which started with the formation of the Siberian traps.
On an unrelated point - most condoms nowadays have been found NOT to be proof against HIV!!! A simple remedy will improve protection 100-fold: a coating of chilli or pepper sauce does the trick, Encona make some good ones, just put about a quarter teaspoon inside the condom and roll it around between your fingers before unrolling over your erect member.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm
If you don't want to buy it, it is available free (pdf) to read or download.
And the US is by far the largest single part of the collective "us".
And as adults they take responsibility for what they can be responsible for. Like production of carbon dioxide. Remains to be seen if there are any adults present.
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3062
From Drudge:
Jul. 7, 2006 15:05
Iran: IDF strikes will bring Islamic 'explosion'
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
TEHERAN, Iran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned on Friday that continued Israeli strikes against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip could lead to an "explosion" in the Islamic world that would target Israel and its supporters in the West.
Again, Ahmadinejad questioned Israel's right to exist. "This is a fake regime ... it won't be able to survive. I think the only way (forward) is that those who created it (the West) take it away themselves," the president told a rally in Teheran in support of Palestinians.
As I Iran continues to threaten the West, please note that their efficient top-running economy has announced, via the "Persian Journal" the following on their bourse http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_16543.shtml:
Interestingly the Island of Kish (91sq. km.) is a resort island and noted, among other things, where Iranian prostitution is a "problem."
See also: http://www.iranchamber.com/geography/articles/kish.php
Iran oil bourse at the end of September
Jul 6, 2006
Iran will start the initial phase of its planned Iranian oil bourse at the end of September. An oil ministry official told that his ministry had already presented the relevant documents to the economic and finance ministry and the bourse organization.
The building that will house the oil bourse has reportedly already been purchased in the southern Iranian island of Kish in Persian Gulf.
Petrochemical and oil-related products will be made available to customers in the first phase but the volume of the shares to be traded is not yet clear, the official told.
Economics and Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari said last April that the issue had already been agreed upon and that the oil ministry had given the go-ahead for the opening of the bourse.
The exchange will have a positive impact on oil sales, not only in Iran but in the wider Persian Gulf region and is slated to replace the current dollar-based oil exchange with one based on the euro, he said.
The International Petroleum Exchange in London and the New York Mercantile Exchange, on which oil is currently traded, both use the dollar.
Iran argues that as long as 60% of global oil and 25% of natural gas needs are met by Persian Gulf states, oil dealing in either New York or London made no sense.
Iran also wants to circumvent dollar-based oil exchanges to avoid being impacted by the United States economy.
The plan to open the exchange in Kish was raised by the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year.
It was due to be opened before the beginning of the Persian New Year on March 21 but has been postponed several times.
There is no consensus, but for quality is is hard to beat some Asian countries, and the German and Dutch and Swedish whores are good if somewhat unimaginitive and relatively expensive. The most beautiful women . . . ah . . . a matter of taste. I would score a dead heat between Honolulu, Baltimore, and Truro, Nova Scotia. Nevada's whorehouses are generally overpriced and overrated. For value it is hard to beat Jamaica or Cuba. Cuban whores are very cheap in dollars. Or at least, so I've heard.
BTW, if we are trying to establish the value of various currencies and how they change over time, women for rent is one commodity that has changed little over the past five thousand years and likely to be a huge growth industry. After all, what are all those flight attendants and pretty receptionists in the tourist and restaurant industries going to do when TSHTF?
Three guesses.
To bad I've never wanted to be a procurer;-)
What--in all seriousness--do you think people will be doing for occupations in the U.S. some years from now.
In case you did not know this, in much of Nevada prostitution is legal.
Please take your narrow-mindedness elsewhere.
Why?
Now let us bury the hatchet and agree to disagree agreeably.
O.K.?
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyid=2006-07-07T125952Z_01_S P136390_RTRUKOC_0_US-MARKETS-OIL.xml&src=rss&rpc=23
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1680717.htm
Four Corners, "Australia's longest-running and most respected investigative journalism/current affairs television program", will investigate the issue of peak oil on the 10th July - Monday Night, at 8:30 EST.
Does anybody have a digital tuner on their PC, and willing to create a torrent for international viewers?
Most interestingly:[ *Four Corners also presents a Broadband Edition on "Peak Oil?" ... See the program in full; watch extended interviews with the experts; delve into interactive maps showing who produces the oil and who buys it; browse key reports about how much oil remains untapped; learn about the alternatives; and discover the impact of peak oil on Australia's economy and way of life. ]
The site would definitely warrant its own threadbot mention (at least?) once it goes live. I hope this spreads through the blogosphere effectively.
The ABC is a publically funded network and is more independent and hard hitting then the commercial networks.
4 Corners tends to be a bit of an opinion leader and there is bound to be more follow up about Peak Oil in Australia in response to this program, regardless of the spin that 4 Corners gives.
I think this:
The decision by Sinopec of China to pay $1bn for the right to explore for oil in deep water off Angola has shocked the west, which fears it could be left behind in a global scramble for resources.
Is really troubling. A large part of the potentially devastating aspects of Peak Oil is the sea change in psychology that could occur as we head into a world of scarce, expensive oil. What we don't want is a panic by consumers to make the situation worse.
I think it will be a miracle if we get past these next 20 or 30 years without a major global resource war, one that could possibly go nuclear.
If such happens, the real reason for the war will not be overtly stated, but rather, a variety of lame pretexts will be used for invading and occupying oil producing regions and for denying our rivals access to same.
The Iraq occupation was just a preview. That one was unopposed (militarily) by any of the major powers, but what about the next one? Are China and Russia going to passively sit on their hands while the US makes its next grab?
The increasingly desperate efforts to secure access to oil and gas are liable to create a world far worse than if we just accepted the coming shortages, lowered our standard of living, and made concerted efforts at reducing energy use and at building infrastructure for renewable energy systems.
Unfortunately, the leadership of the US has been seduced into the idea that it can solve its energy problem militarily, and that is clearly a recipe for disaster.
I think this is the single and most important danger in
the years to come. If I believed we lived in a fair and sane world I would consider PO as a minor to moderate sized technical problem. Unfortunately I don't.
Errm, who said that again? :)
Right on Diamond's wavelength--I'm going over my "Collapse" notes.
I remember coming across a conversation about government knowledge of a meteorite hitting earth. Should they tell everyone so that panic ensues, or do you just let it happen with the understanding that everything will be toast anyway so no one's the wiser? I say we never knew what hit us.
And I concider it better to know about the future then to be happy due to ignorance, if that makes me miserable so be it. Pretending that the future is bright next before an emergency is almost as bad as promising people an afterlife in heaven.
This argument is like the one that justifies torture by using the completely contrived situation where you KNOW someone has planted a nuclear bomb, and that you KNOW if you torture the guy you'll be able to stop it detonating. The situation is so contrived and oversimplified as to have lost any meaning. Reality is never this clear cut, and PO is not a meteorite hitting the earth.
Sure, many will be incapable of doing anything helpful or useful with that information, but then again it's the height of arrogance to decide for others that they are not worthy of knowing because they are too stupid to use it. What if - just pretend - there is someone out there SMARTER than you, who would be able to use the information in ways you hadn't thought of?
I think the concern about not panicking people is primarily a concern about not having financial markets be disrupted - in other words, it is people concerned about maintaining wealth.
Just planting a garden and doing the 100 mile diet would be an improvement.
Throw in some gas rationing and we can extent the plateau for decades.
People and systems can adapt, given sufficient warning and motivation.
Better the wake up call comes in a presidential speech today, than an oil shock tomorrow.
Post soviet Cuba is a good example of a post peak society.
PS: Just for the record. I don't thing this president or the next one will issue a wake up call prior to WTSHTF.
I will go to the local fishermen's market tomorrow morning and buy some fresh Gulf shrimp (swimming 24, perhaps 28 hours before). Maybe something else as well :-)
Some of us will do better than others >:-)
I planted my backyard as an orchard a couple of years back.
Looks like my first crop of pecans will be coming in this year.
Pears and peaches have been doing find for the last couple of seasons.
The complete list:
Apple: health but not very productive.
Gooseberry: health but not very productive.
Pear: health and productive
Peach: health and productive
Pecan: health and productive
Walnut: not yet mature
Butternut: not yet mature
Filbert: not yet mature
Oak: not yet mature
Almond: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
Cherry: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
Plum: Constantly ravaged by Japenese beetles.
China has been building a massive surplus of our dollars (promises to pay) that we've been printing like crazy (no need to raise taxes for the Iraqi war, and, of course, deficits don't matter anymore). Sooner or later, this was bound to come back to bite us. Not really surprising that payback is coming in the energy arena....
In regard to social panic, I'm very interested in the cultural and religious dimensions of this. I have a research project in mind, at the very early stages still, about the plausibility structures/paradigms into which people will fit PO awareness. [In the interests of full disclosure I am a practicing, evangelical, left-leaning Christian. I have to be careful because I'm bringing up PO issues in virtually every conversation now!]
In one recent conversation, with a friend who moved here from CA with her husband a few years ago and who have been living off their homesale equity but now must (but are having difficulty finding) work, she made explicit the link between PO and end times. In general, in regard to PO I'm not picking up such apocalyptic thinking in my Christian circles (yet, anyway), but I may well be out of conversations/denominations/traditions where such linkages are being made.
I'm wondering to what extent TODers are picking up linkages between peak oil and eschatological (end times) religious views as PO awareness spreads?
If you are truly an atheist, you have a tough row to hoe. How do you prove the NONexistence of Anything, e.g. a prime mover, unmoved?
Now I can disprove easily the existence of a Christian God (because it is logically impossible to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent and still have so much evil and unnecessary suffering in the world) but, as a logician, I'd have a hard time disproving the Greek pantheon or the early Jewish God, who was mean, vindictive, arbitray, inconsistent, cruel and jealous.
Aristotle claimed that "infinite regress" was "logically" unsatisfactory, and therefore he postulated a "prime mover, unmoved" who may have been eternal (He was not entirely clear on this point; all we have is lecture notes his students took.) but who did not care about humans, maybe did not even notice them.
Am I an agnostic? Well, that depends on definitions? What exactly do you mean by "God"?
You give me a definition, and I'll examine it.
When we finally endow robots or computers with intelligence, what do you imagine they will think in regard to their creation.
My GUESS is that Whoever created this universe was not the original creator; I think the Greeks were on to something with their several generations of gods concept.
One of the great pitfalls of modern religious discussion is the danger of falling into scientific language, and arguing in proofs and facts, as if one could use science to describe transcendence.
For me, lately, Picasso summed it up with "Art is the lie that tells the truth" .. makes perfect sense to me, but I wouldn't want to try deciphering it from a chalkboard equation. That, or, "A joke is like a frog. You can dissect either one to see how they work, but they usually die in the process."
As far as Machines.. there's always Mike (Mycroft Holmes) as described by Mannie.. "I always thought if you put honest numbers into a computer, you'd get honest numbers out. That was until I met a computer with a sense of Humor."
- Had to add that one, as it was Heinlein's birthday today, and my Daughter's, too!
Could happen more or less that way . . . .
THEN what do the theologists say?
Also, do you recall Heinlein's story, "Jerry is a Man"?
Don't recall 'Jerry', I'm afraid. How about the Asimov story in I,Robot about the positronic 'bot that was campaigning to be president? ("Evidence" , next to last story) 'What would distinguish a Robot perfectly following the Three Laws from a very fine person?..'
Fascinating question.
Heinlein's answer: Yes, because Jerry can sing (and understand) a song.
Note that it is stuff that we do not worry about that buries us deepest in doodoo. I expect an increase in slavery to be one outcome of peak oil. (There is already a lot of blatant and unambiguous slavery in Saudi Arabia and some N. African countries--not even very secret.) Now, suppose we start genetically modifying animals to get around the lack of fossil fuels?
At what point does this become immoral?
I believe the story has been anthologized more than once.
I'm like the atheist in Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse. Death goes to collect his soul to take it to heaven or hell, but to his amazement, when the atheist dies, his soul simply vanishes. :)
BTW, I think you are the clearest-thinking person on this site. What amazes me is that of the 600 or so items I've read of yours, I have yet to find a mistake (other than a rare typo).
- Are you sure you are human?
- Could you have been exchanged shortly after birth at the hospital for a godling baby?
Anthony lifted and adapted some of Plato's ideas. I don't know where Plato lifted them from;-)Exactly. I don't feel the need to disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, either. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. ;-)
Supposedly, LaPlace was confronted by someone who was offended at the idea of physics controlling the planets' motions, rather than the hand of god. They asked him where god was in his book. He replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
Dunno if that story is true or not, but it sums up my view.
By DEFINITION an atheist is one who believes in the nonexistence of any god at all. (Consult any dictionary.)
While I find agnosticism appealing and some forms of theism reasonable, I find it hard to understand the logic of people who say that they KNOW that there is no god.
Probably not, O.K. Maybe several gods. Maybe gods with limited powers. Who the hell can possibly know? But to assert that no god exists I find puzzling.
(For the record, I do believe that it can be shown with strict inductive and deductive reasoning with no holes or weak spots or tricks that the conventional Christian God does not exist. But that proof does not get us very far, IMO.)
film, "Miracle on 34th St."
Note that religious truth (according, e.g. to Mortimer Adler) is much like poetic truth. Maybe the problem is getting too literal. That is, IMO a huge problem that so-called fundamentalists have.
