Evolution is all about a struggle for survival and reproduction. For predators it becomes an arms race. For hundreds of millions of years predatory animals have honed their offensive weapons while prey animals have evolved ever more effective defensive adaptations. Each animal, predator or prey, carved out their particular niche and occupied that niche until they were driven out, to another niche, or went extinct, or still occupy it today.
And that’s the way it went for hundreds of millions of years. Every species multiplying its numbers to the limit its niche or habit would support. Species waxed and waned, predator and prey maintaining a balance. When the prey numbers would expand the predator numbers would expand and when too many predators reduced prey numbers, then the predator numbers would also wane.
For millions of years nature kept every species in check. Population explosions of any species was soon met by either an corresponding explosion of predatory animals, or in cases were there were not enough predator animals, like rat or mice plagues, starvation would ultimately reduce their numbers to what the territory would support.
Sometimes of course there would be conflicts between different species of either predatory animals of prey animals. They can of course develop a symbiotic relationship like zebras and wildebeests, zebras eat the tall tough grass and wildebeests eat the shorter tender grass. But if this doesn’t happen, one species must adapt to another niche or go extinct.
This is not a fast process, sometimes taking many thousands of years to play out, depending on the size of the territory and the lifespan of the animals involved. And over many millions of years the balance was always maintained. Every species lived in and defended its niche and life went on. Only a universal disaster, like massive volcanism poisoning the air and seas could really disrupt this balance.
Every animal had adaptations that allowed it to survive in the wild. But no animal had a “super adaptation”, that is no animal evolved an adaptation that gave it ultimate control over other animals. There was no colossus in the animal world. No matter what the adaption, no animal could be that strong.
But the first hint of such an adaptation evolved about 5 million years ago. Somewhere in Africa a species of great ape evolved that had all the other survival adaptations of other great apes plus one more, that ape was just a wee bit smarter than other apes. And among these smarter apes, some were smarter than others. These smarter apes had a slightly higher survival and reproductive rate than the ones in their own group who were not so smart. But even these “smarter” apes were not really all that smart.
Brain size, which is correlated with intelligence, increased very slowly over two and one half million years. But the ultimate competitive weapon, the weapon that would give this one great ape a huge survival weapon over all other species had begun to evolve. From this point on the fate of the earth, the fate of all other species, was set. The ultimate weapon had begun to evolve. And about 100,000 years ago modern humans appeared.
Until about 10,000 years ago, give or take, humans depended entirely on the natural world for its substance. Killing animals that they could find and gathering what fruits, roots and tubers than nature provided them. Then slowly the Neolithic Revolution started to happen. People began to plant seeds and domesticate animals. However Homo colossus had not yet appeared.
Homo colossus appeared about 250 years ago. That was when man began to spend nature’s non renewable carbon deposits as if they were income.
William Catton: When the earth’s deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel.
However we need to get back to the subject of this post, the competitive exclusion principle.
Wiki: The competitive exclusion principle, sometimes referred to as Gause’s Law, is a proposition that states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim “complete competitors cannot coexist“.
The competitive exclusion principle usually describes the competition of animals for a particular niche. But humans are animals also. We have been in the competition for territory and resources for thousands of years. And we have been winning that battle for thousands of years. But it is only in the last few hundred years that our complete dominance in this battle has become overwhelming. We are winning big time, we are quite literally wiping them off the face of the globe.
The below chart was created by Paul Chefurka.
Three very important things can be derived from the above graph. One, we are wiping out all the wild species. 10,000 years ago humans were about .1 percent of all the land vertebrate biomass of the planet. In 2000 we and our domesticated animals were about 97 percent of the land vertebrate biomass. Today it is closer to 97.5 percent. And we continue to wipe them out. The Earth has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years.
The second thing that is revealed in the above graph is the dramatic increase in biomass carrying capacity that has been made possible by fossil energy. Mechanical farming with tractors, combines and other farm equipment has made it possible for one farmer to cultivate hundreds of times the acreage he could just a little over a century or so ago. But that is only half the story. Fully half the people in the world are alive today because of synthetic fertilizer created from fossil fuel by the Haber-Bosch process.
The third thing suggested by the graph is that the carrying capacity of the earth is being degraded by our massive overshoot in population.
What no one ever talks about is the fact that the animal population is declining just as fast as our population is increasing. This means also that species extinctions are increasing as our population is increasing.
And here is the really, really bad news. Gause’s Law was never repealed. The competitive exclusion principle always applies. And instead of slowing down, the destruction of animal habitat is increasing. The wild animal population is declining at an alarming rate. Species extinction continues. And species extinction will continue until every animal that cannot coexist with man will become extinct.
Of course some animals will survive because their numbers are so great and their niche is so diverse. The rabbit and the dingo will survive in Australia and rabbits in other parts of the world will likely survive also. There is no doubt that rats and mice will survive and hopefully animals that feed on them, like the some owls and hawks will survive also.
Every large animal in Africa, the lion, the giraffe, the rhino, every great ape in Africa, will all disappear. Every large species in Asia will go also, the tiger, the elephant the orangutan, the panda and even the bears of northern Europe, Asia and North America will all become extinct. They all occupy territory and take resources that can be taken by Homo colossus and Homo colossus will take that territory because it is simply in his nature to do so.
We will kill them all.
It would eventually have happened even if not one lump of coal, one drop of oil or one whiff of natural gas had ever been discovered… but it would have taken a few thousand years longer. Our weapon, our intelligence, would have given us such a great advantage over other species that eventually the competitive exclusion principle would have prevaled and wiped them all out. Fossil fuels only enabled us to explode our own population and therefore wipe out the rest of the earth’s megafauna a lot sooner.
All this would happen even if we never have economic collapse. But when economic collapse does happen, every creature that is made out of meat will become a source of food. Economic collapse will just greatly accelerate the decline of the all that is wild.
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What one does then?
Whatever answer I come up with is not pretty.
@Tskoul, I think one lives ones life as best as one can. Despite the horror that we know is coming, we can do nothing to stop it as it is humans nature (deliberately plural) to survive and compete for the best resources. We cannot stop ourselves. It is hard to accept that the CO2 cannot be withdrawn, the plastic cannot be regathered, the ice cannot be refrozen, the extinct species cannot be resurrected, the destroyed ecosystems cannot be restored and the most likely long term future is the development of a toxic hypoxic ocean killing off 99% of all remaining life on Earth.
Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush (CNAR):
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.be/2012/06/collapse-now-and-avoid-rush.html
‘Gause’s Law’ is complete, utter nonsense, it is not observable in nature, it is eugenics by another name.
As modified by Madison Grant it became the intellectual underpinning of ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Final Solution’. After all, Jews are not fit to occupy the same ecological niche as Good German supermen; they are less ‘efficient’; they deserve to be exterminated.
Aside from being nonsense, this myth has become the rationale for Big Business to destroy everything it can get its hands on under the disguise of ‘competition’. It is best not to adapt it. Doing so gives it credibility it cannot gain on its own, better to repudiate the entire idea because it is false.
The myth has political utility, only.
Re the Haber-Bosch process and half the world’s protein coming from fossil fuels, this graph suggests that we don’t have very long to get our act together:
Haber Bosch doesn’t really require fossil fuels, it’s just a cheap way to do it. The key problem is that the abundant molecular nitrogen in the air is bound together by a strong triple bond, and most biological processes can’t break it apart.
It is also worth keeping in mind that fertilizer is wasted on a grand scale, causing an ecological problem by itself, so worrying about shortages seems premature. In addition, a lot of protein consumption comes via meat consumption, which is extremely wasteful.
We are nowhere near optimal here, so panicking about shortages is silly.
How is fertilizer wasted simply because it washes into the rivers and then into the sea. That is how can farmers prevent it? I would regard that as unpreventable waste. Farming simply creates unpreventable waste just as the topsoil is washed into the sea and blown away because of farming. No till farming has helped a lot but it still happens.
I don’t understand how you can make nitrogen fertilizer without fossil fuel. You are going to have to explain that one.
And what’s with your name Ilambiquated? I have no idea what that word means. Dictionary.com doesn’t either. Why would you choose a pseudonym that no one understands?
I think it means he’s drunk. Lambic is an awful tasting beer the Belgians drink to celebrate their defeat during the Flanders war by the Spanish Tercios.
As good a theory as any 🙂
Why have a pseudonym at all? 😉 I just picked it at random.
It’s a misspelling of alembicated, which I think is spelled alembiqué or alambiqué in French. Or maybe alimbiqué? Anyway it’s one of those words you use in a high school explication du texte.
About the nitrogen pollution, I don’t think farmers are really trying very hard to prevent it, because it is cheap and there is no ownership of the consequences. If they tried they could reduce it.
Here’s a link to the 1991 EU Directive on the topic.
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-nitrates/index_en.html
EDIT: Ah, I missed your remark about no till farming. I agree.
alambiqué is correct spelling
And, it’s ‘explication de texte’.
Or it could be alambique without the accent. That’s the hoitty toitty spanish for a moonshine still. These were built in huge quantities by the French after their defeat by Fernando’s forces in Italy.
Fernando, “alambique without the accent” If it was Spanish, yes, but he said French which requires the accent.
Yeah, which is strange because the Latin word is alembicus, meaning still. It’s one of those Arabic borrowings like alcohol — “al” is the definite article.
Anyway yours truly misspelled it in a French test at school, and joked about at the time, because it means “making too fine a point”.
The English word for still was limbeck. The English and French agree that anything involving alchemy (another al- word) is only for people wearing a dunce cap. Dunce caps were named after a guy who was very interested in the ideas imported from the Islamic world, a friends of Thomas Aquinas. Mr. A was born in in southern Italy, so he spoke Arabic. That’s where his ideas came from.
For example, trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is alambiqué (unless you happen to be interested in the mathematics of infinitesimals.)
When Lady Macbeth was plotting to murder Duncan she said:
his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a-fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only.
The electric arc method of nitrogen fixation actual predates Haber Bosch. Theoretically any farmer with a windmill could produce his own fertilizer. It’s an excellent use for intermittent energy sources as well.
The black bean method works pretty good as well.
Speaking of stuff washing into the water….good ’nuff fer drankin’ but not good ’nuff fer carz… http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/3/flint-residents-find-state-water-control-hard-to-swallow.html
Competitive exclusion applied to religious affiliation. Muslims gaining. Unaffiliated in third place. These are projections, not predictions. Who knows what differential death rates may bring. There are also interesting demographic changes in my Southern California. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
Garrett Hardin on this very subject:
And remember the competitive exclusion principle: if fertility varies in a population that is offered options in fertility, then as the generations succeed one another, the pronatalist elements in the population will, in time, displace the ones who conscientiously limit their fertility. You will have failed to internalize population control. (And unfortunately, some of the more competitive individuals may start thinking about violent alternatives. That means that you will get genocide secondarily.)
– Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor
I just read that article about religious groups. It said that the research did factor in mortality rates, but it didn’t really bring up wars, famine, disease, etc.
Seems like the Middle East and Africa are two areas where populations might be reduced dramatically and suddenly under some circumstances.
Muslim Demographics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU
John B, I agree one hundred percent with the point made in this video. And I am a card carrying liberal. Imagine that. But then I did live for five years in a Muslim country, Saudi Arabia, and I think that gives me a better than average insight into the problem. And it is a problem. This video explains the competitive exclusion principle in action.
I must post this Garrett Hardin quote again:
And remember the competitive exclusion principle: if fertility varies in a population that is offered options in fertility, then as the generations succeed one another, the pronatalist elements in the population will, in time, displace the ones who conscientiously limit their fertility. You will have failed to internalize population control. (And unfortunately, some of the more competitive individuals may start thinking about violent alternatives. That means that you will get genocide secondarily.)
– Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor
Hardin was one man who truly understood the competitive exclusion principle.
Yes, the arab’s children will inherit the collapse. I hope they have a better idea on how to handle it. So far I don’t see that at all.
The whole idea of projecting population growth of an ethnic/religion group even 10 to 15 years ahead is on very shaky ground, especially if one believes societal collapses will occur.
I agree. People tend to extend biological principles to human social trends without really understanding the implications and requirements of the biological concept, in the first place.
This is wrong.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to predict the future of complex systems. There are FAR too many equally possible outcomes to allow any prediction of any value.
It is easy for me to visualize a quite possible post-collapse future filled with little isolated islands of sanity, wisdom and deep knowledge despite surrounding anarchy and miserableness for the great majority.
Even in this ordinary place I live in, there are not a few people who live stable lives in the surrounding hills who would not care AT ALL if the town I live in vanished, and all the people in it.
There are millions of such people scattered all over the planet.
Anyone who is known or suspected to have resources (including humans/slaves/breeders) will be a target of any strong group.
Happily, those whose resources are intelligence, wisdom and parsimony are not, by “strong” groups, recognized as having resources.
So, not a target. Safe. Survivable.
And the people in the hills, get their iron, clothes, pumps, motors, all the accouterments of the global industrial infrastructure from where?
Fergodssake! They DON’T get all that stuff. They get what they can get, and get along with that. Like everybody used to do.
AND. They have the wits and wisdom to do it just fine. That’s my whole point.
1. The odds favor another global war as resources become constrained. The world energy supply has yet to completely peak and already the Middle East is a complete basket case. Europe is in danger of another bout with fascism and totalitarianism as between 25% and 30% of the EU’s youth is unemployed and they are growing restless. War has broken out in the Ukraine and Turkey (NATO member) is close to being destabilized.
2. A Nuclear war will have a devastating affect on the worlds resources and carry capacity. No major power is going to sit idle when resource shortages develop. When ever there has been a shortage of resources, nations go to war to obtain them.
3. A collapse in the industrial world will lead to Nuclear power plant meltdowns around the world. The spent fuel pools with boil and the exposed rods will catch fire. Each Spent fuel pool contains enough material to render an area the size of New York State uninhabitable for a millennium.
Perhaps you can hide from society, but it will be much more difficult to hide from the Nuclear genie.
Each Spent fuel pool contains enough material to render an area the size of New York State uninhabitable for a millennium.
I think that may be a gross exaggeration in both time and area.
Chernobyl 25 Years Later
A contaminated zone with a 30-kilometer (19-mile) radius around the Chernobyl plant was established. News reports at the time estimated some 350,000 people were evacuated. Nearly all re-entry remains forbidden to this day, though the Ukrainian government allows escorted tours of the area.
That’s a circle 38 miles in diameter. That would hardly cover New York State. Also the more dangerous radioactive stuff has the shortest half life.
I am with you that a collapse would cause a most nuclear power plants to suffer a meltdown. And it would be a catastrophe. But it would not mean the end of all life on earth.
Why would nuclear plants suffer a meltdown?
Fern Wrote:
“Why would nuclear plants suffer a meltdown?”
No one available to maintain them in a collapse. Nuke power plants need constant human attention even when shutdown. A loss of cooling for the spent fuel pools will cause the water to begin boiling in about 7 to 14 days depending on the size of the pool and how much water. Once the water boils away and the tips of the spent fuel rods are exposed to air, they catch fire (Zirconium cladding reacts with steam to produce hydrogen). Once a spent fuel catches fire its impossible to put out because its puts out so much radiation. anyone getting with in a mile of site will get a lethal dose in minutes.
FWIW: The spent fuel pool at Three mile island still has spent rods and needs active cooling. and TMI has been shutdown for over thirty years.
TechGuy, is it true that they were or have been unable to approach Fukushima Daichi to deal in any meaningful way with it because of the severe radiation?
If so, imagine more than a few Fukushimas around the planet that cannot be approached and that keep reacting for years and years…
This is government, folks. Your pimps that beat you silly. And you don’t leave, or fight back.
I suspect your version of “collapse” is a bit like Mad Max. I don´t see it that way. Nuclear plants would be extremely valuable assets, and I don´t see a breakdown along those lines. Since this is sheer crystal balling we will just have to disagree.
Fern Wrote:
“I suspect your version of “collapse” is a bit like Mad Max. I don´t see it that way. Nuclear plants would be extremely valuable assets, and I don´t see a breakdown along those lines. Since this is sheer crystal balling we will just have to disagree.”
In the event of a Nuclear war, all bets are off. Nuclear plants require stable gov’ts and stable infrastructure to maintain them. Even a short disruption of cooling can lead to a meltdown (aka Fukashima when the Generators were damaged from sea water).
In the US all of the US reactors have problems. All are leaking in some degree (ground water contamination). The reactors designed in the 50’s and 60’s had been designed for 30 years. But because none of the operators can afford decommissioning costs, the NRC has adopted an “extend and pray” policy. The NRC continues to extend permits because the operators can continue to use revenues from generation for maintenance. Soon or later something is going to break.
The issue I see as that the economy continues to deteriorate, there will be even less resources and capital to maintain these reactors. Gov’t around the world will pressure operators to keep damaged plants operational to the point tragedy strikes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station
“In March 2002, plant staff discovered that the borated water that serves as the reactor coolant had leaked from cracked control rod drive mechanisms directly above the reactor and eaten through more than six inches[13] (150 mm) of the carbon steel reactor pressure vessel head over an area roughly the size of a football (see photo). This significant reactor head wastage on the interior of the reactor vessel head left only 3⁄8 inch (9.5 mm) of stainless steel cladding holding back the high-pressure (~2500 psi, 17 MPa) reactor coolant. A breach most likely would have resulted in a mass loss-of-coolant accident”
Former NRC chairman says all US Nuke plants should be shutdown:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/us/ex-regulator-says-nuclear-reactors-in-united-states-are-flawed.html
They need to learn to use ultrasonic probes to measure steel thickness. Evidently some of them are sloppy. This deoesnt necessarily lead to a 400 plant meltdown.
Its more complex that you think. The Reactor steel loses strength because of Neutron embitterment. After about ~30 years of operation the integrity of the steel is compromised and can not be repaired. The reactor has to be replaced. Corrosion is also another issue as you probably heard “Rust never sleeps”. NRC’s policy is simply “extend and pray” because the operators can’t afford decommission and replacement costs.
Neutron flux embrittlement would be a concern. But I don’t think a nuclear plant experiencing a gradual loss of steel strength or containment vessel degradation would necessarily meltdown. If I were in charge I would either remove the fuel and keep it cool or run the plant with a special added hot coolant reservoir (the hot coolant being intended to avoid thermal shock).
If I can’t keep the fuel rods cool I would drill a series of deep 5000 meter wells and shove the rods way down there.
I’m surprised they haven’t done it. That ought to cause a pretty neat hot spot way underground.
In the case of Fukushima, earthquakes cut power to the reactor (which wasn’t generated on site) and flooding from the tsunami knocked out the backup diesel generators. This is essentially what led to the melt down.
These were the only mechanisms that could deliver the coolant to the reactor. The electric grid will invariably fail soom after collapse, leaving the reactors to purely be powered by the generators. But the generators are usually only required to contain enough fuel to last a week or two, and it’s entirely conceivable that diesel could have difficulty being transported to the plants around the world after the onset of collapse.
Don’t worry, I’m ordering solar panels, wind turbines, and lots of batteries to be incorporated into the new nuclear plant designs. The power demand of those coolant circulation pumps is easily handled by renewables in most locations.
K.I.S.S.
Which is not what a nuclear reactor is.
Techguy,
FWIW: The spent fuel pool at Three mile island still has spent rods and needs active cooling. and TMI has been shutdown for over thirty years.
Do you have reference for the TMI SFP still has spent fuel in it. I remember there was not much in it to start with as the TMI plant was quite new and therefore never did contain much spent fuel, but logically it should have been emptied to dry cask storage by now. I don’t understand the reason why it would still be in the original storage pool.
edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Cleanup
Three Mile Island Unit 2 was too badly damaged and contaminated to resume operations; the reactor was gradually deactivated and permanently closed. TMI-2 had been online only 13 months but now had a ruined reactor vessel and a containment building that was unsafe to walk in. Cleanup started in August 1979 and officially ended in December 1993, with a total cleanup cost of about $1 billion
At only 13 months old, it is hard to see it having any spent fuel, though it may have had some new fuel rods ready for its first refuel.
Techguy,
I found this:
http://www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/wpdd/10/documents/13a___3-Mile-Island________________Szilagyi.pdf
P12
1986 to 1990
341 canisters of fuel & debris in 46 shipments by rail cask
to the Idaho National Laboratory (140,000 Kg) 1990 to 2000
Wet Storage in Spent Fuel Storage Pool
2000 – 2001
Removed from pool, dewatered,dried, and placed in dry storage
P20
Beneficial to TMI-2
Reactor had only operated 3 months
Accident was terminated before there was serious damage to the
reactor pressure vessel or primary coolant system
Never lost electrical power
Spent fuel pool was empty; used later for important cleanup operations
Detrimental to TMI-2
There were no significant precedents prior
Robotics and vision technology were not well advanced
Did not anticipate biological growth in the defueling water
Could not discharge processed “Accident Water”
It sounds like the SFP has been emptied into dry cask storage, unless you know something different?
I checked a few years ago, and the Owner spent $15M in Maintenance\upgrade (I think in 2010 or 2011) for the spent fuel pool, and there was a yearly budget cost for cooling. I presume there is still spent fuel in there.
I believe Unit 1 was operating longer than 13 months.
I did a check and Unit one is still operational. I thought they had shutdown both units. I though Unit 1 shutdown a year or two after Unit 2, but it s operation or they restarted it at some point:
http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/tmi1.html
Techguy,
Did you notice they have extended TMI #1 for another 20 years. As they have decided not dismantle TMI #2 until unit #1 is decommissioned, then unit #2 is going to hang around for a long time.
With all this talk of collapse, I wonder where all the money is going to come from for all this decommissioning and dismantling? Remember the funds for decommissioning are invested in the stock market, hoping to grow fast enough to be sufficient for the job. The nuclear companies are playing catch up after loosing a heap during the 2008 meltdown. No pun intended.
From your link
Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, Unit 1
Operating License: Issued – 04/19/1974
Renewed License Issued – 10/22/2009
License Expires – 04/19/2034
Ron and others
A Brookhaven study of worst case scenario for open cooling pool disaster stated:
“A 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island described a worst-case
disaster from uncovered spent fuel in a reactor cooling pool. It estimated 100 quick deaths
would occur within a range of 500 miles and 138,000 eventual deaths.
The study also found that land over 2,170 miles would be contaminated and damages would
hit $546 billion. (my note: I assume that means 2,170 square miles which would be a circle 26 miles in radius, though would more likely be an elongated ellipse due to winds).
http://agriculturedefensecoalition.org/sites/default/files/file/nuclear_japan/114B_4_2011_Japan_Stricken_Fuel_Cooling_Pools_Danger_for_the_Long_Term_March_14_2011_NYTimes.pdf
No milk or food out of that region for a long time. Rivers and streams leaving that area would be a problem also.
But of course that is worst case, much more likely to happen in a collapse situation where no one has the resources to really deal with it (not that they do well now).
I agree with Tech Guy ; war hot and heavy is basically baked in given the nature of naked apes and nation states. Whether it goes nuclear on a wide scale is open to question. We might conceivably get lucky in that respect. Really well armed countries – meaning ones with a large nuclear arsenal and delivery systems- have so far refrained from fighting each other directly and there is some hope that they will continue to do so. Countries with only a very few nukes may attack each other or a smaller neighbor without getting nuked by a larger power but if they attack a major power they can expect to be obliterated in return.
MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION has worked so far. With luck ………. Who knows?
A few nukes, or even a few dozen , so long as they don’t land on major cities of major powers, will not usher in the end of civilization.
I also agree with Ron that the dangers of spent fuel are somewhat exaggerated or grossly exaggerated depending on whose estimates you taking into consideration. The Chernybol case is probably good evidence that land near a runaway nuke can be repopulated within a generation or two. From what I have read about Chernybol it is likely imo that people could live there now in some or most spots but that they would be at very high risk of developing radiation diseases. Beyond that I am not convinced that very many spent fuel pools will be allowed to just dry up and burn.
It seems inevitable to me that a country in great distress will keep it’s nukes in service if at all possible since nuclear power is – once the plant is built – one of the most reliable and cheapest sources of power and one that requires very little in the way of trade . One small ship can bring in enough new fuel rods to last for years as compared to one large ship after another needed to deliver coal in equivalent amounts.
As things get more and more desperate the powers in control will probably start doing something to lower the rising risks of accidents at these worn out nukes.
As conditions deteriorate there will still be central government with substantial resources in power in most countries and even if the honchoes in control of the country could care less about the commoners in human terms they will still care very very much about them as LIVESTOCK or servants – riches are dependent on having servants.
A man with a ton of gold would have to find and prepare his own food in an empty world.
Power itself is something that requires underlings. If there are no commoners then the currently rich and powerful individuals among us will have to fight it out among themselves and create a new underclass.
The rich and powerful care about themselves and it is likely in my opinion they will see to it that MOST spent fuel pools will be secured after some fashion that will prevent runaway fires. Just separating the fuel assemblies from each other and burying them well separated from each other in a landfill would be enough to prevent the short term disaster of a melt down.
Now this last speculation is WAY off topic but I have never gotten a good answer to this question. Maybe one of the engineers or physicists who contribute here will answer it.
Why would it not be possible in principle to grind up hot wastes into fine particles and inject them into a spent oil field using the same basic equipment used in Fracking ?
I know for an iron clad fact that oil found under five or ten thousand feet of overlying impermeable stone is STILL THERE after millions of years for the precise reason that such geological formations are super stable.
Getting the spent fuel back out might be possible but it would be difficult in the extreme. If some additional chemicals were added to serve as a sort of GLUE it might be impossible.
OFM wrote:
“The Chernobyl case is probably good evidence that land near a runaway nuke can be repopulated within a generation or two.”
No spent fuel pools were lost at Chernobyl. Read my reply to Ron. So far the world has not experienced the loss of a single Spent fuel Pool. We came close with Fukashima as the spent fuel pool was compromised, daggling 3 stories up and the frame holding up the spent fuel pool was damaged and leaning. A big aftershock after the reactor blew up would have brought down the spent fuel pool.
Techguy,
As I understood it both Chernobyl and TMI, were both new to fairly new start ups, and therefore had very little material in the SFPs, and therefore only limited danger. The problem these days is many Nuclear power plants are many years old, and many are even past there designed useful life. Permanent storage for waste has been delayed/cancelled and SFPs have been reconstructed with a higher density load pattern, therefore increasing the need for greater and more constant cooling.
The stakes have been raised so to speak if there ever was a loss of a SFP, and the general masses would be totally unaware of this issue if it wasn’t for Fukashima!
Plant was toast post earthquake, but the Level 7 event was a result Power Failure. How long after the accident was Level 7 admitted by any officials? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale
Tech Guy is right about the spent fuel question .
I am sorry forgot to mention that as I have posted elsewhere I think the spent fuel pools will be eventually removed from reactor sites in most cases at least. Spent fuel is not catastrophically dangerous if it is separated into small quantities incapable of generating large amounts of heat in relation to the available cooling- so long as it is well isolated and doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.
A small enough amount could simply be buried in a dedicated land fill for instance with each little bit of fuel well separated from the rest. This would of course still be a very very serious environmental hazard but a hundred or a thousand times less dangerous than having the fuel all in one spot where it could potentially burn.
Sometimes politics practiced with the best of intentions can result in the worst of consequences. I think the opposition of anti nuclear campaigners has backfired this way in that it has prevented the off site storage of spent fuel.
I personally can’t see any reason not to grind it up and mix it with dilute concrete and shoot it down into a deep exhausted oil field. I have asked many times why this would not be feasible without ever getting an answer from an engineer or physicist.
Of course handling the fuel while grinding and injecting it would be an extremely hazardous undertaking but oil bearing geological formations are without a shadow of a doubt geologically stable at the million year time scale.
Getting the hot spent fuel back up might be possible but it sure as hell would not be easy and couldn’t be done without using a lot of men and machinery. Doing it clandestinely would likely be impossible.
Any progress on this front will come from anti nuke types getting off their religious hobby horse and dealing with reality before it bites their hind side completely off. The nukes exist. the fuel pools exist.
We may have to experience a runaway fuel pool accident before we wise up.
A really bad fuel pool accident would contaminate land for a very very long time past habitability and the affected area could possibly run into thousands of square miles depending on the weather and how much could be done to put out the fire once started.
People living thousands of miles away could be at substantial risk of getting a radiaton disease depending on the prevailing wind.
It sounds insane but if I were in charge the first thing that would occur to me would be to bomb the hell out of the site with the most powerful non nuke bombs in my arsenal – assuming nothing else could be done in short order. Dispersing the fuel over a few hundred acres and burying it for the most part in debris kicked out of bomb craters would probably come pretty close to stopping airborne spread of hot particles as soon as the bombing stopped.
Mac, welcome back from vacation.
Ron Wrote:
“Chernobyl 25 Years Later.. that’s a circle 38 miles in diameter. That would hardly cover New York State.”
That was just one reactor. and there was no loss of a Spent fuel pool. The reactor core only contains a small fraction of the radioactive material in a spent fuel pool.
http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/atreactorstorage/alvarezarticle2002.pdf
“On average, spent fuel ponds hold five to 10 times more long-lived radioactivity than a reactor core. Particularly worrisome is the large amount of cesium 137 in fuel ponds, which contain anywhere from 20 to 50 million curies of this dangerous isotope. With a half-life of 30 years, cesium 137 gives off
highly penetrating radiation and is absorbed in the food chain as if it were potassium. According to the NRC, as much as 100 percent of a pool’s cesium 137 would be released into the environment in a fire.
In comparison, the 1986 Chernobyl accident released about 40 percent of the reactor core’s 6 million curies of cesium 137 into the atmosphere, resulting in massive off-site radiation exposures.
If a fire were to break out at the Millstone Reactor Unit 3 spent fuel pond in Connecticut, it would result in a three-fold increase in background exposures. This level triggers the NRC’s evacuation requirement, and could render about 29,000 square miles of land uninhabitable,”
Most nuke plants have several reactors with multiple spent fuels pools.
Wimbi I am generally in agreement with you – just about all the time on just about every issue. But in this case I am afraid you are trapped by your own expertise in making a mistake. Complex non living systems are as you say basically unpredictable.
Being a generalist rather than a specialist I find that most experts in most fields are subject to the same failing. Economists tend to believe in eternal growth for instance. Can’t happen and won’t happen in the usual sense but possible if you redefine growth to mean living well with more free time using less resources.
Biologists generally refuse to recognize the fact that people organized into nation states can and will do something – maybe too late and something that will make the problem worse – BUT QUITE A LOT OF SOMETHING – when faced with life or death problems. Pacific islanders for instance in at least one case killed all their pigs recognizing that they were too destructive of the local ecology.
Western European countries today tax the hell out off motor fuels in order mainly to keep their money at home to the extent possible rather than sending it out of the country to pay for an expendable that must be bought over and over again forever.
But biological systems are predictable to a substantial extent-even though they incorporate the unpredictability of some non living aspects of environment. We can never be absolutely sure what will happen in biological systems since new factors can and do pop up occasionally- factors totally unanticipated or dismissed as extremely unlikely and thus safe to ignore.
But ask any farmer what happens when you put too many cows in a strongly fenced pasture and refuse to either feed them or remove some of them and you will get a prediction that is accurate ninety nine percent of the time. Most or all of them will die of starvation. The other one percent of the time wolves or disease or rustlers get enough of the cows that the rest can survive.
At some point the people in any given country will come to realize that no matter what business as usual is coming to an end and that they MUST change their ways. In many or most cases this realization will come too late to prevent a disastrous outcome -a die off due to war or disease or famine.
But SOME effective measures will be taken to control resource depletion problems and population problems just about everywhere. The problem will be that these measures will be mostly undertaken in a piecemeal fashion too little too late to prevent collapse . Outlawing the sale of three ton personal vehicles in favor of subcompact cars is an effective measure but by itself it won’t solve the peak oil problem or even delay the crisis noticeably.
OFM- Thanks for the positive remarks. I think you are a pretty wise (in the right sense) guy and I enjoy your statements.
