Edufer said:
This is not a valid argument. We have been through this when talking about the Mayans (natural events not related to resource depletion) and Eastern Island example, the only example, but inscribed with an extremely small area, isolated in the ocean, with no technological advances of any kind to avoid the disaster.
This is an energy/resource issue. The thing about technology is that it is neither. It uses both energy and resources. All the cheap and abundant fuels of this planet, with the exception of radioactive isotopes, are fossil fuels. Ancient geological artifacts which run our way of life. And all are energy-dense solid material.
If the indistrialized world were to have an energy crisis, it would need something on a scope and magnitude that would allow them to do without it. In this example, oil. Without oil, and without something to replace it's many critical material uses and transport fuel (which we currently do not have nor are investing any extensive amounts of money for R&D into developing) the industrial society and suburban sprawl simply will not and cannot work in their current contextx, simple as that.
Let's take a minor example.
A little history teaches us that the market for natural rubber collapsed from the moment on rubber could be synthetisized from oil. We must ask what will happen when peak oil arrives.
Today, synthetic rubbers make up roughly 70% of the entire elastomer industry, natural rubbers covering the rest. The total world consumption for all rubbers is roughly 20 million metric tons. With the booming economic growth in China, we will see a steep increase of world consumption over the coming years (all Chinese people want a car, to put it in strong terms). An increase of 30% by the year 2010, and a 60% increase in world consumption by 2020 is realistic.
Now, knowing that it takes approximately 5 kilos of crude oil to create one kilo of elastomer, let's look at the projected numbers:
-In 2010 world consumption of synthetic rubber will be roughly 18 million tonnes, requiring 90 million tons of crude oil per year (540 million barrels)
-In 2020 world consumption of synthetic rubber will be roughly 24 million tonnes, requiring 120 million tons of crude a year (720 million barrels!)
The price of synthetic rubber will skyrocket. And rubber is a basic commodity, for which there are few alternatives.
Only a dramatic increase in natural rubber production may cover the gap.
In short, the only option seems to be the creation of gigantic natural rubber plantations. But this is a nightmare scenario, since it's an agricultural production method requiring years of investment prior to production (it takes 4 to 6 years before newly planted rubber trees can be tapped), and which is highly risky (dependent on climate, and susceptible to disease). Moreover, rubber harvesting is labor intensive (not yet automated) and thus in the end, rubber may become a very expensive commodity, no matter how you look at it.
During the cold war, the US once had such a thing as the "strategic rubber reserve". This was some massive amount of rubber that the government had bought up and stowed away in a cavern in Kansas in the event of a supply cutoff from Indochina. They did away with the program in the late '70's, and sold off all of the rubber (which was still useable), but it is possible to store this stuff for several years if you had to, and showed that the planners had the foresight to plan for this type of shortage, which evidently we do not any longer.
We're talking about O rings, seals for jars, tires, shoes, and much more.
O rings are used on a lot of machines that need lubrication, even if they don't burn fuel. For instance, treadle sewing machines have an o-ring part.
And keep in mind that this is a very very minor example. A big example is the petrochemicals that enable our food production to feed us and make enough extra food to export to China and the fuel to ship it there and within our own country.
Everything is going to go to hell in a handbasket in industrial society as we hit critical levels of depletion.
I like that. I have been trying to do that for a long time now. Started with my kids. Then, once retired, got together with other fellow thinkers and founded a Foundation for a Scientific Ecology. We set up a <a href=http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Articulos.html><b>website</b></a> (one of the most successful in Spanish language on the ecology issue - the <a href=http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/ENGLISH.html><b>English version</b></a> you already know) and had some success toward making children in schools, youngsters in high schools and college students see the “environmental” problem from a scientific side, not from the emotional side.
I'm looking at it from a practical side. Everything in modern society grinds to a halt without a constant supply of cheap and abundant oil. It is the precondition for all other resources. There is not a single product you can get that wan't disributed with, produced from, or otherwise enabled by oil. We've become irrevocably dependent on a single finite resource that has a sharp depletion curve and it's pretty disgusting.
This is a result of what happens when people think themselves somehow above nature, apart from it, or as something that must be defeated. If we designed infrastriucture to "go with the grain" instead of against it, we wouldn't be having these problems. Things like local food production, walkable communities, multi-use centers, mass transit and such are sustainable. As opposed to everyone driving around in individual automobiles that have horrible mileage and burn up precious fuel like there's no tomorrow.
One of the biggest mistakes society ever made was trusting people to self-moderate, because it simply doesn't happen. On Easter Island, whoever was counting the trees was either incompetent or lying to them. Now we face a similar situation with OPEC nations spurious upward reserves that are political and only exist on paper since they aren't related to any actual geological finds and were done back in the 70's and 80's to increase market share because OPEC made new laws saying a country could increase it's oil production commensurate with it's stated reserves.