There is more than one kind of truth, e.g.
mathematics (deductive logic, mostly)
science (rigorous observation, record keeping, replication, etc. uses mostly inductive logic but also some deductive)
Accounting--a whole view of the world based on somewhat arbitrary definitions and conventions--most definitely a big part of the Peak Oil problem and also GW.
Economics--radically different from accounting. Tries to imitate physics much of the time and fails miserably. However, the best of economics contains kinds of truth not found in the physical or biological sciences.
Literary insight--e.g. the works of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, not meant to be taken literally, though Tolstoy got almost all his facts right in "War and Peace" about the war--which, when one reflects, is amazing.
Poetic truth. If you don't get it you don't get it. Poetry was so powerful is scared Plato. He banned the poets from from his ideal "Republic" because sometimes they told convincing lies about the gods. Irony here: Plato was himself a poet, and the "Republic" should be understood as a thought experiment rather than a recommendation for how to organize government and society.
Sociological truth . . .
Whoops, this post is too long. Either I've made my point, or I have not.
As for myself, or should we say ourselves?, I/we are quantum-theists. Both of the following statements are simultaneously true:
- God exists.
- God does not exist.
Einstein was right and wrong at the same time: God does not play dice with the universe, the dice is God and the definition of God is a dicey affair. Hmmm.What if the higher good is human development and we humans typically change very little when we are fat, happy and comfortable ?
I have the hypothesis that the "Purpose of Life" is to give us the opportunity to improve ourselves. Some succeed, some fail.
Oddly, I got this POV from a near-death survivor, a simple woman. She claimed that we had a choice beforehand on what circumstances & issues we would deal with. Like chosing a college circulum. Of course, multiple courses would likely do more good than just one. If we chose our modes of suffering beforehand, there is no cruelity etc. in using this as a learning tool.
The uniformity of near death experiences (~97% good, ~3% horrific) is an interesting experimental demonstration of the existance of an afterlife.
And in my own life, since I chose to change and explore and develop on my own (without the cattle prod approach), "bad things" no longer happen. A data set of one, but the timeline is unmistakeable.
Come to think of it, I do believe Budhha, Confucious, Jesus and Mahomet would have agreed with you.
Moses thought it was always about following God's will, but he argued with God and resented the heavy burden God put on him--said he was unworthy and unable to do God's will. Then God got angry--then relented and said, O.K., I see your point: Your brother Aaron can help you.
One thing I do like about Judaism is that ancient Hebrews were often arguing with God--and sometimes successfully, at least to some extent. Look how Abraham bargained with God to save Sodom or how Job (unsuccessfully) argued at length. I do like the notion of a God you can argue with. Christians and Muslims seem not to have this view of God; I do not know why.
Briefly:
Christians (most especially Roman Catholics, but also Kierkegaard and a bunch of other Protestants) have come up with some very interesting and appealing arguments for the existence of God, e.g. Anselm's ontological argument or the argument from design or a couple of others. Now these proofs are fascinating, because they illustrate the extent to which brilliant fabulously intelligent geniuses such as Aquinas and Descartes deceived themselves. All of these proofs have unambiguous fallacies in them. (However, it is devilishly hard to prove this point: For example, a rigorous refutation of Anselm's argument requires about eighty steps of symbolic logic; at least it takes me that many steps.)
Now the arguments of Atheists such as Marx and Freud are even lamer than the arguments of the theists. Marx said people believe in God ONLY because it is for the interest of the ruling class that they do so. Twaddle and nonsense.
Freud said that theism is a kind of primitivism or almost illness that can be "cured" through modern civilization and especially psychoanalysis. More twaddle and nonsense.
For what it is worth, though I am not a Christian, I find Kierkegaard's writings the most valuable of the theists, though I love reading Aquinas for the rigorous Latin, and Erasmus and Descartes too, poor fellows;-) One of the things Kierkegaard said that struck me is that "agnostic" is a Greek word that translates into Latin as "ignoramus."
Why, he asked, should we be so proud of being ignoamuses?
Pretty much I'm an Aristotelian. And a sociologist/anthropologist. Few things are as interesting as the study of comparative religions, IMO.
I am an athiest, and even more than that, outspoken- hostile to any kind of dogma for reasons given by Sam Harris. I think the above is just what happens to a brain when it goes down- could be verified experimentally, of course. My brother, a psychologist, agrees with me.
So where are all you believers in the light of the strongest admonition of thermodynamics/ information theory "Remain as uncertain as the sum of your information permits."? Following this allows me as close to total uncertainy re god/gods as any measure could be, right? So why bother?
If you wake up in heaven, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Anyway, as Socrates pointed out, it really does not matter if there is life after death, nor does fear of God (or gods) help anybody.
The problem is how to live.
Not what happens after we die.
Why did the brain evolve this *VERY* unusual shutdown routine ? There was no evolutionary advantage (even 50 years ago would have been buried) to a pleasant good bye (in fact knowledge of it would prompt more suicides, reducing evolutionary success).
You could, and probably should, replace "I think" with "I believe" since there is little empirical evidence to suggest that it "just happens" in this idyllic manner.
But we're not. We'd not perfect, we're not even very good, we're just "good enough." And there's a lot of randomness involved. If it's not harmful - or has as much benefit as harm - it may be retained.
FWIW, not everyone who has a near-death experience has a pleasant one. Some have very nasty ones. Some have pretty boring ones. The way different brains respond to oxygen deprivation, maybe.
Reality is almost certainly more unusual than 99% of humans credit, perhaps the 'god-thing' is too.
Anything that depends on a conscious, interventionist, anthropomorphic (based on human) god has a high probability of being human invention with minimal basis in reality. I've also concluded that human anthropomorphic monotheist religions seem particularly amenable to abuse - hating / killing others, uncontrolled breeding programs, warfare and genocide.
My best guess is what most religions distort into god(s) is an innate aspect / function of this universe. In the beginning was awareness, the awareness 'became' the universe...
What is 'perceived' as God is a human personalisation of something. There are two logical explanations of what this something is: a projection of a human need; a response to something fundamental in reality.
I would bet on the fundamental reality answer, this implies I am religious. However, I dislike the personalised monotheist religions most intensly and think almost all the good that may have existed in them has been subsumed by their dogma and control for their own (meme) ends.
I find this an illness of our society - people feel lost and lean more or less blindly on whichever ideology they find (mostly emotionally) attractive. Unfortunately you can not control the way other people think and often receiving extreme responses (complete dismissal or "end-of-times" stuff) is simply not in your powers. FWIW I also fear of PO turning into an ideology of its own.
I also see the 666 issue and not being able to buy or sell as being fulfilled through biometric or chip implants.
We have the world as never before, being complete connected and integrated. This makes for a world goverment/leader (anti-christ)
We also have the European Union as a seen through the book of Daniel
As for PO, like I said, I am a doomer, so I see PO bringing an end to things. But that is a catalyst for the end of the world scenarios in Revelation.
Now for those engineer and math types out there, I will use a mathamaticians answer, Pascals Wager. These are my beliefs, if I am wrong, what have a lost? I've lost maybe some opportunity here on earth but have still lead a good life. If I am right then I have eternal reward. For those who think opposite, well you've gained a little here on earth, but lost all in eternity.
There are much better reasons.
'The Truth is one. The sages call it by different names.'
Buddhist aphorism
That's Dave Brooks. That's why.
Why would God make a person that wears a tie like that? Ergo God does not exist.
Why does a person like that get to survive and write for the New York Times? Ergo God does exist.
I forget why Brooks ended up in the middle of that diagram --I think he had written some dumbass editorial about the superiority of some religions over others and that's why I placed him in the middle of the vise, between ubber-monotheistic Islam and ubber-polytheistic Hinduism.
I read his stuff once in awhile, whenever I run across a paper edition. I refuse to buy newspapers. (What a waste -rags). He's on MacNeil/Lehrer on Fridays. He always seems to hand Mark Shields his ass, but then Mark isn't really much of a fighter. They should really try to get Carville for that spot.
Just because you support the Iraq War doesn't make you a bad guy. To which the obvious response is - "yes it does." Set myself up again.
Oil CEO,
I'm glad you said that because I want to make a confession.
At the time "Shock and Awe" began in Iraq --somewhere back in 2002 (soon after 10-1/10+1) I was home sick with a bad flu. I remember watching TV from bed and rooting: Kill. Kill them bastards!
I had just watched Collin Powell give his speech at the UN. Very impressive. He showed slides and held up viles. Very convincing, especially that part about the aluminum tubes.
Having myself worked in the Defense industry, I knew the government has experts, super experts, in metallurgy, in all sorts of high tech. So there was no way they could have gotten this part wrong. They had intercepted those aluminum tubes. Analyzed them metallurgically, microscopically, structurally, etc. and there was proof beyond even the grayest shade of doubt that those bastards were building A-bombs, that they were out to get "us" and we had to get them, smoke them out, kill them first before they got us.
So that's how I found myself laying in bed with a feverish head, watching the color TV showing the fireworks in all their glory, the flag waving, and me rooting: Kill. Kill them bastards!
So does that make me a "bad person"?
I was misinformed at the time.
I had wrong information.
I know that only in hindsight. After having gained additional knowledge. (I was not even PO-aware at that time.)
At the time, it did not occur to me that "the" President of "America" would lie to his own people, that "the" Secretary of State would stand up in front of the whole world (at the UN) and make a string of scalding accusations, each and every one of which was a bold faced lie.
So was I a "bad person" back then?
Is Dave Brooks a "bad person" now?
Are you?
I'm not ready to judge that way unless I hold myself up for equal judgment.
(IOW, yes I am easily fooled. I am gullible. I am sheeple. I accept most things on face value. I chew the cud and march with the herd. It is only on rare occasion that I have the courage to "cut and run".)
While I don't buy any of it, I'm not making fun of you - I've just never been able to follow that line of reasoning and I'd like to understand it better.
I'd like an answer to that. It would help me understand it better, too. Oh, and I'm not making fun of you either, but unlike Twilight, if you can give me a good answer, I'll buy all of it.
Game for yet one more list??? ;-)
BTW, I don't know if anyone caught Tom Ashbrooke's 'On Point' yesterday, but he spent an entire hour on pirates. Something to do with with Hollywood's obsession with sequels(sequals?) this weekend. Missed the first 15 minutes. Archived on NPR. I'll get link when I have time.
Also, on All Things Considered, one of the funniest movie reviews I've ever heard about same movie mentioned above. I will look this up later as well. I'm sure only Donal will fully appreciate.
it's less risky for Hollywood to make a sequel then it is for them to make a completely new movie.
this is also why they love remakes.
We are emotional creatures.
We feel.
We feel what is right.
We feel what makes common sense.
We feel that we will continue forever and ever, and therefore; there "must be" an afterlife.
Please don't confuse us with facts.
We feel that your facts must be wrong because they contradict our feelings about perpetual existence.
choosing feelings over facts.
I'm not there anymore.
I note that JH Kunstler devotes about 2-and 1/2 pages to the topic "Christianity Inflamed" toward the end of "The Long Emergency" (see pp. 287-289).
Oddly enough my dad called me today -- a rare thing -- to say he'd sent me some literature he'd run across about oil, twe Arabs, and Israel. It seems that some folks on the religious right believe that "the Arab nations" will withhold oil from the world market -- and may already be doing so -- unless the rest of the world withdraws support for Israel, or perhaps even "turns against" Israel.
Kunstler predicts that various Christian sects in the US will interpret events related to peak oil as signs of the apocalypse and so will use such events to persuade people to follow certain beliefs.
I see this as people join (ironically) car-based megachurches in order to ensure salvation through Rapture of through being one of the faithful "Remnent" who is protected from terrible suffering by Divine favor through the time of Tribulation.
I've heard a few comments already which lead me to believe that various forms of "Christofascism" are closely linked to the religious right and especially then to the Republican party and to the Democrats as well through pro-Israel lobbyists and Dems like Joe Lieberman.
The Christofascist narrative makes a superb metanarrative with which to seduce and manipulate many people, who just want to be taken care of by a father-figure.
Such religion manages to avoid the topics we need to address. What did "repentance" mean again?
Should we turn out backs on Israel so we can keep getting oil? (Pat Buchanan thinks we should and will.)
Should we get off the oil teat altogether?
Nuke their ass and take their gas, as Bob puts it?
It seems like he will die as an ardent supporter of the modern nation-state of Israel as the fulfillment of the interpretations of certain prophetic passages of the Bible that he accepts as true. I do note that there is a whole lot of isogesis (reading one's premises into the Bible without realising it) rather than exegesis (comprehending and expounding upon the original meanings of givens texts) involved here.
I think that mostly what people do is create a religion that gives them the comfort of some sort of ultimate gaurantees that their own lives will mean something, or that they will be comfortable and secure somehow for believing the right things and behaving in the right ways.
I think that everybody does this -- atheists and agnostics, deists, theists, animists... all of us in some ways, all the time. We may kid ourselves or refuse to look at this part of ourselves, but there it is in all of its ridiculousness.
We are ephemeral cosmic clowns.
We can't help it.
It is genetic.
At any rate, here comes peak oil, and a whole bunch of cosmic clowns will develop elaborate models of reality to fit "peak oil" into their own cosmologies -- whether these be fundamentalist Christian, Moslem, Judaistic, or even "Free Market Capitalist Fundamentalism Gone Awry."