Re my “wrong” statement. I should have been less terse. Sure, you cut loose a bunch of bunny rabbits in a place with cats in it, and the process goes forward is as Ron says. We all know lots of examples.
I think on that one, like unto those cows in the field, we all agree. No problem.
What I should have said, to be clear, is that any generality of a grand sweeping nature regarding the fate of the biosphere and all that CAUSED BY HUMANS in any way, is totally wildly unpredictable. Because humans are.
Sure, it is likely that the megafauna could all be eaten right quick when the people get desperate enough to go do it, as we have already seen in lots of places. And see continuing right now.—- But.
I lament the passing of Stellar’s sea cow. If that wasn’t the perfect candidate for cosseting then I would love to see the better one. A huge blob of good, easy meat, making its own living eating seaweed!
But those russians need not have eaten ALL of them. Imagine a big boss coming along and forbidding eating too many, and taking great care that nobody else did either. And making a big noise to all the world that these things are highly profitable to cosset.
That’s of course unlikely BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. That’s the sort of thing I had in mind.
Ditto with the bison on the great plains. Even as a kid I saw that wiping them out and replacing them with european cows needing lots of care was flat out nuts. And totally unnecessary.
So. Now I am forced by my inner demons to make a suggestion to our worthy leader on a topic for discussion all by itself–
WHAT WAYS FORWARD MIGHT WORK. STARTING FROM HERE AND NOW.
No idea too wild to throw on the table.
On my own subject of energy, my view is that, except for people of course, energy per se is NOT a problem. Way too many totally accessible sources/processes that could do what we NEED, and even more.
Of course BAU is suicide. We all agree.
And fish. I know nothing about fish farms, but I did see those 4 carp chinese fishponds, and wonder if that could not be used in lots of other places, like in my back yard.
Etcetera.
We are indeed on the same page Friend Wimbi.
As a matter of fact my basic argument is that in some cases some resources will be preserved if only as you say by a big boss.
Humans are partially predictable. Some of us will do totally unexpected things – mostly bad on average probably but the right thing at least occasionally.
History indicates that kings and their more powerful underlings preserved many species of animals in Europe by means of maintaining private hunting reserves for their own use.
There will be some big bosses.
Good grief, Ron.
Here we all are, on the new Darwinian Despair website.
Maybe I’m too optimistic, but this economic collapse thing could have the opposite effect. Things may well go very fast, and while it will increase the need for us to devour every living thing, it doesn’t necessarily increase our ability to do it. Additionally, we will turn on ourselves first. Really, it seems possible that our population could be dramatically decimated in a matter of weeks. Conflict, starvation, weather, and disease could make fairly short work of this mess, particularly in the overdeveloped areas of the planet.
Hell, the more I think about it, yeah, I’m too optimistic.
Things may well go very fast, and while it will increase the need for us to devour every living thing, it doesn’t necessarily increase our ability to do it.
Naw, you are missing something here. We already have the ability to destroy every large animal on earth, and we are doing it right now. We just don’t have a need to do it any faster right now. But we most definitely have that ability. And our ability will not be greatly diminished after the collapse.
No, we won’t turn on ourselves first. I do not believe we will turn to cannibalism before we have devoured everything else edible. So if we do have collapse the megafauna will all be gone within 10 years after the beginning of the collapse. But if we don’t have collapse it could be another one hundred years before they are all gone.
No, we won’t turn on ourselves first.
Ron, you’re missing the point: I don’t have to kill you to eat you, I have to kill you to eat what you would eat over the rest of your life.
I suspect there will be genocide once it becomes an issue of everyone not having enough or reducing the number of people who constitute “everyone”.
-Lloyd
I haven’t heard much from Jay Hanson of Dieoff fame in recent years. But I did encounter a couple of posts indicating that he is currently studying the history of cannibalism.
We are indeed going through a mass extinction period right now. But I would not count the rest of the animal kingdom out so fast. I think that it is much more likely that our population will be decreased substantially by uncontrollable disease in the not very distant future. I would not be shocked to learn that 500 years from now the human population is less than 10% of what it is today.
SW, I am not counting all the animal kingdom out. After all mice and rats are part of the animal kingdom. I actually think they will thrive and even increase their numbers. I am talking about the big stuff. That is Elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers, all the great apes, and such. You know, the ones that are almost gone already. They are disappearing fast. Why on earth would you think this process would slow down?
Well, I don’t. The question is simply what will be left when the human biomass has a major die-off. We know that of course extinction is forever. Yet species can come back from the very brink in amazingly short order when given an opportunity. Move up the food chain from your rats and mice. Coyotees are doing amazing well in urban areas. I would wager they will be around after our numbers are back to pre industrial levels. There are probably more deer now in the continental U.S. than there were before Columbus. In the mountains, where there are deer, there are lions. Christ the lions are eating poodles here in Golden. If you postulate rodents there will be predators to eat them. We don’t eat them. That is an ecological niche that will be filled.
“There are probably more deer now in the continental U.S. than there were before Columbus”
I live in Mendocino Co, in rural Northern California. 6 months after the start of the Depression, there were no deer to be found. There were only 28K people in the entire county in ’40. I suspect the deer currently grazing on suburban lawns won’t fare much better than ours did.
Rat
Once a lot of people are out of work and looking to supplement the food budget hunting will wipe out any game bigger than a rabbit pdq almost everywhere , including government owned lands. The woods around here are chock full of deer and turkeys as well as lots of smaller game and even an occasional bear but I doubt if I could find even one deer after twelve months of Great Depression level unemployment. People with time on their hands and hungry kids would kill every last one of them within a year.
There are just too many people in relation to the deer and there is hardly anyplace left around here where you can travel in a straight line more than maybe five miles without hitting a road.
But if I am right and collapse is not universal and near complete then maybe a few animals of most larger species will survive due to the efforts of rich and powerful people . Having a few deer and exotic animals on the razor wire protected estate may prove to be as important a status symbol as having a properly snooty butler.
This would potentially allow a lot of the larger species to become reestablished at some point after the human population collapses.
There is also a possibility that people will wipe out each other before they wipe out all the larger animals in some places. There are a lot of deer for instance in some of the more remote national parks in the USA and the boonies in Canada. A few might survive hunting pressure. Getting into the real boonies and back is not going to be easy in a collapse situation.
I believe Ron is right about the larger wild animals being totally wiped out in Africa and other places with large populations already living dangerously close to starvation. But Africans are pretty good at wiping each other out – just like the rest of us.
Just because biological war is mostly outlawed is no indication it won’t be practiced at some point.
If I were a powerful politician in a relatively poor country I might come to the conclusion that the security of my country and my own person depends on taking preemptive action against nearby enemies. It it might be easy for just a handful of competent workers to create a fast moving highly contagious fatal disease as well as a vaccine against it within the easily foreseeable future.
Please note that I am not argueing that any given species or most species of animals WILL survive collapse or that collapse is not already baked in.
I am argueing that some species probably will make it if collapse is not universal. I don’t believe it will be but I have no way of proving it.
The burden of proof lies on those who insist collapse WILL occur more or less all over the world at more or less the same time. If only a tenth of the people alive today pull thru – with a large portion of them living in rich stable well endowed countries then industrial civilization is probably safe for a good while.
Furthermore collapse means different things to different people. To me collapse means mad max and no significant industry, no electric grid, no public water, no public sewer, no police nothing in stores to be bought.
I expect extremely tough times even in the USA. We yankees may well wind up living in a police state – by which I mean under an authoritarian government that does pretty much as it pleases without answering to anybody except maybe judges appointed from it’s own ranks.
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are historical examples. North Korea and Cuba are current examples of police states. Cuba is a relatively benign one compared to the first three..
Police states are very very good at making limited resources go a very long way with the elite taking good care of itself of course but generally the commoners don’t starve or die of exposure or as prison laborers except when they fall afoul of the elite.
Both Stalinist Russia and nazi Germany killed their own people by the millions- mostly in order to consolidate power in Russia and mostly because of Hitler’s racist philosophy in Germany. But once a police state has been around a while the commoners are usually safe so long as they don’t make a nuisance of themselves.
I guess it depends on what safe means. In Cuba we ranged from eating cat (me) to smuggling meat (my aunt, 3 year jail sentence), to learning to cook fish bones (my grandma).
Hi Fernando,
I should have been a bit more specific and said safe from the secret police and slave labor camps.
Personally I have never lived in a country such as Cuba but I have read at least a half a dozen dead serious books written by people who have – including some who spent substantial amounts of time in prison camps. Any body who wants to truly understand communism should read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
I am in your corner when it comes to the history and actuality of communism.
This is not to say that other authoritarian governments haven’t behaved just as badly as the communists or that some governments known by other names will not continue to behave as badly or even worse.
Our family doctor way back when for a couple of decades was a Cuban refugee. He was a very down to earth guy who actually mingled socially with his working class patients so I had the opportunity to talk with him a few times. He had about the same things to say about the commies as you .
Mac, at this point time there’s an emerging fascist like political trend in countries like China, Viet Nam and Cuba. We also observe very exotic outcomes such as the ones in North Korea and Cambodia. I study these guys in extreme detail, and it seems communists fail but hang on to power, and steer towards a system we could call national socialism. The problem is their ability to use populism and the religious fervor of naive communist cadres. This allows them to spread dictatorship and abuses unless they are fought tooth and nail.
I’m not too keen on what I see in the USA, there’s too much government power, too much snooping, and too much imposition of political correctness. I’m afraid humanity is headed for the dark ages, but I’m not going to cooperate.
”I’m not too keen on what I see in the USA, there’s too much government power, too much snooping, and too much imposition of political correctness. I’m afraid humanity is headed for the dark ages, but I’m not going to cooperate.”
I agree one hundred percent in terms of the trends and the dangers but I do hold out some hope that there may be a reasonably bright future for a few hundred million humans some where down the road..
And I am with you in not cooperating. I will tell it like it is – or at least as I think it is – no matter what it costs me – and it has cost me plenty at different times.
I was in San Francisco recently, staying by Golden Gate park. I was surprised to see coyote warning signs up in the park. I also was standing out on the street waiting for someone, and saw a family of raccoons cross the street and hop a fence. They then came out the other side of that house, went up a tree to allow a dog walker to go past, descended and headed off down an alley. That mother coon was teaching the young ones some serious street smarts.
There are probably more deer now in the continental U.S. than there were before Columbus. >/i>
I’ve seen right wing blogs making this claim. Do you have any actual evidence that it is true?
I don’t have any hard data, but here’s how and why there could very well be more deer now than before Columbus.
Deer live on and in regions of forest boundary, forest edge. Grasses, weeds, and brush were historically on the edges of forest, whereas the old-growth forest floor was covered with smaller, more-dense materials. Deer live better at the edges.
In pre-Columbus times, forest edges came and went due to natural causes, such as fires, floods, remodeling of earth’s surface due to major earthquakes, and so on. These things occur relatively infrequently, but in nature, at a relatively-constant rate. The deer population was stable.
From the time of the European settlers, through the westward expansion, through the suburban explosion, through greatly increased farming, most of our forest is now in patches. There are few old-growth forests. Much of the wooded areas are smaller than 100 acre patches, and forests larger than 10,000 acres are rare. Small forests act as windbreaks, they act as parks in suburban areas. These all qualify as forest edge as far as foliage, and thus deer eat it and live in it. This gives them an expanded habitat. Also, much of this new forest edge is protected from hunting, is kept relatively free of large predators – people in deep suburbia might enjoy watching deer, but they will not tolerate their area having cougars or wolves – which can be dangerous to them or their children.
So, deer become more numerous.
So do rabbits and mice, for similar reasons.
Incidentally, this also is a vector of flea and tick-borne disease, including bubonic plague.
I predict the extinction of mankind within the next 20 years, possibly as soon as 5 years. It’s almost a hobby to watch WHICH or numerous threats will hit first! While war is a possibility, nuclear and chemical catastrophe after the end of civilization seems a lot higher. There are numerous ways this breakdown could occur, but my bets are still on microbes.
Dear Ron,
This is my first post in 2 years time. Somewhere in 2013 i became aware that financial recovery was not really happening and through research via the internet i gradually arrived at the conclusion that peak oil was probably an important factor. Or if it isn’t yet, will become a key problem very soon. I have been reading this blog for quite a while and would also like to thank people who often post comments here as i find these posts very informative.
As a biologist and environmental professional i appreciate how you link the peak oil issue with population ecology. Although population dynamics is by and far not my specialization i feel in general you are probably correct with regards to overshoot. I haven’t done a rigorous review of the science on this topic, mainly because my gut feeling – supported by existing background knowledge on these matter from university training – has been screaming at me for the past 2 years: “Prepare; prepare NOW”. So here comes the question i most wanted to ask; how do you cope psychologically with all this ? I have been very tense, sometimes near panic, during the past 2 years once the full magnitude and urgency of the problems started to hit home. This is exacerbated by the fact that the few people whom i tried to discuss this with are not concerned at all, or simply think i’m crazy. To give you an example: when i explained my concerns to my mother she replied: “Don’t worry so much about this. It is likely not as bad as you think. Even if it is: we are all in this together”. I couldn’t help but stare at her, completely taken aback and utter “yes; thats exactly what scares me.” I have made some preparations, but off course there are limits to what i can prepare all by myself. To help me better target my preparations i wonder what your thoughts are on the timeframe of the energy descent ( sudden flash crash / relatively prolonged emergency). Particularly; me and my partner (who doesn’t believe a word about any of these gloomy scenarios) currently have a mortgage and 30% equity in our house. I have personally about 4 months wages set aside. Together with my partner we have another 4 months of wages saved up. I have a small old sailboat (i like to sail, but also the get-out-off-hell-go-anywhere aspect of it). Would you invest in a new heating system for the house that uses a solar boiler, knowing that even whilst subsidized, it is barely a break-even deal with current energy prices ? The alternative I’m considering is getting a custom tent for the sailboat, so i can cut the expense of taking it out of the water in winter. Although my gut feeling is telling me not to sell the boat, what are your thoughts on the chance of a fast-track complete collapse where we we literally eat the birds out of the sky ? Alternatively i consider keeping it and “converting” it to a fishing boat and sell the catch if i happen to get layed off.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
T.Y., I am at a loss as to how to reply to your post. I myself am 76 years old and I am making no preparations for the collapse whatsoever. And even if I were a younger man I still would not know what the hell to do. Because we do not know when it will happen nor do we know how the whole thing will play out we are at a loss as what to do to prepare for this cataclysm.
I think that we will likely get some warning. I believe things will start to get bad at least a year or two before things really go to hell.
No, I would not sell the boat. A sailboat will likely be a good thing to have when things get bad. Though I did sell my sailboat a few years back. But it was just getting too expensive for me to maintain it. It was a 34 foot sloop that I kept in Pensacola, Fl and it was costing me about $250 a month just for slip fees. Plus I had to have the bottom scraped and repainted every two years and that was over two grand. And at my age I did not figure I would be needing it anyway.
I am sorry I cannot offer more advice on how to prepare but that is about all I can say. I have three sons and none of them believe a damn thing I tell them about peak oil or the coming collapse. Hell, half the people who follow this blog don’t believe the collapse will even happen. Most of them see us muddling through somehow. I don’t of course but perhaps if I were younger I might try to put a more optimistic face on the future.
But you might try following some of the permaculture sites. Surviving the collapse is what they are all about. Resilience.org is a very good one.
Take care,
Ron
Hi T.Y.
I have a few suggestions- they may or may not be applicable to you. So take em or leave em.
Have no children, please.
Try to live in a place that you can tolerate if living becomes local (less fuel for getting around, vacations, imports of goods from afar, etc). This has many facets. Are the heating/cooling loads relatively mild? Insulate as best you can, and get solar if applicable, or a wood lot. Live close to work. Does your area have plenty of farmland nearby to support its population? Are the people generally trustworthy and orderly, or do you feel it would quickly become a chaotic place in tough times. These are hard things to find in one package, but for some a change in location may be worth seeking.
Realize that collapse is a possibility, and no one can assign it an exact probability. But it always has been throughout human history. Famine, war, slavery,and chaos are pervasive in our history, and are right now in many places.
Also, none of us know on which day we will find out we have a fatal illness. I see new cases every day in my work. Out of the blue.
So, while you try to live a joyful life, part of your consciousness should be steeling yourself against the possibility of hard times and pain.
I’m trying to do that. It is hard to be joyful when you have all this on mind. Got to find a balance, as best you can.
One thing that gives me some solace is the idea that I will be able to achieve a quick exit from this life when I see fit. For me, that is a precious freedom.
To each there own.
Dear Hickory,
You offer good advice; i have been considering some of these things; the house is well insulated, my partner already works part-time at home. I already fled the city to a more country-side area.
That being said; i live in belgium, flanders, this area is very densely populated wherever you go. Belgium is also known for using quite a lot of fertilizer compared to other EU states; its a known issue affecting surface water quality. I think our agricultural production can drop somewhat still produce enough calories to feed most; but how much of a drop can you expect if oil is tight ? I believe it to be in the order of -30% to -50%, do you known some good research literature on this topic that has considered this in depth ?
In terms of not having children; i have been considering this one a lot in the past months. I’m 29 and me and my wife really want kids. I feel somewhat bad in a sense that i’m fully aware the planet is already overpopulated. On the other hand; its really totally crazy to deny your own wish when one considers how easily, without moral concerns, people have large families in all corners of the planet. Even in places where some children are literally starving.
In terms of staying joyous; going to give meditation a try. Initially i had the same idea as you; make sure you can exit the existing system if it does happen to fall apart. This is the thing I’m finding the most difficult. I have been refreshing my knowledge of edible / medicinal plants & mushrooms, gardening , trying to get the hang of home brewing. Suppose i have a garage i could convert to office /shop. What would you do ? what works great in an energy descent scenario ? Would you start an official side-business, at the risk that your current employer might not like it ?
Thanks for your reply, all the best,
T.Y.
Thanks for your reply Ron,
My boat is about 24 foot long sloop, it also costs me about 700 in mooring fees a year (seems somewhat cheaper here compared to your side of the globe). Most expensive is indeed having it lifted, stored for winter and having a new layer of anti-fouling paint applied. the tent could slash that cost in half as i believe the anti-fouling can take 2 years before growth under the hull gets too bad.
Sorry to hear “convincing the family” is not going great neither. I guess those of us who are already convinced just have to keep preparing in small steps and be there to help guide immediate family and neighbors once a certain threshold has been reached and people start to take this more seriously. I did manage to convince my father to keep 2 or 3 chickens in his garden. I started keeping chickens about a year ago and am very enthusiastic about it; they’re really easy to keep and having your own fresh eggs is great. I think that this might be the key; don’t link these things to “preparing for peak oil” simply try and sell these measures on their own merits.
Kind Regards.
Hi T. Y.,
Consider also referring to your comment here in a new comment, or reposting it, under a fresh article. This one, under an older article is already buried and may not get the kind of read it might get otherwise.
@wimbi
Complex system indeed. However having modeled ( computer & experiments ) a variety of very complex systems I have come to appreciate that complex systems that depend on a set of very simple rules prodyce limiting behaviors that are very easy to understand ( pray-predator dynamics, multi-body gravitational systems, multi-phase flow systems etc) extremely difficult to predict exact trajectories but because of the simple rules that govern them can be conseptualised and their limiting behaviors understood precisely.
What Ron writes is absolutely correct. What will require to stop our trajectory is a superior intellect that can fully understand and conquer its own nature. A superior human that will wipe out HOMO Colossus – following the exact simple rules mentioned in Ron’s essay.
DrTskoul, have you read George Mobus’ work on sapience? I personally suspect such Mr. Spock-like capacity will not emerge until 90%+ of non-sapient humans perish, and some form of “humachine” species (evolving today, although most of us don’t see it) and consciousness emerges/evolves and self-identifies with the steady-state conditions required for “consciousness” to persist on a finite, spherical planet, i.e., “Spaceship Earth”.
As I think perpetual growth of population, resource consumption, GDP per capita, and profits on a finite planet is insanely suicidal, it goes without saying that such profiteering human ape folly as Mars One is similarly suicidal.
Yep. All true. What I was getting at was the PROCESS of getting to Homo Smart.
The process is -Homo Stupid kills itself off, leaving little enclaves all over of Homo Smart to take off, like the mammals after the dinos.
Just natural, seems to me.
To Homo Smart, the ruins of present civilization will contain near infinite wealth to exploit for creating the new world.
In fact, I think exactly this is highly likely.
The process is -Homo Stupid kills itself off, leaving little enclaves all over of Homo Smart to take off, like the mammals after the dinos.
I have thought that rather than taking their guns away, we should let the crazy US gun owners shoot at each other and reduce their populations a bit. I’m not saying that all gun owners are crazy. Just the ones who are ready to shoot before they know what is going on. Maybe we can put them all in the same place and if they shoot, they end up shooting each other.
I guess the problem is that in the nuclear age, Homo Stupid (AKA John Bolton) potentially kills most everybody and mutates the survivors.
More likely, your ‘homo smart’ is killed off by the aggressive , gun wielding ‘homo stupid’. Thats been going on for quite along time, and will escalate when the going gets tough. You got a glimpse of this kind of action in Germany in the ’30’s.
Great posting Ron. It would be nice to be able to rationalize away this reality, but no such luck. Looking at this whole scenario from an energy standpoint is critical, but also one can look at it from a soil standpoint. Humans control the productivity from all (OK- 99%), of the good soils of the earth. The exploration, conquest, wars, and population shifts over the past 10,000 yrs has all been about gaining control over those productive soils.
More likely, your ‘homo smart’ is killed off by the aggressive , gun wielding ‘homo stupid’.
I had read somewhere that countries with an excess of potentially dangerous young men thin them out by sending them off to war. So that’s how the homo smarts get rid of the homo stupids while at the same time keeping themselves safe. You send them off to war to fight someone else so they don’t kill each other or you.
So, H-Smart, being smart and all that, uses the time-proven tactic that really works- go off to a place that is mighty hard to get to and not worth getting to when got to after all that work.
Usually mountains. Deserts, Ice sheets work too.
Being well armed and smart is not a bad combination. I live well away from any really big city – Charlotte is over a hundred miles away and just about everybody around here is well armed. If it comes down to a mad max scenario then local people in this sort of community will organize militias that shoot first and ask questions later.
The population will decline VERY VERY FAST in any sort of mad max situation. Within a few months there won’t be a whole lot of folks still wandering around looking for victims. The easy victims will be long gone from either starvation or murder and the remaining tough potential victims will be just as dangerous or more so than a marauder.
Food will be extraordinarily scare even in a diversified farming community such as the one where I live and a substantial portion of even the local population would starve in a mad max scenario. Fifty years ago my own family would have been able to feed itself no problem and to supply a few neighbors without using hardly any off farm inputs at all. In recent times I have bought ninety percent of our food at supermarkets even though we have produced food enough for dozens of people on our little place – if it were possible to survive on apples and peaches alone.
Tending a garden has become a hobby that pays it’s own way at best for most farmers and very small scale livestock production is similarly an uneconomic use of time and resources these days. I only know one person locally who still raises a hog for the family table. Twenty years ago probably every fourth local rural family had a hog and chickens and some had a cow.
I don’t know a soul with a family cow these days.
Just about all commercial western farmers are specialists now and very few devote any resources to producing food for their own use to more than a minor extent.
But most of us could still grow enough and enough different crops to meet our own basic needs if the occasion arises. Getting thru the first year would be tough as hell in most cases.
If I ever suspect the shit is in the fan I am going to town immediately and buying up as much storable food as I can put my hands on if I can beat the crowds to the supermarket and then heading for the farm supply and stocking up likewise on grain and livestock feed as well as whatever seed I can get.
I will be going in a truck that will haul eight or ten tons. A year is a long time and I have friends who will be calling on me as their last hope.
A couple of bags of horse feed could be the difference between living and dieing that first year. Most people in North Korea tonight would be very glad to have a bowl of horse feed porridge served up nice and hot with an onion on the side.
I throw out this homely country boy wisdom mostly for the benefit of doomers who don’t seem to be doing much thinking about what they are going to do PERSONALLY if and when the collapse they believe in arrives unexpectedly.Collapse might arrive like a thief in the night.
Correction Hickory. Humans are rapidly destroying the productivity from all (OK 99%) of the previously good soils of the earth. Here in the UK, soil depth is now less than a third of what is was in 1948. Humus levels, which should be 20-30 precent for maximum fertility are universally only around 3 percent. Without continued massive applications of NPK and other chemical additives, yields would collapse utterly. The UK was probably maximally populated in 1800. The natural carrying capacity today is probably less than 2 million (not 64 !). And we have practical no fish left in our seas. I could go on, but you know how it is…..
Welshfarmer I have long understood that England as such is deep into overshoot.
But even so your figures concerning soil depletion are scary as hell. I find it hard to believe the country has lost soil as fast as you indicate on an overall basis. I would not be surprised at all about this level of soil loss happening in some given localities.
Where did you find these figures?
I don’t think it’s so much a question of stupid and smart as one of having a strategy suited to the situation at hand. As the situation changes (partly due to the actions of the players) different strategies come to dominate.
In one of those Faulkner stories there are some Indians sitting in the shade watching the farmers working in the fields and wondering out loud why white men want to sweat so much. There was plenty of game in the woods anyway, no need to chop down all the trees and plant corn in the hot sun. But of course they were soon overwhelmed by the densely packed farmers, and we know how that ended.
Ironically, Faulkner’s rural Mississippi is now dying — slowly depopulating. What seems like prime farmland to a Cantonese farmer hardly seems worth an American’s effort to till.
So despite American’s meteoric rise, maybe Faulkner’s Indians got it right after all. More likely, some thriftier way of life will replace it.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Maybe it will be outsiders, and maybe it will be a new generation of Americans. City governments all across the countries have noticed that places like Detroit and Memphis that embraced the car culture have crashed and burned. Now there is hardly a city on America that isn’t slowly backing away.
My near identical experience was right next door in rural Louisiana, and the Indian equivalent was a born-slave black farmhand. He and I sat under a live oak tree eating our lunch, watching my father dig out in that sweltering field.
” Dat man crazy. What he doin’ ‘at fo’ when he could be on de bayou fishin?”
And my thought was “Yeah, and he will get himself exhausted and angry and come home in a mood to beat shit out of any of us kids who makes the least wrong move- most likely, me.”
So, there you are, folks. Progress! Excelsior! Meliora!
Like OFM, when I was young, everybody had pigs, chickens, dogs and guns, always including an army standard issue 30-’06, a thing that could knock off those uzi guys before they could grunt up that first unpaved road.
The bad part was the habit of the people to get into deadly quarrels involving pigs, chickens, dogs and guns.
And, too many kids.
When we decided to settle down, my wife, always prudent and farsighted, picked this place because she judged it survivable. After all, the people in it had survived. Our wonderful neighbors had pigs, chickens dogs and guns, and knew what to grow and what not to grow, and no kids. They knew all about surviving.
They were wonderful surrogate grandparents. They lived a long time, and died at home with no fuss.
Your Homo Smart sounds very much like Nietzsche’s Superman. The Slave find solace in the afterlife. Religion is a rebellion against reality. The Master finds reality more desirable but is a nihilist, and has no goals higher than personal enrichment or pleasure. He leaves no legacy.
Superman declares that God is dead, and there is no solace in the afterlife, but still believes there is a meaning to life — creating a better world.
I view that as nonsense. People are people. What changes is the system. For example, Dutch cities are built to make bike riding convenient and driving a pain. So the Dutch use less gas than Americans, whose cities are built to make driving convenient and bike riding dangerous. But the Dutch aren’t any smarter than Americans.
Now American city planners are discovering that car oriented cities are doomed to fail, because they waste a city’s only real asset, land. (The Germans figured this out in ’73. They temporarily banned cars from their city centers because of spiking oil prices, leading to a downtown real estate boom. Now cars are mostly banned permanently.)
So Americans will be forced to start riding bikes. It’s already happening, because the cities and state DOTs have their backs against the wall.
Biking riding is criticized as dorky (especially by Republicans, who laugh at Obama for riding a bike) but soon Americans will begin to rationalize the choice they didn’t make, own it and regard it as quintessentially American. That’s how they got into accepting the current system as well.
So the system changes, the people just follow along.
Good comment, ‘Lamb.
For some reason, I also liked this expression within; ‘Religion is a rebellion against reality.’.
…But, ya, just wait awhile and time changes things, the systems change and we all do our own little minute/quantum/fractal/moral/religious roles in changing them… But if we are going to be the little butterflies, might we also flap our wings ethically with some view toward the kinds of hurricanes/so-called ‘unforeseen’ circumstances we might manage? Or maybe not. Or somewhere in-between. And so it goes…
…until it doesn’t… and so on… ‘u^
I Am The Lamb ~ Coklacoma
Which software did you use? I did some models in the 1990s with IthinkTM. Found I lacked sufficient data to define human behavior in unusual circumstances (such as an oil tanker captain decision when navigating north of 65 degrees latitude).
Not much of a predator pray sims, mostly unstable chemical systems, that exhibited limit cycles , chemical clock like behavior which are similar. Most of the time wrote my one code, using standard diff. eq. solvers
I think the prey and predator model can be run in an IThink model. The multi body dynamics is a hobby? I use a purchased software package, but had to buy a new desk top computer to run that sucker, it was overheating my portable. I don’t know much about unstable chemical systems other than teenagers trying to get drunk on cheap booze.
Hobby/university/profession 🙂
It is very cheap nowadays … A single 8 core machine with some flavor of
Linux will do it… Lots of open source software out there…
@sw mega fauna has become extinct in the distant past many many times. No oil, medicines etc – lots of human suffering and disease indeed. That did not stop their extinction by humans. Lions roamed Ancient Greece. They were gone before any A.D. Years
True but this does not equate to a world with nothing but mice and men if the human population is reduced to pre-industrial levels.
The log-linear deceleration of the population growth rate has halved since the peak in the 1970s, which mirrors the rate of change of acceleration on the other side of the bubble and its subsequent collapse curve, only we humans don’t experience “reality” in terms of relative rates of acceleration and deceleration***. We experience “reality” in linear time space. IOW, population growth is set to peak long before mid-century and probably within the next 5-7 to 10 years.
One occasionally hears in the mass media the word “bubble” in relation to financial assets prices, unreal estate, farmland, etc. However, the human population bubble is the largest in world history and its bursting will affect negatively a much larger share of the population than the inevitable bursting of financial bubbles (which will be devastating to the capacity of the hyper-financialized economy to sustain its level of consumption per capita).
In fact, a post-peak, collapse-like, “anti-bubble” trajectory of population “growth” implies that the rate of change of deceleration of “growth” will accelerate hereafter; that is, the halving of the “growth” rate will go from the most recent ~40 years to 5-6 years, and then 2-3 years (give or take), resulting by the early to mid-2020s in a peak of human ape population and a subsequent decline by no later than sometime in the 2030s.
Note also that the rate-of-change deceleration of world population “growth” mirrors the decline in US oil production per capita since the peak in 1970 (and the secondary peak in 1985 and onset of US deindustrialization and financialization of the economy); that is, growth of population requires growth of the primary energy source of modern, complex, high-tech, high-entropy civilization per capita in order to sustain further growth of population, which is inextricably linked by empirical historical data to the growth of population, its capital deepening, its subsistence and replacement, and the necessary growth of capitalist extraction of surplus labor value in the form of profits in order to sustain GROWTH OF capital accumulation to keep the system and population growing.
The larger inference is that we as a species reached global net energetic/exergetic growth on the basis of western-level of resource consumption and real wages and GDP per capita 40-45 years ago in the US, and now the world is where the US was in net global exergetic terms as in the mid- to late 1970s. Growth of fossil fuel-based industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, socialist social-welfare programs per capita, “globalization” (Anglo-American imperial trade regime), financialization, and feminization of “the economy” is over, coincident with Peak Oil, overshoot, and LTG.