Ignorance goes hand to hand with fear. I don’t have to elaborate on that, it is basic psychology. Fear renders a person harmless and without reactions. It makes the brain to stop functioning. The roar of the lion when jumping on its victim's back is based in that principle. To terrorize the victim and paralyze it for the precious second the lion needs to sink his fangs on the neck.
The same applies to people: a mugger points a knife at your throat (it happened to me in New York, 1973), and asks for the money. A normal, not trained person will freeze in terror, and 99% of the time will hand out the wallet. A trained “karate kid” will break the muggers elbow in a fraction of a second. I did that. I happened to be a self defense expert (I had commando training in Argentina’s and Brazilian armies) that didn’t get scared. Just evaluated the situation (they were two junkies needing money for dope), I measured the distance, and the guy with the knife got a broken elbow; the next half a second later the other guy got a broken knee with a side kick. Knowledge –and training- saved me. Knowledge, training, and experience will keep mankind going for it.
See, that is the type of logical evaluation like I would do. Most people would just freak, go wobbly in the knees, and get victimized. The vast majority of people have no knowledge, training, or experience with emergency situations. They are just used to the easy motoring economy and everything being prepared already for them for easy purchase. They live in this little bubble of cheap oil enabled high-standard living industrian society, and everything they know is useless outsode that context. The United States is little more than car dependency, so as the crisis deepens in the coming years, the situation will be made manifest.
I guess you are talking about the cereal cartel Archer-Midland, Dreyfus, Bunge Born, Cargill, etc. You are right on that. But their context for making business is not cheap oil. The fact is they set the grain prices in Chicago and work elbow to elbow with the banking system – the Rothschilds, Lazards, Barings, Morgans, Erlanger, Warburgs, Seligmans, Mirabaud, etc, who are the real owners of this world. The main problem I see with you is that you are leaving out of your analysis very important variables and constants of the World Equation, and are obsessively focusing on Oil Depletion. A broader look would tell you a different story.
I'm looking at the distribution network. Here in the U.S. it's all individual trucks that ship our food throughout the system and get it down to the local foodstore level. The food is grown at point E, gets harvested and transported to point D for processing, gets processed and goes to point C for packaging and distribution, goes to the distribution warehouse point B and finally gets trucked out to the local grocery store near where you live, point A. This only works in teh context of cheap oil to bring your food from the farm in Texas to the corner store in ovepopulated New York ans well as all other products as well.
We've got 700 million automobiles that all run on the same stuff. We could be utilizing railways and expanding those since they are much more economical and less resource intensive, but it isn't happening. We have a railroad system the Bulgarians would eb ashamed of. All the things that we need in order to mitigate the problem and pave the way for a post-petroleum society aren't being done. Conservation is a forbidden word in politics. The closest thing they can say to conservation is efficiency, but due to
Jevons Paradox, efficiency just breeds additional consumption. So we not only don't have any supply-side solutions, we are unwilling to implement the few options we do have available to us. It should be obvious where this will ultimately lead.
See what I mean? You see oil everywhere. It will end up drowning you.
I just call it like I see it, and in an oil-addicted and dependent society, it isn't hard to see where oil was the precondition for everything that goes on. ignoring the vast implications isn't going to make those inconvenient facts disappear, so I say it's best to confromt them.
I already do what you propose: I live in open country in an “estancia” (a ranch – 2600 hectares, 10 miles from Cordoba city). The whole family lives there (most of my grandfather descendants), we have our own water well (120 meters drilling –excellent, abundant water), grow most of our vegetables and grains, we breed cattle, pigs, chickens, goats, rabbits; we have cows and get our own milk, butter, cream, cheese, etc.
From the sound of it, you are exceptionally well off to weather such an event since you already have access to what billions of other people are going to be trying to develop when it becomes apparent that they can't continue to have food migrated to them from thousands of miles away.
After Peak Oil hits and we go down the curve a bit, I expect to never eat much less see another banana as long as I live.
Most of all, we pride ourselves of being “free thinkers”. We believe that the richest man is the one who needs the less. If you can control your desires, then you are rich. And we believe (contrary to Malthus) that you should help the needed.
This is a philosophy that I have come to realize recently. Yes, we should help those whenever we can. I'm actually a pretty generous person. But I can only help those when I have the resources available to do so. If I had, say, a bunker for instance with enough food to last 40 people a year, and a small town of 200,000 showed up at my front door for assistance, the problem there would be obvious.