My guess is that many american Christian fundies will want to nuke the Islamic nations and take thier gas ... in convenient support of Israel, of course. But then a bunch of other American Christian Fundamentalists will somehow develop an elaborate interpretation of the Bible which will cause them to turn on Israel and all Jewish people -- again.
Cain and Abel. Deja vu all over again.
I myself will continue to pedal my tricycle.
OK, I think it must be time for bed now!
Probably it will include a myth about Noah and the solar arc ("Noah do you heed me? Go thou and build a solar concentrator with a radius arc of 10 cubit measures")
Probably there will be a Sodom and Gomorah myth about how the wasteful people of that far away city on the shining hill burned all the oil due to greed, self-centered sinfulness and a worship of the Smithian Snake.
1+1=3
3/2= 1.50
The key, I think, is control. Animals, including the human sort, need to feel they have some control over their fates...whether or not they actually do. If they don't, they go crazy.
There was some fascinating research done on depressed people a few years back. The belief then was that depressed people look at the world through dark filters, seeing the worst in everything. So they asked depressed and non-depressed people to evaluate their situations, then compared their assessments to those of independent, blind judges.
To their surprise, the depressed people saw their situations accurately. It was the non-depressed people who were way off. They were way too optimistic. Apparently, a normal person looks at the world through rose-colored glasses.
Some speculated that being surrounded by hordes of cocked-optimist Pollyannas was the reason those who took a realistic view were depressed...
is a condition necessary for evolutionary survival.
Those gene variants that did not include some hard-wired compulsion for control and command, did not survive for more than one or a few generations. Is it any wonder that we humans "crave" power and control?
The way I figure it, our species might have a couple of decades to go. If some of our species survives that, we might have some time to figure out sustainability.
If some folks figure out how to be sustainable and especially how not to kill each other/ourselves off, then we might have some millions of years to figure out how to convert the planet or parts there-of into a completely self-contained spaceship. Who needs the sun when it starts doing odd things toward the end of it's life cycle, eh?
Ultimately we come to the mysteries of individual and species-level mortality, with creation and evolution, with the mysteries of consciousness and of what appears to some to be an afterlife.
No outcomes are certain. My own religion is a kind of Christian mysticism, but that's another story.
At this point. the peak oil phenomenon vies with the global climate change phenomenon as the latest challenges to emerge from our own little Pandora's box of challenges resulting from unintended consequences....or are they unintended....? Who is doing the intending here, anyway?
2 decades?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Hmmmm.
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Has any species on the planet ever lost 6 billion in population in 20 years?
Uhhhhhhhhhh. I don't know. How bout you? What answer did you come up with?
You're smart. Think, MotherFucker, Think. What does this shit look like to you? Why are you here? Why do you visit this website everyday? Surely you have better things to do than to view the....the.....the...Truth
Do you see four fingers, or five? - O'Brien.
Did Goldstein exist?
I have no anecdotal data on this, but I think it can go the opposite way also, leading to an unspreading of PO-awareness. IOW, people who believe in the end-is-here scenario (The Rapture or whatever) figure that PO is a small don't care issue in the overall scheme of things because we're doomed anyway --i.e. maybe a big asteroid will hit the Earth, kill all the nonbelievers (or convert them into "left behinds") and after that who cares about lack of some gooey black liquid?
By the way, I love Oregon myself. There are only a handful of states I would be completely happy to live in, and Oregon is one of them.
Cheers,
RR
Shucks! That u gives me away.
This is what I hear. Not what I believe.
Peak oil involves the opposite: all secular powers disintegrating and ruling over smaller territories. So I don't think Left Behind type thinking will absorb PO. It's a small comfort, but I do think PO will get the Revalations obssessives to shut up for once. When the Christian Western Roman Empire disintegrated, the Bishops looked at Jeremiah and Amos, not at Revalation. (For example, see St. Gildas.)
I saw your post when it had no replies. I was going to say this then, but bit my lip, because I was curious.
You don't want to ask questions like that here. Not with this crowd. They are honest and they are smart. They will tell you what they really feel. Every time.
But do follow up. You never know who your friends might be.
I was sitting in a massive clusterfuck of an Oregon traffic jam this afternoon in Portland, and asked the busdriver of such things...
She first said that a 'technological new fuel was going to replace oil' she'd 'seen a story about it'. I commented that most of these new fuels required more oil to produce than if they'd just burned the oil to begin with. So then she said: 'Well, I'm retiring soon anyways...' She stopped talking about her grandkids at this point.
I try to work PO into conversations and have yet to meet ANYONE, outside of PO group, who senses (possible) extent of problem.
Lots of "Jesus, don't leave earth without him" t-shirts and bumperstickers, though. Lots of kids wearing religious-themed clothing. Kinds of bothers me that adults are advertising their beliefs on their children's bodies...
My neighbors just moved in next door on their CA equity. They ripped up thousands of dollars of plants and replaced them with slightly different plants. Shiny new equity cars and toys. Easy living consuming quality of life.
I've long ago given up trying to prostelytize PO to anybody. Most people are just not psychologically ready to hear inconvenient truths like that and who can blame them? It's a kind of truth that really sucks.
Most people label me a kook if I raise PO. So I keep my mouth shut.
Funny thing. When gasoline prices are rocketing sky high, the same folk suddenly look at me as though I were some sort of weird prophet dude, as if I suddenly have "the answers" --which is pure BS. Then when the Price noise/signal drops a bit, or they get used to "$3.15 is the new $2.15/gal" idea, it dies away. I'm back to being a kook. If you tell a sheeple that his (or her) herd is stampeding toward the cliffs, they instantly think of you as a "cut-and-run" weirdo. Loyal members of the herd always "stay the course." Sorry if that it makes us humans sound like we are an almost mindless herd of mammals, but we are --another inconvenient truth.
Perhaps we are more used to the oil & gas industry here and understand depletion or ?
The "Right" thing to do is build more streetcar lines, create more walkable neighborhoods, keep the car from dominating the urban fabric and so forth. Whether they understand Peak Oil to any degree is unimportant if the right steps are taken.
It is far better to do the right thing with the vaguest of understanding, than to have precise knowledge but do nothing.
Think on that TODers !
If we start 20 years ahead, Peak Oil will be a jarring speed bump, but no real damage. If we start 10 years ahead there will be manageable problems and some economic problems. If we wait till the last minute, it will be difficult.
I discuss alternatives (corn-based ethanol (10 units of energy in, 13 out) and slow extraction rate of tar sands & Venezulan "improved asphalt".
Overall, I have had a 50+% success rate (one of my two brothers not).
Congratulations on your understatement: "If we wait till the last minute, it will be difficult.". 'Difficult' ceased when heroic, 'Manhattan Project style', mitigation was not started 10 years before PO. 'Unpleasantly messy' is now more appropriate, the significant words in its definition are 'billions' and 'dead'.
Probably 2008, sadly.
Actually, I had an experience of the Einstein kind yesterday, as oil was once again tweaking towards new record highs, which is why I wrote that.
This one fellow who I showed Hubbert's graph to a while back, dismissed it as another one of those "prediction" curves that all scam artists make up.
Quite frankly, that attitude makes logical sense. We are bombarded with "prediction" curves. Every stock market hawk on the planet creates "trend" charts showing the never-ending climb of his favorite company to the Moon and beyond. 99% of prediction curves or charts are pure horse manure. So quick dismissal of Hubbert's curve is understandable.
In fact this particular naysayer is an Einstein, much smarter than me, and I deeply respect his logical and highly analytical mind. Sharp as a whip. So the other day he calls up and mentions that stuff and what's happening with it? Obviously when the "price noise" gets loud enough, fast enough, people sit up and take notice. I think the attention will fade soon enough as oil slides back down to the "$70 is the new $30" level.
Alan
Good Luck. Read 1984 a few more times.This may ease the pain.
Soaring costs hit Shell oil sands project
-C.
Other firms feel Shell Canada's oil-sands pain
And they go on and say ... "Out-of-control costs and a lack of skilled labor have been a prominent feature of nearly all major oil sands projects"
-C.
Thanks,
RR
And there's always the La Brea Tar Pits.
Of course, I was four years old the last time I was there. ;-)
Summer Excavation Begins at La Brea Tar Pits
but they've still got that "brea tar" there.
I say embrace the redundancy, and smile when you say it ;-)
http://www.huntington.org/
http://www.getty.edu/visit/ (founded by oil billionaire J. Paul Getty)
http://www.originaltommys.com/
(On Esplanade in New Orleans)
But no coffee and beignets close at hand.
I'm chauvanistic; never been to POC :P>)
So, I plan to hit La Brea first, see the Getty Museum at some point, stroll along Venice Beach, check out the Santa Monica pier, and maybe check out the Hollywood Walk. I had thought about the Channel Islands, but not sure I have time for that. I have picked out a couple of decent looking seafood places. The link from Leanan recommended Gladstones in Malibu.
Now, what to do on Sunday? :)
Just kidding. I don't know that I will be able to do all of the above on Saturday and Sunday.
RR
Since he's staying in the valley, take the Universal Studios tour.
A walk along Hollywood Blvd. from LaBrea to Vine is always a treat-- several esoteric museums along there as well.
The Reel Inn in Malibu has great seafood as does The Water Grill in downtown L.A.--a totally different vibe.
Brian
I will keep an eye out for The Reel Inn since I plan on spending some time in Malibu.
Universal Studios looks like the best studio tour, but I don't know if I will have time. I am mapping out my itinerary now.
Thanks,
RR
or not.
Enjoy your stay.
Pimpin' large. Nosin' the habit. Chillin' the most.
Furan derivatives obtained from renewable biomass resources have the potential to serve as substitutes for the petroleum-based building blocks that are currently used in the production of plastics and fine chemicals. We developed a process for the selective dehydration of fructose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) that operates at high fructose concentrations (10 to 50 weight %), achieves high yields (80% HMF selectivity at 90% fructose conversion), and delivers HMF in a separation-friendly solvent.
I don't know how this fits in with what is already commercially available:
Natureworks LLC already produces tons and tons of bio-based plastic every year and ADM has partnered with Metabolix to develop PHA Natural Plastics. Even Dupont brought their Sorona product line to market.
Biomass-derived products are edging out more and more petroleum- and natural gas-based products. The prices now favor biomass-based methods and the technology is improving. Here is a good source I found describing the top petroleum- and natural gas-based chemicals that are likely to switch to biomass sources.
Hey all you graduates out there, the future is bioplastics.
how many people are you willing to let starve so you can have your plastic ipod?
Most of the world is doing quite well. Take a look at this link to get a clue (play the multimedia file).
Errr, natural gas and petroleum are OLD biomass.
The issue is how cheap/abundant the old biomass was and how it won't be such in the future.
As for starving - looks like that is solved.
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2411.htm
(30% dead. Unless it is the 'sledgehammer' variant. That one is almost 100%.)
So...who's got some cow's with pox?
http://anthropik.com/2005/12/thesis-18-peak-oil-may-lead-to-collapse/
Now I see why doomers see things half, or even mostly empty.
Check out Thesis #26: Collapse is inevitable. It has this map of areas that have already collapsed, and are only being "propped up by the peer polity system they are enmeshed in":
The U.S. has two red areas. One is NOLA, one is Montana. (Jared Diamond's Collapse argues that Montana has already collapsed, and is only being propped up by the rest of the country.)
The port is back almost 100% (two weeks ago we handled more ships than the pre-K average, and cruise ships are scheduled back). Shell Oil is back 100%, etc. Hotel rooms are at ~80% and we just handled an 18,000 person convention. Most food manufacturing is still down (except Folger's coffee & Domino sugar refinery), but nearby shipyards and refineries are back, close to 100%.
Many reasons, mostly having to do with mining and so forth. Diamond addresses that question more thoroughly than I could here. A review of the book by Michael Kavanaugh summarizes the case thus:
Diamond himself put it this way:
Naturally, many Montanans don't like the idea of their state being referred to in such a manner, such as Kendra Okonski, but I personally find Diamond's analysis much more compelling, and Okonski's rebuttal to be, frankly, rather pedantic.
'Thus, the "point of no return" in the collapse of any society is when an increasing percentage of the population begins to believe that further complexity is no longer worth it.'
That is an incredibly suspect statement - it even seems to define complexity in terms which make any turn in any direction except 'increasing complexity' a sign of collapse.
And such statements as 'even less obvious attacks on complexty, like open source and blogging' are just mind numbingly silly. Truly, is the world wide contributing readership of TOD engaged in an attack on complexity, or are they instead a new form of complexity which simply doesn't fit well into the terms used? I am quite certain that in the sense of CPU transistor density (a fine measure of complexity, I would think, by any measure in this confusing debate), the TOD is at a level of complexity which was essentially unimaginable in 1970. That we aren't using complex artifacts to travel to meet together in a physical location is not exactly a sign of social collapse in terms of complexity. I don't think that printed periodicals replacing regular face to face meetings were a sign of collapse during the Enlightment either, by the way.
I am sorry, but social change and social collapse are not the same thing, regardless how it looks to those who feel the society they grew up in is the only correct measure.
There are definitely areas collapsing at this point, using any reasonable measure of the term. People using open source software are not part of that collapse, by any stretch of the imagination - a world spanning culture of computer programmers looks like a true increase in social complexity, not a reduction. (Bad for Microsoft's long term future, sure - but then, is the elimination of parasites interested in their own profit through more efficient forms of 'production' another sign of pending social collapse?)