A larger plurality, if not a growing majority, of participants on Ron’s exemplary blog are either keenly aware of this or are coming around to its veracity. However, those among the rentier Anglo-American and European (and also oil emirates, Japanese, Putin, and PLA in Beijing) Power Elite top 0.001% who “know”, and the principals among the Wall St. bankster oligarchs, CEO managerial caste, technocratic Establishment nomenklatura, and Pentagon planners who also “know”, don’t want you or me to “know” because it would irretrievably challenge the metanarrative upon which the top 0.001%, Wall St., et al., maintain their credibility, legitimacy, wealth, and power to rule, make the rules, socialize and condition the mass-social “reality”, and conduct tax, monetary, economic, and foreign policy in their interests at the increasing cost to the bottom 90-99%.
***We humans experience “reality” in linear terms, our population grows exponentially, and Nature checks our profligate, biological imperative to reproduce ourselves at a log-linear limit bound at which we encountered in the 1980s to date.
P.S. Bill Catton (RIP) coined the term “redundancy anxiety”, which was once available in pdf form on the Internet but no longer is (or at least yours truly can no longer find it).
The average 0.001%-re is as dumb as the average Joe. Don’t expect them to “know” shit. They who “know” of course want to retain status quo for the rest of their natural life.
DrTskoul, I know many who console themselves in thinking that the top 0.001-1% don’t “know” human (and other kinds of ) excrement, which allows them to assume that the mighty (those who self-identify with yfel or “up from under”), i.e., “the first shall be last”, will fall with us bottom feeders attempting to survive competing for the detritus of whale excrement. I can assure you that the top 0.001-1% “know” and they have our collective numbers and our foreheads in their sites for extermination.
50-90% of the human ape species’ sell-by date has expired or is due in the not-too-distant future.
Love (surrender the illusion of “self” achieving any-“thing”) those who presume to be worthy of loving you . . . and themselves; it’s all the vast majority of us fearful, angry, vengeful, resentful, greedy (by design) human apes are going to have until we don’t. We’re each worthy of the affection, compassion, and forgiveness we want as bonobo-like human apes; if we behave like it, the “rational” act might make our descent en masse into the stardust oblivion a little less collectively traumatic and painful, and perhaps even no less noble because it was inevitable because of the same desire to exist and affection of our predecessors.
Karma. “What Is.” “No-thing.” “Nature.” “Natural state.” “Golden Rule.” Crucifixion (of the illusory separate “self”). Sacrifice of innocence (“unmoved”, “no-mind”, “no-thing”, and “the Void”). Passover. Pay it forward. “Imagine.” “We” (you and I) deserve “it”.
DrTskoul, I know many who console themselves in thinking that the top 0.001-1% don’t “know” human (and other kinds of ) excrement, which allows them to assume that the mighty (those who self-identify with yfel or “up from under”), i.e., “the first shall be last”, will fall with us bottom feeders attempting to survive competing for the detritus of whale excrement. I can assure you that the top 0.001-1% “know” and they have our collective numbers and our foreheads in their sites for extermination.
I don’t know whether the .001-1% are intentionally creating economic policies and laws to eliminate the 99%, but I think income inequality will do this. As the wealthy need fewer people to keep the world running and don’t feel inclined to support the excess, it is likely that there will be a die-off.
And, from an environmental point of view, it’s probably better to have far fewer people. But it is ironic that people who may not support environmental policies will ultimately help the environment by reducing the number of people the Earth has to support.
Aren’t most of here. At or near the top 1%?
In 2000 using an Excel spread sheet and using energy as a measure, I took all the countries of the world; got their population, petroleum use, natural gas use, and electricity use. I figured the per capita use for each of these energies for each country. I then rank order each of the per capita uses for each energy from the least to the most and then did a population accumulation so that I could ask what did 75 to 80% of the people use.
For petroleum 72% of the people in the world in the year 2000 had access to 4 barrels of oil or LESS each year. The United States that year had access per capita to 25 barrels of oil. The per capita use in many countries is misleading because the wealthy get the bulk of the energy. With electricity, 75% of the world population had access to 5kWh a day. And that again is misleading because the wealthy got the lion’s share.
I have done this multiple times since the 80s and the numbers have remained essentially the same. With scrapping the bottom of the petroleum barrel and the ongoing threat of climate change, the outlook is bleak initially for the poor.
In fact, a post-peak, collapse-like, “anti-bubble” trajectory of population “growth” implies that the rate of change of deceleration of “growth” will accelerate hereafter; that is, the halving of the “growth” rate will go from the most recent ~40 years to 5-6 years, and then 2-3 years (give or take), resulting by the early to mid-2020s in a peak of human ape population and a subsequent decline by no later than sometime in the 2030s.
In all the reading I’ve done on population dynamics, I’ve never seen any stats published that suggest what you are suggesting here.
Did you just make them up?
-Lloyd
Lloyd, no, sir. Few of the UN projections of population include any of the primary causal factors of the LTG World3 BAU scenario that are tracking remarkably closely per capita.
The UN is a political body in the service of perpetual growth prescribed and required by Wall St., global capitalism, resource consumption per capita, and Anglo-American-Zionist empire.
Yes, I realize, it’s incongruous and not the metanarrative we are “educated”, socialized, and conditioned to internalize and actualize. Think about it. Look around. Middle East. Central Asia. North Africa. West Africa. Central and South America. Look at the date for the share of income spent for food AND the FAO data for utilization. The world surpassed the ability to sustain the growth of food supply and utilization, and thus the human ape population, for the next generation in 2004-08.
Why would politicians, imperial ministerial technocrats, and Establishment eCONomists funded by Wall St. and DC tell us this? They have zero incentive.
You talk about a reduction in the rate of growth in your comment of 6:55pm; your response of 8:20pm either implies that the coming lack of resources will somehow cause people to stop having babies now, or you are attributing a coming population decline to reduced resources- a die-off event- which is non-responsive to my comment.
You are suggesting something that goes against Limits to Growth and the Doomers, the various forces of BAU, or anything I have read on population dynamics. This is a big claim. If you’ve got data, show me. I want a reference or a graph, and an explanation of how it leads to your interpretation.
Otherwise, it’s just talk. Actually, less than talk: unsupported HOKUM.
-Lloyd
Lloyd, would you dispute that the 10-year rate of growth of human population has halved since the 1970s?
If not, then apply a log-linear regression to the current population and declining fertility rate and extrapolate the global population in 2020, 2025, 2030, 2035, and 2040.
When you do, you will not be able to escape the inference that population is peaking NOW. Then you will be compelled by scientific curiosity to understand why. At some point in your inquiry, it will become inescapable that Peak Oil, population overshoot since the 1970s-80s, LTG, and net exergetics per capita prefigured the population and net exergetic collapse trajectory of civilization as long as 40-50 years ago, which was not lost on the Power Elite top 0.001-1% WRT the LTG BAU scenario.
Granted, NO ONE will get credit for this realization and acknowledgement; it utterly violates the imperative to f&$k ourselves to mass suicide on a finite planet, including the biological imperative of self-selecting for 0.0000000000000000001% of population to colonize the Moon, Mars, and the Rings of Uranus, and perhaps driving a Tesla S 120 mph on the surface of the Sun-lighted side of the Moon. 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIIkN1vMbmo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnUeovQ68Tw
I’m rather confident that the aliens from the Rings of Uranus on the dark side of the Moon don’t speak Japanese, nor do they speak English nor Jupiterese or Venusian. I’m rather sure, too, that they don’t program in C#, Ruby on Rails, and Python, and they don’t have Facebook and Twitter accounts. Then again, I might be out of touch. 🙂
As always, this is bullshit.
How this works is you show us your data set and assumptions and graphs, and we look at ’em and decide if you’re full of crap.
If you had done the work, your links wouldn’t be to music videos.
Lloyd, you can do the work that I mentioned for yourself, of course.
Caucasian American, Brit, Canadian, Japanese, European, and now Chinese and Singaporan females are not reproducing at replacement, and even the birthrate for Hispanic females in the US has plunged from the level of American Caucasians in the 1950s.
Peace.
Lloyd, you can do the work that I mentioned for yourself, of course.
Are you an idiot?
You make an outlandish claim and refuse to justify it.
Every comment just digs a deeper hole for your lack of respect for the way this blog works.
Either show a graph, a table, a chart, or an equation- or shut the fuck up.
Seems I’ve inadvertently provided you with a big shovel to dig your own hole, Lloyd.
Have you closely examined the LTG’s World3 BAU scenario?
“Limits to Growth” was right.
“Limits to Growth” business as usual (BAU) scenario
Using the World3 computer model, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update presents 10 different scenarios for the future, through the year 2100. In each scenario a few numbers are changed to test different estimates of “real world” parameters, or to incorporate optimistic predictions about the development of technology, or to see what happens if the world chooses different policies, ethics, or goals. Most of the scenarios presented in Limits result in overshoot and collapse—through depletion of resources, food shortages, industrial decline, or some combination of these or other factors.
Under the “business as usual scenario,” world society proceeds in a traditional manner without major deviation from the policies pursued during most of the 20th century. In this scenario, society proceeds as long as possible without major policy change. Population rises to more than seven billion by 2030. But a few decades into the 21st century, growth of the economy stops and reverses abruptly.
As natural resources become harder to obtain, capital is diverted to extracting more of them. This leaves less capital for investment in industrial output. The result is industrial decline, which forces declines in the service and agricultural sectors. About the year 2030, population peaks and begins to decrease as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.
World oil/petroleum/liquids production per capita peaked in 2005.
World energy production per capita (kt of oil equivalent) peaked in 2008-11 to date.
Industrial production AND real final sales/GDP per capita for 70-75% of the world peaked in 2005-08 and the rest of the world peaked in 2010 to date.
World real, trade-weighted US$ trade per capita peaked in 2008-10.
The rate of deceleration of world population growth since the 1970-1990s is ~40-45% faster than the UN’s central scenario projection.
Food production per capita has peaked since 2008, and growth of food utilization per capita is increasingly strained.
Dennis Meadows: Too late for sustainable development.
No, Lloyd, I don’t consider myself an idiot, unless Donella and Dennis Meadows are, which is your prerogative to conclude, of course.
What is idiotic (at least for most of us who must try to adapt) is that the powers that be chose not to heed the LTG work, and the BAU path they chose for us resulted in very close to the conditions the LTG BAU scenario projected, leaving us to face the predictable outcome in the years ahead.
From your original post:
IOW, population growth is set to peak long before mid-century and probably within the next 5-7 to 10 years.
-Snip-
In fact, a post-peak, collapse-like, “anti-bubble” trajectory of population “growth” implies that the rate of change of deceleration of “growth” will accelerate hereafter; that is, the halving of the “growth” rate will go from the most recent ~40 years to 5-6 years, and then 2-3 years (give or take), resulting by the early to mid-2020s in a peak of human ape population and a subsequent decline by no later than sometime in the 2030s. Bold mine. Let’s call these little nuggets Postulate 1 and Postulate 2.
These postulates are what I want you to justify.
Show me the assumptions and data set that lead you to a graph showing a peak in world population in the 2020-26 period, as per Postulate 2. Not in the fertility rate: a plateau or peak in world population.
Account for demographic momentum, please: might need a separate graph to explain how the current fertility rate isn’t really the measured 2.58, and what number it has to be to result in a decline in the world population in the next ten years. My guess is that it would have to be below 2.1, but you’re the expert- it’s your theory. Do you think the current fertility rate is less than 2.1?
Postulate 1, as written, says the exact same thing: a reduction in growth is a decline, and you say it is probable in the next 5 to 10 years. If you meant a decline in the fertility rate to below replacement, well, that’s even dumber, because you would then have the population decline of postulate 2 occurring before or at the same time as the drop in the fertility rate from the current 2.58- an impossibility.
Now, if you’re confused, and can’t tell change in the fertility rate from change in the population, or you forgot about demographic momentum, or your dictation software ate your homework, or you got some o’ them big numbers wrong, that’s OK.
Just own up to it.
Whatever.
Hi Lloyd and BC,
BC may have seen this chart I did a while back, using UN Total Fertility Ratio (TFR) data. If the trend continues then World TFR would be at 1.5 birth per woman by 2040. Note that I do not believe the trend will continue. The UN low fertility scenario has TFR at 1.75 in 2055 and 1.51 in 2100.
Also there is a paper on long term total fertility scenarios at link below.
http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol28/39/28-39.pdf
From page 1153 (fig 1a) chart has caption below:
Figure 1: Global population size from 2000 to 2300 resulting from alternative global fertility levels as indicated (TFR to be reached by 2030-2050 and then kept constant) combined with a maximum life expectancy of (a) 90, (b) 100 and (c) 120 years
Hi Lloyd,
Note that the chart above was done by well known Demographers (Stuart Basten, Wolfgang Lutz & Sergei Scherbov) who are well aware of population momentum. You are correct that first the TFR declines and that population declines after a delay.
The UN low fertility scenario has population peaking in 2050 and the TFR=1.5 in the chart above is consistent with that, it is possible that the TFR will below the UN low fertility scenario, possibly getting as low as 1.25, so somewhere between the yellow and purple lines is possible.
I expect the death rate and infant mortality to bottom soon (or is bottoming) and child deaths to increase because of peak and declining food and food utilization per capita.
Sub-Saharan Africa will be a nightmare.
Thanks Dennis (and sorry BC.)
By the time I realized BC was really confused (as opposed to disagreeing with me) I was already at full boil. I felt guilty after posting; will try to be more civil in the future.
-Lloyd
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/global-population-10-billion-not-so-fast
http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/09/worlds-population-to-peak-earlier-than-expected/
As death and infant and child mortality bottoms and the fertility rate further declines from falling food and food utilization per capita, the rate of change of deceleration of population growth will increase, prompting demographers and the UN to reduce population projections in the next 5-10 years.
One of the articles BC refers to in his comment of Apr. 6, 4:03 pm reports on a study into global population by Deutsche Bank. Here is the salient quote from the Bank’s report:
” In our view, global fertility will fall to the replacement rate in less than fifteen years. Population may keep growing for a few more decades from rising longevity but, reproductively speaking, our species will no longer be expanding. We forecast that world population will peak at around 8.7 bln in 2055 and will then decline to 8bn by 2100. Thus, world population could peak half a century sooner and, by 2100, stand 2.8bn below what the UN currently predicts. Bold mine.
They see the world population rising until 2055, not declining by 2025 as BC forecasts (and for which he still hasn’t produced a scintilla of evidence for.)
The Bank’s projection is lower than the UN’s, but it does not support BC’s case. Their statisticians understand demographic momentum; BC clearly does not.
The other article offers no predictions.
I do wonder why BC insists on posting stuff that makes my case.
I no longer feel guilty about calling him an idiot, however.
(And for the record, it’s academic. I think we will suffer the standard run of Limits to Growth, and that there will be a die off caused by a reduction in life span long before a drop in the fertility rate could cause a population decrease.)
Hi BC and Lloyd,
I think you may be in agreement without realizing it. Clearly you disagree on the details. Both of you seem to argue that fertility will fall and death rates will rise due to resource limits, though there seems to be some disagreement about the speed with which each of these will occur.
BC believes that a rapid rise in mortality rates due to collapse will counteract population momentum, Lloyd is correct that no specific model has been presented to suggest how this might play out mathematically, mostly hand waving.
The basic idea is to imagine a rapid decline in the total fertility ratio (to say 1.25 by 2050 and 1.0 by 2100) or between the yellow and black lines in the Stuart Basten et al chart and then add a rapid increase in mortality rate starting in 2025 or so, which might bring the world to the gray line in the chart or lower due to resource constraints (lack of food, water, energy, and fertile soil.)
I am imagining the Limits to Growth scenarios (I have never looked at these closely).
I like you BC, you make me laugh. I mean this in a good way.
Of course everything you say is true and it’s sort of tragicomic. Let us each choose our exit gracefully.
Thanks. 🙂
The UN, like, say, the IMF or World Bank, are a joke.
.
The UN, like, say, the IMF or World Bank, are a joke. 🙂
Disunited, disintegrating, discombobulating “tribes”? 🙂
And what’s more disconcerting, even depressing, is that these are “the best institutions” we have, including the CFR, CSIS, Chatham House, and their peers, institutions that serve the global top 0.001% more often than not at the expense of the rest of the human ape species (and in my case the sub-species whose ancestors originated from the extraterrestrial bacterial lifeforms from the Rings of Uranus). 😀
Yes it is disconcerting…
Maybe some others are from those Tardigrades (except you of course); not quite extremophiles, but can tolerate extremes for some time. Or, rather, they think they can. Extreme-fantasy extremophiles. So they apply these fantasies to the culture and planet at large, and the extreme shapes they take start to become self-fulfilling prophesies.
I think you are vastly over estimating the Wall Street bankers. Without wishing to seem arrogant many are not as bright as all that, and like anyone else most are focused on their own thing.
My experiences at hinting at this stuff w very bright investors is blank stares
My experience with managers of banks is all concern with meeting goals and their comp
Wake, I fully appreciate that. I would suggest you graduate up to injecting yourself into the professional and social engagements of the operators and the machinations of the top 0.001-1% of the TBTE primary dealer bankster oligarchs and puppet masters fingering the strings and writing the checks for DC.
While you’re at it, check in with Nate Hagens for some instructive insights about those serving the Temple of Mammon on Wall St.
And then when the demands of your (and other readers’) life permit you to step away, give yourself 90 minutes (or perhaps 900 minutes to undo your former “education”) to breathe and ponder an alternative narrative to the version of history vetted and written by “the winners”, such as the following:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/everything-rich-man-trick/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/149591092X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=149591092X&linkCode=as2&tag=ifamericankne-20
http://secure.campaigner.com/Campaigner/Public/t.show?84i4r–44g3p-b38e9r9
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Jews-Espionage/dp/0312156480/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428016392&sr=8-1&keywords=jews+loftus
P.S. Thanks, Ron, for indulging me to present what my lifelong personal and professional experience and academic work persuades, no, convinces me, is the accurate metanarrative of the history of the past 80-130 years, as well as the implications for the outcomes hereafter.
Competitive Exclusion Israeli-Palestine Immigration/Birth Rates http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/population-israelpalestine-projected
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Reports/2001/PopulationTrendsandChallengesintheMiddleEastandNorthAfrica.aspx
Seems to me that instability will affect the region sooner than declining birth rates. Even if women stopped having babies, I would think the problems triggering war would continue.
It’s unfortunate that war as a population reducer is playing out in the Middle East and Northern Africa, but it seems to be doing so.
In 20 years we may see a massive flow of Israeli refugees fleeing towards Europe and North America. I don’t think Israel is sustainable, the whole idea of setting up a colonial entity in the Middle East sure was naive.
I feel like isreal has a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a deal and decamp to Greece
Too many people surrounding them with economies that will implode in the next two decades
Way past time to get outta town
It would be the birth of the grecojudean civilization, with kosher gyros and lamb stew covered in tzatziki sauce.
I agree that there is some risk that the fundis might end up chasing the more progressive, better educated Israelis out. Then Israel would end up as a well financed loony bin, like the gulf Arab countries. Or maybe not so well financed.
The only solution I can see is de escalation.
Netanyahu has different ideas. The ongoing debate led me to write an article about Netanyahu, I tried to be funny rather than biting, but I do see israel in a future train wreck. It’s not sustainable.
I don’t think Israel is sustainable, the whole idea of setting up a colonial entity in the Middle East sure was naive.
That’s what Ramses II said 3,200 years ago.
“The State of Israel” today ain’t the same dudes who likely adopted the monotheistic tribal desert sky god religion of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. 🙂
“Israel” is a Cold War construction by the US and UK to prevent the Soviets from establishing an imperial, militarist garrison-state in the oil-rich Middle East.
The “Jews” of “Israel” are but pawns on the great imperial chessboard of Anglo-American oil empire.
The Anglo-American and European Power Elite could pull the plug on Bibi and his thuggish regime and unsustainable garrison-state overnight, contrary to the popular mythology about “Israel” being the tail that wags the Anglo-American imperial dog. Wall St., not “Israel”, wags and the imperial dog responds.
Oh the fantasy world of the uninformed.
John B., I’m not sure he’s that uninformed. I sense there’s a lot of concern over Bibi’s behavior here in Europe. I was shocked to see a spot on TV about Israeli theocratic practices and how they make life so difficult for women. It sounded very critical of Israel.
Hi Fernando,
I don’t see any women being stoned to death in Israel. I would venture to say that women have it a lot better in Israel, than in the Muslim countries.
With regards to the Power Elite, Wall Street, and Jews in the US, they’re pretty much the same thing.
If things got real messy, Israel has vastly superior weapons (including nuclear weapons), to anything else in the region.
Europe is being taken over by Muslims, so you should expect a strong anti-Israel bias there. E.g. watch the youtube video of a Jew walking through Paris.
Well said, BC.
Your SunWeb blog’s icon with the knitting spider and sunface just drips and oozes with cuteness! ^u^
delurking
Thanks Ron. A most powerful presentation of the ongoing tragedy. I have admired your straight forward, no nonsense approach since The Oil Drum. I share your view of the future but I’m glad Old Farmer Mac has returned to POB. His well reasoned posts have given me some hope that maybe, just maybe, human life on the other side of TEOTWAWKI will be other than “nasty, brutish, and short”.
I have over 20 million people in densely populated areas to the east of me. If things start to go down, it will not be very pretty. They are all mostly in dreamland as far as their daily lives go and the educational system, government and business is not shaking them awake to any potential extreme downsides.
If not enough food is imported into that vast metropolitan area, the first reactions will be childlike tantrums, then obedience to government mandates with an under course of criminal activities and black market operations.
If things go further downhill quickly, it will be chaos. Just the burning towns and cities will be enough to cause “nuclear” winter. Then the crops don’t grow very well or not at all. Then more chaos and burning, less crops and so on. A relatively quick ending to much of the civilization on the planet and not a shot needed to be fired except at their own citizens.
That is the downside of too much infrastructure, too much to burn.
Allan H – I also have around 20 million clueless people living in densely populated areas to the east of me, and it worries me too, for exactly the same reasons.
I, too, see a lot of clueless people in the world.
But what I see is that when they get violent, they tend to turn against others in their own communities or in their own countries. So I am inclined to think that when they start doing damage, they will mostly do damage to their neighbors and ultimately to themselves.
So if we are talking about die-offs, I think the war part of it will be self-inflicted.
Yes, there might be some countries fighting other countries, but that takes a degree of organization. Chaos doesn’t support that.
I feel that most people on the planet are horribly poor at hunting large game. Once the gun powder runs out, isn’t shipped, is unaffordable or gets horded by the few, I suspect even people who qualify as ‘good hunters’ by today’s standards will become poor hunters if they are reduced to using bows. There is lots of elk up in the hills where I live and once the petrol and powder is gone those elk have a better chance than they do now. It’s plausible that some humans might take to protecting those elk as they are a valuable resource to nurture. In some cases the hunter might become the hunted. I feel most city folks are about 3 meals away from total anarchy and they’ll turn on each other fast. A few agent provocateurs might enhance the outcome.
Around here, in the hill country, LOTS of people kill lots of deer with bows. Modern bows are damn good, and can last a long time.
We lease out our hunting rights, the hunters give us exactly the good young tender ones demanded by my picky wife. We get all we need before the gun season starts- from bow hunters.
It is also true that the city people who come down here are often totally pathetically inept, and leave a lot of miserably crippled deer for the coyotes to feast on.
I myself have only taken one bow shot at a deer. My aim was perfect, I hit the exact spot, but the deer had jumped at the twang, and the arrow hit just the tree and went in so far I could not get it out. The skilled bowhunters laughed at my tale of woe, and then told me their tricks.
I then went to a muzzle-loader, which has never missed. Making gunpowder is easy.
The skilled bowhunters laughed at my tale of woe, and then told me their tricks.
Umm, let me guess, a twang slilencer? GRIN
That, and lots of others, eg, get to where, if the deer jumps, it jumps along the arrow trajectory, and/or, aim where any jump won’t be far enough to avoid a fatal hit,
And so on and on.
But why mess around. We have a ton of tech to throw at that deer. How about a proximity fuse exploding a load of buckshot instead of just that simpleminded broadhead?
I bet you could actually build a twang silencer with fancy electronics these days. Yamaha already sells a silent (acoustic) piano. If You turn on the silencer you can only hear it with your headphones. It’s to avoid annoying the neighbors in dense Japanese neighborhoods.
Ron, you said:
Three very important things can be derived from the above graph. One, we are wiping out all the wild species. 10,000 years ago humans were about .1 percent of all the land vertebrate biomass of the planet. In 2000 we were about 97 percent of the land vertebrate biomass. Today it is closer to 97.5 percent. And we continue to wipe them out. The Earth has lost half its wildlife in the last 40 years.
I have a minor quibble with that. Perhaps you meant to say that humans plus their domesticated livestock represent about 97% of total land vertebrate biomass? While in absolute numbers, humans far out number cows for example, in terms of total weight cows alone represent roughly double the biomass of humans. So actually that graph from Paul Chefurka is probably more consistent with the following information:
http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/what-animal-collectively-makes-largest-biomass-earth-0
You sometimes hear very large estimates for the biomass of certain animal groups, like ants or nematodes, but these consist of thousands of different, specialised species. The single species with the largest global biomass is likely to be amazingly prolific in one area, or extremely widespread. Among the most widespread animals are humans. 6.9 billion people averaging 50kg each equals roughly 350 million tonnes. Staggeringly, cow biomass exceeds 650 million tonnes (1.3 billion cattle conservatively weighing 500kg each). The only wild species in the running is Antarctic Krill. A 2009 global estimate gives 379 million tonnes fresh biomass, but unknown aspects of this shrimp’s ecology make it hard to be sure. By comparison, blue whales (with their krill-based diet) comprised about 35 million tonnes pre-whaling, and about half a million tonnes in 2001
In any case it doesn’t change the fact that our biome and ecosystems and therefore most of us are in for a pretty tough ride!
Yes, of course I meant humans and their domesticated animals. I have made that change. 10,000 years ago we had no domesticated animals.
We had dogs, but point well taken.
Anyone paying attention sees the predicament.
Wow Ron…You are quite talented at explaining things in a simple and powerful way.
Been following your posts for years.
I was hoping Thorium and Coal To Liquids might come to the rescue.
But it appears there is no escape….
Maybe we can all eat Cheesy Poofs and Onion Rings for the next couple centuries!!!
When does Peak Beer kick in!! LOL!!
A Boltzmann Brain
Peak beer?!?! now you depress me…..
Said he while drinking his schooner …
Peak Beer
We will only know when it is behind us……….
That’s ok because there will always be ethanol.
The cool thing about ethanol is it can also be used as a disinfectant; a lighting fuel source; a preservative; a solvent, and as a general fuel…
“Hey, sweetie, whatcha makin’?…”
Forget coal to liquids (coal reserves are limited). Coal to liquids can help reduce the crisis in the USA, Colombia, and a few other countries, but there isn’t enough coal.
I am humbled on this site of the great knowledge that can be found here.
The only expertise I can claim is that my sister is a geologist..LOL!!!
CTL, GTL, KerogenTL (KTL??) are all scientifically possible.
The US Navy is creating gasoline from sea water using the excess energy from their nuclear powered ships (for you EROEI guys).
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Navy-Develops-a-Technique-to-Produce-Jet-Fuel-from-Sea-Water.html
When we get desperate enough, the economics of this production will be TRIVIAL in comparison.
A choice between a 200 barrel of oil or a hunter gatherer lifestyle AINT NO CHOICE AT ALL.
There are massive Coal, Natural Gas and Kerogen reserves on this planet.
Ron’s excellent article above shows that this route won’t work either (and I believe in climate change).
Thanks to all on this site for the free (no such thing as a free lunch) learnings. It has meant a lot to me!!
Give me a free nuclear reactor fueled with highly enriched uranium and I´ll give you very cheap electricity you can use to make hydrogen you can feed into a reactor to make synthetic gasoline. It won´t make much, but I really want that reactor.
Point taken Fernando…LOL!!!
I am not a nuclear engineer, but my understanding is there are nuclear designs where you could generate electricity for the grid and at the same time convert a given feedstock (coal, natural gas, kerogen, sea water, etc) into liquid fuels using the excesss energy.
The explanation I read was based on Thorium (LFTR) nuclear technology (I’ve read the arguments about Thorium being a pipe dream, but Oak Ridge built a functioning reactor in the 1960’s).
Obviously, it would be a huge and expensive undertaking, if possible at all.
Thanks!
Brain, burning carbon generates energy. We burn carbon to generate carbon monoxide. But we need energy to generate hydrogen. Mixing hydrogen with carbon monoxide can yield a bunch of things.
This means a breakthrough in fusion power has the potential to allow us to take all sorts of organic crap, heat the hell out of it, burn it to make carbon monoxide and then mix it with hydrogen we generate using electrolysis. We could make a polyester suit factory using grass clippings, rabbit heads, pianos, you name it.
What about cow poo to liquids? LOL!
Thorium isn’t as impossible as Nuclear Fusion. It has been demonstrably proof of concepted (is that a phrase?) by ORNL in the 1960’s. China, India and ORNL are going for it again ( I am too tired to dig up the article…but trust me).
Anyway, I am out of my league in these discussions.
I just want to challenge Group Think.
Thanks!
Father,
Forgive me for I have sinned.
A lot of complaints are about how people are ignorant of energy issues.
Well, I am trying to educate myself so forgive me if I get some details wrong (nuclear fusion with fission…I don’t know).
Mike Huckabee 2016 ( I thought Jesus said you should give your money to the poor Mike?)…
Unlike Mike we should “Do what Jesus Said”..
It’s all a joke.
Forward March!!
– The Comedian (Alan Moore)
My thinking is that there actually is enough coal to enable the ones of us who pull thru the coming collapse – assuming there are some who do pull thru while maintaing an industrial civilization- to continue using fossil coal for quite a while. This is assuming of course that collapse comes before most of the remaining accessible coal is burnt.
A renewables based industrial civilization IS POSSIBLE. Physicists agree on this point. The real question is whether we scale up renewables sufficiently before we run desperately short of fossil fuels. The odds in my estimation are very bad for the world in general but a few of the more powerful, better located, and better endowed countries might pull thru. If they do industrial civilization is safe for some time after.
I can’t see any fundamental reasons other than mismanagement and bad luck that would stop a renewable energy economy from coming into existence- on a limited basis. Of course mismanagement and bad luck are formidably tough obstacles.
Farmer Mac, my great grandma did very well when my uncle built a small hydro power plant on the family property. This allowed the family country store to sell ice and ice cream to the surrounding area. They used the extra cash to send my dad to get an MD, and an aunt to become a nurse.
I saw the way they lived and the tiny hydro plant really changed their lives.
Mac,
Firstly, glad to see you came back to site. I’ve always enjoyed reading your opinions.
SASOL in South Africa is producing ~100k barrels of CTL production today. And it is obviously economic somehow or they wouldn’t be doing it.
I don’t see for the life of me, why when people get desperate enough that others won’t build this technology that Hitler figured out how to build.
No one saw how fast the USA would be able to grow shale production. Yet it happened.
The USA government could print a trillion dollars and provide the capital needed to build CTL/GTL plants for a small and irrelevant inflation penalty.
Do I think this will be easy or smooth?…No.
But I think it will definitely happen as there are no other good options.
This is purely my opinion, but I suspect there is lots of coal at $200 a barrel CTL.
I live in Australia (but am American) and they have a shit load of Coal, Natural Gas and Kerogen (not to mention farmland and other commodities). But unfortunately, they don’t have much military strength.
China, India or Japan might be making a permanent visit here if the USA loses interest in this area.
Also a shitload of sun and wind. Why not? Real easy to do a little bite at a time. No big chunk of capital needed all at once, ideal for thinly spread out population.
Hi all,
Dave Rutledge estimates about 750 Gt of coal (we have already produced about 340 Gt of coal and recent output is about 8 Gt per year.