Since you are already in an ideal setting for this very type of problem, I would suggest that you start canning food and accumulating as much spare provisions as you reasonably can, because you, your loved ones, friends, and anyone else you take in will be needing them in the future. The thing about oil depletion is the less dependent your society is to the resource, the better off you are.
Europe has that price (and higher). No big deal.
Yeah, because of their fuel tax and oil network. They designed their oil pipelines under the unrealistic assumption that they would never have to import more than they produced. However they have good mass transit capabilities which we have a gross lack of here in the U.S.. The people are also conditioned to cheap energy. They don't realize that the cost was too low and that it has to go up, nor will they understand it. This is going to cause things like strikes, protests, demonstrations, and other forms of civil unrest.
And it doesn't stop at $4 a gallon. that was a conservative example. at like $10 a gallon, the food pretty much stops. The government would have to subsidize the trucking industry just to keep food on the shelves. Add that to the fact people would be panicking at the same time, trying to hoarde, grabbing up everything they could.
It is not the final price what is important. It is the relation between the price and the purchasing power of the people what counts.
The purchasing power of most the people in the U.S. (i.e. the low income earners) totally sucks. Minimum wage has been stagnant here since 1997 and the cost of living has done nothing but gone up. So what has been our solution to it? Big tax cuts for the top 1% of income earners that need it the least. Our economy is already hurting outside the context of Peak Oil and when it hits, it's going to be more than enough to send this boat over the edge.
We have in Argentina a $2.00 pesos/liter ($0.60 US dollars, making a final price of $2,40 a gallon), but the purchasing power is here one of the lowest in the world. The minimum wage has been raised last wee to $500 pesos = US$ 166.00, but a normal clerk salary is $800.00 (US$ 266.00). It looks outrageous, isn’t it? And the IMF still wants its pound of flesh. But we manage to keep going. We have food, although a bad distribution, there is hungry in many parts of the north of the country (the jungle and forest, populated by Indian that cannot live in harmony with nature – because they lack the technological means to survive, while the government is corrupt and incompetent). How much would have the gasoline price to go up in the USA for reaching the same relationship “gas price/purchasing power” we have?
The U.S. would devolve to total chaos before we ever got that bad. The people just wouldn't have it. You have to understand this is from a Nintendo culture raised on technology, with technology and knows nothing but technology and much higher living standards even among many of the poor than compared with countries like your own. A nation spoiled, basically. When the idea sets in that their way of life is going to come to an end, it's going to be a complete shitstorm. My worst fear isn't the effect resource depletion itself will have, which will be very drastic by itself, but how the people will react to it.
Not true. When you err on the cautious side sometimes you are covered, but sometimes you have taken too many precautions, that "missed the train"; missed the opportunity for lots of things. Being excessively cautious may be harnful for your health. How many people have died because they were scared stiff and opted for the precaution side? You see that constantly on building fires. Firemen do not apply the Principle as you suggest, and thank to that they save many lives. Had we applied the precautionary Principle from the beginning,
mankind would still be hanging from tree branches afraid of getting down to walk and get near the river. Greens would like that!
Of course the precautionary principle must be used within reason. Life is a risk, after all. We all have to take risks, but I'm the calculated risk type. I know some people that are just like "Ooh there's a risk! I'd better go take it!" and end up losing everything.
Everything I do is a cost/benefit analysis that usually errs on the side of caution. There are some exceptions where the potential payoff is great enough and the potential consequence is manageable enough to warrant taking the risk.
That’s absolutely true. But for the opposite reasons you promote the Principle. I wrote an essay on the <a href=http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Polit/Precautionary.html>Precautionary Principle</a>, that you can read in our web.
What a coincidence. I'll have to check that out.
The abstract would say (if there was one):
<dir>“The <b>strict application</b> of this same Principle <b>makes it unacceptable.</b> It is too dangerous for mankind's survival, and there is no need for the logical or scientific proof for taking a preventive action. Thus, I propose a <b>World Campaign</b> for discussing the Precautionary Principle in all Congress in the world <b>and be prohibited as a base for legislation and regulations of any kind.</b> ”
Of course. You can't be 100% conservative or precautionary, but I just like to set my mind in such a fashon where it makes the best decision possible when presented with a choice. Like if I'm in Vegas and I can go double or nothing betting black on the Roulette wheel, but it's my rent money, I take the precautuionary principle and keep a roof over my head.
Baron Max said:
Hey, I just thought of something else ....where are these survivors gonna' put their trash and garbage? Oooooh, and where are they gonna' shit and piss? ..gonna' get awfully smelly, ain't it? ...unless you bury all the sewage. But then it'll get into your drinking water, won't it? What then?
Instead of wasting a valuable resource like
humanure when you/your community has to be self-sustaining, you use it to fertilize your crops.