To me, collapse is essentially measured in terms of starvation, unavailable health care, disintegrating educational systems, abandoned land, buildings, machinery, etc. To an extent, the author of Thesis 26 agrees - but then seems to miss the point -
'That process is the inevitable end of any civilization, because nothing can grow forever and without limit in a finite universe.'
There do seem to be a number of fairly steady state societies in human history, at least in the sense of continuity in such frameworks as Hindu India or 'Confucian' China - both of which still exist, obviously. (I believe the Communists will earn roughly the same blip in Chinese history books in 2000 years that the Legalists do today.) Neither of these societies/social frameworks (as you will) seem to have used external resources in significant measure to continue to exist, unlike the West, which expanded its framework over several continents. Of course, this may be too tenuous a definition of 'civilization,' as both India and China went through massive political upheaval over centuries - but I am guessing that from a basic view of most of the population, little changed except who sat in the palace and the amount of taxes/levies they were subjected to. Regardless of that, a scholar in either society from 50 A.D. and one from 1500 A.D. would likely have thought they shared the same civilization.
If I understand the author of Thesis 26 well enough (trust me, I don't), then it would seem that any turn to efficiency is already a sign of social collapse - a bizarre perspective and a truly perverse definition of 'collapse.' I guess this means that Germany is showing signs of collapse, as it gears up its export oriented wind turbine business and attempts to phase out nuclear power. Or it just might be that the complexity of nuclear technology outweighs its benefits, so other methods will be used instead - which in turn, are only less complex from an arbitrary perspective.
Or does the author truly believe that only the cancer like social/economic framework of the U.S. is the pinnacle of human achievement? It isn't, though I do await its collapse with a certain sense that my children will pay for it, even though they have never had anything to do with North America.
I do realize that Leanan has experience with a larger world, but I wonder how many of the people writing such things do - and if they do, is the only yardstick American? And please note that no one on the planet under the age of 30 except Americans use a yardstick anymore anyways, having gone to a less complicated metric measurement system - surely another sign of imminent social collapse?
I think the confusion comes from the different ways Tainter and Diamond define collapse. With Tainter, it's a dramatic loss of complexity. Political complexity, technological complexity, social complexity, etc. Count the artifacts type stuff.
Diamond sees collapse as a more environmental thing. Trashing the environment to the point where you can't sustain yourself any more. Hence, Montana has collapsed because instead of exporting timber, minerals, food, etc., they must import them. Forests have been cut down, old mines are leaching poisons into the rivers and streams, 90% of the fish that once lived in Montana are dead, once fertile farmland is encrusted with salt due to years of irrigation. That's why Diamond says Montana has collapsed already.
yes, I did get the feeling that there was a major amount of mixing going on in terms of what 'collapse' meant.
Worse, at least in my reading, was the complete lack of any clear understanding of 'complexity' - to suggest that a global network of programmers creating a software framework such as Linux is somehow a rejection of current social complexity and a return to a simpler model is just a stretch too far. Using GPL etc. software, for example, is an attempt to increase efficiency by reusing the best code available, so that 100 programmers do not have to each invent their own wheel, or worry about legal questions when sharing their work. Efficiency may look like an attack against complexity or a return to simplicity, but anyone familiar with software creation would be hard pressed to say that the tightly organized, ruthlessly pragmatic Linux programming eco-system is somehow primitive compared to the lumbering monolith of a company like Microsoft. (I could go on here about how Groklaw, essentially a weblog, also shows how the power of a community united in purpose is an incredibly effective tool in a legal framework, even if it may not look as complex or as organized as a major law firm.)
More than occasionally, I do wonder if some of the people writing such texts are actually aware of a larger world.
This is not to disparage exploration of ideas, but it is too easy to start mixing and matching whatever strikes a person's fancy to fit their world view. And with such rich terms as complexity and collapse taking a central role in the discussion, it is very important to at least follow a clear outline of their meaning.
I did keep reading (in both directions), though it was hard when you hit things like 'we are past the point of diminishing returns for our investments in further complexity' - personally, I think the global sensor network which is still being emplaced (from subsea to Earth orbital to solar system dimensions), with data spread through the Internet seems to be doing nicely so far, and I have yet to see any serious discussion about abandoning such information gathering, though individual instruments and techniques do fall out of favor or become unworkable (I doubt anyone is ever going to grind a 200 inch lens again, or build a very large array of radio telescopes on rails in a desert - but this is not a symptom of collapse in my eyes). As a matter of fact, this still expanding global network allows much of the discussion of collapse to be presented and discussed on a factual basis.
But when I hit a line like 'collapse increases our quality of life' then the feeling is inescapable that my idea of collapse and the author's are just not the same. My idea of collapse includes things like starvation, plague, and war - if the author wishes to enjoy such an improvement in his quality of life, I am quite certain he can simply migrate, as a number of places are enjoying such improvements as I write.
Somehow, I doubt he will. If he is married, or has children, I am quite certain his family will not be following him as he tries to improve their quality of life.
Again, the debate is necessary, and I am not trying to make fun of people exploring ideas. It is just when the author writes 'Our views of collapse are filtered through the lens of literary tragedy. The fall of Rome is our archetype, and it is viewed through the eyes of the aristocracy who lamented the loss of their power, and those who yearned to join the aristocracy in that power.' that I become certain that anyone who can write such lines without even beginning to include such diverse cultures as China, India, or Egypt is simply staring at the reflection of a fairly small mirror without noticing the large windows in the room. Even when the writing focuses on China or India, it is still from a fairly restricted view - I especially loved the idea that for a few hundred million Chinese, the best option would be to head to the mountains - 'assuming one can find a reliable source of food and water in them.' The hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian peasants will live as they have for thousands of years - at the hands of people who have little concern about them at all. The peasants will not be making the decisions, and never have except in the most desperate of situations - and to suggest with a straight face that 'Simply pursuing a simpler, agrarian life seems like a sure-fire way to perish in such a collapse, though. With degrading farmland and little available fresh water, an agrarian life is set up directly in the line of fire for most of the problems China and India face' is to literally ignore millenia of history - mass starvation is not exactly a surprise in such areas, and not exactly something new. And somehow, as a guess, the Chinese and Indians are unlikely to think returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the smartest alternative. Given the choice between, say 2 in 5 dying of starvation, or something on the order of 999 out of every 1000, I'm pretty sure that China and India will follow tradition - which is why they have such large populations to begin with.
I could go on, and have too long as it is. Each thesis/article was as hard for me to deal with, and it has absolutely nothing to do with my avoiding the truthes the author sees so clearly.
By day, I'm a software engineer. I've programmed at the level of API calls with both Linux and Windows. I do believe that open source is more efficient, and I wouldn't characterize it as "primitive" at all, but that efficiency is gained by casting off the complexity of the development hierarchy. Open source software is usually more robust, safer, and so forth as a result of its lower level of complexity. As any programmer knows, complexity is a bad thing in programming; the more complex a piece of code is, the more buggy, insecure, and liable to break it becomes. You've suggested I don't understand complexity, but you seem to be using it almost as a synonym for "good." I disagree with that most ardently. Complexity is neither good nor bad; it is an investment. It has a cost, and it has a return. The question is not whether complexity is good or bad, but whether the return you're getting from it is worth the investment you must make into it.
Again, you're focusing rather myopically on a single measure of complexity. Overall, our returns on complexity have grown smaller, while our investments have grown larger. Some areas defy this trend; "Moore's law" is basically an illusion created by the fact that computer technology is still on the upwards trend of that curve. The evidence for that statement comprised one of the longest of the Thirty Theses, thesis #15. I'm not sure if you missed that link, but you certainly have not addressed any of the evidence I offered to support that statement, so I find your dismissal troublesome, as it seems you are dismissing my conclusion without taking the time to read my argument. I can fully appreciate if you feel it's an argument not worth my time, but I would hope if such was your decision that you would refrain from dismissing an argument you've not taken the time to fully consider.
This, too, is addressed below. Those things are often associated with collapse, but they no more define collapse than a blog defines the computer. They are often created by collapse, but such a view of collapse is highly romantic, and grounded in a very biased account of the process from the upper classes losing their control over the population, Collapse often entails a period of even greater suffering from the consequences of civilization, but where civilization maintains starvation, disease and war within tolerable levels theoretically forever, collapse causes these things to momentarily spike, before crashing to negligible levels. The initial experience of collapse is often horrific, but the advantage of collapse over civilization is that eventually, those negative experiences end.
Rome is an example I happen to know better than most, having studied its collapse for some ten years before becoming interested in the wider phenomenon. But throughout the Thirty Theses, I pull examples from the Mayan and other experiences of collapse. You will find similar, non-Western examples in Tainter, who applied his model to every known example of collapse.
This is why I see collapse as an improvement in quality of life. For most people, it means little change, except that when it is over, all those things are over for good, as well. It is seen as a superlative tragedy because our accounts come from the elites, who are suddenly thrown from lives of comfort, to the very lives they've so long afflicted others with, and then the loss of all their power and wealth.
In China and India specifically, the population has advanced far beyond its carrying capacity thanks to the added energy industrialization has provided. That extra energy has allowed them to destroy the landbase in precisely the same manner we have in the West. After this experience, I doubt they will be able to return to an agrarian lifestyle, since the landbase that lifestyle was based on has been so significantly obliterated by the present experience. Even if it were still viable, those levels are far below today's population; that implies a die-off. Like so much of the rest of the world (and primarily by following the West's example), I think that China and India have both painted themselves into corners.
I'm sure that will be the case. I'm sure it will likely be the same here. I just don't think the agrarian lifestyle will work--I think we've done far too much harm to the soil now for that to work. Agriculture slowly kills the soil, that's what has driven its expansion (Richard Manning describes this very well in Against the Grain). We turned to industrial agriculture precisely because traditional agriculture was no longer working. We've pursued a "just in time" strategy for 10,000 years, and I don't see where the next break is going to come from.
So, I have no doubt that most will pursue a return to an agrarian life in China and India--and in the West, too. I also believe that they'll till lifeless dirt, their crops will not grow, and they will either begin hunting and gathering, or die. Sadly, I think most will choose to die. I think the bottleneck will be the imagination to even try foraging in the first place, rather than the numbers it can support. That's why I'm making my exodus in such a public way, as I try to learn how to live in such a way. I doubt I'll inspire enough to make much of a difference, but I can at least try.
I think much of the argument about complexity is false - true, it is neither good or bad, but to suggest that the complexity induces is own death is trite - entropy works on all systems and processes, regardless of complexity. As for investment - a good point, since the software which the company wrote for the IBM system 36/38 still runs on an IBM AS/400 / iSeries (and the iSeries also runs Linux, Windows, AIX software, to the best of my knowledge). The newer systems are more complex, but they also use much less energy and material - in other words, the complexity can also be viewed as simplification, without having to throw away any previous investment in software.
Much complexity is artifically induced for short term benefits - which is another argument entirely, and one which free/GPL software attempts to deal with.
'Overall, our returns on complexity have grown smaller, while our investments have grown larger' - I just can't agree, since there is absolutely no dimension of leverage here - that is, the amount of data being collected, stored, and used is not part of a whole new infrastructure, it is built upon an existing one to a major extent. The 'investment,' such as it is, is in the sharing - again, Linux being a fine example of an ecosystem growing within limitations in the past (discarded PCs and freely available source - and let's be honest, much Linux work still fits into that framework).
Moore's Law is silly (and constantly revised and misused), and I have never used it in an argument - the most fruitful direction in the last several years in CPU design has been reducing the number of power-using transistors, which would seem to contradict the whole point of this law.
I did not read Thesis 15 until now - and much of the material was not new to me. The opinion 'information technology, the field that has seen the most strikingly successful technological development in the past 50 years' is certainly defensible. But does something like oral rehydration therapy (ORT) fit into your category viewing? It certainly does mine, and the number of lives ( an estimate of 140 million since 1978 is defensible - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12179878& dopt=Abstract - this article is from 1988, and says roughly 25% of children had access to ORT then - my guess is that percentage is much higher today) saved by a little knowledge represents the sort of return on investment - essentially, human beings talking to each other - which I think we can both agree is likely to remain a feature of human existence as long as humans survive, regardless of social form.
I will add that your belief 'The initial experience of collapse is often horrific, but the advantage of collapse over civilization is that eventually, those negative experiences end.' is the sort of thing which Europeans who experienced WWII will just shake their head at. Of course, Europeans may be deluded in thinking that enough food to eat and enough heat to survive winter are just delusions which civilization offers while crushing their souls - but then Europeans have a very hard time grasping much of American society and its products these days.
And 'I also believe that they'll till lifeless dirt, their crops will not grow, and they will either begin hunting and gathering, or die.' is the sort of thing which living in Germany contradicts wonderfully. Speaking very broadly, Germany's long term perspective to forestry (forests all around me, after they clear cut everything between 1500-1700 or so) and agriculture are a real world rebuttal to the idea that surviving from the soil is not possible, even for an agricultural society. To the best of my knowledge, both pesticide and fertilizer use have been declining in Germany for the last 20 years or so - the damage from pesticides was too obvious, and using fertilizer is not useful over the long term - and the amount of bio (organic) farming has been steadily increasing, and encouraging it was officially goverment policy for years. I will agree that humans can be destructive, and that agriculture is at best a very mixed blessing.