For simplicity let’s assume peak is at the halfway point (375 Gt) and output remains 8 Gt/y until peak. That would be 4 years (2019) until peak, if output increases it will be sooner.
Link to David Rutledge’s research below:
http://rutledge.caltech.edu/
Steve Mohr also estimated coal URR in a PhD thesis at about 935 Gt see
http://energybulletin.dev.postcarbon.org/node/53509
Steve Mohr Thesis at
http://ogma.newcastle.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:6530
Note that there are 20.7 EJ/Gt of coal.
If we take Mohr’s estimate half way would be 468 Gt and if we assume average production until peak is 9 Gt/year, then the peak is 14 years or 2029. So depending on which estimate we believe coal will peak between 2019 and 2029 or 2024+/-5 years.
Out of my league…
But I thought reserves were relative to a price point? $100 dollar oil brought some unexpected results…..
If the price goes up….how much do we have?
thanks!
Hi Brian,
If the price of coal increases there are two things that happen, supply increases and demand decreases. It is difficult to say in advance how much higher coal prices can rise without other substitutes such as wind, and solar replacing a lot of the coal demand.
Coal to liquids(CTL) is not an inexpensive process so higher coal prices may put CTL out of reach.
The model by Steve Mohr looks at both supply and demand for coal and even his optimistic (high coal URR) case has coal peak at 2030 at the latest.
Link to Steve Mohr article
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-07-20/projection-world-fossil-fuel-production-supply-and-demand-interactions-paper-exce
Link to full thesis (very long paper)
http://ogma.newcastle.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:6530
Hi Dennis,
I have changed my mind recently about how long coal reserves will last – credit due to your links as much as anything. Sometime back I was still of the opinion that we have plenty of coal for another half century or so.
But even if coal peaks within the next twenty years or so there will still be a hell of a lot of coal produced for the next twenty or thirty years – with the price of it necessarily going up as the remaining supply declines. You can bet that some coal owners have the deep pockets and patience to delay production once they are convinced prices will be going up. If the current owners can’t wait other people who can will buy up some coal deposits.
Now I am not a TRUE BELIEVER in the Wonderful Wonderful Market and the Invincible Invisible Hand but given time the market and the hand have and will continue to accomplish some remarkable things – both good and bad.
ONCE it becomes fairly obvious to the green eye shade gartered sleeve sitting on stools guys who keep the books for the really big boys who own just about everything -ONCE this realization comes to pass – then an awesome wave of investment into renewables will come to pass – a tsunami of capital will flow into the renewables industries at every level.
The folks who own and operate Silicon Valley see it already and the biggest and smartest of them are already putting substantial amounts of capital into renewables.
Now whether there will be a successful transition -As much as I wish it will happen I doubt it will happen except in a few places that have the most resources and the best educated people and the most stable and honest governments.
I am afraid most of the world is not going to make it. There are plenty of good reasons for believing that even the most fortunate countries and societies might not manage a successful transition.
Even the places that do – if any succeed -are going to have to adopt low energy lifestyles for the foreseeable future. But a low energy life can still be a very satisfactory life style if the individual and his society make the right choices.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
Your perspective seems quite realistic to me.
Transition to a lower energy lifestyle powered by alternatives may be possible, but it will not be easy and in many places may not be possible.
Lower population will help, if we get to 1 billion by 2200 we may have a shot, population will decrease by some means, hopefully it will be due to a demographic transition rather than war, famine, and other disasters.
No doubt it will be a combination of factors that reduces human population, as Wimbi has suggested, the problem is complex and hard to predict.
Hi Brian,
The coal to liquids(CTL) in South Africa exists because of the trade embargo to end apartheid in South Africa. The plant only exists because oil was not available during the embargo.
There is some CTL being built in China, but the total CTL output is relatively small as coal prices rise it will not be competitive.
CTL/GTL are marginally economic only if the feed ( coal, gas ) is free (nationalized).
It doesnt have to be free. I have run conceptual cases. The optimum is to have a low construction cost, cheap natural gas and cheap coal. Venezuela could offer all the right conditions but it’s a basket case.
DETAILED predictions of what might come to pass are apt to make a fool of the prognosticator but I won’t be here in twenty years so no problem for me.
So given that I am stuck in the house with nursing duties with nothing to do I can fire a few speculative broadsides for the fun of it. Electronic powder is cheap enough to use it freely.
Liquid ice fuels do not have to be cheap or affordable in the sense they are today in order for society to survive peak oil and eventually peak gas and peak coal.
They do have to be AVAILABLE and CHEAP ENOUGH to use them to maintain and food production and distribution and any other essential transportation that cannot be managed by other means.
Lots and lots of things are not cheap anymore compared to former times- water for instance is very expensive in a lot of places but the people in those places give up some income they would otherwise spend on other things to pay their water bills.
I just installed a new well and septic system on some property I own. The well will last indefinitely and the septic system will probably last in excess of a hundred years. Maintenance is a trivial expense except for replacing a pump every ten years.A new pump now is about six hundred bucks. I install them myself using a couple of farm hands to do the heavy work.
Water is FREE via gravity from springs on some of our property .
Ten years ago I could have gotten that new well and septic system for five thousand dollars.
Ten thousand is the new local norm and I had to pay it or do without on that particular tract of land.
I know people in town who are paying close to a hundred bucks a month for water and sewer service..and the monthly bill goes up a little just about every year.
If we have to- and we will have to – we can manage with a rather minor fraction of the liquid fuel we use these days.
If we quit buying throwaway junk – and we will because we will have no choice – that alone will result in a fifty percent or greater reduction in the use of truck transportation. If we quit buying potato chips instead of potatoes that will result in an eighty percent plus reduction in the use of liquid fuels associated with eating potatoes.
When gasoline is both rationed and prohibitively expensive – and it will be both eventually – then people will make one trip to the grocery store for every three or four trips they make now in the family grocery fetcher , and they will carpool. Or maybe the supermarket will run a delivery van on a regular schedule within a few miles of the store.
That could cut the liquid fuel cost of delivering food by eighty percent or more in a flash..
Ten dollar gasoline NOW would be a death sentence but twenty or thirty years from now, assuming OLD MAN BUSINESS AS USUAL is still staggering along ten dollar or even twenty dollar gasoline in constant money will be the norm and young people will buy a little now and then without paying much attention to the price.
We will be able to afford coal to liquids to the extent we MUST have liquid fuel because we will have NO CHOICE but to adapt to and pay for coal to liquids.
But by then long distance trucking will be no more than a story told by old guys to kids. Very very few cars will be running on gasoline and the number of cars per capita will have fallen off dramatically unless the hoped for battery revolution comes to pass. The cars of the future will be driven less and for shorter distances per trip and electrics will rule.
But I expect bulldozers and large farm tractors and combines will still be running on diesel.
Of course there may be affordable natural gas storage good enough to use it on small cars and farm and construction machinery but gas will be in short supply just like oil.
I have no idea how long the coal to liquid industry might last but coal depletes too and it will be in pretty short supply in the last half of this century.
If Old Man BAU lasts people will find that they can afford the pv and insulation and triple glazed windows and pv they need to go net zero on their house and car-if they have one- because they can’t afford NOT TO.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
When I suggest coal to liquids will be too expensive, I mean that there will be enough liquid petroleum available at a lower price to satisfy demand, this is a guess on my part.
I expect petroleum liquids to become very expensive, but coal to liquids to be even more expensive and not able to compete with petroleum. I could also be wrong, but if coal peaks as well as oil by 2025, then coal to liquids may never be competitive.
Prices of all fossil fuels will rise by 2030 to the point that wind, solar, nuclear, and efficiency will substitute for much of the fossil fuel use. It will mostly be used for farming and maybe some mining and occasional backup for critical electrical (hospitals and communications) when wind, solar, hydro, batteries, and fuel cells cannot meet the electrical demand.
The transition will be disruptive and difficult and perhaps impossible, but with great difficulty we will find a way.
Changing the subject from peak doomerism to peak oil.
The author of this site made a very brave prediction that the year of peak oil would be Sept 2014 to Sept 2015. Well we are now half way through that time period. If the monthly distribution were to be on a normal curve we should begin to see declines from now on. Yes we seem to be seeing that in US shale oil production.
But will the decline in the US be enough to counter the rise from Iraq. (And possibly Iran.) We live in interesting times. see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-02/iraq-s-four-mile-line-of-supertankers-fuels-shipping-rates-surge
p.s my own belief is that peak oil will occur dramatically after a sudden collapse of the current global financial system. But the probable cause of such a collapse is the reality that peak oil has already arrived.
Hence I am not willing to guess when that might occur. And despite being a doomer I do believe there will be a next financial system.
Ready?
Iranian oil production can’t increase that fast. The world loses a % of production capacity per year (I don’t want to debate the actual %, let’s just say it’s a real figure). I’m not sure if it’s going to be peak oil or not. The answer depends on price expectations and the ability to resume development activities. Those two are huge unknowns.
Exactly, and as we debate % this % that, rate of this and rate of that as though it matters if peak whatever occurs in 2005 or 2015 or 2025 the planet continues to be degraded at, do I dare say it, exponential rates.
Too much talk of “we” and getting “our” act together. Sort of silly.
The only we is the folks holding the best guns on the folks who don’t have the best guns. Then “we” manufacture cause to mow them down, record the legitimacy of that cause in all history books and do quite well for a very much longer time, supplementing any scarcity difficulties with slave labor.
It’s not really that big a deal.
Unless you fail to fund victory.
I’m with Watcher on this one. When the grid goes out all those with solar on their roofs will be like beacons of light for the dispossessed. I’m afraid the remainder of the starving hordes together with remnants of the Uzi wielding street gangs will roll over all the transition towns & sustainable communities in a matter of days if not hours. But if you exchange the word “guns” for the best weapon of a particular era then it’s all just a bit of history repeating.
When the grid goes out the guys with an old gas well making 100,000 cubic feet per day will need a small army to defend it. If I were into the survivalist game I would buy me a plot of land with several stripper gas wells in the mountains and start digging bunkers to defend them.
What are you going to do with the gas in a forted up economic situation?
Would you have any real hope of selling or exchanging it for food or raw materials or lumber ?
You might use a good bit as engine fuel to run a sawmill or fair sized electrical plant and thus have a local small scale grid that would make you a pretty big man locally.
I personally have no doubt that a renewable energy economy will come to pass unless things get too bad too fast everywhere and prevent it from happening. It will be a much smaller economy, in terms of both per capita consumption and the number of people it supports but there is no question that such an economy is technically possible.
If the average middle class American were to decide his long term future depends on having a super efficient house he could drive a cheap subcompact for the next couple of decades and put what he spends on cars into upgrading his house and have a good shot at having a net zero home or something pretty close.
What we can afford depends to an enormous extent on what we MUST afford. A typical economist or renewables naysayer will tell you that solar power is unaffordable but it isn’t , really ….. if you want to afford it. You just give up whatever else you would have spent the money on. More solar panels, more insulation, better windows, a battery electric car .. money spent on these things is money still circulating in the economy. The money would still be providing jobs for people working on your house or the materials needed to build your new energy efficient house or upgrade your present house.
It is true that you personally would be consuming LESS for some extended period of time but OVERALL consumption would not change that much.
A person who takes this path today would probably have the opportunity to consume a LOT more than otherwise ten or twenty years down the road when energy is much much expensive.Energy will get to be more expensive as long as the business as usual economy lasts and when it collapses it will be PROHIBITIVELY expensive rather than cheap for a good long while , perhaps forever , in most places.
A few drums of diesel will be priceless. A RUNNING Nissan Leaf will be priceless- if it comes with a few solar panels. Solar panels and serviceable batteries will be priceless. Only a fool could possibly believe otherwise.
A saddle horse that can be retrained to pull a plow will be priceless but the owner will have to bring it inside every night to keep somebody from stealing it and eating it.
But just maybe a few places will have governments strong enough to maintain basic services via draconian rationing. The grid might stay up and every body or almost everybody might get a basic food ration. We could manage that in the USA on a half the oil we use now. Probably even less than half. We could all eat ok on half the farm output we have now by dropping way back on the beef and pork. ETC ETC.
Riots and unemployment might be bigger problems than keeping the country fed and sheltered.
What we can afford depends to an enormous extent on what we MUST afford. A typical economist or renewables naysayer will tell you that solar power is unaffordable but it isn’t , really ….. if you want to afford it. You just give up whatever else you would have spent the money on. More solar panels, more insulation, better windows, a battery electric car .. money spent on these things is money still circulating in the economy.
That’s what I think.
So you live in a smaller place. You don’t have cable TV anymore. Your family owns one car, if that.
If it comes to survival, then maybe you get rid of all the non-essentials so you can afford the essentials.
Some of us in this forum have pointed out multiple times that there is a lot of waste in the typical middle class lifestyle. There’s so much we could cut without significantly diminishing our quality of life.
I am delighted to see you folks making remarks like that. The snowball is rolling!
I add a bit more optimism. I preface it by saying that I am super lucky in many ways, and the stuff I mention here had absolutely no outside resistance, and first cost was not a barrier.
I know this is unusual and the huge majority of humanity lives on a LOT less.
Anyhow, by choice and certainly not any necessity, I went all solar a couple of years ago and have felt NO pain in the doing and the result. Quite the contrary.
First, I put in an “excess” of PV (9kW)on the cheap, merely by picking up bargains as they came by (used panels, etc) and doing most of the work myself as my hobby.
I then went all electric in my house- everything except the wood stove, which wife likes to look at and I like to warm my rear end. Our very hard working son-in-law next door is a forester and likes to cut wood.
All Electric
Space heat/cooling -Mitsubishi mini-split (house very insulated)
water heat pump (boosts solar, stove water heat)
Induction cook stoves (wife loves them)
PV water pumps pumping roofs drains to high storage tank
Leaf EV (gave good honda to granddaughter, can whistle back as needed) (I don’t drive, wife drives her numerous friends all over and brags up PV-EV)
We are grid connected, but even with all of above, we still pump back to them about 5 times as much as we take from them over the year.
Only two gloomy months last year did we get any electric bill, totaling $ 10. I am working on a wood-to-electricity backup widget to put that down below zero. (sure, could just put the wood gas thru a honda genset, but that would be too easy)
And, comparing with my similarly situated BAU neighbor, all of above, and especially operating cost, cost a lot less than he spends for less good result- and a big gob of ff’s.
And is a lot more fun. All highly recommended.
Now, the inevitable question. What happens when life gets tough and the tough get going down the road to get my goodies?
Simple, before all that starts, I make sure they see me as worth a lot more to them alive and doing what I do, than dead, and worth nothing to anybody.
All good points, OFM.
I consider myself a little too old to break new ground, but if I was healthy, young and not attached my current locale, I would strongly consider relocating to a place I considered stable and survivable. I will make such a suggestion shortly, but first I will acknowledge that civil unrest, chaos, warloads, or a totalitarian government could make all such plans irrelevant. With that in mind, do your best to find decent neighbors and a decent neighborhood. You define decent for yourself.
OK- drum roll…the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Fertile, watered, and moderate of climate. Have at it.
I’m afraid the remainder of the starving hordes together with remnants of the Uzi wielding street gangs will roll over all the transition towns & sustainable communities in a matter of days if not hours.
There are people in the world starving now. And they are the ones getting shot by guns, not the rich.
Look at what is happening in this country. The middle class is slowly losing what they had. Are they rising up against the rich who are passing laws to encourage income inequality? No. They are being encouraged to blame the poor, various minorities, etc.
Stop and think about it. While there are these vision that the poor will overthrow the rich, in most cases it is the rich using the poor to go fight the rich’s enemies.
In fact, telling you that the poor with guns will take what you have is a way for the rich to control you and the poor. If they convince you that the poor are after you, then that’s whom you might shoot if you have a gun.
That’s how wars start. Someone with some control tells you that someone is after you and you had better go shoot them. You’ll probably do that rather than shooting the people with control.
You guys missed the point.
The funding of guns would be at the national level.
When the pie is getting smaller, and you need or want a bigger slice, you take it from someone else. What you don’t do, what no one ever does, is accept en masse that everyone will have a smaller slice. That’s just insane.
And as for finding a way not to need to have the good stuff, the winner can forbid that. If some measure your slave is taking could eliminate your leverage over him that keeps him your slave, you forbid that measure.
So as Europe becomes more dependent on Russia, Russia will (and SHOULD) impose non monetary prices on oil and gas. “You want oil? Send us your tanks. No, I didn’t say build us new ones. I said send us your tanks. Good. Well done. Now send us your fighter aircraft.”
No more Marshall Plan silliness. This is playing for keeps. You defeat the enemy and you keep him defeated.
The funding of guns would be at the national level.
But that’s what the big Second Amendment fights have been about. I’m not sympathetic to the NRA, but you’re making their case. They fear their guns will be taken away, and you’re saying that’s exactly what will happen.
I think the idea that gun owners are going to have to defend themselves against the US government is unwarranted, but you’re saying that it is.
Europe won’t send tanks over. The best solution would be to offer to join the Russian Federation and overwhelm them with the sheer numbers of europeans.
Every once in a while the commoners take out the elite.
French Revolution.
Russia when the commies took over.
Of course a new elite always emerges.
Every once in a while the commoners take out the elite.
It happens infrequently enough that I think visions of poor taking over the rich in a collapse is not as likely as the rich engineering a way to reduce the numbers of the poor.
Marcus wrote:
“I’m with Watcher on this one. When the grid goes out all those with solar on their roofs will be like beacons of light for the dispossessed.”
Odds favor a Nuclear war. The first devices will be high altitude detonations that render all PV systems inert in about 5 nanoseconds.
Fern Wrote
“When the grid goes out the guys with an old gas well making 100,000 cubic feet per day will need a small army to defend it.”
Wooded land would be much better. The wood can be harvested for firewood an will has building material. A homestead built in the woods is less likely a target than a gas well. Ideally one does not want to make themselves a target. That said, The nuclear genie trumps survival plans.
Marcus wrote:
“I’m with Watcher on this one. When the grid goes out all those with solar on their roofs will be like beacons of light for the dispossessed.”
Odds favor a Nuclear war. The first devices will be high altitude detonations that render all PV systems inert in about 5 nanoseconds.
You’re not suggesting that someone would intentionally take out PVs, are you? That wouldn’t make sense if there is a war over resources. While PVs might give their owners a competitive advantage, those attacking the owners would be better served by taking over the PVs rather than destroying them. Seems like they would want to kill the people, not destroy their assets.
Real easy to turn wood into electricity. Wood is solar once removed.
PV is nice, I love mine, but not at all necessary. Wood would be as good. Some ways, better.
And don’t forget mirrors and good ol’ heat engines.
Now, all this talk about nuclear and boomdoom. What does this say about nuclear power as a no-ff energy option re solar/wind.
“I’m with Watcher on this one. When the grid goes out all those with solar on their roofs will be like beacons of light for the dispossessed.”
Really? Methinks you guys have been spending waaay too much time in movie theaters watching apocalyptic flicks !
BTW Solar Impulse 2 is in China right now and will soon be preparing for a 5 day non stop solar powered flight to Hawaii. It was interesting to listen in on the conversations between their mission control and students in various engineering schools in India who are very interested in solar solutions. BTW solar energy works really well in the third world where people don’t know that they NEED electricity 24/7. Something tells me the people living in these huts are not all going to attack their neighbors because they have a few lights on at night and can charge their smartphones to browse the internet…
Something tells me the people living in these huts are not all going to attack their neighbors because they have a few lights on at night and can charge their smartphones to browse the internet…
Yes, PVs are a resource. It would be foolish to destroy them because you’re mad that your oil has run out.
Victory is not a concept consistent with the vanquished being comfortable.
And why on earth you think that stuff continues to work with no spare parts shipments makes no sense.
And why on earth you think that stuff continues to work with no spare parts shipments makes no sense.
Why would that be a problem any time soon? We’re not out of energy and if consumption goes way down and is rationed for critical and strategic uses, why couldn’t we channel what we have left into spare parts production?
Lots of people, in lots of places, in lots of times, have gone with no spare parts from outside for decades at a time.
The tear ’em out of dead ones, or make what they need from whatever happens to be at hand.
Gawd. Talk about effete! Where did you grow up?
They’re surrounded by all manner of fresh, ripe and succulent fruit on the trees, and someone appears from a trip overseas bearing a container full of the same kinds of fruit, only they are dry, unripe, genetically modified, pesticide-laden, wax-covered, and relatively tasteless…
So they take the container of fruit, go into their manufactured homes and, with their solar panels, watch tv shows of stories, as told, gathered around campfires, of tribes they once knew…
There are campfire pits just outside, but they are empty…
FM: thanks for that picture.
Every time I see it a warm, hopeful feeling and a smile brighten my day.
Most welcome sir!
Billions of birds flying in the sky. Geese and ducks are going to continue to fly after the ‘collapse’. Thousands upon thousands of geese flying north these days. You’ll be able to bag a couple if you have any luck. Wait until they land, fire a couple of high-powered rifle shots into the gaggle and you’ll have your geese for supper. I doubt very much that the birds will be wiped out, the populations are too high.
The Tragedy of the Commons: Oil.
One night about 1:00 AM, I saw the biggest raccoon I’d ever seen crossing the street in the middle of the small city where I live. The next morning was trash collection day, so the raccoon make frequent visits to neighborhoods to dine on leftovers. You’ll be able to hunt them to eat, but good luck, they’re tough critters. A coyote has his hands full against a raccoon.
One day, a moose was running up my street. Deer often group in small numbers, three, four, just up the street from my house, right in the middle of my town. Deer migrate to populated areas for protection. Too many predators out in the wild, they seek safety where humans live.
I see coyote now and then, but they’re wily, so you only hear them at night. I saw one a couple of years ago, hollered at the wild thing and he was gone in a flash. Plenty of wildlife out there. Wolves, cougars, coyote hunt down deer, cattle and sheep. Ranchers shoot coyote at anytime of the year, no license required. A mama cow, if it gets a hold of a coyote trying to hunt and kill her calf for dinner, will grind that coyote into the dirt, nothing left of the coyote, gone. That’s the way it goes moving west.
Peak Coal was around in 1789, humans have managed since then. Now it’s Peak Oil, not too difficult to see why it is.
Never underestimate the will, ability, capability to survive.
USGS says in 1975….14.5 TRILLION TONS of coal world wide
USofA…1975…. 840 BILLION TONS of coal
I think theres a wee bit of coal around mabey for a few hundred years.
I think theres a wee bit of coal around mabey for a few hundred years.
Whell, mahbey, mahbey naught! >;-)
http://old.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645
Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy
…Well, in the energy crisis about thirty years ago, we saw ads such as this (shows slide). This is from the American Electric Power Company. It’s a bit reassuring, sort of saying, now, don’t worry too much, because “we’re sitting on half of the world’s known supply of coal, enough for over 500 years.” Well, where did that “500 year” figure come from? It may have had its origin in this report to the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate, because in that report we find this sentence: “At current levels of output and recovery, these American coal reserves can be expected to last more than 500 years.”
There is one of the most dangerous statements in the literature. It’s dangerous because it’s true. It isn’t the truth that makes it dangerous, the danger lies in the fact that people take the sentence apart: they just say coal will last 500 years. They forget the caveat with which the sentence started. Now, what were those opening words? “At current levels.” What does that mean? That means if—and only if—we maintain zero growth of coal production.
So let’s look at a few numbers. We go to the Annual Energy Review, published by the Department of Energy. They give this (pointing) as the coal demonstrated reserve base in the United States. It has a footnote that says “about half the demonstrated reserve base… is estimated to be recoverable.” You cannot recover —get out of the ground and use—100% of the coal that’s there. So this number then, is ½ of this number (pointing). We’ll come back to those in just a moment. The report also tells us that in 1971, we were mining coal at this rate, twenty years later at this rate (pointing). Put those numbers together, the average growth rate of coal production in that twenty years: 2.86% per year. And so we have to ask, well, how long would a resource last if you have steady growth in the rate of consumption until the last bit of it is used?
I’ll show you the equation here for the expiration time. I’ll tell you it takes first year college calculus to derive that equation, so it can’t be very difficult. You know, I have a feeling there must be dozens of people in this country who’ve had first year college calculus, but let me suggest, I think that equation is probably the best-kept scientific secret of the century!
Dunno, but mahbey ah few of dem ‘SMART’ apes dat doo survive dee dieoff will understand dee exponential function becuz t’will bee nahsussary fer dee survival of dee fittests!
Now wouldn’t that be poetic justice if Darwinian evolution produces a new truly rational and mathematically savvy species of the Homo genus? Homo mathematicus might one day be able to look back on primitive Homo sapiens just as today we look back at our cousins, Homo neanderthalensis…
Unfortunately if historians are correct the author of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and the father of calculus seems to have died a virgin…BIG GRIN!
BTW, This was Newton’s personal coat of arms, maybe he knew even more than we give him credit for. I think it doesn’t bode well for the future of Homo mathematicus …
Na your wrong 14 trillion tons of coal in 1975
im sure its over 20 trillion tons now..BIG GRIN..just like oil they find more every year.
Theres a few that control the market place..sometimes greed gets in thier way ,even among them selves.
Flood the markets [like now with oil] some want to play thier OWN game . So they have to be stepped on like wars or threats of lesser evils .
Mathemations are there for the using of the idle RICH you just dont know it …MAYBE ?
Hi billd,
Coal reserves tend to be overestimated. The number from 1975 is too high by a factor of 10 to 15 and is possibly a resource number.
Reserves are what is recovered, resources are what is estimated to be in the ground. The coal that is 1000 meters below the surface will never be recovered. Recent estimates are about 1.1 trillion tons of coal reserves, and that is still probably too high by a factor of 2.
“Reserves are what is recovered” No Dennis, you of all people should be exacting with definitions. Reserves are not “what is recovered”.
Since we’re talking about coal, reserves refer to coal that is legally and economically and technically feasible to extract and resources refer to coal that is potentially valuable and for which reasonable expectation exist for eventual economic extraction.
No, I take that back Dennis, your explanation is fine (well sort of). I’m just being an ass, insisting on French having properly installed accents (diacritical marks), etc. I think my problem is having a wife always accusing me of sloppy/non-existent logic plus, eons ago, being programmed to get definitions right: My apologies.
Hi Doug,
No apology necessary, the definitions I gave were indeed sloppy and I am happy to be corrected when I am sloppy (or incorrect).
I think your definitions were much better.
I was mostly trying to get across the idea that reserves are a subset of resources. We expect that most of the reserves will be extracted at current prices and with current technology, lets call these R1, there will be some of the resource that is more expensive to extract, let’s call this R2. The total resource is R1+R2, I am guessing that this might be 2 or 3 trillion tons of coal, only some of this coal will be produced, currently Rutledge estimates about 750 Gt (including 347 Gt of cumulative production) and Steve Mohr estimates about 940 Gt for a coal URR.
My guess is 850 Gt with a peak in 2023.
Coal needs diesel to be mined and hauled. Coal is only good for smelting and generating electricity. CTL (Coal to Liquids) cannot be scaled up to replace declining Oil and Gas Resources.
When transportation fuels (Diesel & Gasoline) production collapses so will coal mining, and food production. The rising costs of transportion fuels will cause the economy to spiral down. As the economy collapses so will the demand for electricity and smelting. There will be a feedback loop caused by demand destruction causing production of all energy resources to collapse.
Already in the US Coal production is already in decline:
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/energy_in_brief/role_coal_us.cfm
Partly because of the Climate change policy but also because production costs are rising as the Easy coal is becoming depleted. The US is consuming less Coal as Industrial production (Steel smelting/recycling) is declining as operations move to China and India. Coal demand for electricity is falling (perhaps collapsing begining in 2016-2018) as new regulation are forcing the closure of over 100 GW of coal fired plants).
Never heard of steam engines?
NAOM
A coon won’t last two seconds against TWO coyotes. One coyote would not bother to try a big one.
Give us coyotes a little credit here.
Can coyotes climb trees?
God to Noah, Cosby version…
“How long can you tread water?”
Rats can swim 1/2 mile in open sea and tread water for 3 days.
http://www.terrierman.com/aboutrats.htm
Da Rat, down by the docks of The City
Glad to hear it. Us coyotes need our livestock sturdy enough to live off tough circumstances. If they didn’t, we might have to go back to work.
“Never underestimate the will, ability, capability to survive.” You forgot the essence of this essay; and to destroy everything in our path doing it.
Peak coal was not a global effect. 1789 the weapons were minuscule compared to what we have today. And in speaking of weapons, not just those that can destroy humans and all around in war; but also the technologies that this evolving “smart” human uses to destroy the oceans, the soil, the air and the water lifeforms inhabiting.
I doubt very much that the birds will be wiped out, the populations are too high.
Yeah, they thought the same about the Carolina Parakeet and the Carrier Pigeon… see any of them around recently?
Cheers!
Plenty of parakeets at the pet store, they’re everywhere, no worries there. lol
Well, I didn’t see any Carrier Pigeons, otherwise, they would be dinner!
They’ll be back home soon, after delivering the message.
I think you meant the Passenger Pigeon.
I do have pigeons living in an old building on my farm, and, unbeknownst to them, they will be dinner sooner than later. The pheasant I leave alone, would hate to see them be eaten and not be there anymore. Just have to go to the nests, find a few chicks, place them in a cage, voila, squab for supper.
Gettin’ time to do the slashing and burning, planting time is after that.
The future of small farm systems is here, no engine, no fuel, saves hours and hours of labor.
Paper Pot Transplanter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWd8gBJgEMY
Well, I didn’t see any Carrier Pigeons, otherwise, they would be dinner!
They’ll be back home soon, after delivering the message.
I think you meant the Passenger Pigeon.
LOL! Don’t kill the messenger!
Devastation and overshoot has indeed been going on for humans, now it is global.
One of the early Church Fathers, Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 – 240), commented on the effects of human enterprise on the earth: “Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times . . . Everywhere there are people, communities – everywhere there is human life!” To such a point that “the world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press . . . Pestilence, famine, wars, [earthquakes] are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race.” (Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathederal, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y. p. 6.)
Tertullian’s Blessing from Garrett Hardin’s “The Ostrich Factor”.
Everything that kills me makes me feel alive
‘I fly like a falcon!’ says Hanna, shuttling at high speed back towards the carcass. Indeed, falcons – as well as wolves, wild boar, moose and some species not seen in these environs for decades – are thriving in the forests and villages around Chernobyl. One particular falcon, however, has not fared so well. A large grey and white specimen, it is strung up, dead, chest puffed and wings outspread against the slate sky, above Hanna’s chicken coop as a warning to its brethren. ‘He came and ate my chicken, so I beat him with a stick,’ she says.
Babushkas of Chernobyl
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Looks like the upcoming generations will need that attitude as things wind down/unravel/fray. The ‘priest’ reminds me a touch of the late Michael Ruppert.
Just this past week, I emailed a friend in Mexico City about how I love small towns in part because I can see many more stars more clearly. (Hey, where’s a good place to live in Mexico?)
BTW, the Orion constellation (that I recently taught myself about in a small town here– imagine, I had been looking all my life with wonder at these 3 stars in a row without knowing that they were Orion’s belt) contains Betelgeuse which is a red supergiant that may be about to supernova. It may already have, we just have yet to catch its light, which is pinkish to the naked eye.
Ron has basically laid out what is going to happen to the world and most or maybe just about all the people in it and he is in the ten ring – bullseye dead on- in terms of understanding the basic sciences involved.
Where the doomer camp falls short in my estimation is failing to take into account the realities of geography, technology , and political organization at all levels.
The shit is going to hit the fan in a very big way in the not so far distant future. Just when is hard to say. We have already passed the tipping point in terms of being on the downhill side but the hill probably has a relatively flat top – a plateau if you will- and it may be thirty years before our population starts declining. My guess is no longer than thirty years and I would not be surprised if population decline starts sooner.