Your writing keeps focusing on complexity as if it is the only valid measure of human existence, and when complexity (I would use specialization) inevitably fails, this means game over.
To a certain extent, we are truly talking past each other - I live in a place where the ruins of a previous civilization are part of the public space of the current one, one which also knows its time too will be the past at the some point. This makes America fairly unique in certain ways, which to me flavors much of the Thesis writing (and no, I cannot really read them all - the return on their complexity is not justifiable at a personal level) - someone has discovered that America and its culture will not be eternal.
So? Everything ends, a trite truth, or did I miss something? I may add that leaving problems behind is a very American trait (I did too, so it is not personal - but in my case, part of what I left behind is the idea that we are all islands), but at some point, a society seemingly based on the creation of ever larger amounts of waste since new frontiers are waiting will be replaced by a society able to get a grasp on the long term.
I truly doubt that a durable future society will be composed of foragers (well, for a while, foragers among the ruins could be viable, certainly), but the point is open. I don't have blind faith in my ability to see the future.
Hopefully, you have read Le Guin's 'Always Coming Home' - a gorgeous book, but in the end, even her Kesh would be considered doomed agriculturalists by your view - and to think how hard she likely worked at developing a convincingly sustainable society. But some of her recipes might be good to try out anyways.
I would say an API call adds complexity. It reduces an individual's experience of complexity through abstraction, but that abstraction adds a whole new layer of complexity to the process.
Sure there is; I discussed them in detail in the various articles linked above.
As for ORT, IT is certainly not alone in its position as having not yet run into diminishing marginal returns. Complexity does have a return, and new paradigms can substantially reset the clock, as it were (this is something Tainter gets into in some detail), but these are caveats to the main point that complexity is subject to diminishing returns. There are very basic reasons why complexity becomes a more costly investment as it increases, and why its returns grows smaller. The question, then, is where are we on that curve? I've argued that we're past the point of diminishing returns overall, though some sub-fields are not--IT was the example I used, and I'm willing to accept ORT as another. By comparison, one might consider the Hubbert curve for a region, compared to the production of all wells in that region. It's not only possible, but expected, that even on the down-slope of the regional Hubbert curve you will still have several individual wells that are increasing production. Complexity has many facets; even with declining marginal returns overall, we should expect some of those facets to continue to show the opposite.
This is precisely why I tried to avoid too much in the way of such anecdotal evidence and looked for more objective measures of overall complexity. Ever metric I found was in decline.
Germany's agricultural production is as much based in the Green Revolution as the United States. While organic farms produce food for an increasing niche market, it simply cannot scale up to the needs of the whole population. The reforesting of Europe is largely thanks to agricultural imports, especially from the United States, offering a relief from agricultural pressure to allow the soil to heal and ecologies to regrow. But agriculture is essentially a means of drawing nutrients out of the soil for human consumption--dipping into the savings account, if you will. If you wiped out your savings account last month, and you're letting it replenish this month, do you really expect to be able to live off of it entirely next month? Though permaculture offers some interesting possibilities, it is basically true that you cannot both live off of and replenish the same land at the same time.
No, I think complexity is the only valid measure of civilization, which is a far cry from human existence. Civilization is just one recent aberration in human existence, and on the whole a fairly negative one at that. But when complexity inevitably fails, yes, I would say that's game over for civilization. I do believe humans will endure, and even prosper, without civilization, but I also think that the transition will be a classic case of ecological overshoot.
I'm not nearly as parochial as you seem to think, and your continued assertions to that effect are beginning to feel quite patronizing. The previous examples of civilizations' collapse is a major theme in my writing. I can certainly respect your decision to not invest the time to read them, but I cannot respect your persistence in forming opinions on that work regardless. What I argue is that civilization is, by its very nature, inherently unsustainable, that the brief experiment begun in the Neolithic was a disastrous one, and that civilization will be short-lived. I see this as a brief aberration that will shortly come to an end. What I advise is preparation for that end, and the adoption of much more time-tested strategies, strategies which are not only more sustainable but more rewarding, as well (I suspect, but cannot prove, that the latter is a significant reason for the former, that widespread unhappiness is generally unsustainable).
In the larger perspective, only foragers have ever proven their long-term viability. Every other form of society ranges from disastrous to unproven and highly experimental.
I have a friend who's a great fan of Le Guin, but I've never read any of her work. It is true, though, that I have a tendency to find flaws in most supposedly "sustainable" schemes. For agriculture, it generally comes down to the fact that agriculture turns arable land into desert, and after 10,000 years, there's precious little arable land left. We adopted the Green Revolution largely out of necessity, because there's so little arable land left we now need to use fossil fuels to lay down a layer of artificially arable "land" on top of the deserts we created. When that's no longer an option, I think the consequences of 10,000 years of farming will finally catch up with us, with a vengeance. Agriculture is also a distinctly Holocene endeavor. In the long run, soils will replenish, but that will also represent a significant break in agricultural continuity. We may need to relearn the whole enterprise. In the long run, I think the end of the Holocene--whether it's renewed ice age, or global warming into a new Jurassic--will mean the end of agriculture for a very long time.
More than implied, that is what I have stated quite explicitly. Why should that make it "suspect," though? Most societies can increase or decrease complexity, depending on the situation. What makes civilization a unique kind of society is that it is compelled to always grow. Any net reduction in complexity will cause collapse, because it is an unsustainable and highly unstable form of society. I argue this at greater length throughout the Thirty Theses.
No, you're engaged in an attack on complexity. You're trying to make the world less complex. I applaud that, but it has systemic consequences, as well. Linux, as a piece of software, is probably no more or less complex than Windows (Red Hat Linux v. 7.1 was estimated by David Wheeler to contain 30 million source lines of code; Windows 2000, released one year earlier, had 29 million). "[Wheeler] also determined that, had [Red Hat Linux v. 7.1] been developed by conventional proprietary means, it would have required about 8,000 person-years of development effort and would have cost over $1 billion (in year 2000 U.S. dollars)."[1] However, the process by which Linux was created was much less complex. The hierarchical organization of Windows development at Microsoft created a plethora of roles, titles, and administrative and bureaucratic overhead. That is complexity. Linux had its benevolent dictator, Linus Torvalds, and very little differentiation between contributors beyond that. So, Linux has no significant difference from Windows in terms of software complexity, but it has significantly less organizational complexity in its development process. That means that in total, Linux represents significantly less complexity than Windows.
I, too, balked at the idea of "less complex" in college, thinking it a bit of sneering Eurocentrism. What is important to keep in mind is that complexity is an investment; it is neither good nor bad in its own right. In my mind, the opposite of complexity is elegance. I would describe open source as a far more elegant system, able to obtain greater results at less cost (less complexity also requires less energy). This is why societies collapse. Collapse is an economizing process. Collapse occurs when the marginal returns of complexity have diminished sufficiently that lower levels of complexity can fulfill the same needs at lower costs.
Not really; focusing on any one measure of complexity to the exclusion of all others carries the same fallacy, because while complexity generally moves as a single block, there can be varying emphases within that distribution. Focusing on any one measure may fool you into seeing your complexity as increasing, when it is not, or vice versa. But you are correct that our complexity continues to rise, despite all efforts to simplify and reduce consumption. If Tainter is right (and I think he is), you'll know when that changes, by when you start to see the breakdown of national governments and cannibals roaming the streets. There are, of course, plenty of places where that has already happened.
That's because they didn't replace face-to-face meetings, you added another element, i.e., you added more complexity. But even if there had been a replacement, the face-to-face meeting is a much less complex thing than the printing press, the distribution network, and literacy involved in printing periodicals. Any way you cut it, that is as clear an example of increasing complexity as one could ask for.
No, they are not. Collapse is a snowballing process whereby an unstable system (a civilization) dependent on constant growth in its complexity fails at some point to meet the needs for that growth, which causes an escalating abandonment of the system as everyone races to not be the last one to pull their investment out of complexity. This continues until the next lowest level of stable complexity is reached.
Depending on how far it goes. If that's all that happens, then that means that the reduction in complexity created by the new development model was insufficient to turn civilization's overall complexity negative. That's within the limits of tolerance, so it would simply be change, not collapse. However, if overall civilization's complexity begins to diminish rather than grow, this is more likely to set off a reaction whereby others question the amount of energy they invest in complexity, and turn to less complex means of achieving the same ends at higher EROEI. Then, we'll cease to put the investments into complexity necessary to maintain a complex society. We'll be willing to pursue a strategy of less complexity to meet our needs. We'll turn to local, community solutions. Larger scale, global levels of complexity become irrelevant. The result of that is collapse.
Your comments on what collapse is, and steady-state civilizations, are addressed in my reply below.
I wrote below, too, of my definition of civilization, but I do not see civilization as the pinnacle of human achievement. Rather, I see it as a way of life that humans are terribly ill-adapted to, and thus a cause of great suffering. The "pinnacles of human achievement," like art, religion, knowledge, and so forth, are universal to all human cultures, civilized and uncivilized alike. In trying to find some criteria that would seperate those cultures we consider "civilized" from those we consider "uncivilized," the best I have so far been able to find is the strategy of constant growth. That is the best definition of civilization I've yet found, and yes, I do think that's rather reminiscent of cancer. I think that means that civilization is not long for this earth, but I do not think that is a bad thing.
I fail to see in what way the metric system is any less complex than the English Imperial system. Both are quite arbitrary, though the metric system's base 10 approach does at least make the arbitrary designations easier to remember.
'What makes civilization a unique kind of society is that it is compelled to always grow' - now I see one of the word problems. Um, the 'civilization' currently found in the EU seems to fairly uncompelled to grow by such standards as population increase, which is the root evil which agriculture causes, if I understand one of the basic premises of your theses correctly. It is a strange experience to read American media describing the 'death' of Europe because it isn't growing, though. Since you seem to exist in this framework yourself (if only through opposition), trust me, Europe is not dying because it is not growing.
As a couple of side notes - comparison of 'Linux' generally include everything in a distro, whereas Windows is just the OS. Microsoft does the same thing when reporting on security problems between a distro and their own OSes. Linux involved the (self-) coordination of a world wide spanning network of individuals - in my perspective, that is much more complex than a centralized organization occupying a couple of geographical locations. Obviously, these are different measures of complexity - it is true that Linux development seems to have been effective at preventing parasitic infestation by non-productive or non-contributing individuals - maybe because successful parasites don't focus on hosts which offer little to feed on.
I do think CPU density is a fine measure - look at how many people world wide have CPUs to use in a world wide computer network - that too is a measure of density. Unfortunately, the addition of 'transistor' likely ruined this, I see.
But 'cannibals roaming the streets?' I have enjoyed SF for decades, but that is a true reach. And even where you can find cannibalism on a mass scale (Leningrad in WWII comes to mind), it wasn't because of a breakdown in government.
The periodicals most certainly did reduce face to face meetings - but it is equally true that they added complexity. A complexity which means it is still possible to read those works today, while most face to face meetings left nothing behind. Complexity over time does not seem to be part of your framework at all - how do you judge a basic medical text describing various techniques of emergency care without medical equipment from 1990? In terms of your belief that the American military is the premier information processing organization on Earth - which I don't share - let's make it an Army field manual. Is this an increase of complexity leading inevitably to civilizational collapse, or a wise investment in resources which can be used for decades if not centuries? Even after Rome collapsed, it was not as if some giant hand erased everything. (This is not a strawman argument, by the way - I am curious if the idea of long term investment is at all meaningful in your framework.)
I do think that the frameworks we use, and likely the experiences of our daily lives are just a bit too divergent to have a very fruitful discussion. The town I live in has just planted a couple hundred more cherry trees in one its orchards (are generally unsprayed, mixed fruit orchards agriculture?), and the long term replanting of the trees felled by a hurricane in 1999 seems to be going well - is this an increase in complexity, a return to a simpler state as a sign of collapse, or just banal life in a small town near the Rhine, as imaginable in 1800 as in 2200, regardless of form of government or what resources in terms of metals or energy sources are available?
Again, without at all trying to be insulting (I do that enough already) - the world is much, much larger than the U.S., and much of what is assumed to be universal in America is thought to be peculiarly American by the rest of the world.
I also read the long response - the reply with the point that humans might actually be able to create a steady state society should not be dismissed out of hand - elements of it can most certainly be seen in the EU, with widespread contraception and the acceptance of the necessity of long term planning - and the 'perilous' decline in population would be a positive indicator in this debate. Whether the EU will somehow develop in this direction is fairly unlikely, but certainly not impossible. If it happens, you are welcome to consider it soul crushing, though.
It was Europeans--Romans, specifically--who first stumbled on the idea that you could essentially "outsource" the nastier parts of your prosperity to a periphery. The Pax Romana was a time of peace and prosperity--for Italy. The provinces were wrakced with war and rebellion, and mired in poverty. By exploiting the periphery, the Romans essentially created a system to concentrate the benefits of civilization in one geographical region, while exporting its costs to others.
European empires continued this strategy through the 20th century, and the European Union has already shown a talent for it, as well. Lavish social programs in the EU can be afforded largely because so little is needed for military expenses--because the United States does that. Population growth in Europe is fairly low, largely because of the diminishing marginal returns on complexity, oddly enough. To make a child economically viable in a complex European society takes two decades of education (a very significant cost), but returns less than in traditional societies, because that same complexity has pushed social models towards greater atomization, nuclear families, and so forth. In the Third World, a child can be economically viable in just a few years, but remains enmeshed in an extended family where they will continue bringing in material benefit for years to come. Not surprisingly, population growth is low or even negative in parts of Europe, but very high in the Third World. Also unsurprisingly, much of Europe's prosperity relies directly on the externalized costs placed on the Third World. In other words, as I argued in thesis #4, looking at Europe on its own is like reaching conclusions about medieval society based solely on an examination of the nobility. The total, global system that Europe prospers from is still growing, even in terms of population. And of course, Europe's prosperity is as much built on the prospect of eternal economic growth as the United States or Canada.
I'd say it's more impressive, but to call it more "complex" would require a re-definition of the term that would simply make it meaningless. It's more complex to have fewer roles, fewer formalized processes, and to discard the entire complex system of bureaucracy and management? I don't think there's any fair definition of complexity under which you could call the open source model anything but significantly less complex than the traditional, closed software development cycle.
No, I don't expect it to be because of a breakdown in government; I expect breakdowns in government to be caused by the same things that cause cannibals to roam the streets, or more realistically, breakdown in government because cannibals are roaming the streets. Governments break down when they cannot provide for the basic needs of their citizens (John Robb wrote about this with reference to Maslowe's hierarchy of needs with State Failure 101). My expectations here are set by previous examples of collapse, not science fiction or contemporary European examples. Listening to Diamond's Collapse on CD on the long drive to Poughkeepsie, NY, it was such a recurring theme that it became a macabre joke to us: at the end of every chapter, I would proclaim, "And then came the grisly cannibalism." It's an option of first resort for most people, unfortunately; we know that we are made of food, but we're less clear on the edibility of something like Lady's Thumb, Plantain or Dandelion, and so, desperate populations have typically turned to the most extreme measures before even attempting to utilize more stable resources. The Donner Party starved to death in the midst of a grove of pine trees, I understand, and had even been fed a meal of pine nuts by Paiute indians a few months before.
You've missed my point entirely. It's both. Complexity is an investment. It has a return. Printing has a return. The question is how much does the investment cost, and what is its return? After a certain point, further investment in complexity shows lower returns, or diminishing marginal returns. Because of this, eventually, complexity ceases to be an economically viable strategy, forcing society to adopt a lower level of complexity, where the return is economical again. That's precisely what collapse is.
Sure, insofar as long term investment is precisely the kind of investment one might pick up complexity for. That's one of the good parts about complexity. The bad part is the cost. Collapse happens when the cost starts to outweigh the benefit.
Hard to say from such a distance, but I fail to see the relevance of personal experience. My parents have a lovely garden, too, and I go camping in the woods regularly. That doesn't change the facts about complexity, EROEI, diminishing returns, and everything else we've been discussing here.
That is certainly true, but my data is not just from the United States. It can be hard to get Americans to look up long enough to give you data on the rest of the world, but you'll find that specifically American data are no more prominent in my work than specifically British, specifically Russian, specifically Austrlian, or specifically South African data. I do sometimes address more localized concerns, but in the Thirty Theses, I addressed global trends.
I have noticed a certain unwillingness on the part of many Europeans to countenance such things, adn I suspect it has something to do with European outsourcing I mentioned earlier. Most of us can see the costs of complexity every day, but I see many Europeans have an "out of sight, out of mind" myopia that helps them reap the benefits of others' misery with a clean conscience. A perfectly natural, human response to such a system, but it can be very aggrevating, nonetheless.
I fail to see in what way the EU could be considered any more sustainable than the US, particularly since the EU is so dependent on so many unsustainable systems--like the US.
Soul crushing? No, I'll simply find it extremely surprising, revisit my data to figure out where I went wrong, and probably book a ticket. At the moment, though, I really can't see how you could possibly call the EU sustainable. I've long considered it one of the poster children of unsustainability, due to willful blindness and externalized costs.
I especially disagree with your impossible to pin down use of the terms complexity and collapse - at best, we are talking about entropy (no argument there), at worst, they are simply terms to justify any opinion.
As for externalizing costs - certainly, this is going on. The question is, to what extent is it required. Of course, by your lights (defensible ones) it is a necessary component. By my perspective, the externalized costs are much lower than you seem to accept, at least in German terms such as food production, or reuse of materials - this may be hard to imagine, but most of the new building materials in Germany come from the demolition of older buildings - yes, they do pull out all the rebar from concrete for example, and the building blocks are made from the ground up remains of the old ones. Generally, it takes about as long to remove an old building as to build a new one in its place. And yes, the wood comes from a local forest, cut at a local sawmill. And so on.
But this is meant simply as a small bit of information, not a point by point debate.
We simply look at things differently, based on our own experiences and frameworks.
It's also not replacing the city's nutritional requirements, either, is it? I'd need a lot more data to make any kind of sensible case, but my intuition is that it's probably a simplification. Some portion of their food is now being grown locally, through less intensive means, thus short-cutting the more complex, more intensive agricultural systems, and the entire apparatus of long-distance transport. At the same time, it's a fairly mild simplification that is quickly and easily subsumed by the larger context of growth and greater complexity around it.
Well, my definition of complexity especially is quite easy to pin down: count the elements. But your disagreement then is not with me, it's with the standard anthropological definition of social complexity. There's a large literature on that, but you should be clear on where the disagreement is; this is not some notion I simply made up myself, after all.
I'm actually aware of this. Most European countries have been forced to adopt much more reuse than the average American would anticipate. We, at the moment, remain wealthy enough that we can afford to ignore such things. Still, if all of Europe's materials came from reuse, you wouldn't even be standing still, you would be shrinking (see, trophic levels). Yet European economies continue to grow, and this is not simply inflation. Where is this coming from, if not continuing exploitation of new resources, and externalized costs? I do not think that Germany's economy could continue to grow if it were no longer able to exploit the Third World, and I think the contraction would trigger a chain reaction of withdrawal and cessation of investment that would end only with the dissolution of civilization itself.
But this is the comment where we truly, truly part ways - 'Most European countries have been forced to adopt much more reuse than the average American would anticipate.' Why 'forced?' Is there some sort of inherent social rule that says raping the land and resources for the short term gain of a privileged few is the necessary feature of civilization (as you define it)? I certainly agree that this sentence is logical if you look at contemporary America and its rejection of anything forcing restraint of its appetites, and it certainly is a lesson repeatedly found in history, but are humans truly as dumb as yeast? Maybe, of course - I don't think the human animal holds some special place in the world.
But as you have defined the debate, and to an extent, the terms (as was pointed out by someone, Tainter and Diamond do not have the same idea of collapse, for example), saying that the proof exists for those who pay attention is not really an exploration, as these conclusions were likely drawn before all the facts were gathered - and it allows facts which seem to contradict these conclusions to be dismissed with self-confidence.
I simply don't agree, and the world I see around me contradicts much (though certainly not all) of what you seem to assume to be universally true.
Enjoying your debate with jason here --even if it is an old thread.
I think jason has built a private language over at Anthropik, a language in which "complexity" and "collapse" have special, term of art meanings not easily discerened from the generally accepted definitions of "complexity" and of "collapse"
If I understand properly, part of jason's "Antroplogical" definition of complexity is that human beings differentiate sort of like biological stem cells differentiate from being jacks of all trades (no offense jack) to being highly specialized units; and it is that proliferation of highly specialized, narrow focus, human units --and their intricate interactions with other, differently specialized units-- which makes the society "complex". When a "collapse" occurs, the units revert back to being more stem cell like and less like their specialized former selves. The interactions between human units or cells similarly reverts back to primitive form. Example of an "intricate" interaction: I wish to bid $75/bbl for a futures contract on your sweet crude deliverable in March 2007. Example of a primitive interaction: Give me that godamn oil for free or I'll nuke you.
You'll note that in both cases, my definitions are quotes pulled from standard anthropological discussions. As I said, I don't comment much here because I come from a different background, anthropology, and have little of value to contribute here, but it's hardly a "private language." I'm using these terms precisely as they are used in the anthropological literature. You can certainly make many valid points about jargon, but I think anthropology is likely the most relevant field to such a systemic discussion of human societies, and that its lexicon is likely the most useful. But I do not think it is fair to call it anything like a "private language."
Well, specialized roles are certainly one barometer of complexity, but that's hardly the definition. The anthropological definition of complexity is as simple as the number of cultural elements. A cultural element can be anything: the notion of a "king," for example, or a physical artifact like a lug nut (you'd generally count "lug nut" as one cultural element, not all the lug nuts in existence), and so forth.
A better example of collapse might be the disintegration of the Roman Empire. With the loss of the empire, there were several smaller states, none of which had the economies of scale to allow for some of the social roles the Roman Empire had. Whole sections of law became irrelevant. Many kinds of taxes were abolished, there were fewer roles in society, communities become more localized (so complex systems of long-distance interaction faded away), and the ultimate result was a much less complex society than the Roman Empire. See Tainter's volume, which applies his complexity model of collapse to each known example, including the Ik of Uganda.
I have actually discussed the idea of complexity with Leanan here, using the example of a scram motor - one with essentially no moving parts except the fuel pumping system. Is that motor complex or 'elegant'? (Which is a fair term to use.)
Further, to push the whole thing, if I am using a wind turbine to create hydrogen to fuel the scram motor, is this complex or elegant? (This may not even require a pumping system in the aircraft any more, by the way.) Especially when compared to a turboprop using oil which is pumped, shipped, then refined, then transported again to the airport - one is certainly more complex in terms of items used, but it is the more 'primitive' one. (This is merely an example of thinking, not an actual example obviously - though none of it is unlikely or technically beyond bounds.)
I simply don't see where knowledge fits into this debate about complexity and collapse - I believe that my comment about ORT was completely neglected, for example, though it was arguably the largest medical achievement of the last century, even using the terms proposed in one of the theses (15?). Certainly, one does not need high technology as a measure of progress - I found that something of a straw man argument, by the way, though one worth making since so many people believe progress is based on technology. Generally, I think progress is measured by knowledge, which is also admittedly a slippery concept.
And I certainly don't disagree with the idea that entropy is inevitable - the argument about externalities is not incorrect either.
But to start talking about whether people here can feed themselves when Germany is essentially self-sufficient in food production, and plans to remain that way without destroying its various ecosystems or relying on massive amounts of pesticides or fertilizers, is just getting beyond comparing different perspectives of social responses to the normal challenges of long term survival (and sure, maybe some ravening horde will plunder this land - not the first time, and not the last, I'm certain - the Roman Empire conquered and retreated right through the area I live, by the way) and start to move into the realm of belief systems.
I believe people are able to build on the past, learn from mistakes, and then kick it all away again in an orgy of destruction and insanity - Germany again being a fantastic example.
But I consider this fairly banal, not some sort of earth shaking revelation which the unseeing refuse to accept because of its horror.
This my fundamental problem with anyone attempting to argue about how we are all doomed - we are. The discussion is in the details of how you live until you die - which you will (cue Bill Shatner for background music - 'live every day like you're gonna die - because you're gonna'). I see the harvest of grain all around me, from the window of the train I used to get to the city where I just had a decent tempura dinner, and while I can imagine that in ten years the Japanese restaurant might not be serving sushi at a price I can afford, or at all (being unair-conditioned, that part of the experience is likely to remain unchanged), I can't imagine that the harvest won't be sowed and then gathered - the straw currently piled up in bales in the fields is used by the various horse stalls in the region - the small field we own, for example, is less than a mile from the town's horse 'farm,' with about 40 horses (and the manure from the horse stalls is spread again on the fields, of course). Apparently, many of these fields were still being plowed by horse in the 1950s. Things change, and that life may not be the milk and honey (or Konsumterror, as some Germans would have it) we now think normal is a given. But Germans aren't thinking of using horses - they are thinking of using biodiesel, grown in the same fields. And the grain elevators about 5 miles from here, connected to the rail system are likely to keep functioning too. But the horses are also there (yes, including a few plough horse types), even if a number of people may go hungry or even die before enough food is produced that way.
Part of the difference between an American perspective and a European one is that Europeans do have a lot of experience over centuries of surviving, empires here or there.
An interesting personal example which has been told before - there was a hurricane in 1999 which wiped out a number of forests here, and while walking through part of the local forest months later, we counted rings on a couple of pines, and noticed they were roughly fifty years old. We had also noticed neat, lined rows of small scooped mounds, without any explanation. We met an old man, walking through the forest, and he explained that the trees had been planted after the French clear cut the forest ca. 1947, and the town citizenry had been 'forced' (he used the word 'Fronarbeit' - call it serf labor) to replant the trees - since they were fed for their labor, forced isn't quite the right flavor, but it wasn't voluntary like the planting I and my children participated in a few months later, where the town turned out to replant another section of now open land. The mounds were to keep the seedlings from being destroyed by the wind, and as the pines grew, the saplings and then trees were progressively thinned over the decades - being used for fuel or lumber in town, as appropriate.
He was not exactly sad, and not exactly untouched - things grow and die, sometimes the way you expect, sometimes in ways you don't. But you do the best you can, because it is the best you can - and sometimes, even your best isn't good enough.
There isn't any great moral of collapse or complexity here, no grand themes of civilization needing growth to stave off collapse. There is just life in a very typical small town in a very typical region of Germany.