There are already many places -entire countries – that are dependent on imported food and fuel which must be either paid for by means of exporting raw materials or finished goods – or obtained by means of charity. The people living in such places are basically headed to hell in a hand basket but so far only a very few of them understand the situation and are trying to get away while it is still possible. Those who try to get out later are going to be met at national borders of countries in better circumstances by troops with orders to shoot as many as attempt to cross. A few countries such as the USA and Canada and maybe some western European countries may allow some immigration but the numbers admitted in comparison to the numbers in extremity will be trivial.
Don’t get caught in Egypt!
We don’t know how far or how fast the ongoing destruction of the environment will proceed because we just don’t know how long our one time gifts of non renewable resources will last or how long it will take for our population to crash.
Personally I don’t think co2 levels will ever get to be as nearly high as projected due to peak oil being a current reality for all practical purposes and peak coal coming within thirty years at the most. There are plenty of reasons to think the world wide economy will crash and burn sooner and thus result in a lot of coal and oil being left unburnt – at least within the next few decades.
In terms of the future of humanity I am of the opinion that peak fossil fuels are much more of a short to medium term threat to our survival than global warming – which may actually be considerably less of a problem than climate alarmists believe it will- for the two basic reasons that fossil fuels are depleting fast and that business as usual on a world wide basis is a dead man walking. This is not to say that climate change is anything to laugh at; if we survive getting shot at and hit in the fossil fuels crisis headed our way then we still have to deal with the climate monster. I am saying only that the climate monster may turn out to be as bad as expected.
It is altogether possible and maybe even likely that collapse will be universal in time and place but I have not seen any evidence that collapse WILL BE universal in time and place planet wide.
Resources and power both military and economic are very unequally distributed planet wide. Some of the richest countries are not only rich in economic and military terms ; they are also rich in terms of natural resources even yet. Some countries are extremely well situated in terms of being able to defend themselves. The two luckiest countries in the world in this respect are probably the USA and Canada.
Some other countries are rich economically but not well off in terms of their remaining endowment of resources and poorly situated in terms of geography. France is such a country – she has little in the way of coal, hardly anything at all in the way of oil, and not a whole lot of any other mineral resources. She is not too well situated in terms of defending herself , geographically speaking. So while France has a shot at surviving economic and ecological collapse it is not so good as American or Canadian chances. A country such as Egypt is basically badly burnt toast.
When the shit hits the fan the countries that have enough power and resources are going to hoard those resources and countries dependent on importing food in exchange for throw away junk or luxury goods are going to be in very very deep do do. Nobody is going to exchange a shipload of grain for a shipload of cheap clothing or other consumer goods.A few shiploads of luxury automobiles may still be delivered to the US from Germany but not very many – rich yankees will have to content themselves with domestically built cars. The calculus of politics guarantees it.
I will have more to say about this later but things are hectic and gotta run.
What you say oldfarmermac would be true if, and only if, USA and Canada were not intent on shooting themselves in the foot with unlimited immigration from the world, mostly, but not exclusively, from Latin America and Asia.
There is not a single place on this planet that accepts as much net migration as USA/Canada. For now it’s alright as we have a lot of space and resources, but eventually it will be a problem (already this has started with unemployment and discontent rising as population continues to increase).
Politically speaking, though, we are hopeless, thoroughly committed to deficits and war/welfare spending, and it will probably take a minicrash of some sort in North America for a genuine policy of “splendid isolation” and fiscal responsibility to emerge.
@OFM
At peak oil conditions, where oil is too expensive to produce, people will chop every single tree down. Where is CO2 going to be sequestered if we deforest the last remaining forests?
If collapse is slow and drawn out then deforestation will continue to be a grave problem. If it comes on pretty fast , regionally, as I expect it is most likely to do, deforestation will be more of a local issue. You can”t eat trees and getting rid of them to farm the land they occupy is a slow tough job. Collapse is in my estimation going to manifest itself mostly by way of disease, starvation, and war.
The people who live in economically backward countries are not able to project power and the ones that live in economically advanced countries would not be able to harvest and transport and burn very many trees ( relative to the size of the overall forest cover of the world ) in a fast collapse situation.
At any rate it is hard to imagine trees being burnt on the scale that oil coal and natural gas are burnt these days, especially in a collapsing economy. I might be wrong but I don’t think co2 is going to get to be much more of a problem because of deforestation in a fast collapse.
A long drawn out slow collapse would indeed result in the loss of a substantial part of all the forests. But there are a lot of trees in places remote from human population centers and getting them from where they are to where the people are is probably not going to be feasible. My guess is that coal will continue to be the answer in places where coal can be delivered. I don’t think we are going to run out of coal anytime soon.IF coal cannot be delivered – then neither can wood.
The political calculus is changing fast in terms of immigration both legal and illegal. In case you failed to notice the republicans mopped the floor with the democrats last congressional elections. Even committed liberal democrats will change their tune about immigration once they start feeling the pinch themselves. Forgive me for being a right wing redneck in some respects but the democrats are basically sheltered from the effects of having too many people – especially too many POOR people – FOR NOW – in comparison to the working poor.
For example – the biggest two single particular non ethnic blocks of people who are democrats are probably government employees and members of the better ( more effective and powerful) labor unions. Neither group suffers any competition for jobs from typical immigrants whereas the sort of people I live with do. When a couple of dozen immigrants show up at a hiring session at a local non union employer looking for unskilled labor they put a lot of downward pressure on wages and the long time locals understand this very well indeed when a person from someplace else gets the job they hoped for.
It’s a Darwinian world folks.
Well off conservative businessmen are as individuals very very happy to get all the cheap labor they can but even such business men are gradually coming to understand that what works for them as individuals is a disaster for them as a group. Low wages across the board means they are without customers in addition to having to pay to support the welfare safety net and the legal judicial police industry.
Some of my well to do liberal acquaintances are quite happy to hire undocumented immigrants to cut their grass and clean their houses. And while they understand that they pay more taxes as a result to support poor people they still do it because they are saving as individuals whereas their own actions do not change their own tax bills. Abusing the commons is almost always a good strategy for the individuals who do it.
When the local owners of the furniture industry which was a major employer here moved production overseas they got rid of a hundred thousand employees but kept three hundred million customers – temporarily. Now the industry belongs to the people in the places where furniture is manufactured and they are left with sales organizations.
When fifty thousand businesses moved every thing possible overseas to get the cheap labor that left enough formerly decently paid people with few choices except welfare or burger flipping. This is a modern day version of the tragedy of the commons in terms of industry and jobs.
I might be wrong but I believe the political sun is about to set on immigration on a world wide basis except maybe for a few countries already looking at depopulation such as maybe Italy in a few more years.
Republicans got fewer votes by a significant margin in the congressional last election. Gerrymandering got them a majority, not the “will of the people”, whatever that means. They got the fix in by blindsiding the Democrats by spending on state elections.
True on the total numbers but the trend is in favor of people who are in favor of less immigration not only here in the US but all over Europe too so far as I can tell.
I know a lot of democrats who are dead set against allowing any more people into the country and their numbers are increasing.
Even the semiliterate local black guys (VERY decent people but unlucky in the lottery of life ) I employ as part time farm hands have come to understand that a dozen more immigrants mean a dozen less jobs for them locally as well as lower wages. They vote a straight democratic ticket if they vote but they have no use for immigrants.
Of course the PC crowd generally tars me as a racist redneck when I point these things out but then that same crowd also generally insists that more people means a better life for everybody – saying more people means more economic growth , higher wages etc.
A lot of them are also environmentally minded and literate when it comes to such things as limits to growth. But being PC they are adamant about maintaining their blind spots when it comes to population pressures and jobs for the worst disadvantaged people among us.
Some things are dirt fucking simple. The reason restaurants pay miserable wages is that they don’t have to pay anymore. For every opening there is generally a dozen potential applicants. With fewer unskilled people coming into the country the unskilled people here already would be a substantially smaller part of the employment pool and the market would work to guarantee their getting paid much better.
Ditto shipping our industry overseas. The elite both left and right have been mostly insulated from the problems created for the working class when they lose their jobs.
If it weren’t for globalization and immigration our underclass would probably be only a quarter or a tenth of it’s current size.
The Democrats know a few things about gerrymandering themselves and kept control of a lot of states and localities for a long time using the gerrymander. When they lost those states and localities the republicans started doing the same thing.
Turnabout may not be ethical but it is the way the world works.
So far as I am concerned a pox on both parties although the democrats are much to be preferred on environmental matters and the republicans USED to be preferable on matters relating to keeping spending under control. Not anymore of course. Nowadays republicans believe in running up debts that can never be repaid to about the same extent as the democrats.
It’s not racism. Wide open illegal immigration is allowed because republicans like cheap labor and democrats like uneducated people who tend to be leftist. I’m an immigrant and I think usa policy is stupid. Europeans are worse, they got hordes of Arabs and africans coming in and seem unable to do much about it. The left here is very much in favor of open immigration. I guess they see it as a means to destroy society.
That’s interesting. In the UK studies have shown people with higher intelligence are more likely to vote for left-wing parties like the Greens.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609001238
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608001049
Interestingly studies have generally found conservatism is negatively correlated with education level.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609000051
In my country most of the stupid people vote right-wing. This is because they can be tricked into voting for policies to their own detriment by simple arguments and basic propaganda. For example, you could tell them things like ‘communists want to take over the country and therefore the rich should have tax cuts’ and they would eat it up and vote against their interests.
They are also more likely to lack understand of science and the world, therefore believing in superstition.
So David P,
What do your best educated citizens think about open borders and taking extra people into their countries at rates high enough to ensure population growth – and high enough in many cases to create some extraordinarily tough – perhaps even insoluble – social problems?
I have read recently that there are immigrant enclaves in French cities now where the cops will not go except to make an organized show of force.
I remain personally convinced that the average college professor is perfectly insulated from the economic competition generated by immigrants. Ditto the typical professional person or so called public servant aka government employee.
When you never have to worry about an immigrant taking your job or renting the last cheap housing available in your neighborhood it is MUCH easier to have a more tolerant attitude.
It is quite true that well educated people tend to vote more more often for leftish oriented parties in European countries and there is good good evidence that this is also true but to a lesser extent here in the USA.
Well educated conservatives here tend to vote anti environment in most cases in my personal opinion not because they are ill educated or superstitious but rather because environmentalism is associated in their mind with the left liberal social culture and they have less than no use for that culture. They see it as a threat to their way of life.
To some extent I see it as a threat to MY own way of life. I personally could hardly care less about Adam and Steve but I happen to think that people who do have a right to live in a community of like minded individuals. People need to be able to sort themselves out into like minded communities as I see things.
If I want to marry another man it seems to be ok with most folks these days. Why should it not be ok if I were to want to marry three women – assuming no coercion of course?
I happen to respect people who believe that a fetus is a still a human being even though he or she has not yet emerged from the first home. This could have something to do with the fact that I have a sister who specializes in the care of preemie babies – some of her patients are younger than some that are routinely legally murdered -in the opinion of SOME people.
I actually have met somebody who met a woman who survived a saline abortion herself.
Now just about every body will take this as an antiabortion rant. But I do not oppose abortion. I think a woman should have the right to an abortion without a hassle if she so chooses. I am able to rationalize her decision well enough to sleep ok myself. After all tens of millions of kids are born to starve or die very young of miserable diseases and horrible living conditions year after year.
I am trying to throw some light on how and why people line up and choose their friends and allies politically.
It is extremely unfortunate that environmental issues have come to be associated with leftish leaning culture in this country .
This makes it almost impossible to talk rationally about these issues with a lot of people. I know coal miners for instance who are absolutely convinced the so called war on coal is a commie/ democratic plot to put them in the poor house.
Some of my neighbors who still farm are convinced that clean water regulations are going to put THEM out of business and leave them bankrupt.
I am going to lose twenty percent of my best bottomland myself to clean water regulations that are on the books for future implementation but being technically literate I do understand the need for such regulations. I will be stuck paying taxes on it and unable to sell it and it will be utterly useless to me except maybe if I decide to go rabbit hunting.
There is a good bit of truth in your comment. I am adding mine to throw some more light coming from a different direction on this general issue.
Hi OFM,
I think most of the educated left-wing people in my country subscribe to the ‘multiculturalism is good’ line as well as harbour a techno-cornucopian view of the world.
The fact that immigration eats into the finite resource pie doesn’t even register with most of them as they think the pie can infinitely expand. How they come to this conclusion despite being reasonably intelligent is another matter… My thoughts are that this is just an unquestioned assume which is created through the culture meme of ‘infinite progress’ etc.
I would call myself somewhat of an intellectual (like most people posting here probably are) but I’m not stupid enough to see the flaws with immigration or the fact the when times get tough people tend to congregate with ‘similar’ apes.
I think most of the educated left-wing people in my country subscribe to the ‘multiculturalism is good’ line as well as harbour a techno-cornucopian view of the world.
The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley want access to the best minds in the world. Telling them that they can’t have them because of immigration laws doesn’t wash.
And if you think about it, why do we allow capital and trade to move across borders, but not labor? Seems like if people are not free to go where there are the most opportunities, then economic freedom is hampered.
My grandparents were immigrants, and I know immigrants who have more to offer the US than people who are born here, so I am reluctant to close the doors.
Now I realize there are problems with mass immigrations, but perhaps the solution is to find better ways to fix the global economy than to keep people out of different countries.
Still, for those of you who question the wisdom of letting anyone into your country who wants to come, I appreciate your concerns.
I suppose if there are no immigration laws anywhere, then people would go to areas with the most opportunities. Then if they overwhelmed those places, the quality of life would go down, people would leave, and some other place would become more popular. We’d have a world of transient workers, going from place to place in search of work.
Peak oil really is not the problem.
Firstly there are electric vehicles which can be powered by wind power.
Secondly oil can be made from coal and there is lots of it still.
http://www.fluor.com/south-africa/projects/projectinfopage.aspx?prjid=156
Thirdly gas can be liquified for trucks and there is lots of gas globally.
http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/features/feature-the-worlds-biggest-natural-gas-reserves/
Oil and gas can be transported quite cheaply, considering the energy they hold.
The greatest threat is peak water. It has happened in several countries already. It is very expensive to transport and so excess water on one continent cannot rescue drought situations in another.
If Saudi Arabia cannot desalinate enough for agriculture than there are real problems for countries with fa less oil and gas.
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20120710129483
As the aquifers go dry the land becomes almost useless and since 1 kilo of grain takes a tonne of water to grow, transporting that water over hundreds of miles is out of the question.
Unlike oil, water cannot be made out of anything else and is already forcing people to leave their farms.
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jul/06/food-supply-threat-water-wells-dry-up
“The greatest threat is peak water.” Why not use all that extra solar energy for desalination? No problem. On the other hand, perhaps you’ve missed the point entirely: Which is — too many people, resources being depleted, earths ecology being destroyed.
In the middle of India there is nothing to desalinate. I was going to say why not think before you type a sarcastic reply. However you probably would need a few years.
In the middle of India or Northern China there is nothing to desalinate.
Try to think things through.
Interestingly, the Chinese are building a vast system to transport water northwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project
Hahahahaha … Good old boy you made me laugh. Peak oil happens when economy cannot afford to extract any more. Why do you think coal to liquids will be cheaper at that point??
Look Ma! No climate change just a little rain, that’s weather in the Chilean desert…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHunQP7ozoo
and if you lived in China in 1642 what would you have said?
http://www.livescience.com/23913-flood-facts.html
Fact is far larger floods have happened in the past.
Fact is, there’s a new documentary out called,
Merchants of Doubt
“IT’S NOT THE SCIENCE THAT’S AFFECTING US. I MEAN THE SCIENCE IS PRETTY CLEAR. IT’S SOMETHING ELSE THAT’S CAUSING THIS REJECTION…THE REASON WE NEED THE SCIENCE TO BE WRONG IS THAT OTHERWISE WE SEE THAT WE NEED TO CHANGE. THAT’S REALLY A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW.”
– CONGRESSMAN BOB INGLIS (R, SOUTH CAROLINA)
Where did you get that quote? From the film?
From your link you need to scroll down quite a ways…
and if you lived in China in 1642 what would you have said?
Probably something like this:
气候变化
Qìhòu biànhuà
You amuse me… Of course larger floods happened before!!! Nobody said otherwise… Enough straw men plz…
Very interesting post and discussion I think, as I prepare to head out to the rural parts of my island to visit my late father’s homestead, a week after the anniversary of his passing. My parents brought me up with a respect for the environment and and understanding of natural cycles that I believe is way above that 99% of my fellow citizens (I guess that makes me a one percent’er of sorts). Plans are well advanced for the addition of another 1000 gallons of storage to the current 5,000 gallons of the house’s rainwater harvesting system and most of the equipment for a 3kW (~15kWh per day in my location) solar PV system has been acquired.
Fact is, like Ron has so clearly outlined, I am just one individual trying to establish a sustainable existence in an increasingly unsustainable system. I envisage, some time in the future, having to turn of my lights at night, even though I might have electricity when the grid is out, in order to avoid becoming a “shining beacon on the hill” since the house is on the top of a hill and is clearly visible from the local town square! I have already opened my big mouth too much and had a request for some of my water from someone who hadn’t got any water from the unreliable municipal supply for an extended period. I have been trying to explain to other people in the town how insane it is NOT to harvest rainwater, under the circumstances of the extremely unreliable municipal supply there, by telling them about our system. Might not be such a good idea!
As I see it and have said before, we are entering a period of a race between a Peak Oil related collapse and the “Clean Disruption” fairy tale I have allude to here before. Unlike the more ardent doomers here, I believe there is a remote chance the Clean Disruption will avert total collapse of life as we know it but, unlike folks like Nick G and John B, I do not think the winner of race is a foregone conclusion.
My life’s goal as I would like to state it, is to convince as many people as I can, to do as I am doing, harvest rainwater, install solar PV, think about getting an EV as soon as suitable models become available/affordable, grow our own food as much as is possible etc. I certainly don’t want to be the only guy in town with water or electricity or an EV or food! Will there be a die-off somewhere at some point? Based on what I see around me, particularly in the “low income” areas of the city I spend most of my time in, I just don’t see how most of these folks are going to survive but, I am doing my darnedest to try and avoid being one of those doing the dying! I was raised as a pacifist so, I hope it never comes to the point where I have to enlist violent means to survive but, I think if it comes to that, survival instincts will trump whatever I was raised to be.
Alan from the islands
Around here, lots of people are doing what you and I do. I wonder how come what I see all around me is not at all reflected in the usual doomerish comments here. Am I in some sort of unique place? I very seriously doubt it.
These people say- So we see trouble ahead. let’s do something about it. Here and Now.
These people have low incomes BY CHOICE, and they get along well by cooperating with each other.
The really poor people around here, and there are quite a few, are mostly that way because, thanks to state policy, they have essentially no education at all, and often, alas, are mentally incompetent, a hard thing to fix.
A zebra stallion that has a harem of mares will know if the offspring of the zebra mare is the stallion or not, if the foal is from another zebra stallion, the foal will be killed by the dominant stallion. Living is dangerous business.
As long as hockey survives, the world will be well. No greater game in the world, hockey trumps them all.
The world owes a big ‘thank you’ to Canadians and Canada for inventing the world’s greatest game. Then America hijacked the game and developed the league even in Tampa and Los Angeles. Frank Zamboni made it all better.
Canada is one of the world’s treasures. Where else can you go and experience wilderness, ain’t nobody out there, it’s pure frontier.
Let’s hear it for the Canadian Shield.
Also, if you aren’t using youtube as your primary source of television, you’re not up to speed.
Forget netflix and amazon, youtube is tv at its very best.
Sorry for the interruption.
“Canada is one of the world’s treasures. Where else can you go and experience wilderness, ain’t nobody out there, it’s pure frontier.”
Russia.
True dat… Especially all the way to the east
The fishing industry is collapsing now. Fish depletion is a worldwide problem.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-of-fish
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/predatory-fish-have-declined-by-two-thirds-in-the-20th-century/
We’ll have to grow fish in ponds.
Yeah, so three quarters of the surface of the earth is covered with oceans in which the fish stocks are depleted and your solution is to raise fish in ponds on the dry surface of the earth, why that’s just pure genius! Sounds to me like all we need are a few simple engineering solutions… Hey I know, maybe we could raise the fry in tanks orbiting the earth then we could seed the clouds with them and just let the little fishies rain down!
Or in big nets out at sea, the way the salmon fisheries already do. Do an image search of “salmon aquaculture” and you’ll see what I mean.
The problem with wild fish is not that we eat too many of them. The problem is that nobody owns them, so they are overfished. Overfishing is not a symptom of eating too much fish. It is a symptom of bad management. Well managed stocks produce more fish.
I guess the solution to the problem (if one ever comes) will be total control of fish stocks and total surveillance of every fishing boat on the planet. In other words, Big Data. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, as the following link shows.
http://shipfinder.co/
Yes, I have been following Open Blue ocean farming of cobia for quite a few years now, I get their news updates via email on a regular basis.
http://www.openblue.com/
I am aware of other farms for other fish species as well. Unfortunately how they get the fishmeal they feed the cobia, is still an unsustainable practice in the long run but I believe they are working hard to make it more sustainable.
I have no doubt we are going to be farming much more of the open ocean in the near future. Makes ocean acidification by CO2 an even greater concern. It will also be interesting to see if they start using more sail transport as peak oil starts to hit marine transportation.
Best hopes for a much wiser civilization in the future.
What about algae or whatever likes to grow in sewage as food for the edible things that that like that sort of thing.
I recall the chinese fish ponds. I used to order fish that came out of such ponds. Good.
Personally I tend to read a great many of Fernando’s post as sarcasm.
We can put lots of fish in a pond and feed them trash (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but it seems to work). I have an acquaintance who owns a shrimp farm, he has some sort of deal to grab fish guts to feed the shrimp. And he takes the shrimp feces and uses them to fertilize something else. He’s got a biologist showing him how to do a nearly full cycle system.
Here, read this http://www.eattilapia.com/operations/tilapia-farming/
Fernando, if I tried to sell you a free energy machine you’d probably tell me to take a hike and justly so. You understand the laws of physics and are familiar with the colloquial expression “There is no free lunch!”
Well guess what, in biological systems those same rules also apply.
“There is no free lunch!“Of course you can raise Tilapia in ponds. My relatives do it on their farm in Brazil. Most of them are also biologists and agronomists and they understand ecosystem thermodynamics. They are very aware of recycling all their waste. However you are not going to be able to scale those ponds to feed everyone on the planet for the same reason that perpetual motion machines can’t be harnessed to do real work.
Humans are currently demanding 1.5 earths worth of biocapacity we are all living on borrowed time. I can’t tell you when but I’m pretty sure we will see a crash of our agricultural system in the not too distant future.
Well guess what, in biological systems those same rules also apply.
“There is no free lunch!“
Not that I would want the human population to increase, but how many people could we feed if everyone ate as low on the food chain as possible, and what they eat doesn’t require land or oceans.
Let’s say we had massive tanks growing algae. The input would be sunlight, carbon dioxide, some sort of growing medium, and whatever nutrients the algae would need (a combination of mined minerals and waste recycling).
If we feed people basically algae and whatever mineral supplements required to augment the algae diet, how many people do you think we could support?
In other words, how many people do you suppose we could support on Earth if we had as pure a closed system as possible: algae to people to recycling people back to algae?
If we feed people basically algae and whatever mineral supplements required to augment the algae diet, how many people do you think we could support?
I realize you are proposing this only as a thought experiment.
I’m not a nutritionist but I highly doubt we could survive on a diet of only algae plus mineral supplements. I think we might start with a look at Dietary Reference Intakes: The Essential Guide to Nutrient Requirements, to at least get a better understanding as to what our requirements actually are. It gets quite complex.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/Essential_Guide/DRIEssentialGuideNutReq.pdf
I suppose it would be possible to calculate how many people we could theoretically support on the face of the planet eating a lot lower on the food chain than most of us do now while still maintaining adequate nutritional requirements.
While it sounds like an interesting research project and perhaps someone has already done it, I think I would be a bit out of my league to try to come up with any numbers on the fly.
Having said that even if it were possible to support more humans on the planet by doing something like that I can’t think of many good reasons for wanting to do so.
Having lived/worked in China for about seven years I’ve not met one person there who didn’t spend a good portion of his/her day thinking about their next few meals: the more exotic the better and ideally containing something on a forbidden and endangered species list like South China Tiger, Bluefin Tuna, Green Turtle, etc., etc., etc.
Let’s see tonight the Lotus Garden has wonderful combination of eider duck, raw red jellyfish, Mongolian pheasant, king cobra coils, spring sparrow, raw dolphin, yellow dog, plus electric eel all combined with ram testacies, shark fin soup and those perfect fresh Spring noodles but If we go to Dynasty Dumpling House we can get two kinds of algae plus three mineral supplements.
If we go to Dynasty Dumpling House we can get two kinds of algae plus three mineral supplements.
Yeah, but they deliver >;-)
We’ll have to grow some people in orbiting fish ponds.
Fishmen?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI
I think I saw Fernando.
Here’s a classic… We might be considering them more often as things wind down.
First off i just want to say great blog I really enjoy reading it and it shows that a lot of work goes into these articles, but I think that you guys when talking about future sustainability after the collapse, seem to be forgetting about nuclear waste and 400+ power plants that will start melting down when the power goes out, and when that happens shit is out of control, the radioactive isotopes will get everywhere on earth overtime. And no living creature can really survive that in the long-term as far as I know. So all this sustainability stuff is not going to save any of us, there won’t be any pockets of sane people if we’re all dying from cancer and our kids are born deformed and that’s besides all the other poisons we’ve dumped into nature that alone would make it very hard for animals and humans to survive.
Why would nuclear plants melt down?
Murphy’s Law?
Smooth rich dark chocolate surrounding a creamy nougat center?
Same reason a perfect airliner in perfect weather would slam into a mountain.
That was a crazy dude that did that…
Yep, human behavior is complex and unpredictable. Now remind me which species is responsible for managing nuclear power plants and warheads again?
The average Joe moron I guess
Because of disruptions to the electricity supply/blackouts caused by riots,civil wars, wars, lack of coal/gas/uranium supplies since there will be a shortage of oil that is needed to transport them to their locations.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-energy-primer/
Can a reactor melt down once the nuclear reaction is stopped?
Even after the control rods have done their job and arrested the fission reaction the fuel rods retain a great deal of heat. What is more, the uranium atoms that have already split in two produce radioactive by-products that themselves give off a great deal of heat. So the reactor core continues to produce heat in the absence of fissioning.
If the rest of the reactor is operating normally, pumps will continue to circulate coolant (usually water) to carry away the reactor core’s heat. In Japan the March 11 earthquake and tsunami caused blackouts that cut off the externally sourced AC power for the reactors’ cooling system. According to published reports, backup diesel generators at the power plant failed shortly thereafter, leaving the reactors uncooled and in serious danger of overheating.
Without a steady coolant supply, a hot reactor core will continuously boil off the water surrounding it until the fuel is no longer immersed. If fuel rods remain uncovered, they may begin to melt, and hot, radioactive fuel can pool at the bottom of the vessel containing the reactor. In a worst-case meltdown scenario the puddle of hot fuel could melt through the steel containment vessel and through subsequent barriers meant to contain the nuclear material, exposing massive quantities of radioactivity to the outside world.
+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool
In many countries, the fuel assemblies, after being in the reactor for 3 to 6 years, are stored underwater for 10 to 20 years before being sent for reprocessing or dry cask storage.
Which also needs constant cooling which is provided by electricity.
Hey at least the Fins have a 100,000 year plan to store nuclear waste…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgtUxGCWIfg
I’ve seen the very good documentary film, ‘Into Eternity‘, about this.
I don´t buy it. I can see a nuclear reactor in Congo having a meltdown. But I don´t see 400 reactors ALL melting down. Like I wrote above, it´s just a matter of perception of how things break down.
Scenario 1:
1. Nuclear war: First Salvo of Nukes are high alt. detentions that generate EMP, which will kill the grid and the majority of electronics. The Guys running the plants will unlikely to be able maintain them without a functional grid. EMP damage from high Alt nuke blasts can take out an entire continent’s power grid. An EMP attack on the US that disables the grid nationwide will disable all 104 operating reactors, plus the spent fuels pools at any shutdown or storage facilities.
2. Nuclear detentions over targets will certainly disable any reactor in its blast radius. When the Plant melts down and the spent fuel pools catch fire it will render near by regions uninhabitable. Plant operations will evacuate/abandon these other plants creating a slow chain reaction that spreads.
Scenario 2:
1. Solar flare triggers long term blackouts. Nuke Plants cooling system are disabled globally. or the infrastructure required to maintain them is knocked out for weeks to months. All Plants in the same hemisphere will be disable at the same time all will meltdown around the same time. A powerful solar flare can take out the distribution transforms, and these transforms take months to repair or replace. With out the Grid, No fuel at gas stations. All electronic systems are disabled (no electric money ATM, wire tranfers). Roads and highways will be clogged with disable vehicles, People will riot as food shelves go bare. It will be unsafe for plant workers to go to work, cannot (no fuel, blocked roads, etc).
Scenario 3:
1. Long term economic collapse. Nations will keep plants running as long possible and they will not take measures to decommission or safely handle spent fuel. Pressure will be made to ignore safety rules to keep plants operating at all costs. Eventually something serious fails.
2. Once a reactor fails there will be insufficient resources to address the issue. The entire region around the plant will need to be evacuated. The chaos of the event will lead to mass civil disobedience, affecting adjacent regions also with Nuke Power plants. As more an more regions are exposed the more chaos and panic occurs leading to an all out civilization collapse, first on the continental level and eventually worldwide.
Scenario 4:
Major natural disaster in a heavy industrialized nation. Earthquake, tsunami (Hawaiian big crack, Canary Island landslide), large meteor strike, super volcano/ or very large volcano, etc. Multiple plants are destroyed along with the infrastructure. Chain reaction of adjacent reactor failures because of lack of infrastructure or reactors are inside the lethal contaminated zone of the previous destroyed reactors.
Law of unconsidered consequences. The biggest failure of humanity is to fully understand how complex systems fails. To assume that it cannot and will not happen is how civilization has managed to paint itself into a corner. 40 to 50 years ago, everyone involved in the Nuclear power industry expected that the US would implement long term storage for spent fuel. Here we are in 2015 with no solution. That said, yes we could start moving spent fuel into dry casks and moving it into long term storage. We could also decomm. and replace aging reactors, but nothing will be done because there is no capital and resources to do this. No one will do anything until disaster strikes, but it will be too late. 2015 is the year of Peak fossil fuels. Its all downhill and resource and capital will only become further constrained.
Good summary! Now, do same for solar and wind. Keeping in mind that solar is NOT just PV.
Hi Wimbi,
Techguy is assuming the grid is destroyed and cannot be repaired. A pretty unlikely scenario in my view.
So if there was no grid, Wind would not help much. Solar PV would be useful especially with battery backup.
I do not know if the solar flare scenario affects PV, it certainly would have little effect on passive solar.
Ron,
Thank you for this…it was quite a read!
-I believe this should be on the header part of the site, in line with “Energy and Human Evolution”, “Of Fossil Fuels and Human Destiny” and “The Grand Illusion”!
You made my “rebirth themed” Easter celebration complicated…The ham and wine will not taste quite the same.
-Of all other forums dueling on the peak energy and climate/environment change/destruction meme (among other themes), yours stands out as one of the few that (due to writings akin to this one) logically, reasonably and scientifically ties the predicament we are in with human nature and the whole philosophy of human developmental history – both in terms of beings (i.e.: biochemically and physically interacting cellular organisations) and behavior (i.e.: abstract thinking; conscious and intentional action/reaction; etc).
That is why, even if we knew exactly the date and minute of peak oil/energy way, way in advance – we would be in the same position we are today. That is exactly what the “glass half full” EV and PV crowd is missing, their ideas being very good ones not withstanding. Human nature never changes:
“…We will kill them all.
It would eventually have happened even if not one lump of coal, one drop of oil or one whiff of natural gas had ever been discovered… but it would have taken a few thousand years longer…”.
As my dear “friend” Machiavelli said:
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.”
You,contrary to the prevailing thinking that collapse shall make growth impossible and somehow restore the natural order of things, correctly predict that collapse shall accelerate the process of extinction/degradation.
However, I must digress with you on how this shall happen.
See, I believe that when everything else fails, the rulers take us to war. Historically, it was always done this way. No exceptions.
This time however, unlike the 5th – 11th century AD following Roman Empire collapse, we have nucelarWeapons and I think the other species shall be extinct as the result of other than ” we humans eating them”.
This time even the most resilient of all creatures shall have it very tough…..
Interesting times to say the least…
Thanks again for the fascinating read!
Be well,
Petro
Which seems to stand to reason that it may attract paid government trolls and drive-by’s, etc..
Yes my Pet, be well, even though we both know that may become a progressively tall order as things unravel and the vast large-scale wastes and inefficiencies of large-scale centralized crony-capitalist plutarchy governmonsters flail around struggling to survive on the diminishing meats of the earth, humans and animals.
Good one, Ron. I’ll keep this short and sweet.
I have mentioned before we live in a pretty nice spot on Vancouver Island. We are overrun with elk, which will probably not survive a big downturn. We are also blessed with huge salmon runs, despite the collapse of world fisheries. They don’t get them all, I guess. Anyway, I have just ordered in a fishing kayak. If there is scant fuel for my fishing boat, I can always supply our fish needs with the kayak. There are always a few cod and clams to get. We will survive here long after the village folks move on. (300 population 6 km away). Yes, three hundred. The nearest small city is 75 km away and Vancouver is 250 km and a ferry ride away. There won’t be hordes and roaming people packs, here. Besides, all of us have mucho guns and do our own reloading, etc.
What I wanted to write about are rabbits. I used to raise rabbits for years. We treated them very well and they returned this care by providing us with scads of very good meat. They are easy to raise and folks can raise them in a small yard. Their favourite food was willow bark. They are eating and breeding machines. Their manure is so mild it can go right on the vegetable garden.
As for living in a densely populated area….would you want to compete with folks like these?
https://www.google.ca/search?q=walmart+people&biw=1067&bih=469&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=KjcgVcfVGtTjoASHw4DIBw&sqi=2&ved=0CC0QsAQ&dpr=1.5
I wouldn’t. If I lived in mall America I would freaking get out of Dodge, now.
And where is OFM these days? Is he okay? I hope so.
regards…
Hi Paulo,
Old farmer mac is fine.
I think he’s been busy with other stuff.
He still posts occasionally.
Those people at the Walmart sure are winners!
And so, remember this?
“With these lower gasoline prices, it will be like a gazillion dollar tax cut and hugely stimulative to economies everywhere!!!”
Anyone seen the latest economic reports? We’re what, 6 months into sub $65 oil and cheap gasoline and what happened to the projected economic boom? Globally. US NFP Friday was essentially hideous. Goldman is projecting sub 1% for Q1 GDP growth. Amid cheap gasoline.
That NFP report btw smacked the dollar. No oil trading so we don’t have a price yet. Probably tomorrow about this time.
Hi watcher,
World GDP is fine.
Really? How does it compare to Q1 last year?
And btw not IMF projections. Country by country data. That’s delta btw, country by country, who has exploded upwards in Q1 2015 vs Q1 2014’s delta via cheap gasoline?
Eurozone doing quite fine. Rest of the world not so much.
Yes, until Grexit.
Which is exactly why it will never happen.
Hi Kam,
If the Euro unravels it will cause some short term pain, but would probably be better for the European economies in the long run.
It is not a good thing for nations not to have control over their own fiscal and monetary policy.
Hi Watcher,
Q1 data is not out yet, I don’t really worry about quarter to quarter to quarter data but Q4 2014 was up 3.1% over Q4 2013.
Lower gas prices are not the only thing that affects the economy, ceteris paribus, lower petroleum prices will tend to increase economic growth for the World economy. The ceteris paribus assumption is never correct.
Is your argument that very high oil prices would lead to more rapid economic growth? If so, I believe you are incorrect.
Nobody said growth would explode, I indicated economic growth would be somewhat higher with lower petroleum prices. Over time I will be proven correct by the data.
EDIT
I found the following article
http://blogs.ft.com/gavyndavies/2015/04/05/global-growth-report-card-world-slowdown-causes-concern/
At the end of the article they estimate QoQ growth for Q12015 at 3.6%, a slight uptick from Q4 2014 (3.5%). As soon as growth returns to 4%, oil prices will rise and growth will slow down (after a couple of quarters lag).
Move along, these aren’t the droids your looking for…
Watcher,
Global cheap money low interest rates are no longer driving economies forward. Economic collapse will happen before the effects of peak oil really start to set in not because of peak oil. Then because of peak oil economic recovery will never take place. Total global debt to GDP is around 300%. It’s never been anywhere close to this at any other time in history. The previous global debt to GDP peak was around 217% during WWII era. Globally we have added over $30 trillion in new debt since 2008. Most of which was really unproductive debt and can never be repaid. We are experiencing the beginning of the unwinding of all that unproductive debt now as it shows in global economic data.
More debt can no longer bring forward consumption or prevent debt implosion.
Now on the other hand population collapse when it arrives will be due to oil scarcity.
I should add that globally 65% of all debt is denominated in US dollars. Then a little over 20% in Euro’s. The other 15% is denominated in all the other currencies out there. So 65% of debts in existants need dollars to be repaid. This is important. People believe that China’s foreign reserves are some how going to save them. This is an incorrect assumption since those reserves are denominated in US dollars. People also believe that the new BRICS banking system matters or that all the gold China and Russia have been importing recently matters. It don’t because globally mostly you need Dollars and Euro’s to service your debt.
More debt can no longer bring forward consumption or prevent debt implosion.
As you look at where the rich put their money, a lot of it doesn’t make economic sense. They invest in bubbles, or they invest in items that other rich people want (e.g, high priced real estate, art). They aren’t doing a lot with their money that creates real wealth or anything sustainable.
Now, if more Silicon Valley money goes into alternative energy technology, we might get something. Otherwise, I’m not sure that a lot of this paper wealth and paper transactions are providing much that is meaningful or transformative in terms of the global economy. Maybe the wealthy will come to realize that they don’t actually own much and panic, but if they pull out all of their money, some of the industries that crash and burn as a result probably weren’t worth keeping propped up anyway.
During the housing crisis, some observers pointed out all of the vacant houses left standing. So it probably wasn’t a matter of needing more housing. We just didn’t have agreed upon ways to match empty housing with people who needed it. And in some cases, it probably would have been better to let people stay in those homes for free and keep them maintained than to let them sit empty and deteriorate.
Those so called rich people will no longer be rich when their assets values collapse. You’ll see fortunes disappear into a blackhole. The wealth won’t even be transferred it will just vanish into the thin air it was created out of.
Margin debt is at all time high, the rich are highly leveraged.
The wealth won’t even be transferred it will just vanish into the thin air it was created out of.
That’s why I don’t believe debt will be the end of civilization. The transition will be difficult, but the wealthy will “lose” a lot more than the rest of us.
It might not be the end of civilization but it will be the end of civilization as we know it.
Think about how many peoples jobs are dependent on debt.
It might not be the end of civilization but it will be the end of civilization as we know it.
There are multiple reasons to expect the end of business as usual: loss of energy resources, declining water supplies, natural disasters, too many people, and so on.
I just don’t view debt to be a bigger challenge than any of those. If anything, I think debt is less of a problem than environmental issues because it is a social construct. It isn’t a biological necessity.
Those so called rich people will no longer be rich when their assets values collapse. You’ll see fortunes disappear into a blackhole. The wealth won’t even be transferred it will just vanish into the thin air it was created out of.
Margin debt is at an all time high, the rich are highly leveraged.
You’ll see fortunes disappear into a blackhole. The wealth won’t even be transferred it will just vanish into the thin air it was created out of.
That won’t surprise me. But having the wealthy get less wealthy shouldn’t be a problem for those who aren’t sharing in that wealth right now.
If the wealthy find out that no one wants their art, their stocks, and so on, those assets become worthless, but those devalued assets shouldn’t factor into whether or not the 99% have enough to eat, to stay warm, and so on.
The wealthy will take us all along with them. Count on it.
They are preparing contracts that guarantee rentier income for themselves and their descendants in perpetuity. They own all of the productive energy and material sectors of the economy.
When you work you are paying them (through the state, which redistributes the income to them) and when you consume you are paying them.
Our function, and the function of your children, is to pay this rentier income forever.
All of these contracts are enforced by governments worldwide with the barrel of a gun.
You’re only way out of this is to accept being shot by the police and military or start a civil war. That’s it. Nothing else is going to change the system, peak oil or not.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” ~ John F. Kennedy
The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) puts total debt at $100 trillion in 2013 and World GDP was $75.6 trillion according to the World Bank, so debt to GDP is at 132%, not really a big deal.
If I was debt free and income was 100k per year, and had a 20k down payment and good credit history, I could borrow enough for a 320k home (15 year 300k mortgage) and my debt to income would be about 300%. It is not clear why the World economy cannot support 300% debt to income ratios.
I like analogies that put spending, debt service and the like on a human scale. But the problem here is the “if I was debt free.” In the case of USA, the 3.5T income is already spoken for and then some (~500B deficit). USA debt to income is in the neighborhood of 500%. No 300K mortgage for you. Other countries in similar state.
A little off tópic, but here you can see a mountain of coke, near the Jose upgrader complex in Eastern Venezuela. The conveyor belt used to transport the coke to the cargo vessels burned down a few years ago, but it hasn’t been replaced. The photo is from Nelson Bocaranda, who posted it his runrun.es blog.
“There is no a priori reason that there should be a satisfactory solution to any problem that we face. Our assumptions of a solution to problems is one that has been framed within the our various local niches, where we often do have some real control, and the facilitation by growing socio-economic complexity enabled by the internal stability of the globalised economy and the energy and resource flows that enable it.
Other ages could point to fate and the capricious gods to give meaning to the inexplicable. We have tended to look at the globalised economy, and assumed it was not just created by us, but the result of our intentions. This is part of our mythology, one that flatters as it deceives.”- David Korowicz – Trade-Off,
Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse.
http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/
As someone who was raised on the Breeding Bird Survey, I heartily agree with Ron’s claim that wild animal populations are in rapid decline. You have to know the species to appreciate the magnitude of the cataclysm.
But it was already well underway when the population was half what it is now, so I don’t think population itself is the issue.
I was just down at the Brigantine National Wildlife Preserve two weeks ago. I saw a number of ducks but not anything like I used to see. Are the duck populations falling also, or am I just not taking a big enough sample (it was the migration time)?
Actually i think the ducks are doing pretty well by 20th century standards. The government clamped down pretty hard on hunters and that helped.
The extinction of most of the big animals is entirely possible. However, the main chance of this happening would be that civilization does NOT collapse but staggers on for a while longer.
Anthony Barnosky wrote a paper on megafauna extinction and later a book (“Dodging Extinction”). He points out that there was a spate of human-caused (or human-abetted) extinctions from 50,000 years before present until 10,000 years b. p. But from 10,000 years b. p. to about 1700, nonhuman megafauna stabilized. His argument is a bit complicated, but basically he says that this minor extinction event which began c. 50,000 years b. p., primarily caused by human overhunting, was exacerbated by climate change. Human expansion (and domestic animal expansion) from 10,000 years b. p. until 1700 was mostly just filling the niche created by ancient climate change, and did not come at the expense of wild animals (nonhuman megafauna excluding domesticated animals). Since 1700, though, it is a different story, and extinction has cranked up again.
Prima facie, it seems if civilization does truly collapse back to post-industrial levels, any wild animals that make it to that point will survive and we will return to the status quo ante of pre-industrial times, at least in terms of wild megafauna. Humans might even learn something about the futility of this sort of “dominion” over nature from this experience.
10,000 cb to 1700 and megafauna had stabilized ???
Have you read this?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Take another look at the Wikipedia article you’re referencing. Then look at the extinction dates of the species along the right hand edge. It might also be helpful to look at the stuff Barnosky has written and you’d get a better feel of where he’s coming from.
Madagascar:
Starting with the arrival of humans around 2,000 years ago, nearly all of the island’s megafauna became extinct.
Etc etc…
Again, please look at the Wikipedia article you referenced, and check the dates of the species which are prominently mentioned as going extinct in the “Holocene” on the right hand side. These are all modern extinctions. The dodo, the quagga, the Mexican grizzly bear, the Caribbean monk seal — all extinct since the 17th century.
The basic point is that there was a major spate of extinction due to prehistoric overhunting, which ended when we had pretty much killed everything off (megafauna-wise) and agriculture developed. From 10,000 years before present until about 1500, extinctions fell off. After the industrial revolution, it picked up again with a vengeance.
In the case of Madagascar we have the exception that proves the rule. The arrival of humans in Madagascar corresponds to the invasion of humans into Asia, Australia, the Americas, etc. in the period leading up to the invention of agriculture c. 50,000 ybp to 10,000 ybp. Second verse, same as the first.
Not if we don’t deal with the nuclear waste and decommissions, and fast.
Depends. You could argue that right now, humans are a bigger threat to wildlife than nuclear waste. Google “wildlife around Chernobyl.”
Well, it is hard to deny the fact that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event, when a massive amount of species die out every year. (Though event is a bad term, it is going on for 2 centuries already.)
But we are not really above the earth’s carry capacity, simply because such nonsense doesn’t exist. The amount of people we support today is much more than 18th century folks would have ever imagined possible. And as long as scientific progress and personal growth goes in the right direction, we will be able to support the 3-5 billion more people predicted for the coming decades.
The key technologies coming up allowing us to sustain population (and, consequently, economic) growth:
1. renewable energy
2. green infrastructure
3. water production (as in cleaning water, turning salt to sweet, or even extracting it from the water vapor around us).
4. GMO’s
Apart from that, international diplomacy and development assistance are extremely important, but these are getting technologically easier, too. Less people die in war, economic development assistance is getting more effective and governments have to be more accountable as people need nothing more than a smartphone nowdays to keep track of what public officials are up to.
delete please
But we are not really above the earth’s carry capacity, simply because such nonsense doesn’t exist. The amount of people we support today is much more than 18th century folks would have ever imagined possible. And as long as scientific progress and personal growth goes in the right direction, we will be able to support the 3-5 billion more people predicted for the coming decades.
Delmy since I believe you are new around here I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are sincere, albeit rather uninformed. Wishful thinking doesn’t change reality! We have scientific methodology and empirical evidence that says we as a species are already in deep global ecological overshoot!
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/methodology/
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/NFA%20Method%20Paper%202011%20Submitted%20for%20Publication.pdf
ABSTRACT
Human demand on ecosystem services continues to increase, and evidence suggests that this demand is outpacing the regenerative and absorptive capacity of the biosphere. As a result, the productivity of natural capital may increasingly become a limiting factor for the human endeavor. Therefore, metrics tracking human demand on, and availability of, regenerative and waste absorptive capacity within the biosphere are needed. Ecological Footprint analysis is such a metric; it measures human appropriation (Ecological Footprint) and the biosphere’s supply (biocapacity) of ecosystem products and services in terms of the amount of bioproductive land and sea area (ecological assets) needed to supply these products and services.
This paper documents the latest method for estimating the Ecological Footprint and biocapacity of nations, using the National Footprint Accounts (NFA) applied to more than 200 countries and for the world overall. Results are also compared with those obtained from previous editions of the NFA.
According to the 2011 Edition of the National Footprint Accounts, humanity demanded the resources and services of 1.5 planets in 2008; this human demand was 0.7 planets in 1961.
Situations in which total demand for ecological goods and services exceed the available supply for a given location, are called ‘overshoot’. ‘Global overshoot’ indicates that stocks of ecological capital are depleting and/or that waste is accumulating. As the methodology keeps being improved, each new edition of the NFA supports the findings of a global overshoot
Sorry, there just ain’t enough pixie dust for everyone…
That kind of research reads like a kind of ideology I don’t think I would ever be able to buy into. Population growth leads to unparalleled economic growth, and economic growth is what gave us the astonishing levels of prosperity we currently enjoy as a species. But the deeply ironic thing here is this economic growth is also what gave all of you here the tools and infrastructure you had to use to type your messages of pessimism, doom and gloom. Which is why I just don’t get what actually motivates you guys. Do people here get some sort of jollies out of always being pessimistic and trying to rationalize why you aren’t ever able to get the “common folk” you encounter and the mainstream media to talk about economic and population growth and oil usage in the pessimistic ways you want these topics to be talked about?
Do people here get some sort of jollies out of always being pessimistic and trying to rationalize why you aren’t ever able to get the “common folk” you encounter and the mainstream media to talk about economic and population growth and oil usage in the pessimistic ways you want these topics to be talked about?
I, too, don’t understand the thinking of the extreme doomers. If you tell people their future is hopeless and there is nothing they can do about it, then they won’t do anything.
If you want them to change their behavior, you have to tell them that doing so will make a difference.
Truth is not doom or gloom .
If the ship is sinking i would like to know .
Large comet next sunday at 4 pm.
Now don’t you feel better .
If the ship is sinking i would like to know .
But if the ship is sinking, you probably also want to know if there are lifeboats. And even if there aren’t lifeboats, you might jump ship in hopes of swimming to safety.
There’s a difference between knowing a crisis will hit and making a plan to deal with it, and knowing a crisis will hit and just waiting to die.
Even if we do expect a negative outcome, we aren’t quite sure what events will happen when. Are we talking about a crisis that will doom the world tomorrow? Or maybe in ten years? Or maybe in 30 years? And so on.
My philosophy is somewhere between extreme pessimism and extreme optimism.
I think the world is on an unsustainable course. I would like to see economic systems and lifestyles developed that involve far less resource consumption.
But I believe that once consumption goes down significantly (probably out of necessity rather than choice), what’s left of the human species will survive.
And if conditions are such that no humans can survive, then we will recede into our small place in the history of the Earth and the universe, and something else will replace us. On the grand scale of the universe, we and Earth don’t really matter much.
There is know lifeboats , we have zero space ships .
Jump and swim for IT …die alone ,i dont think so.
Like Ron ,i believe we will kill everything , burn everything …for just one more year , day or min.
What do you call a mass of angry humans –a flock , sheeple, herd ?
Herd sounds good , how do we stop a hundred thousand herd of humans heading for the hills to kill or eat anything they can ? And thats just one herd ,take it times a thousand . What a bloody mess. Yes a few will survive in a way none of us will ever want to. Is this doom or gloom or just the facts ma’am !
They will have to walk if it comes to mass migration out of the cities and most of them will starve along the way and thus not many will ever make it to the more remote hills. But between the locals and the few that do make it to the boonies I agree that there will be hardly anything left that is edible. Acorns maybe in season in my part of the world. Not much else.
Even if we do expect a negative outcome, we aren’t quite sure what events will happen when. Are we talking about a crisis that will doom the world tomorrow? Or maybe in ten years? Or maybe in 30 years? And so on.
No, we are talking about a multi faceted crisis that is upon us right now! Not tomorrow, not in ten years and certainly not in 30 years!It is happening today! While it is true that we can’t predict the exact unfolding of events we know without a shadow of a doubt that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the biosphere, our resource base and our waste sinks. We also know with 100% certainty that we are on an unsustainable path.
Now you can take that information and go sit in the corner and cry or you can be all happy and positive and believe that maybe some miracle will save us and life will go on as it allways has. Or you can accept that reality and deal with it in whatever way you can. Nature isn’t going to care one way or another.
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.
Winston Churchill
So here is the point: WE ARE IN OVERSHOOT RIGHT NOW!!!
That’s a fact. Any questions?
We also know with 100% certainty that we are on an unsustainable path.
Oh, I agree with that and I think everyone here agrees with that.
Where we seem to disagree is what will happen next.
Check out the pictures in this NY Times article
California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth
A punishing drought is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been the state’s engine has run against the limits of nature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/us/california-drought-tests-history-of-endless-growth.html?emc=edit_th_20150405&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=26604481&_r=0
After WWll we as the world could have had a world PLAN , thru the United Nations..with population control , food control , pollution ,etc. This to me was the biggest failure of modern man .We came so close to a near perfect world without hate and greed . WE FAILED.Its to big to control now , like a forest fire with only a bucket of spit.One for all , all for one ..not..owell what the hell lets be positive and happy .
Hi Fred,
As Boomer says everyone agrees (or most do), what is not agreed upon is if anything can be done to improve the situation. Policies to increase the likelihood that the UN low fertility scenario (or even lower) will become a reality would be a start.
One can certainly argue that nothing can be done to improve things and that any action to do so will only make things worse. I am not convinced that humans cannot reduce their environmental impact. They may choose not to, but the impact on the biosphere is becoming difficult to ignore. Some humans do think long term and think about future generations.
The future is not fixed, human decisions can have an impact.
Some humans do think long term and think about future generations.
The future is not fixed, human decisions can have an impact.
I certainly agree, case in point the Fins with their 100,000 year plan to store nuclear waste. That’s pretty long term thinking and the fact that they are doing so does give me some hope that not all people are lost cases.
What sets me seeing red is when I face people who say BS like this:
That kind of research reads like a kind of ideology I don’t think I would ever be able to buy into. Population growth leads to unparalleled economic growth, and economic growth is what gave us the astonishing levels of prosperity we currently enjoy as a species.
Maybe I’m wrong but the impression I get is that that would be the vast majority of people. That’s where I start to get a bit gloomy.
Population growth leads to unparalleled economic growth, and economic growth is what gave us the astonishing levels of prosperity we currently enjoy as a species.
I’m an anti-growth person, myself, so that doesn’t reflect my thinking. I think economic growth has produced quite a bit of waste. I’ve been a Small Is Beautiful advocate since the 1970s.
Where I differ from some people here is that I think we still need to try to moderate human activity rather than to conclude it is too late to do anything. Yes, it might be too late, but I feel better about giving it a try. I see nothing to be gained by not trying.
And as I have said, in the spirit of Cosmos, what happens here on Earth is insignificant in the greater scheme of things. So when things look like they will get ugly, I just remind myself that our stay, and Earth’s stay, were always also going to be short-term in the history of the universe. Little lasts forever.
Forget people; think TARDIGRADES and you won’t be so gloomy. Because in 2007, thousands were attached to a satellite and blasted into space and after the satellite returned to Earth, many survived. Some cheeky females had even laid eggs there producing healthy hatchlings. But, it’s not just space tardigrades can enjoy. They are content living at 18,196ft in the Himalayas, in Japanese hot springs, at the bottom of the ocean and Antarctica. They withstand huge amounts of radiation, being heated to 150 °C, and being frozen almost to absolute zero: They could care less about PO.
Yes, I know. Perhaps humans are entirely too complex to survive in the universe. Tardigrades and their like might be better suited to carry on than we are.
That’s not fair, Tardigrades are pretty complex. I think!
Thanks Doug, Tardigrades made my day!
And yes, they are quite complex.
”Maybe I’m wrong but the impression I get is that that would be the vast majority of people. That’s where I start to get a bit gloomy.”
I agree totally.
Hi Fred,
Yes the cornucopian perspective is very silly, but the doomer perspective is as well.
The sensible position is somewhere between these extremes, we need to see population decline and conserve resources, build quality stuff that lasts a long time, recycle stuff as much as possible, make do with less of everything, and stop fouling our nest (the Earth).
Both perspectives, the “there is no problem we need more growth” view and the “all is lost and there is nothing that can or will be done to improve the outcome” view are depressing to me. So I am with Boomer II there, I think things look very bad and humans may be able to institute policies that will allow us to muddle through until population falls to sustainable levels.
Realism has nothing to do with pessimistic doom and gloom. A good dosage of cynicism and realism allows the right type of people to focus on the achievable and the meaningful.
It also allows for a certain type of serenity in front of the inevitable.
Denial is not your friend. Unadulterated optimistic technucopian spirit is actually your enemy. It blinds your senses. Not much different than believing to magic fairies, elves, and other entities. I have been doing cutting research and technology development the last 17 years in energy technology…no magic bullet homie…
You know … Standing on the shoulders of Giants….not just a saying… research productivity ( output/input ratio ) has been decreasing for the longest time…. I cannot afford to do experiments that were conducted in the 70’s. Some times we can get away with it, other times I give praise to the heavens for someone having done that in the past.
Fracking?? Sth envisioned in the 60’s and 70’s…first question to be answered : why not do horizontal drilling…
Solar energy…look at the ancient Greeks for concentrating sun rays for heat and warfare…
Brain surgeries?? Around since the ancient Egyptians…
And so on and so forth….
That kind of research reads like the kind of ideology I buy into. Population growth leads to unparalleled economic growth, and economic growth is what gave us the astonishing levels of drawdown we currently inflict on the planet. And the deeply ironic thing is this economic growth is also what gave all of us here the tools and infrastructure we have to use in our relative prison and desolation to type our messages of realism. Which is why I get what actually motivates many more people these days. But some people get some sort of jollies out of always being clueless and trying to rationalize how they are the “common folk” and how the mainstream media, like Fox News, is da bomb and how they like to talk about economic and population growth and oil usage in the most optimistic ways possible, despite their disastrous evidence to the contrary.
(This fine comment crafted on-the-fly with the Patterson Press™ Comment Editor. Got second thoughts? Do it with The Patterson™!)
Which is why I just don’t get what actually motivates you guys. Do people here get some sort of jollies out of always being pessimistic
The reason I do not step off the top of a 40 story building is not because I’m an anti gravity ideologist or a pessimist, it’s because I understand the theory of gravity… Oh, that, and the fact that I tested the theory by tossing a watermelon off the top of the building and verified what happened to it when it hit the sidewalk down below…
Well there is the air resistance to think about and you realize the lesser mass m follows a geodesic path through fixed space-time; oh shit, here comes the sidewalk………..
LOL!
oh shit, here comes the sidewalk………..
You see, that’s what happens when you’re all about gloom and doom. Now if only you had had a little more time you could have got into a more detailed discussion about air resistance and how you might have used it to your advantage by deploying a parachute…
But then of course someone might have accused you of being a watermelon because you were trying an alternative means of descent. You just can’t win >;-)
As for the geodesic path…
OK Fred, I think we’ve run the gauntlet now. Nice elephant though.
Suppose the Fed prints a new value of G.
Hi Delmy,
You do realize that growth cannot continue forever, I hope. You seem to think 8 billion people is fine and more would be better. How about 8 trillion people? Or 8000 trillion, would that be better?
Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?
By then, Dennis, at those numbers, they would of course have ventured out into space, and overpopulated it, too. Imagine pollution at universal levels! Smashing into space-junk at relativistic speeds! The other universes would have to seal up all their wormholes of access to theirs, so as to prevent us from becoming a blight on their universes as well.
I’m afraid that is not true, Fred. As I said in my article last week, here in peak oil barrel, the human species is not in overshoot. Overshoot requires that not enough resources are available in the present to sustain current population. We are still growing, and a population in overshoot does not grow.
You should check an Ecology Manual. I provided a link at the end of the article for one on line. You should not get your biological definitions from a NGA.
Those who are pc will just have to forgive my redneck sense of humor because I cannot resist using it to explain where Javier is missing the point.
Once upon a time these two minority guys applied for truck driving jobs at a redneck old southern company determined not to hire them so the secretary just told them to fill out the applications and bring them back expecting to be able to shit can them due to errors and omissions – but they were letter perfect in every way. So she gave them to her boss who checked the references – again perfect in every way.
So he called them in for a road test hoping to get rid of them but they aced the tests.
So the applications were kicked upstairs to management and when the topic came up the lawyer said leave it to me to interview them. So the secretary called them and told them about the new policy – all new hires to be interviewed by management.
They aced every question concerning billing paperwork , state and federal regulations, everything. So finally the lawyer says to one of them ,
Suppose your are have started down a very long mountain with a full load and suddenly realize your brakes are totally inoperative. You are doing sixty five .. seventy .. seventy five .. eighty – no end to the down grade in sight. And suddenly you see a temporary flashing sign saying landslide ahead detour five mph one mile .
You are doing eighty five and still gaining, still on the down grade. WHAT are you going to do?
So the driver thinks and thinks and the lawyer tells him this is an emergency and he HAS to think quickly.
So the driver to be says after a few more seconds,” I guess I would wake up my buddy in the sleeper.”
Thinking he has the disqualifying answer he wants the lawyer demands to know what good waking up his co driver could possibly do.
And the driver says , ” Well Sir, it won’t do any good at all. But my buddy ain’t never seen a wreck like the one we’re going to have.”
No point missed, OFM. You cannot go to a science like ecology and change the definitions because you like them some other way. Read “The Human Population Problem” in this blog if you want a better example with one of Darwin’s finches on why a population is not in overshoot until it is in overshoot.
I accept that we are most likely to be in overshoot in the near future, but we ain’t there yet and we don’t know when we will be there. I think it is important to be correct and it is not the same to say that we are in an unsustainable path, or reaching the limits, which are true, than to say that we are above carrying capacity or in overshoot, which are untrue.
It is just another example of taking a scientific term and changing its meaning to further an agenda.
Overshoot requires that not enough resources are available in the present to sustain current population. We are still growing, and a population in overshoot does not grow.
Not necessarily true.
I think we are quibbling about nuances within definitions:
I agree that for most biological organisms the following applies:
The carrying capacity (K) is the maximum population size that can be supported or sustained by a given environment. At K, population growth ceases. Environmental conditions fluctuate and cause K to fluctuate. Time lags in a population’s response to environmental conditions will cause the population size to oscillate around K – the population will slightly overshoot K and when individuals die due to lack of resources, the population size will decrease and will slightly undershoot K. Since there are enough resources below K, the population will start to grow again and the cycle repeats itself. We think of K as some “average” value for the environment.
So it is absolutely possible for a population to overshoot its resource base and continue growing, this is generally known to ecologists as reproductive lag.
The situation for humans is a quite a bit more complex, but again, it is possible for a population to be in temporary overshoot. This is generally followed by a die off or population crash.
I think we both agree that the general trajectory of our civilization is currently on an unsustainable path.
Javier wrote: the human species is not in overshoot.
If anyone ever made an incorrect statement that is an incorrect statement. In the Nova program Rat Attack, a small bamboo forest in East India bloomed and fruited. That happens every 48 years. The black rats in the area went from about 100 for the small area, to over 4,000. The bamboo fruit supplied them with an abundance of food and their population exploded. When the bamboo fruit was gone they then moved into the local rice and corn fields. When that was gone the rats starved. Their numbers shrank back to 100 or so.
So when were the rats in overshoot? When their numbers were above what the territory could support without the temporary supply of food, or when they were at any point above 100 or so. They were definitely in overshoot at 1,000. They were further in overshoot at 2,000 and even further at 3,000 or 4,000.
We Homo sapiens were in overshoot at two billion. We were deeper into overshoot when I was born in 1938 at about 2.2 billion. Now we are hopelessly deep in overshoot at about 7.3 billion. Not just in overshoot but we are deep, deep into overshoot. We live in times of plenty.
If there is ever a time of plenty this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
Richard Dawkins: River Out of Eden, page131-132.
If anyone ever made an incorrect statement that is an incorrect statement.
When are you going to come to the conclusion that this guy is totally delusional?
Anyone marginally paying attention, and has literacy in population biology , can see this guy is illiterate on the subject.
And the climate science is even more telling.
I have always been under the impression that ‘overshoot’ in the ecological term was referring to the long-term carrying capacity.
If long-term means >50-100 years then I dare say we completely fit this definition.
I am sorry Ron, but it is not only my opinion, it is the opinion of most ecologists. And it is stated very clearly in almost all Ecology textbooks.
In any scientific discipline definitions are very important and they cannot be ambiguous.
The carrying capacity, K, is the maximum population that can be achieved. By definition, at carrying capacity populations have zero growth. Clearly not the case of mankind.