I can believe in all sorts of death and destruction (you can still see all sizes of holes in the sandstone blocks of buildings in this region, most built before fossil fuels became available, courtesy of the American and German armies in the winter of 1945), but just because the next unexpected hurricane will knock down trees, possibly including the ones we planted, doesn't mean anything much to me in terms of some grand theoretical construct. It just means the town forester will have another chance to make his patterns for the next century or two. Whether his successors use a car, a bicycle, or just walk is the sort of complex question which seems pointless to discuss in most ways, the same way it is pointless to discuss whether the tree planting and cutting is done by machine or by hand - we did it by hand, by the way, using saplings from a local nursery. In most ways, it is hard to see how we could do it with lots less complexity - the schnapps was locally produced (the cherries aren't just for the birds) as was the butcher's Wurst (from one of at least three in town that do their own slaughtering) and the Brötchen (from one of at least two bakers that bake their own bread, one apparently using some of the grain I saw from the train window, ground at a nearby mill).
So many of these discussions are really reflections of ourselves, not the world around us, regardless of what we think.
And I still think we hit peak oil, and we are in deep, deep trouble in terms of what we consider normal life. This doesn't mean the world will be a better place if something like 6.49 billion people die off, so the lucky, privileged few can go back to foraging naturally. (And though this note shouldn't have to be added - I am in no sense implying you want this to happen in any sense of causing it, or thinking the death of billions is a good thing.)
Assuming it still works, it's elegant. It works more effectively precisely because it's less complex; that's as good a definition of elegance as I could come up with. There is a certain baseline, though, as Stephen Gould discusses in the biological context in Full House: any simpler, and it ceases to work at all. I might give you a block of steel that's less complex yet, but then it's no longer a motor, because it no longer performs the function that defines a motor.
Compared to ... ? These terms are relative; the don't make sense in such absolute contexts. It's more complex than the motor alone. Whether it's complex or simple is simply a measure of which involves more elements. Whether or not it's elegant depends on the balance of effectiveness and complexity; the greater the effectiveness and the lower the complexity, the more elegant it is.
I assume the turboprop is the more primitive and more complex one? I would agree then.
Knowledge is one kind of complexity, and it is subject to diminishing returns, as well. The more you have learned, the more difficult it is to learn something new (you learned all the easy things first).
I'll accept it as an example akin to IT, but do you really think this niche is comparable to the eradication of smallpox, or the polio vaccine?
I don't deal with the notion of "progress" at all. I find the very notion far too ethnocentric to be redeemed. I think it's a concept best abandoned entirely as utterly useless.
German agriculture is just as industrialized as any other Western country, with fertilizer, pesticides, and so forth. As a country, it's self-sufficient. That's not what I said, though; you're arguing a strawman. I asked if the city in question was being fed entirely by the gardens you mention. The scale of the nation is, I think, a fairly arbitrary one. German cities may be dependent on exploiting the German countryside for its food, but it still relies on foreign imports of petroleum to fuel that food production, so is it really self-sufficient, or has it just shuffled its externalized costs suffficiently to hide its dependencies even from itself? More importantly, what does that matter when German cities are still so dependent on exploiting the countryside? Without transportation systems to move food into the cities, it does not matter much if the countryside a particular city exploits happen to be inside the same arbirtrary, imaginary lines that define "Germany," does it?
I have no doubt the labor will be there. It's the soil's ability to support that kind of agriculture that I doubt.
Hmm, that kind of mistake only makes it more likely that collapse will happen even more quickly.
There's that condescending tone again. My expectations of collapse are based on previous examples of collapse, not my flights of fancy, American or not. You're right to mock the average American's historical myopia, but you should know that I mock even the average European's. By my perspective, the whole 10,000 years of agriculture has been a brief and catastrophic experiment that is now coming to a swift end.
I think we'd all have been better off if the first person to plant grain in the dirt had been immediately and brutally murdered by some unseen assailant to instill terror of the demon in the wheat, but that didn't happen, and we're here now. The longer this goes on, the more the tragedy will be compounded, and the greater the horrors of collapse will be when they do eventually unfold.
Civilization's history is a story of constantly escaping the consequences of its unsustainable rampage across the planet, always in the knick of time, each time cheating fate, and each time multiplying the effects for when it finally runs out of tricks. This time, the threats are coming from multiple angles, and for the first time, we have no more tricks up our sleeves. We've reached the only end this game could ever have: we've filled up the whole world, there's nothing left to conquer, and now we'll need to face the consequences of 10,000 years of this life.
I think our great-grandchildren will have better lives than us, but that's cold comfort to us in the midst of it. For me, primitivism serves two functions. First, it's a pragmatic response to the crisis with the highest probability of survival, but secondly, it also provides a framework to understand what's happened, make sense of the greatest catastrophe to ever befall an animal species, cope with it, and hopefully salvage whatever lessons, hope, or good we might be able to pull out of it.
But two points -
>But Germans aren't thinking of using horses - they are >thinking of using biodiesel, grown in the same fields.
'Hmm, that kind of mistake only makes it more likely that collapse will happen even more quickly.'
Please - what did the horses eat for the centuries the land was plowed without machines? Plant oil is being pressed now to burn in diesel motors in already existing tractors using an already existing infrastructure which consciously isn't so totally reliant on oil today (this is not America) - and yes, I guess the Germans are hastening the predicted civilizational demise brought about by not using oil since they are replacing oil so they don't have to use oil which won't be available anyways. Some people would call this response planning, though - and they would also likely believe that planning helps prevent collapse, if only by allowing the correct level of complexity or simplicity to be developed in relation to the expected conditions in the future.
At some point, this gets absurd. The number of allowed pesticides and the amounts tolerated remain on a distinctly shrinking basis, and the Germans seem pleased. And is this tested? - sure is, since a good amount of the entire region is used for groundwater for Karlsuhe, and fairly detailed and regular probing is done - unallowed substances/amounts are politely but firmly dealt with. And people here, who drink the water, think this is a good idea. Most people here applaud the reduced use of fossil fuel based pesticides, fertilizers, and diesel - I still can't grasp the idea this means they are tearing down their civilization by not poisoning themselves, or are being 'forced' to not poison themselves.
And at this point, you may well start talking about how the assumed amount of lead in pipes predating the 1930s along with the lead found in the soil along all major traffic routes will lead to the sort of insanity in the upper classes which could have been a factor in the collapse of Rome, which meant that lead-mining then died out in Spain eventually leading to massive 3rd World exploitation by Roman successor states - and you may, since it is all true. Humans seem to be somewhat specialized in pattern recognition.
And again, something like -
'German cities may be dependent on exploiting the German countryside for its food, but it still relies on foreign imports of petroleum to fuel that food production, so is it really self-sufficient, or has it just shuffled its externalized costs suffficiently to hide its dependencies even from itself? More importantly, what does that matter when German cities are still so dependent on exploiting the countryside?'
both poses reasonable questions which can be explored, and terms which just make such a discussion not really possible.
'Exploit' may be a fine technical term, but symbiosis comes as easily to mind, as does the idea that city and country can simply be part of a whole, without the boundaries you assign. But 'exploit' also comes with a framework, and I simply don't share it, though individual facts are undisputed (that cities require food from the countryside is true, for example).
I did think of how to describe my views. Signal/noise ratio is obviously a basic component of communication, and certainly can be applied as metaphor to the idea of transmitting knowledge.
But unlike the entropy contained in complexity and collapse (no argument there), signal to noise ratio is subject to a number of variables, arguably not based on an idea of complexity or simplicity, but instead of experience. Language, for example, seems to be balanced in certain ways to allow a reasonable exchange of information in various acoustic settings / cultural boundaries - this evolution is not necessarily one of complexity, it is one of experience, and not to be measured well on another scale which measures entropy (and since everything can be viewed entropically, we don't need to keep looping).
Nonetheless, in my eyes as long as the signal to noise ratio of transmission of knowledge (refined by wisdom or pragmatism based on reality - even more slippery terms) is high enough, people can live well.
We can argue grand themes endlessly, but certainly in the end, everything will be reduced to an entropic finality.
I live in a place where that happened - quite honestly, people are capable of acting in such ways when their beliefs include justified murder, even if only in the abstract.
Humans have not yet learned how to deal with this trait.
Not so in Sweden. Lots of the metal from old buildings are reused, wooden or plastic parts are often burned for their energy content and to get rid of them, crushed concrete and brick is used as filling material and the rest is left on landfills.
Demolition is often fairly quick but the overall volume of demolition dont seem large. My impression is that most of the demolition is in shrinking more rural towns and the largest expanding cities, inbetween there is usually plenty of room for new buildings and the building stock is overall fairly well maintained while the econiomical activity often is low in those towns.
The supply of new wood, plasterboard and fresh gravel for new concrete is almost limitless in comparision to the population. The major change has been from natural ice age gravel to crushed rock. And glass fiber reinforcement of concrete is getting popular, probably made from recycled bottles.
The only high volume building material reuse in Sweden is probably paving asphalt, the limit for it is the old coal tar pavements that nowdays are classified as toxic material.
There has been some experiments in my home town with moving old apartment houses as sawn up modules and rebuilding them as new houses. A fun experimnet that dident make much economical sense.
Brazil is "red" and Bolivia is "white".
Russia is "red" and Ukraine is "white".
Borneo is "red" and Java is "white".
Argentina and Chile are "red" and Nigeria & Liberia are "white".
Thailand is "red" and Cambodia is "white".
Nonsense !
That is how I see it, and what the map is intended to illustrate. Even parts of the U.S. are in collapse, like Montana and New Orleans. The Soviet Union collapsed, and you see a classic example of collapse in the former republics. Most of Africa, of course, is embroiled in the post-colonial legacy--another classic example of collapse. Diamond makes an argument for Australia as an example of collapse comparable to his argument for Montana, to say nothing of more obvious examples of environmental problems leading to collapse in Oceania, like Tuvalu. United States tampering in Latin America keeps most of the region in a state that I think would be fair to characterize as collapse. Latin America shares many of the same post-colonial problems as Africa, as well.
But civilization chugs along, with multinational corporations, the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, and so forth--all organizations based in "the West" (especially if we define "the West" rather liberally, to define countries like Japan or Singapore). Through these networks, those countries that have not yet collapsed create a network to maintain complexity in otherwise collapsed regions. The IMF and the World Bank are especially blatant examples of this.
Still seems way to conjectural and interpretable, and of little real use.
I think this idea is especially important today in our interdependant global economy; but applies most immediately to central banks/governments.
The gasoline/diesel from IEA last fall comes to mind as an example too.
Most of the issues I see raised here get down to the question of what "complexity" and "collapse" mean. These are both discussed in the Thirty Theses. Firstly, complexity is a feature of all societies; there is no such thing as a society without complexity. The relevant question is one of degree, not kind. There is, however, a certain threshold: namely, the point of diminishing returns. In anthropology, social complexity is seen as a function of social elements. These can be anything. A CPU is an element; the notion of a "President" is an element, too; a word for "gratitude" is an element, and so on.
Joseph Tainter's primary argument, of course, is that complexity is an investment: it has a cost in terms of energy, and it has a return. To put it in terms TOD'ers would appreciate, both starting a fire and building an oil rig have a certain energy cost, and they both have an energy return. This is the whole notion of EROEI, is it not? But of course, the EROEI of the oil rig is very different from that of the fire. I would guess the fire would have a higher EROEI; it has a much smaller return, but it is also a dramatically smaller investment. Tainter's case is basically that when we graph complexity against EROEI, what we see is a diminishing returns curve. As we become more complex, more of our energy is consumed simply in attending to our complexity, and less to the tasks we're really after.
It is not only useless, but terribly ethnocentric, to define civilization in such meaningless terms as "progress" or "advancement" when we have no objective metric for such things; neither can we define civilization in terms of art, knowledge, etc., or we've simply defined a synonym for any society. The best definition of "civilization" that I've yet found is "any society which chooses to answer all stresses with an increase in complexity."[1] Naturally, this is not strictly absolute; one part of the society might simplify while two others create greater complexity, but the overall complexity of a civilization must continually increase. After 9/11, George Bush created more complexity: in this case, bureaucratic complexity, with the Department of Homeland Security. In response to Peak Oil, many advocate new technology; this, too, is responding with more complexity. Asking people to use less energy, on the other hand, is a response of decreasing complexity. This can be tolerable, so long as it is not so much a reduction as to turn civilization's net change in complexity negative. I see this as closely related to the anabolic growth cycle described by John Michael Greer (PDF).
I am also skeptical of civilization's capacity for steady state. I see no evidence of it. Expat, above, points to "Hindu India or 'Confucian' China" as examples. I can't say I've studied either intensely, but it's my understanding that both have spent most of their history in an undulating cycle of increasing and decreasing complexity--first unifying under a single government, then dissolving into civil war. It seems to me that it's more accurate to portray these societies as a peer polity system. At any given time, there are some number of peers expanding at the expense of its neighbors, which are necessarily in decline because of that. I would not call this a steady state, even though there is an undulating cycle of increasing and decreasing complexity, because it seems to be the same pattern of unstable rise and fall, but with multiple partners to iterate the cycle repeatedly. I also do not believe that either society shows much promise in terms of long-term sustainability; on the grand scale of human experience, the few thousand years that these two societies have only barely managed to survive is hardly impressive.