Overshoot is the condition when the population is above carrying capacity, due to reproductive lag or to a reduction in the carrying capacity. At overshoot, populations experiment decrease natality and increased mortality. Clearly not the case of mankind.
Some proof of what I say:
1. The population size at which growth stops is generally called carrying capacity, or K, which is the number of individuals of a particular population that the environment can support. At carrying capacity, because population size is approximately constant, birthrates must equal death rates and population growth is zero.
M. Molles. Ecology Concepts & Applications. Chapter 11. Population Growth.
2. The carrying capacity, the population size at which the population growth rate equals zero, is reached when the per capita birth rate (# births/time/individual) equals the per capita death rate (# deaths/time/individual).
McGinley Population ecology. The Encyclopaedia of Earth. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/155311/
3. The carrying capacity of a population represents the absolute maximum number of individuals in the population, based on the amount of the limiting resource available.
Hale and McCarthy. An Introduction to Population Ecology. http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/loci/joma/an-introduction-to-population-ecology-the-logistic-growth-equation
4. Carrying capacity: The density level at which the rate of increase of a species population is zero which is equivalent to the equilibrium population density. Abbreviated “K”
Population Dynamics. University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. http://ucanr.edu/sites/W2185/files/109437.pdf
5. Overshoot of (carrying capacity) K causes very low survival and birth rates, population falls well below K
Population Ecology. Washington University. http://www.cfr.washington.edu/classes.esrm.450/Lecture13/Cycles.pdf
As you can see, hardly the most incorrect statement ever made. This is what academia thinks of the issue. You can obviously disagree, but then you have a problem. Without a definition based on carrying capacity equal to zero growth you have no way of knowing when you reach carrying capacity and when you reach overshoot.
As an example, what was according to you Earth carrying capacity for mankind and when was it overshot? Hmm, you see the problem, right? Whatever values you choose they are only valid for you because they are based on your assumptions.
So the conclusion is pretty solid. We will reach carrying capacity when we stop growing, and will be in overshoot when due to lack of resources natality decreases, mortality increases and population starts reducing.
Javier, I don’t really give a shit what anyone says, we are deep, deep into overshoot. Overshoot is when the population surpasses the long term carrying capacity. Now a lot of people don’t think we are at that point yet. In fact we passed that point about 4 or 5 billion people ago. We are destroying the earth. If we were not in overshoot then our numbers would not be destroying the earth!
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
If you ever read one book in your life you should read that one.
I’ve read many books including that one, Ron. I agree with a lot in that book. I agree that we are completely unsustainable and on our way to overshoot.
There is no such thing as long term carrying capacity. Carrying capacity, as everything else in the biosphere is constantly changing. It is a moving target as we are about to discover when it goes below our population number.
As I showed, we are destroying species and changing the environment since 50,000 years ago, when mankind was only about a million. I also showed that our number to allow maximum biodiversity should not be above 25 millions. You can really pick any number and declare it overshoot.
Okay, I will post this link again:
Overshoot (population)
In population dynamics and population ecology, overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the long term carrying capacity of its environment. The consequence of overshoot is called a crash or die-off.
And again, there is no official definition of overshoot but the one quoted by Wikipedia is by far the most popular and is the one I subscribe to. Long term “human” carrying capacity means the carrying capacity of the earth without the aid of ancient sunshine in the form of fossil fuel.
I prefer the number 25 million (over, say, 1 billion that is often quoted) because of our species’ rapaciousness.
While I am unsure we are necessarily safe even at that number, at least depending on the areas we inhabit and our concentrations in those areas (and here, I’m thinking of the Maori wiping out the moas with rudimentary technology) as I’ve remarked before, we currently appear catastrophically out of scale on a planetary level in any case. Not extremely, but catastrophically.
I am therefore inclined to find it remarkably laughable that some would think that 7 billion would be anywhere near sustainable or that we will manage a smooth civilizational decline.
Well, it is hard to deny the fact that we are in the midst of a mass extinction event, when a massive amount of species die out every year. But they keep trying.
Given our economic/technological footprint, we are really above the earth’s carrying capacity, simply because different forms of government and industrial nonsense exist. The amount of people we support today is much more than 18th century folks would have ever imagined possible, and they had it good compared to the congestion, overcrowding and greatly-diminished ecological foundations for survival we now have. But hey, that’s progress, as some like to spout. And as long as so-called scientific progress and personal growth goes in those kinds of direction, we will be unable, at least in any way that is really meaningful, to support the 3-5 billion more people predicted for the coming decades.
The ‘key technologies’ to unlock the abysses that the government-industry propagandists’s keep repetitively suggesting, ad nauseum, that will allow ‘us’ to sustain population (and, consequently, economic) growth are:
1. renewable energy (for the elite or whoever can afford it before no one can)
2. greenwashed infrastructure (rabbit hutches for the job/tax-slaves. Maybe those Chinese ghost cities will be good for something afterall)
3. water production (since the natural stuff will be increasingly hard to come by).
4. GMO’s (i.e., Frankenfoods)
Apart from that, the ongoing lies and illusions of ‘international diplomacy’ and ‘development assistance’ (usually for the 1%) are often sold as extremely important, but these Orwellian doublespeaks are getting hackneyed to an increasing population that is becoming increasingly restive and rebellious, and for good reasons. Despite the usual ‘less people die in war’ parroted meme, economic development is running things into the ground and getting more effective at that, while governments are of course fundamentally unaccountable and increasingly demonstrate this with impunity and ‘diplomatic immunity’ as people’s movements, smartphones and computers are monitored and/or hacked into by spook-snoop outfits such as the NSA to keep track of everything people say and do and everywhere they go.
Once in a while, I read some Plutarch just to gain some new perspective or something. Of course, there is Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, so it helps.
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
From The Life of Dion:
“At this meeting the general subject was human virtue, and most of the discussion turned upon manliness. And when Plato set forth that tyrants least of all men had this quality, and then, treating of justice, maintained that the life of the just was blessed, while that of the unjust was wretched, the tyrant, as if convicted by his arguments, would not listen to them, and was vexed with the audience because they admired speaker and were charmed by his utterances. At last he got exceedingly angry and asked the philosopher why he had come to Sicily. And when Plato said that he was come to seek a virtuous man, the tyrant answered and said: “Well, by the gods, it appears that you have not yet found such an one.” Dion thought that this was the end of his anger, and as Plato was eager for it, sent him away upon a trireme, which was conveying Pollis the Spartan to Greece. But Dionysius privily requested Pollis to kill Plato on the voyage, if it were in any way possible, but if not, at all events to sell him into slavery; for he would take no harm, but would be quite as happy, being a just man, even if he should become a slave. Pollis, therefore, as we are told, carried Plato to Aegina and there sold him; for the Aeginetans were at war with the Athenians and had made a decree that any Athenian taken on the island should be put up for sale.”
Competitive Exclusion Principle way back then.
Anyone here read “Merchants of Despair”?
“There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.”
http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Despair-Environmentalists-Pseudo-Scientists-Antihumanism/dp/1594034761
Yipee! Sounds like a real serious science based book… I can’t wait to read it. It even names all the bad guys:
… the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore.
…provides scientific refutations to all of antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, and industrial development.
This, brought to you by the guy who also wrote:
How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet by Robert Zubrin (Dec 2, 2008)
Sigh!
It’s a satirical comedy Fred.
Ah! >;-)
Anybody up for a good news story re: animal population increases?
Where I live we are drowning in elk. I have everything requiring protection behind 7′ fences. I lock up the driveway gate every night. Anyway, last week a helicopter buzzed around the valley for awhile..(a jetbox) and spotted a few herds. They then set up a collection pen and baited it with a watcher standing guard. When the pen filled with elk a guy hit the switch and the gate closed, trapping the elk. A large transport carrier was loaded up with 20 or so and transported up to northern Vancouver Island, Mahatta River to be precise. They were then released to repopulate barren habitat.
40 years ago this place was crawling with deer due to logging increasing forage areas. The more logging…the more deer. Then, the wolves arrived, swimming over from the mainland (island hopping). The cougar population has also increased giving us the highest density of cougars in the world. (I have had 4 in our yard and had to shoot one 2 years ago that killed my sheep). Anyway, the cougars and wolves have decimated the deer population to the extent that deer are only found in towns and cities for the most part. I gave up on sheep having lost quite a few over the past 5 years. The primo deer hunting areas of the past are empty, except for elk. Roosevelt elk are huge, and live in herds. They can stomp wolves to death (and dogs) and single cougars have little chance bringing down adults. In this case living in a herd is an advantage. (I have seen a 300 lbs yearling elk killed by cougar so they can get the small ones, sometimes.) The hunting pressure is controlled with a limited entry draw for tags…so in this case the herd behaviour will not be their downfall as it was in the past.
The field where the 20 elk were rounded up had another 20 the next night.
We had elk stir fry last night. mmmm I got a draw this past fall!!! This morning I will take the dog out for a walk and see what they have been up to. I just want to share with you that all human interactions and effects on wildlife are not always bad news stories.
regards
This morning I got up to look out the window for any sign of sun after several soaking days.
I was flabbergasted to see, right in front of me on the road, two big fat beaver waddling down it like a couple of overweight fishoutofwater.
I have seen no beaver around here,for many decades, heavily infested as it is with hillbillies, dogs and guns.
But it was not merely a hallucination. I yelled to the wife and she ran out and got a photo just as the beaver pair turned down toward the pond, a far better place for a beaver- and little beavers -than the middle of a road.
Now, I am waiting for a swarm of salmon rushing up the creek and some cougars. We sure need them for those deer, who keep bending everybody’s bodywork around here. The coyotes don’t hack it.
Thanks, Paulo for your good glimpses of the good life. I really like salmon, but have never seen one in our pond.
PS, Everybody could also be living in paradise if there were fewer, maybe 10% of present. Easy way to get there- make a cheap, super addictive drug that gives a fantastic high-and sterilizes everybody who does’t think like I do..
Problem solved. Next?
Wimbi that might be the best idea I have run across in a long time. Kicking myself for not thinking of it but I have often thought that if I could I would distribute free food in famine areas with birth control drugs mixed into the food – long lasting drugs, assuming they could be invented.
I would clearly label the food as what it would be – eat this if you are hungry enough but know you will not have any children for the next few years if you do.
Going all the way to a sterilizing drug in food aid might be a bit too far and open up the donors to accusation of genocide.
Putting it in a drug with a label on it depicting a childless couple wistfully looking at somebody else’s kid would be plenty of fair warning in my opinion.
Or we could do something really crazy, like making modern birth control methods freely available to everyone along with free education for girls and women.
Some basic rights for women would be helpful as well, but I am not that much of a lunatic. 🙂
For those who take an interest.
My recent post where I explore any relations of total global debt, interest rates and the oil price.
http://fractionalflow.com/2015/04/05/the-oil-price-total-global-debt-and-interest-rates/
Not bad. I added you to my list.
From your chart:
Global debt has increased by $57 trillion since 2007, outpacing GDP growth
Given that oil is one of our most important resources and if it is true that we are at the peak utilization of that resource and global GDP is closely linked to its use, I have to wonder if there is a some kind of a correlation between that statistic and what is happening with our ecological footprint:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
World Footprint
Do we fit on the planet?
Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.
At least in my mind that is a much more worrying type of debt than the monetary kind…
Fred,
I do not hold all the answers.
I think there is wide consensus that economic growth (as expressed by GDP) is well correlated with energy/oil consumption.
Economic growth (GDP) may however be turbo charged by the use of credit/debt (pulling future consumption forward in time). Credit/debt is a human invention (social construct) with all that entails.
That is why I also think it is vital to understand the role of credit/debt for GDP.
Just a thought experiment.
Say the world starts to pay down its credit/debt. That would reduce aggregate demand, lower GDP and thus likely lower energy/oil consumption.
GDP is a metric of economic (end) transactions within the economy.
The thing is that present debt levels are likely higher than underlying collateral, so when the music stops, most will be left without chairs.
And yes I do not think we can fool Mother Nature….all the time.
Rune, it’s after 2:00 am in Norway, don’t you ever sleep?
Doug,
I am a little behind tonight. We introduced daylight savings time a week ago…so
Say the world starts to pay down its credit/debt. That would reduce aggregate demand, lower GDP and thus likely lower energy/oil consumption.
GDP is a metric of economic (end) transactions within the economy.
The thing is that present debt levels are likely higher than underlying collateral, so when the music stops, most will be left without chairs.
Debt fuels consumption, so limiting debt might be a good way to scale back consumption.
If the music stops, I’d say that the lenders (the rich) are the ones who will be left without chairs.
I see consumption, not debt, to be the bigger problem because it has environmental consequences. I’m not troubled by the idea that the rich will lose money. In fact, hasn’t that been the problem, that we have bailouts and tricks so the rich won’t feel the pain and will continue to fund activities that make no investment sense?
Debt is also a claim against your future income, so doesn’t a problem arise if you don’t invest the debt in productive assets and instead use it just to fund consumption. This will ultimately serve to depress future demand.
Of course, the other side of this is the owners of the debt, which are more households and corporations. They think that they’re prudently saving and are terrified of taking losses. Over saving is just as much a problem as too much debt, and it’s those savings which will be wiped out.
”Debt is also a claim against your future income, so doesn’t a problem arise if you don’t invest the debt in productive assets and instead use it just to fund consumption. This will ultimately serve to depress future demand.”
I think within that statement, we also find our predicament.
Future income is also based upon growth in debt. If the future income for some reasons declines, it will affect debt service and thus creditors.
One of the explanations for the declining productivity of debt to GDP is that debt is used for consumptive ends instead of productive ends.
‘Debt’ seems like a very distant concept to most (unless they have gone into bankrupt due to it).
However, in a modern economy most of ones food comes to the table through debt financing. How is that?
Well, most farmers cannot afford to self-finance their operation- they have to borrow huge sums of money up front to purchase their equipment, fertilizer, seed, fuel, etc. They secure this money prior to the planting season, and are in big debt until they get a good harvest, and price at market, to square up with the lenders at seasons end.
If the debt system breaks down, so does the abundant food supply. Would you get together with 30 neighbors to directly fund a farmer? Do you have money put away for this purpose?
Likewise, oil and gas drillers all operate on debt, just like the farmer. If the debt system is broken, the oil supply will plummet within the year.
It sickens me to think of how irresponsible the government has been in its stewardship of the debt system. It has allowed/encouraged far too much gambling, and now we all teeter on the edge of solvency.
Hickory,
Good observations.
Consumers buying food and energy/oil also in some way go into/use debt to afford this.
An interesting thought to explore would be to look into how this would work out without debt created “ex nihilo”.
Hi Rune,
If we required banks to have 100% reserves, it would simply mean a higher money supply would be needed. It would change very little.
Dennis,
What is your definition of 100% reserve requirement?
Where does most of the money in circulation come from?
Hi Rune,
Money is created from nothing in two ways. By central banks and by fractional reserve banking. I thought at first you were talking about the fractional reserve banking.
As long as the correct amount of money is created by central banks so that inflation is between 2 and 4%, there is really no issue. Does inflation seem like a problem at present?
Dennis, I asked;
”What is your definition of 100% reserve requirement?”
What would a 100% reserve requirement mean?
Hi Rune,
I see my mistake, any lending requires fractional reserve banking. 100% reserves could only result if a bank did not loan any money at all.
That is clearly nonsensical so I get your point.
What is not clear is the alternative to money creation by banks. Does an economy with no borrowing seem like a good idea?
If it does, then we could avoid money creation and we would live in a very depressed economy.
So money created by a central government when selling bonds or by a bank when it lends money is not a problem in my view as long as inflation remains at reasonable levels (between 2 and 4%).
In the US, reserve requirements for large banks are 10% of demand deposits currently and roughly 90% of money is created through bank lending.
The situation is more complicated due to credit card debt and debt that exists in other financial institutions such as brokerage firms and such.
You enter this world an infant, totally helpless, born at a hospital with doctors and nurses, you’re there, they’re there, they have to be paid and you are the liability. You can’t care for yourself, you can’t earn a dime, yet you are the cause of multiple costs, doesn’t matter where it originates, it’s there. You begin owing a debt to society, without it, you might not survive to adulthood.
All you have to do is go out into the world and make the best of it you can, if you have a more than fair share of all of the marbles, I guess that’s the real deal, what it is all for.
Warren Buffet has managed to make a few dollars. He started out in life as a baby, crying, hungry, in need of swaddling clothes, just like everybody ever born. A liability.
Goldman Sachs needed a loan and where did they go?
Went to Warren, crying like babies with wet diapers, probably, and in dire need of funding for some reason, doing God’s work and all.
Suppose the debt is owed to each other.
Suppose??? Do you mean: presume, assume, believe, think likely, envisage, conclude, posit, accept, take for granted, or some other bloody thing, that the debt is owed to each other? In other words, are you asking a question or asking us to assume a condition? Remember, you’re talking to mere mortals here Watcher. More important, don’t forget one of us (me) already has enough trouble with the debit-credit distinction even though deep down, it seems like a good question (or sensible statement).
Watcher,
You assume all debt is neutral.
Someone deferred their consumption, so others could pull it forward in time?
Most of the credit/debt created by commercial banks are created “ex nihilo”.
Most of the money in circulation is the effects from someone going into debt with a commercial bank against a promise of paying it back with interest.
Bank of England in the spring of 2014 published a report about how commercial banks create loans.
Where do the central banks get their money for QEing?
Ya, all true. My point was quoting a total debt probably isn’t valid if it’s not net.
Keep in mind that be it bank credit or be it the central bank QE or be it a national debt. The interest payment or charge is money that doesn’t exist. Because banks only create an amount equal to the loan amount not the loan amount plus interest.
Our government only pays the interest payment on the debt. They don’t pay any on the principle debt. So once a debt comes to exist it will always be.
This is why paying down the national debt isn’t a option. Paying down the debt would be extremely deflationary. Enough new debt has to be created every year so there will be enough money in the system for the interest payments to be made. This also means that every year a larger amount of credit must be created than the previous year.
Two points are that because of interest charges money is scarce, There is never enough money in the system for everyone to pay their debts. When someone pays a debt off it means there is less money in the system for other people to pay their debts off. Without ever increasing amounts of debt the system doesn’t and cannot work.
Total debt eventually becomes so large it can’t be service at any interest rate and interest payments will eventually consume all as they eventually reach 100% of any budget. This is the endgame for debt is money. Look over to Japan currently 46% of their tax revenue goes to the interest payment of their debt. They must continue to issue new debt or they implode immediately, not months or years or 30 minutes from now but immediately. But everyday they get a little bit closer to their demise.
Without ever increasing amounts of debt the system doesn’t and cannot work.
And therefore the system needs to be fixed. Having people say we CAN’T fix it doesn’t really help much. That’s buying into the same justifications that created it in the first place. It gives far too much power to those who benefit from the status quo.
At some point you have to face up to the idea that a system is broken, rather than continuing to use it as is.
If, for example, you have a society built upon slavery, slave owners are going to tell you that their economic system will collapse without slaves, particularly if you free the slaves without paying the owners. Well, tough. Just because an economic or social system has been created around some concepts, that doesn’t mean those concepts have to remain untouchable or unalterable.
Hi Watcher,
On a World level there is no net debt. Unless we are borrowing from extraterrestrials. Total World Debt is kind of a silly concept, it is money we owe to ourselves. One person’s liability is another person’s asset, the interest is the price required to get someone to save and lend.
For the World net debt is zero.
Dennis,
Couple things. Debt is not zero. At minimum, current debt is owed by future workers.
Also, Paul Krugman is a poor source for a well rounded view on this subject. Its kind of like just getting your environmental news from Fox. Thin slice, slanted view.
Hi Hickory,
Net debt for the World is zero. The World balance sheet of assets and liabilities (for debts) sums to zero.
Would you argue that there should be no debt? Typically a depression results as total debt levels become too low. In fact the problem is too little debt, rather than too much.
”Typically a depression results as total debt levels become too low. In fact the problem is too little debt, rather than too much.
Sarc alert on
That perfectly explains the 1930’s and 2008. If only the economies had loaded up on more debt those depressions would have been avoided.
Debt from here to infinity solves “our” problems, damn future generations and by the way, what good have the future done for us?
sarc alert off
Hi Rune,
Deficit spending by the major economies during World war 2 and during its aftermath to rebuild are what got us out of the great depression.
Lack of debt since 2008 is the reason recovery has been so slow.
In Europe austerity was particularly severe, the result, poor economic performance. In the US there was some fiscal stimulus which helped, but it was not nearly enough for a robust recovery.
Monetary stimulus really does not get the job done very well as businesses are unwilling to invest even at negative real rates of interest if the economy is doing poorly. That is the reason that deficit spending during a recession is the sensible approach.
Is the solution to eliminate all debt?
I doubt that is your argument.
What debt level is reasonable, 60% of GDP?
Note that US wealth is about $200 trillion, about 12 times GDP (about $17 trillion), total debt is roughly $55 trillion or about 27% of total wealth.
I agree that there can be too much debt, this is less of a problem for a nation that has control of its own fiscal and monetary policy. I would also argue that there can be too little debt.
A lot of it comes down to if one believes that the market will self correct in a reasonable period of time when faced with a depression. I believe that the Great Depression confirmed the Keynesian view.
Milton Friedman and Anna Shwartz argued that the Great Depression was due to poor monetary policy at the time and an inadequate money supply. The recent experience since 2008 has disproved this thesis as very expansionary monetary policy and an inadequate fiscal stimulus in the US resulted in a very slow economic recovery.
In Europe a tight monetary and fiscal policy had the expected response, very little economic recovery and generally high unemployment rates.
What if you want to encourage economic contraction in advance of peak oil and further environmental disaster rather than wait for those problems and then have economic contraction/disruption/collapse after those occur?
Although I am a Keynesian if government money goes to improving infrastructure in sustainable ways, I’m all for eliminating debt if it shuts down unnecessary and harmful consumption.
In other words, while it wasn’t intended to be so, austerity is a way to decrease government and consumer spending. Less spending means less consumption. Less consumption means less demand for resources.
”Lack of debt since 2008 is the reason recovery has been so slow.”
So what caused the slowdown of growth in private sector debt post 2008?
Could it have to do with the ability to service, total debt levels?
You make it appear as the private (and public) sector has the ability to assume increasing amounts of debt.
It is quite ironic considering this blog main theme is about limits to growth (LTG) due to resource constraints and then some (as in one person) tries to bypass this by advocating that printing more money and issuing more credit will solve this.
First step is to understand that money has no intrinsic value!!!!
You appear to avoid the role of the interest rate.
The thing with credit/debt is that it allows to pull consumption forward in time, in other words, it allows to consume more than one produces against a promise to repay that sometime in the future.
Based upon the above it is possible to delay the inevitable with more debt, but at some point debts needs to be settled, that is societies have to produce more than what they consume.
What if the resources for any reason becomes unaffordable to repay said debts? What will be the consequences of that? Solve it by printing more money/issuing more debt.
Why bring in the estimate of the wealth of the US? Will the US trade some of this for down payments?
The reason why businesses are hesitant to invest even at a low interest rate could have to do with lack of profitable projects, outlooks for future growth.
The US has now a public debt of more than 100% of GDP. Government spending is approximately 23% of GDP and deficit spending is about 4-5% of GDP.
Does that sound like a sustainable path?
The US has run a budget deficit for more than 30 years. How much longer does it need to do that before the market self corrects?
How many years could it take to bring US public debt to GDP to say 60%?
The point is that the currency of a nation works due to trust!!! If a nation goes too far into debt and or try to solve its debt problem through too much inflation, it erodes the trust of its currency.
When trust first is lost, it takes a long time to reestablish it.
The great depression was very much a liquidity issue, not enough money around to connect buyers and sellers.
Based upon the above it is possible to delay the inevitable with more debt, but at some point debts needs to be settled, that is societies have to produce more than what they consume.
I don’t think debts need to be settled. Life doesn’t depend on repaying debts.
However, I am in favor of reining in debt as a way to reduce consumption.
Default is one way to settle debts.
It comes however with consequences.
Default is one way to settle debts.
It comes however with consequences.
Of course it does. But in this forum we have been talking about possible significant catastrophes: man versus nature. So the consequences of debt defaults strike me as minor in comparison.
Now taking on debt in order to prevent those catastrophes makes a lot of sense to me. Taking on debt to speed up the timetable of those catastrophes strikes me as very unwise.
If man can’t put the breaks on himself through common sense, then I am all in favor of putting on the breaks for him by insisting on paying down debt even if it plunges the world in a global economic depression.
Boomer II, I am unsure some debts can be paid down sufficiently to matter or without some considerable pain, and I have also encountered quite a bit of talk about just forgiving some, making some disappear/deleting them, or simply rejecting them as such, as legitimate, etc., which seems to make a lot of sense. Debt, in a way, seems like a bit of an illusion and form of control, among other things, and nothing is written in stone, so to speak.
In a ponzi or hoodwink economy or system, too, walking away from some forms of debt would also seem like an imperative/rebellion/revolt/resistance/etc., such as for example, in light of stealing from future generations; corporate welfare/bailouts; or a governpimp generally racking up other forms of debt to the detriment of its captive populations that have little to do with it.
Why pay back debt that one’s slavemasters/pimps accrued by other slavemasters/pimps? Makes little sense. So any discussion of debt needs to take these kinds of things into consideration to have clearer meaning.
See also my comment about money under the most recent article.
Boomer II, I am unsure some debts can be paid down suffiently to matter or without some considerable pain, and I have also encountered quite a bit of talk about just forgiving it. Making it disappear. Debt in a way seems like a bit of an illusion and a form of control. Nothing is written in stone so to speak.
Yes, forgiving debt is what I think we will come to.
Boomer II,
I think what we face is, as one put it;
“A longage of expectations and shortage of resources.”
And yes, I am in favor of less overconsumption.
Debt defaults are not extinction events, and certainly not debt forgiveness.
Caveat
emptorcreditor.Dennis,
Is debt just a balance sheet item not to worry about?
So debtor and creditor are the same on both sides of the balance sheet?
Hi Rune,
Nope. As long as the debts are at levels that do not cause problems, we are fine. The Bank of International Settlements(BIS) puts total World Debt at about 130% of World GDP, my guess is that the Banker’s Bank has this number right. Debt is not a problem at current levels and based on BIS data the World Debt to GDP ratio has been coming down for the past few years. World GDP in real terms has been growing at about 3 to 4% since 2010, but World Total Debt has stabilized at around $100 trillion in nominal terms. Perhaps the problem is too little debt.
Perhaps the problem is too little debt.
Sometimes Dennis your total disconnect from reality truly amazes me. How can anyone look at that chart you posted and not see a problem?
Such an increase in debt can only be sustained if the economy keeps growing and growing and growing. But if the economy goes into decline, that is if GDP goes negative and stays that way for a couple of years, that debt will be a very serious, even a catastrophic, problem.
Hi Ron,
The debt levelled off since 2011 while the economy continued to grow. Also note that debt more than doubled from 2001 to 2008 from 35 to 80 trillion a rise of 12.5% per year on average. From 2008 to 2012 the average rate of increase was 5.7% or less than half the rate of the earlier period.
The time to deleverage is after the economy has recovered.
Dennis, you completely missed my point. You said while the economy continued to grow.
That’s my point exactly. Debt is no problem while the economy continues to grow. But we are nearing the end of growth. Once we hit that point then debt will become a catastrophic problem.
How much of the GDP growth came from growth in debt? (Inorganic growth)
Interesting story on US debt.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/21-days-treasury-says-debt-has-been-frozen-18112975000000
”Nope. As long as the debts are at levels that do not cause problems, we are fine.”
So at what levels (percentage of GDP) do debt starts to cause problems?
”The Bank of International Settlements(BIS) puts total World Debt at about 130% of World GDP, my guess is that the Banker’s Bank has this number right.”
Does that 130% number include all debts?
And Dennis are you the go to person when BIS shall have their numbers verified?
What does a debt to GDP ratio, of say 130%, signify?
”Debt is not a problem at current levels and..
So at what levels does debt become a problem….and by the way does the interest rate play a role here?
Perhaps the problem is too little debt.
Could you demonstrate that?
There are now scores of institutions, professionals and politicians giving a lot of attention to problems that is caused by too much debt.
Then there is Dennis Coyne who claims it is not a problem, without providing supporting documentation.
Hi Rune,
There are differences of opinion about what levels of debt are a problem. In the past people focused on public debt rather than total debt, private debt in the past was not as much of a concern because banking regulation was better and the shadow banking system was much smaller.
I cannot find the source for the chart, but a Bloomberg article uses very similar numbers to the chart from the BIS.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-09/global-debt-exceeds-100-trillion-as-governments-binge-bis-says
Also see page 18 of following BIS quarterly review (March 2014)
http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1403.pdf
There are other sources that claim the total global debt is higher, I tend to believe the BIS data.
Higher interest rates will likely coincide with better economic growth, this leads to higher inflation, higher tax receipts and lower government deficits so the public debt will grow more slowly as economic conditions improve.
Often debt from the public sector needs to rise to offset falling debt levels in the private sector.
I would agree with the proposition that too much debt when the economy is doing well (like before 2008) is bad, but when the economy is in a deep recession is the time when deficit spending by governments is needed to offset a fall in debt in the private sector.
My suggestion for too little debt is based on the flattening of the total debt from 2011 to 2013, a little more debt from public investment in Europe might get Europe economies growing again, once that happens debt can be scaled back.
Higher growth will lead to higher tax collections and higher inflation which will reduce real debt levels and allow the higher interest to be paid.
For every economist that believes that the current World debt levels are a problem, there are others that think the current levels of debt are not a problem. You believe the first set of economists are correct, I think the second set are correct.
Dennis,
The figure you pointed to is global debt securities market.
BIS in their 84th annual report estimates total global debt at end 2013 at around $150 Trillion exclusive of financial debt.
McKinsey puts all debt at Q2 2014 at around $199Trillion.
Your claim that global debt levels has stabilized at $100 Trillion is proven FALSE!
Perhaps a good start for you was to get the numbers right!
Hi Rune,
Fine 150 trillion it is, still not a problem in my view. That is about 200% of 2013 World GDP. Eventually the debt will need to be paid down. In comments elsewhere you claim that the US has not had a balanced budget for 30 years. The last year of a US budget surplus was 2001 see
http://www.davemanuel.com/history-of-deficits-and-surpluses-in-the-united-states.php
Maybe you should get your facts straight as well.
There is disagreement over how much of a problem liquidity was during the Great Depression. Do you think that liquidity has been an issue since 2010? I agree that inadequate aggregate demand has been a problem and I submit that the fact that excess liquidity in the present period has done little to solve the problem of aggregate demand. I would also submit that the present experience disproves the Monetarist hypothesis that lack of liquidity was the main cause of the Great Depression. The Keynesian analysis fits both periods much better.
Dennis. You will understand this little debt issue if you do some more reading on it. Consider more than just one source, or angle (hopefully non-partisan if you can find it).
Simply, some debt is very useful, too much crashes the system.
When it comes to debt, the world is now like one of those 600 lb obese people that you can see being winched off their sofa.
Its enough that it adds huge degree of instability to a scenario that is already so unstable in other ways.
The worlds consumption and population growth would have never have become so bloated if not for this excessive debt expenditure.
When a debt situation crashes, its not just the debt holders (wealthy, retired people, pensioners, 401K’s, municipalities, states, etc) that get slammed. It also results in effects that hit all people, such as depression level unemployment, empty store shelves, big crime, and on.
It is thus wise to keep debt spending well below the level found in many countries, that is, if you prefer to live with a degree of stability in your life.
Dennis,
There is some discussion that the US had a tiny, tiny budget surplus a few years ago, but this is not reflected in data from Fed. (Note, I use official statistics!)
So can you point to official statistics that shows that, and explain why this makes a difference.
Again, nice try, but you completely miss the point.
The $150 Trillion are exclusive of financial debt.
Dennis, why should financial debt be excluded?
McKinsey also uses data from BIS estimated global debt at 286% as of 2Q 2014.
According to McKinsey global debt to GDP was at 246% in 4Q 2000.
Can you Dennis Coyne point to/document where McKinsey gets it wrong?
Apparently for someone completely detached from reality $200 Trillion in total global debt is not a problem.
For a proper understanding of debt read Paul Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/paul-krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?_r=0
You might think our failure to reduce debt ratios shows that we aren’t trying hard enough — that families and governments haven’t been making a serious effort to tighten their belts, and that what the world needs is, yes, more austerity. But we have, in fact, had unprecedented austerity. As the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, real government spending excluding interest has fallen across wealthy nations — there have been deep cuts by the troubled debtors of Southern Europe, but there have also been cuts in countries, like Germany and the United States, that can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in history.
All this austerity has, however, only made things worse — and predictably so, because demands that everyone tighten their belts were based on a misunderstanding of the role debt plays in the economy.
For Dennis
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2015/02/10/nobody-understands-debt-including-paul-krugman/
Hi Rune,
Krugman and Bernanke understand how money and banking work, just fine. Avoiding the intricacies of banking in an exposition of debt is just a simplification. Are you seriously going to argue that Ben Bernanke does not understand money and banking?
Really?
From the Forbes piece:
Bernanke dismissed Irving Fisher’s Debt-deflation Theory of Great Depressions” with the cavalier statement that “Absent implausibly large differences in marginal spending propensities among the groups, it was suggested, pure redistributions should have no significant macro-economic effects”. That’s because he shares Krugman’s delusion of treating bank lending as no different to “peer to peer” lending.
Dennis, nice try
”Are you seriously going to argue that Ben Bernanke does not understand money and banking?”
Can you point to where I made such a claim about Bernanke?
Trying to put words in my mouth will not get you anywhere!
Hi Rune,
The article that you linked to is where I got the quote about Bernanke, I assume if you link to an article that you agree with what is written in that piece, in this case the piece talks about Krugman and Bernanke.
As far as I am concerned both Krugman and Bernanke understand debt quite well.
I like Krugman, but I wish he wasn’t so focused on growth. The contractions that austerity has forced on the world are good in terms of sustainability. No money = less consumption.
Now we could have used debt to finance transitions to more efficient, less energy intensive infrastructure, which would have given us growth with positive long-range benefits, but we haven’t done much of that.
”…….which would have given us growth with positive long-range benefits, but we haven’t done much of that.
What kind of growth?
What kind of growth?
Economic growth. That’s what Krugman is looking for. So if we are trying to get that, at least use the money to transition to a more sustainable economic system.
Hi Boomer II,
As you point out not all economic growth is bad. In fact, economic prosperity will tend to lead to a demographic transition which will help to alleviate many of the World’s problems. A progressive tax code and elimination of tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid estate taxes would also be a positive step forward.
Proper taxation of externalities and a reduction of tax subsidies would also allow resources to be better allocated for a transition to a more sustainable economy.
I think the problem arises from the fact that, as our current system is structured, debt and assets should both be increasing in a healthy growing economy. However biophysical limits will soon make growth harder to come by. This is incompatible with our current monetary system.
Basically I think that the monetary system as described by mmt, as espoused by Steve Keene, is how the system operationally works. That doesn’t mean that the system isn’t flawed. The concept on the interest rate is fundamentally incompatible with an economy based on finite real resources. That’s the rub. Debt servicing with interest rates that aren’t equal on depositing and lending sides is an impossibility.
Hi Sam,
Aren’t the MMT guys the one’s that think austerity policies in Europe were a good idea? If I have that right, then MMT should be relegated to the dustbin.
I am pretty sure if interest rates for deposits and lending were equal, we would not have a lot of banking and much less lending, wouldn’t you agree?
EDIT:
No I have that totally wrong, MMT believes deficits are not very important so are not in favor of austerity.
http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/03/19/brad-delong-to-paul-krugman-yes-deficits-do-matter-in-mmt/
We are Rapacious Apes, raping the Planet:
Jesus Dave, that one is close to the bone. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a commercial fisherman many years ago who said: “We fill the net, take out the (can’t remember what they were ‘harvesting’ at that point) and everything else gets dumped over the side – dead.” Disgusting!
Doug-
I’m a former commercial fisherman, but troll fished, so was able to target wanted species.
That said, even though I was feeding thousands of people, being one of the last hunter gathers, I got tired of killing.
Clubbing a glowing, flashing, florcent yellowfin just got old.
Really liked this post, I’m glad you folded this in to the peak oil discussion b/c it’s highly relevant and commenters touch on it. The ‘competitive exclusion principal’ is basically a subset or corollary of the relationship of the 2nd law of thermo to the origins of life. There is a lot of great research and hypotheses into this linkage by England et al, but the upshot is: life exists to reduce energy gradients.
In a turbulent environment, the usual means of dispersing energy (i.e. into the vacuum of space) are less effective. Earth is an example of a turbulent environment: atmosphere, liquid water, floating landmasses. Those molecules that could, by dint of their shape, efficiently capture and degrade energy were first preferentially selected. Those that, through chemical reactions, became even more efficient and mastered the trick of replicating, became life. Those life forms that were the best at reducing gradients replicated the most, driving organic evolution.
Early life forms were pretty good at reducing available energy gradients, but not perfect. When they died, depending on subsequent events, some of them had their latent energy gradients trapped. Today, we call these fossil fuels.
Fast forward to the starting point in Ron’s post, the emergence of modern, intelligent humans. Essentially, humans became at that point the most efficient species at energy-gradient reduction the planet has seen. So efficient, in fact, that we’ve worked out how to reduce that stored energy in fossil fuels.
As Ron said, we will kill all the mega-fauna. Why? Because we are so much better than they are at reducing available gradients. We can’t help it; it’s just in our nature.
Really liked this post, I’m glad you folded this in to the peak oil discussion b/c it’s highly relevant and commenters touch on it. The ‘competitive exclusion principal’ is basically a subset or corollary of the relationship of the 2nd law of thermo to the origins of life. There is a lot of great research and hypotheses into this linkage by England et al, but the upshot is: life exists to reduce energy gradients.
Well I like to think that energy gradients are reduced because life exists… >;-)
Ecosystem
Thermodynamics
Aiko Huckauf
Storage of Exergy
The ripening of ecosystems increases their ability to
consume incoming solar exergy. This tendency has
been formulated as the tentative Fourth Law of
Thermodynamics:
If a system receives a throughflow of exergy,
it will utilise this exergy to move away from
thermodynamic equilibrium. If there is more
than one pathway of movement, that one is
likely to be chosen which yields most stored
exergy (and creates the longest distance from
equilibrium).
Humans have been simplifying and outright destroying ecosystems for at least the last 10,000 years, first by inventing agriculture, then by putting agriculture on steroids with the discovery of oil, which is why we now find ourselves in the pickle we are in with both ecological and populational overshoot…
We need to find a way to let our ecosystems regenerate. Perhaps that will be the greatest silver lining of Peak Oil.
We need to find a way to let our ecosystems regenerate. Perhaps that will be the greatest silver lining of Peak Oil.
I agree. The essential challenge is that while individuals can grasp the scope of our destructiveness (evolution allows for variance in forms after all as a hedge), the mass tendency will be to do what we (and all life forms) have been hard-wired to do for (cue Carl Sagan) literally billions of years.
If we are in fact doomed, the question I’ll ponder as the ship sinks is: was there some way to override our hard-wired, gradient-reducing tendency, or did the path not taken lie in somehow working with our tendency?
httpp://willmartin.com/peak-fish-and-sustainable-foods-last-mile-problem/
peak-fish and more
“The dream of California now is probably different than back in the 1960s,” he said. “Now it’s more financial opportunity. I think before it was what we’re looking at now — great weather, beach weather, tremendous diversity of lifestyle. Really, if you cannot find your lifestyle in this state, there is something wrong with you.”
Dr. Starr, the University of Southern California historian, said the crisis would force California to do what was needed to carry on. “Our destiny is not just to be a fantasy place,” he said. “As much as we enjoy the good life in California, we have to come to terms with Mother Nature, with our arid environment.”
“Every time California has a problem — we ran out of electricity in the early 2000s, then we ran out of money, and now we are running out of water — people say California is over,” Dr. Starr said. “It’s not over. It’s too important a part of American culture to be over. But it will change itself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/us/california-drought-tests-history-of-endless-growth.html?_r=0
The importance of Water is a lot like that of oil. We either adapt or live a lot of miserable years and parish.
Is supposed to rain in a little while. I just saw Tisdale’s niño review and it sure looks like an unusual pattern is emerging, a dual El Niño with the first uptick in 2014 and a stronger uptick in 2015. This will cause rain in California and drought in Venezuela. Yey.
It’s early, but the possibility of a major El Nino is developing.
This would releases a lot of stored ocean heat.
We should have a clearer picture by late May.
Something to keep track of.
is there a report you can recommend on geographic impacts? As best I can tell the relative rarity, appearance in different seasons, etc makes a very muddled picture, particularly in Brazil
I would recommend:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html
Weather geeks, but you can glean information not available elsewhere.
Here is a look at the long term monthly charts. Prices will need to over come the trendline that originates off the 2007 highs in order to ever see $100 oil again. Judging by where prices are currently that’s not likely to happen until mid 2017 or later
Zoomed in. Just remember Fed had also cut interest rates from 5.25% to 0.25% back in 2009 and that won’t happen this time around.
Barring something crazy happening somewhere in the middle east or somewhere else. Even if price action breaks this trendline somewhere around 2018 price still might not reach $100 until 2020 or beyond.
And, for the Electric Disciples among us:
BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE PROJECT SHOWS PROMISE FOR ELECTRICITY NETWORK
“Scientists have revealed the potential of a new battery energy storage system to reduce electricity prices while improving power efficiency and quality.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150402101417.htm
Montana Rancher becomes vegetarian
Haber Bosch
Looks like you’re going to need some natural gas, I suppose you could set it up the plant next to a feedlot in Texas and make a go of it, but I’d say natural gas from the ground is better.
First they came for the useful idiots, but I wasn’t one of those useful idiots, so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for the useless eaters, but I wasn’t one of those useless useless eaters, so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for the peons, but I wasn’t a peon, so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for the shitons, but I wasn’t a shiton, so I didn’t speak up. Then they came for the clingons, but I wasn’t a clingon, so I didn’t speak up.
One of those competitive exclusion models.
Oil is sitting at 51.45 at the moment. Some interesting price developments are occurring. Dollar is getting crushed as hopes for interest rate hikes vanished after Friday’s jobs data. Equity’s are up because interest rate hikes vanished. But the all important USD/JPY currency pair has decoupled from it’s risk on relationship. Dollar weakness is showing up there as well. This is important because if this pair unwinds due to dollar weakness then all Yen based currency pairs unwind. If Yen based pairs unwind so will all equity markets. USD weakness leading to yen strength leading to market unwind as Yen carry trade unwinds everywhere. Dollar weakness is actually going to take this market down instead of dollar strength. Oil should benefit from a weaker dollar. We will probably see a move back to the 68.00 handle if we can get a close above 55.00
The Japanese central bank will keep the Yen dropping against the dollar ‘at all costs’, since that is the only tactic left to them in order to avoid outright path of bankruptcy.
They are in effect trying to gradually default on the massive loans they have accrued, through the mechanism of Yen devaluation.
The tricky part is that most of loans (government bonds) are held by the Japanese citizenry!
The BOJ is going to lose the battle. Yen will make an all time high against the dollar as the Yen carry trade completely unwinds. Then hyper-inflation will happen.
Ouch! If that scenario happens, there goes one of the keystones of the world economy. They won’t even be able to afford heating oil.
What makes you think the BOJ will fail.? They own the printing press. I doubt the citizenry will revolt prior to the bank running out of ink.
Every fiat currency that’s ever existed has failed. I don’t buy the fact that because they can print whatever amount is needed they can’t fail.
It’s not interest free money that they are printing. They can’t print without incurring more debt either. Currently 46% of tax revenues go towards the interest payment on the debt. They could raise taxes but that will crush tax revenues. At some point well before they reach 100% of tax revenues going towards interest payments they will fail.
The Yen will strength massively as everyone will see whats coming an unwind their positions. It would be different if the Yen wasn’t a funding currency. But since it is all those short yen position will be unwound before total loss of faith occurs. Which is all hyperinflation is anyway.
I just going to take a guess and say that their failure point comes somewhere between when interest payments consume between 60-70% of tax revenues.
Yes- the Japanese people think they are rich because they owe themselves gazillions of yen. And for any given holder of a small piece of that debt , cashing in and getting out is possible- getting out with the cash to spend on real assets or to convert into another currency.
But when the crisis of confidence finally hits – they will find that their gazillions of yen are basically worthless. They are broke but they don’t understand it.
The value of their real estate must necessarily crash even without considering their screwed up money. Real estate values depend very much or mostly on scarcity – and with the population peaking and starting to decline there will soon be more houses and stores and offices than can be sold at current high prices.
I wonder if they will eventually loosen up on immigration. My gut feeling is that they will not – at least not within the next decade or two.
They don’t have the next decade or two. they only have 2-3 years tops and thats only if the rest of the world remain calm during the next 2-3 years. If major war breaks out anywhere or if you get a Greek exit, anything that would send the rest of what remains above zero of their bond yield curve into negative yields would cause a situation where the BOJ would be buying $85 billion a month in negative yielding bonds
If they buy $85 billion a month in bond with negative bond yields for any period of time. Then bond yields can never be allowed to go back to being a positive yielding asset. Their pension funds will blow up almost immediately. Taking their bond market with it. As large as their QE program is which is huge compared to what the FED did cause Japan’s economy is only a third as large as the US. It would need to be much larger to absorb the outflow from pension funds.
Japan has no way out and their running out of time.
“They are broke but they don’t understand it.” Really? I know many Japanese people and find them all to be remarkably well informed (and well educated). Moreover, almost every Japanese newspaper contains detailed analyses of their economic situation. I subscribe to two of them, Toshima Shimbun and Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, to help stall my rapidly diminishing language skills, and I’m totally fed up reading about their economic plight. But, perhaps you’re right.
Any optimism in those newspapers, Doug?
“Any optimism in those newspapers, Doug?”
Good question. Japanese tend to be a stoic bunch so it’s kind of hard to tell. What I might read (and interpret) as a cool, level-headed analysis might reflect panic or elation in a Japanese mind: Being fluent doesn’t make you multicultural. As a first approximation I’d say Japanese are fairly pessimistic about their lot, for a number of reasons.
And, their education system is intense and rigorous but often they seem to be caught up in details and loose the picture. The average Japanese high school student can pound out solutions to calculus problems that would confuse a 2nd year science student here: The answer will be correct but he may not know why the calculation was necessary (the problem). Sometimes I think that applies to their society: Like playing chess in the middle of a war zone. What war, I just took your bishop.
Now Watcher, why did you ignore my excellent question up above? Or, is my grasp of economics so pathetic I’m best just ignored?
Thought the subsequent text clarified.
There is a problem adding up all debt and declaring something meaningful about it as a function of oil this or that. Some of it may be owed to each other, so it would net to a lower number.
As for Japanese education, the core item of their curriculum is the teaching “Japan was struck twice with nuclear weapons because Japan has no oil”.
Had Japan possessed oil, Pearl Harbor would not have been bombed.
This matters now in the context of Chinese grabs for the Senkaku. People who do not understand the specifics of Japanese education on this matter will not understand their absolute unwillingness to have that oil taken away. They will fight and they will invoke any treaty they can.
“Had Japan possessed oil, Pearl Harbor would not have been bombed.”
I concur 100% with this. I’ve had many discussions with University of Tokyo professors, the crème de la crème of Japanese society, and they are all convinced to this day that WW II was necessary owing to the West keeping resources from Japan. I concur on Senkaku as well.
The debt stuff is meaningless to me: I confess to extreme economic retardation.
Ten years ago this would have been an issue.
Now, it’s largely exposed as pretense. The system is being held together with intellectual delusional duct tape. Some threat appears and money is printed and will be printed to make it go away.
The assay discussions on shale’s content is probably the most important matter under the radar going on right now. Insufficient fuel is the engine of doom and it’s not far off.
University of Tokyo professors are good liars.
The West implemented sanctions for good reasons. The Japanese Empire was just as brutal as the Nazis.
Hi Doug,
Maybe they do understand – some of them – the ones you know personally.
Maybe I am wrong myself.It wouldn’t be the first time or even the first time today lol.
Maybe I should have expressed my thoughts differently.
Maybe they DO know what a jam they are in but they are still apparently refusing to admit it to themselves or else they would be selling out and leaving in droves , or at least converting their assets into cash in another currency and moving the cash out of the country to a place in less danger of near term economic collapse.
I haven’t heard that this is happening but otoh I don’t follow Japanese news to any serious extent.
I would take more interest if I knew of a good Japanese paper with a free English language website.
Most people every where seem to be either ignorant of the problems we are facing or in a state of denial. Why should the Japanese be any different?
Good article Ron,
I agree completely with the picture that you paint. Biodiversity is going to suffer enormously wether we keep doing what we do or we suffer an economic collapse.
Competitive exclusion principle however, is only a small part of it. Competitive exclusion after all only refers to species whose primary resource is the same. And even when we kill a predator that has the same prey as we do, that is not competitive exclusion since the predator is not excluded but killed. Many of the species that we have driven to extinction have been so by direct overexploitation, others by introduction of invasive species, habitat destruction, poisoning, etc. Quite a few of them have been accidental extinctions. Probably most of them can be englobed as caused by human appropriation of primary net production.
The prospects are really bleak. Already in many countries conservation efforts are fighting a loosing battle against encroachment by economic interests or simply population growth. Once economic collapse takes place those conservation efforts will cease to exist.
Competitive exclusion principle however, is only a small part of it. Competitive exclusion after all only refers to species whose primary resource is the same.
Javier, I think you are using a far too narrow definition of the competitive exclusion principle. And you are forgetting about territory. Resources and territory are equally important. Most species go extinct because of habitat destruction. That is we want their territory and we take it, it is as simple as that. Look at what’t happening to the soon to be extinct Orangutan. We want their territory to grow palm trees for palm oil. So they must go and they do. They were competing with us for territory and we won. Habitat destruction is a perfect example of the competitive exclusion principle.
Virtually every species that has gone extinct in the last one thousand years went extinct because we either wanted their meat, hides or territory.
And even when we kill a predator that has the same prey as we do, that is not competitive exclusion since the predator is not excluded but killed.
Errrr… If an animal is competing with me for food and I kill that animal I would have to think I have done a pretty fine job of excluding that animal. For sure he will never compete with me again.
We are competing with every large animal on earth and some of the smaller ones for resources and territory. And we are winning… big time.
Ron:
Hint: This guy is functionally illiterate on population biology.
I’ve taught it, and most 10th graders are beyond the simple concepts you gave a example of.
I am sorry, Ron. I will not bring up the issue of wrong use of definitions of ecological terms again. I just think it is a pity that in a blog where there is so much knowledge on oil extraction, that it is never allowed that somebody misuses an oil term, nobody is interested in learning the correct use of ecological terms.
As I said I agree with your article, and I think it does not detract from the conclusions that you don’t use the ecological terms correctly. You may think what you want, but no ecologist will accept that killing wolves because they attack our sheep or cutting down a forest to build a housing development are examples of competitive exclusion. The competitive exclusion concept was developed to explain why we never find two species occupying the same niche. Competitive exclusion explains why Galapagos finches are specialized in so many different ways. It has little to do with the way we destroy biodiversity.
I am a biologist and I do know ecology, since I have studied it and I have always been interested on it. I really don’t care that some people in the blog forum enjoy attacking me. If my knowledge is not appreciated I will refrain from sharing it. Not my loss.
Overshoot (population)
In population dynamics and population ecology, overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the long term carrying capacity of its environment. The consequence of overshoot is called a crash or die-off.
Javier, there is really no “official” definition of overshoot. But by far the most popular definition is the one given by Wikipedia above. That is the one I subscribe to.
Fine with me, Ron. After all definitions are stablished only so people know exactly what they are talking about.
But I hope that you do realize that you are now transferring the ambiguity from the overshoot concept to the carrying capacity concept.
The following is a figured based on Joel Cohen 1995 Science article “Population growth and earth’s human carrying capacity”. Joel Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on carrying capacity and has a book published on this subject.
All those 65 estimates of Earth’s carrying capacity for mankind are peer reviewed and published in scientific journals.
If we don’t know what is the Earth’s carrying capacity, we cannot know when we were or will be in overshoot.
Javier, are you serious with that chart? Seven studies say 64 billion is the earth’s carrying capacity? Absurd! And one idiot says 1,024 billion is the earth’s carrying capacity. That is 140 times tie current population of the earth.
Let me tell you what we do know with absolute certainty. We know that we now have over 7 billion people on this earth. And we know with absolutely certainty that species are going extinct at the highest rate since the K/T Extinction. We know that we are driving those species into extinction by killing them for food or sport or by destroying their habitat. We know that the ocean is so over-fished that most of the food fish have already disappeared. We know that rivers and inland seas are drying up. We know that water tables all over the world are dropping by meters per year. We know that deserts are expanding. We know that rain forest and boreal forest are disappearing at an alarming rate. And I could name at least another dozen ways we are destroying the earth but I hope you get the point. Therefore…
We know that with our 7+ billion people we are destroying the earth and most of its other species. Therefore we know that 7 billion people is way above the earth’s long term carrying capacity. Therefore we know that we are deep into overshoot.
If the earth were not in overshoot, if we were not already well beyond the earth’s long term carrying capacity, we would not be destroying the earth.
I did not make that chart, nor do I subscribe those studies, but I do not ignore them either. They represent a lot of knowledge, far more than I have.
Ron, I agree 100% with your description of what we are doing to our planet and it is a matter that has caused me great concern for many years. My love of life is what made me a biologist. I don’t think it is possible to be a biologist without suffering for what is happening to the biosphere.
However a central question is if we are destroying Earth’s ecosystems because we need to do it to survive, or if we do it just because we can and because we don’t care enough. If an important part of the answer is the second, then it is not related to carrying capacity. It is because we have chosen to live lives that are too far from being sustainable for the environment. We are undermining our future carrying capacity not only because of our number, but more importantly because of our actions. By focusing on the number only, a very important part of the problem is ignored.
I personally don’t know what Earth’s carrying capacity for mankind is since a) it changes all the time and b) it depends on our rate of consumption. I do know that we are in a highly unsustainable path and that we will overshoot if we do not make drastic changes. I am not very hopeful that we will make them.
If we would chose to respect the environment, make a better use of water, eat less meat, stop deforestation of natural forests, develop more sustainable agricultural practices, and in general put the environment above economical interests, my opinion is that we would probably not overshoot. But for that we would need to be a rational species which clearly we are not.
However a central question is if we are destroying Earth’s ecosystems because we need to do it to survive, or if we do it just because we can and because we don’t care enough.
Thanks Javier, I now see what the problem is. You see our destroying the earth as something we do as a choice. No, we are doing what we do simply because it is in our nature to do what we do. We live to the very limit of our existence, all of us.
To expect 7+ billion people to “choose” to try to save the planet by doing whatever it might take is just not a rational expectation.
Javier, we will continue to behave as Homo sapiens have always behaved since our brains evolved in our hunter-gatherer past. We will continue to do what we have always done, to take resources and territory from other species. And we will continue to do it until all that are competing with us for territory and resources are all gone.
I don’t care enough about the definitions to participate in these discussions, but it did occur to me that one reason the human population doesn’t as neatly fit into some of the animal models is our long lifespan. Ideally we need enough resources to sustain each generation for about 70-90 years of life. So even if we seem to be doing okay at the moment, we may run out of food and water before we live our full lives.
If the technical term for overshoot is current die-off, then it is happening in a few places right now. And if localized die-off isn’t good enough to call overshoot, and if for that we need global, simultaneous die-off, then at that point the globe will have become some of a food desert, with very little life left anywhere. Humans being omnivores, we can probably made a meal out of bugs, weeds, and algae, so getting to a point where there isn’t enough food to support anyone anywhere would be nearly a dead planet.
Hi Javier,
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge of biology and ecology.
You are certainly not an expert on climate science, I am not either. On climate science many think they know more than the climate scientists, in most cases they are wrong.
I agree that 2C above the average preindustrial Holocene temperature will be ok. What is your assessment for a safe level of average global temperatures above the average pre-industrial Holocene temperature? Assume we reach that level by 2300 and remain at about that level for 1000 years or so. Also assume that these average global temperatures and the likely changes in rainfall and storm intensity are at a level that will not cause a severe dieoff of most of the flora and fauna of the planet.
I agree. But I think that the problem is how little climate scientists know about climate, rather than how much other people know. The fact that they know a lot more means little if they don’t know enough to understand climate.
That is a difficult question and the honest answer is that we have no idea. The best answer that I could give to that question would be to look at temperatures in the past.
We know based on proxies that 85% of the past 550 million years the Earth has been significantly warmer than present. Average is about +3 ºC above 1961-90 levels. So I would say it is hard to argue that that should be catastrophic. Warm periods, the opposite to cold periods as current ice age, average +4-8 ºC anomaly. That certainly would pose a problem for cold-adapted species. But I sincerely doubt that a massive die-off would take place. Mass extinctions are not associated with warm periods (they are marked in the graph).
Between +8-10 ºC can be considered rare extreme hot periods. One would expect that although probably some group could go entirely extinct, tropical species would thrive while high latitude species would be wiped. Not a mass-extinction but a severe overturn of biodiversity.
Above +10 ºC all bets are off. However we should consider several factors:
– Earth has had >10 times more CO2 than preindustrial levels with temperatures ≈+3-5 ºC (Devonian-Carboniferous), so at some point more CO2 does not affect temperature (log curve).
– We should be realistic about how much more CO2 can be produced from fossil fuels.
– Our biodiversity is severely weakened and under assault by mankind. It could be oversensitive to changes.
If you’re living on the Tibetan Plateau, you’ll probably survive the meltdowns of nuclear plants and the meltdown of the systems gone wild. Won’t make any difference if you know it or not, it won’t have much effect on your chances of survival.
Saw an eagle flying high on Saturday. The eagle doesn’t have weekends off. Actually, that’s a good thing, the eagle must be eating a healthy diet and the eating must be good, he had the power and strength to fly. Must be some good vittles out there for the taking. Top of the food chain for the eagle, he can take his pick. The eagle is a very lucky dog indeed.
No eagles, nothing to eat. Eagles gone will be a very bad sign, the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
For right now and at the moment, it is a very healthy ecosystem from where it can be seen at this time. Warts and all.
Oil jumps 5%
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/06/us-markets-oil-idUSKBN0MX01T20150406
Major poacher taken down:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/04/poaching-vessel-thunder-sinks-in.html
Here is an Image:
…the Shepherd saved the crew of “Thunder”?!?!
Why…so they can go to another “Thunder” and kill more rare fish?!?!
What happened to : “oops….rough seas…we cant…we’re sorry”
Maybe the other 5 “Thunder”(s) would have taken a few days off and a few fish have been saved…
-Well, as Ron wrote:
“…We will Kill them All…”; we will “WIN”…and then eat each other…
Be well,
Petro
Feral pigs will compete with humans for foodstuffs. The solution is to kill and eat them. You’ll never get them all, they won’t be around you all of the time, so you’ll either have to hunt them or, upon their return, kill them then or pen them into a pigpen and raise more of them. Can’t let them roam free, someone else will kill and eat them or they’ll come back and ruin your garden, then you’ll kill them. You won’t be a happy camper. Ergo, either the pigs go or you imprison them to eat them or take them to market. To exclude them, you include them, feed them stuff you won’t eat, pigweed, and then sell them at the market. Pork bellies from Iowa on the Chicago Board of Trade receive a bid.
Unless the animals take over your farm and it becomes Animal Farm, George Orwell, aka Eric Allen Blair, you’ll profit from the competitive exclusion principle.
Captain Cook had pigs with him and left a few on islands along the way, Hawaii was one place. Those pigs became known as Captain Cookers. New Zealand is another place where pigs were ‘seeded’, upon return to New Zealand, supper was waiting for Captain Cook and the crew.
Competitive exclusion principle where humans can and do benefit and the pigs live another day until they don’t.
It’s curious that oil prices and the dollar are both up today (so far, around noon Eastern Time).
Regarding monthly Brent prices, I suspect that 1/15 (the DCPB*) is to the current decline as 12/08 was to the 2008/2009 decline.
The short term and longer term rates of increase in monthly Brent prices (two months and 27 months respectively) following the 12/08 price bottom were both 43%/year.
Assuming a monthly price of $56 for March, 2015, the annualized rate of increase in monthly Brent prices from 1/15 to 3/15 was 90%/year (from $48 to $56 in two months).
*Dennis Coyne Price Bottom
Jeffery,
Long end of the yield curve sold off. 10y and 30y bonds are down = yields up giving some support to the dollar. Guess there is nothing to worry about today since rate hikes are off the table. It’s not a big move but enough to give a little support to the dollar.
Why the dollar is up is important. If it were the case where interest rate hike expectations were pushing the dollar higher in would be negative for oil.
Fed put is alive and well. I’m starting to believe that the only thing that would ever bring this market down is actual economic recovery which we will never get. Economic recovery can’t be allowed to happen because bond bubble would pop when everyone left the safety of bonds. Leaving the Federal government bankrupt. So economic recovery is not in their best interests.
That is a pretty radical thought but think about it. It’s true!
Managed contraction.
In the 1970s, Ehrlich predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and it was too late to do anything about it. “The cancer of population growth … must be cut out,” Ehrlich wrote, “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” – Dr. Paul Ehrlich
Or was it Chicken Little?
The battle to feed humanity is not over, the battle to save humanity is over, it can’t be done, humans are too stupid to save themselves.
United Nations Calls for an End to Industrialized Farming
wrt the documentary Cowspiracy
ANDERSEN: “Well, I thought I was doing everything I could to help the environment–driving less, riding a bike, taking short showers. And then I found out a UN report study that our diet and raising animals for food livestock creates more human-caused greenhouse gases than all the transportation put together. And then that led me on a journey of discovering that not only that, but this one industry is the leading cause of rainforest destruction, water consumption, water pollution, ocean dead zones, and species extinction, and basically across the board, and then to find out that our world’s leading environmental organizations–Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Oceana, all these groups, they don’t mention this anywhere. And it seemed, if anything, they might have been covering it up.”
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12659
Garret Hardin, the competitive exclusion principle
I have just returned from a tour of some remote tribes in southern Ethiopia. The Mursi, Hamer and Omo people live an ancient pre-industrial life in huts surrounded by African wilderness. It is a deeply moving experience to see people do without shower, packaged food or anything that we assume is vital for our existence. Kids as young as 10 have a useful function as goat herders. They don’t go to school because life is the school.
Sadly, what is promoted as generous development aid is really a destruction of perhaps the oldest civilizations on earth. The skeleton of Lucy was found in Ethiopia and is estimated to be 3.2 Million years old. These people will survive a post oil society without problems, provided there is no nuclear exchange over the remaining resources.
Life is also joyful and simple. I met a Mursi leader who spent two years in Australia. He settled back into his hut to dedicate his life to raising his children and herding cattle. It is a tough life but he prefers it to the stresses of modern life.
Young backpackers should visit this place before they go and see other wasteful “first world” countries. Seeing rural and remote tribal Ethiopia will put all they know into perspective.
Even in this apparent wilderness, there are few wild animals. Lions, tigers, giraffes have been replaced with cattle and goats. The competitive exclusion principle applies.
Whatever happens in such a society does not get recorded as GDP. Nor are births and deaths recorded in a registry office. They don’t have banks or shopping malls.
Yet this society is just about as old as mankind. And perhaps these people will be among those to survive and thrive when our fossil fuel based civilisation is done with the last drop of oil.