What, then, is collapse? Our accounts come from the literate classes, naturally, and that colors our accounts with the perspective of the wealthy--i.e., those who had the most to lose from the loss of complexity. Tainter defines collapse as the sudden loss of an established order of complexity. The breakup of any large system into smaller parts is a collapse. The independence of former colonies is a collapse, for example. Expat writes above, "My idea of collapse includes things like starvation, plague, and war." This is a common idea, but nevertheless a difficult one to support.
Collapse is an economizing process that ultimately makes society more livable, though this usually does not apply equally to all parts of society. To define collapse in terms of "starvation, plague, and war" is particularly ironic, because each of these are conditions either peculiar to civilization, or extremely exacerbated by civilization. On starvation, Richard Manning writes about the historical centers of civilization in Against the Grain as "famine centers," because the rise of agriculture was always accompanied by the first appearance of famine. While it's true that some foragers in very extreme conditions like the Inuit will often go hungry, and most foragers are at least familiar with lean times, many forager groups reacted with incredulity and disbelief at the suggestion of anthropologists that people could actually starve to death. Foragers rely on such a wide variety of foods, compared to the narrow focus of agricultural societies, that it would be nearly impossible to starve out most foragers--though you may well succeed in forcing them to eat foods they would not usually prefer. Pine nuts are a good example of such a "starvation food" used by North Americans: bland, yes, but effective. You might not particularly like it, but starving to death is another question entirely. The subject of pre-civilized war is a hot one, of course, but my view on the subject (this is necessarily a very short summary, since this becomes a whole thesis unto itself in the aforementioned book I'm writing) is that conflict has a given place in any human society, but war as we know it is entirely a product of civilized society. Pre-civilized warfare is, I think, qualitatively different from what we call war. Finally, plague is the easiest to respond to, since I only need to cite Jared Diamond's classic, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," where he shows that nearly all of our diseases are zoonotic--that is, the result of agriculture.
If these are all products of civilization, why do we associate them with collapse? These are responses to civilization, but when the complex systems of civilization break down, there is a lag. Civilization develops complexity to deal with the negative consequences of its complexity; which in turn, leads to more negative consequences, requiring still more complexity. This is one reason why I argued that civilization must always grow (thesis #12), and why civilization can never exist very long in a steady state. If a civilization is not growing, it is dying. The effects of civilization, like war, starvation, and plague, continue on, and even increase for a time as civilization's means of keeping such negative consequences confined to acceptable levels breaks down. The process of collapse itself is a horrible, merciless one, Darwinian in its most dire sense, but when it ends, it leaves a much improved society. Civilization reduces quality of life; collapse increases it. Take, for example, the effects of the Roman collapse.
Naturally, this comes as cold comfort to those actually caught in collapse, but it must also be understood that the long-term effects of collapse are quite positive. Richard Heinberg's notion of "Powerdown" offers a possibility to reap those benefits without enduring the horrors of collapse, but I remain skeptical of how realistic such a plan really is. This is why I object to the label "doomer." I believe that our civilization has pursued complexity far beyond the point of diminishing returns. Tainter points out that the usual explanations of why collapse occurs are "just so stories." Invasions, environmental disasters and so forth are precisely the stresses complexity is supposed to manage. We cannot explain the end of complex societies in terms of the very problems complex societies are invented to handle, can we? We must find an explanation as to why they were no longer able to handle such stresses. Why could the Roman Empire not repulse the smaller horde that crossed the Rhine in 409 CE, when it so easily repulsed much larger forces in the past? Why did the Mayans collapse because of this drought, when so much of its complexity was dedicated specifically to handling drought? Tainter points to the diminishing marginal returns of complexity: our complexity becomes less effective as we pursue it further and further. Once we pass the point of diminishing returns, Tainter argues, we become "vulnerable" to collapse.
Past that point, we become increasingly incapable of answering the same stresses we once were able to handle. A contemporary example might be New Orleans. It is impossible to know the future, but I share Garreau's outlook that the city will likely never be rebuilt. Some point to the example of Galveston, wiped out by a hurricane in 1900. Even Galveston was never quite the same, but that was also an earlier time, when we were at a more profitable point on the diminishing returns curve. Our ability to answer this stress is diminished from where it stood in 1900. If things progress as I expect them to, the differences between New Orleans and Galveston will reveal how much the marginal returns on complexity have changed.
This is how collapse begins; a stress comes that reveals that complexity no longer yields the same returns it once did. There are few stresses so great that they could not be overcome by some sufficient investment of energy into complexity. Those responsible for such investments cease doing so. They see reductions in complexity as more economical responses to the situation. The trend among Peak Oilers to reduce consumption is an excellent example of this. This sets off a process that Greer (2005) describes as "catabolic collapse."
If complexity is an investment, I compare collapse to a "run" on a piece of over-valued stock. When people stop investing, it creates a snowball effect that rapidly escalates, whereby more people stop investing. The result is a collapse that happens very quickly as soon as the pace of our expansion and increases in complexity show any sign of slowing (again, I am skeptical of the possibility of a steady-state civilization).
As I mentioned above, I believe we're already fairly far along in a process of collapse. I've argued that we've past the point of diminishing returns (thesis #15). Peak Oil has the potential to be the kind of trigger that initiates such a process, as I argued in the thesis linked above that began this discussion, but so does environmental change, terrorism, and any number of other problems we face. The convergence looming in the next decade is one that I will be very surprised to see our civilization emerge from, but these are only proximate causes. The ultimate cause of collapse is always the diminishing marginal returns of complexity.
That said, I don't identify myself as a "doomer." I don't expect civilization to outlive me, but I don't see that as a terrible thing. I do see civilizatio as a terrible thing.
Works Cited
Greer, John Michael. 2005. "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." Unpublished; available online. PDF
Schiffer, Michael B. 1979. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory , Academic Press. (Amazon)
Stromberg, Joseph R. 2000. "The Old Cause," AntiWar.com
Tainter, Joseph A. 1990. The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press (Reprint edition). (Amazon)
I'll have to read it later.
Too much right now.
What happened over at Anthropik? Did it undergo collapse?
Pardon? What do you mean? We just got a new theme up a few weeks ago, the last article was a long one just posted on Friday, and we even updated the podcast on time today, with an interview with John Michael Greer. So, I'm not sure what you're talking about. :)
Link is included for others who want to take a gander at Jason's recent works.
One point I am unsure about remains steady state civilization. I think, perhaps for the first time in human history, we may actually have some scientific understanding of how to create a steady state society. Yes, there are many loose ends to clean up but we're closer now to understanding that than perhaps at any time prior to this. Thus, I am unsure that one can completely rule out the emergence of such a civilization. I do believe that such a civilization cannot emerge until we see the collapse of the current one but I cannot rule out such a civilization at this point.
But I'm not sure how much longer that possibility will remain open. To address your second point, about a succeeding civilization, I argued in thesis #29 why I do not believe any civilization will be able to emerge after us for quite some time; at least, not on any significant scale. Theoretically, I'm not sure what kind of society could meet, say, Childe's criteria of civilization, and have a steady state. I have no doubt that steady-state societies could be very elegant, efficient, happy and so forth--most of them are now, and have been in the past--but I'm not sure how you would achieve that, and achieve the requirements of civilization, i.e., dense city life, state rule, concentration of wealth into the elites, class-based society, etc.
Whew --that was a long read. Took the full lunch period. Well written. I think I see where you are going. Bottom line is that you welcome Peak Oil and its aftermath as some sort of cleansing blood bath --a collapse and rebirth of a less complex organism.
I for one, do not have such a "welcoming" attitude for the coming collapse. I like the fact that, when I have a toothache, "complexity" provides me with a dentist to patch it up. If I have a cancerous tumor, "complexity" provides the MRI diagnostics and surgical technologies to excise it. In simpler times and in a simpler civilization, the simple answer was to die. Not very complex, but also not very comforting.
Sometimes we have to walk through a lot of complexity just to get to an elegant but simple solution. I'm hoping some techno-geniuses out there will find the path from our overly complex dependence on oil to some simple, nanotech self-assembly solution. But until that happens (if ever) we've got to survive with whatever crude alternatives we can dredge up.
As far as health concerns, I addressed that in thesis #22. Our ethnomedicine is no more or less objectively effective than any other. Health problems are problems, and they can be solved in any number of ways--including by increasing or decreasing complexity. Our medicine also suffers from diminishing marginal returns.
However, modern, Western biomedicine is extremely good at addressing disease, but pays absolutely no attention to illness or sickness. When one takes into account (1) how much of our sickness is caused in one way or another by complex society (thesis #21), (2) how much we neglect and denigrate some of the most powerful healing effects we've ever encountered, such as placebo, (3) the fact that even Mesolithic hunter-gatherers performed effective brain surgery, and (4) how many of even our pharmaceuticals have been developed from herbs known to indigenous peoples, as I argued in the Thirty Theses, I do not think health concerns can really be raised as a valid reason to cling to an overly complex society.
The possibility of that unknown "X factor" is why I'm not one to go about saying that Peak Oil will end civilization. It may be the proximate cause, or it may not. It has the potential, is all I can say from here. But if we do solve Peak Oil, it will almost certainly be because we found some "techno-fix" or other, that will avert this proximate cause only by exacerbating the ultimate cause of collapse--creating still more complexity. This is why I'm willing to make statements that are so much more bold about collapse as a whole, than I am on this or that possible cause, because anything we are capable of doing to avoid the proximate causes only drives us harder into the ultimate cause of collapse, and makes it that much more likely. I don't know what the proximate cause will be. I only know that all unsustainable systems have one thing in common: they're never sustained.
You should write a summary and stick it at the beginning of a new DrumBeat. I'll comment then.
To tip my hand a little, I think the major flaw in your simpification is that progess is n-dimensional, and complexity is expanding different ways on n-dimensional fronts. This argument collapses them onto a single axis, and then a single outcome ;-(
As far as the argument that this is a simplification, that, too, is addressed at the end of thesis #14, with this quote from Tainter:
(Anything can be described as "a system." The question is whether that naming hides more than it illuminates.)
I think that not treating complexity as a single variable hides more than it illuminates, in the same sense of "seeing the forest for the trees." Tainter gets into this more, of course, but I find his argument compelling that all the aspects of complexity operate as a single, intertwined phenomenon.
Hmmm. Maybe believers in the "singularity" make the same mistake, at the other extreme?
Heh.
From Science here is a possible snag in the plans for CO2 sequestration: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/628/3
Like many things in our lives the unintended consequences keep showing up.
Those examples of cultures in history that avoided collapse had one very important thing in common. They set limits and found a way to enforce those limits. They set limits to forestry consumption (Japan) or they set limits in population and took the necessary measures to make sure those limits were enforced.
The U.S. is not a limit based culture; it is a technofix culture and will pursue technofixes in preference to limits until it inevitably reaches the point of collapse and ensuing catastrophic decline.
We are not setting limits on resource use, energy use, or greenhouse gas production and, therefore, we blindly pivot from one scheme to another scheme in a vain attempt to keep the ever growing gdp going into some indefinite future. Any sequestration that takes place which just be counterbalanced by an increase in energy consumption because we will perpetuate the illusion that we have solved or can solve the problem. We will exponentially increase our use of coal and will let some future generation (the next?) worry about peak coal instead of peak oil.
We believe that there will always be alternatives and some magic fix around the next corner. We passionately believe this because we can't imagine a world of less consumption. We have difficulty even imaging living in a world of 1960s consumption, much less the level of consumption necessary to truly deal with peak oil. And that's just for starters.
There are a vast range of sequestration techniques. When we collapse "them" into "it" a fix, I think we lose sight of the good questions. Would action X be good or bad? I think it depends on X, and not if X falls into the sequestration bucket.
"terra preta" is sequestration.
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2006/0707.html
I kind of like that. The gold standard could be de facto population control.
The gold standard is what the warlords of Afghanistan use to keep the common folk under their thumb. Apparently the author thinks this is a good model for the US to follow. God did not create money and there is no reason to choose a few metals for that purpose. In fact the gold standard is a corruption of one of Jesus's core teachings. Instead of treating others as you would like to be treated it's become "He who has the gold makes the rules".
Yes, I know tying money to gold does give money a certain apparent reality and imposes a discipline on those who control the fiction. Gold is just a slightly floppy, yellowish metal of minimal non-decorative use (I do know it is a useful coating on electrical contacts since it doesn't oxidize).
Money is a convenient means of exchange. Things got out of hand when it got above that station and the demise that is probably about to happen to money as you know it has been inevitable since.
Please do think, ponder and meditate on 'money', your conclusions will probably surprise you. Linktish:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/gnazzo/2006/0312.html
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/767
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2006/0205.html
http://www.benbest.com/polecon/monetary.html
http://landru.i-link-2.net/monques/mmm2.html#MODERN
Not even one syllable there about gold. No, it just says Congress can do anything it jolly well pleases.
It doesn't even oblige Congress to act wisely. Quite the opposite, it preposterously suggests that Congress, or anyone, actually has the capacity to regulate the "Value" of "foreign Coin"!
I could go into bimetallic standards and how we went off and on and off the gold standard, but that is really boring and usually irrelevant stuff.
I mean, goodness, what next? a computer internet usage tax? water hose tax? TV usage tax? Fast food tax? where does it end?
Are we going to have to have a revolution to stop the madness?
If we want a government, we have to pay for it.
I do agree that taxing mileage is stupid. The gas tax is working fine. If it doesn't bring in enough revenue, just hike it.
I didn't know that Nuclear power is a direct substiture to natural gas.