The UK is among the worst placed for this, as you will learn on your own within the next 5 years.

Read the dieoff link to understand the interconnections. Read "Limits to growth" and "Beyond the limits". Decondition yourself of flat earth economics.

The keywords you need to understand are food and population.

The UK could lose its wealth very fast if it had to import food at high prices.

This, if anything, should be reassuring to other countries - as I think the UK is not in too dire straights.

The most essential thing in the whole die-off equation - food- seems to be something that we could potentially produce in far greater quantities than we do now.

We currently meet 60% of our food needs with less than 2% of our labour force, and on less than 1% of our land - of which 23% is arable.
In addition, we throw away perhaps a quarter of our food.

In my view, even if petrochemicals were phased out, and no technological improvements were found, and even if we had enormous problems in almost every sector of our economy, we could at very least feed ourselves, which is in the final analysis the most crucial factor against the die-off hypothesis.

Current food production comes from intensive agriculture, which is fossil fuel dependent. You couldn't possibly produce as much per hectare without that. It's not about the percentage of population involved in agriculture, but about yield per hectare.

The UK has one of the worst ecological footprints per capita in Europe, mostly due to high urbanization and high population density.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

I'm not so sure. The beauty of current food production is its ability to yield large amounts of food without the use of a larger labour force. What I am suggesting is that, even if productivity were to drop by a large margin as a result of declining petrochemical availability, were we to dedicate more labour to agriculture and on a greater area of land, we could still feed the population.

If you factor in some other points, for example the possibility of reducing livestock agriculture (which is by far less efficient in terms of calorie per hectare than growing crops), and the feasibility of 'permaculture', i.e. individuals growing some food on their own land or land in their community, then the possibility of at least producing at least sufficient food seems even more likely.

You need to study the relation between yields per hectare and fossil fuel use. Again flat earth economics is of no use here.

The UK doesn't have enough prime land for its current population without fossil fuels -- it's a serious ecological debtor in terms of its footprint.

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Fossil-Fue ... 0865715653

Told ya, there goes my job!

Instead, I need to go become a farmer,I guess. Who is going to pay me to farm? What if I suck at farming? (I can't even grow enough food for myself presently, let alone other people)

What I'm suggesting isn't that we could achieve more yields per hectare with increased labour mobilization, but that we could achieve greater yields with more hectares. This would require more people, and more cultivatable land, both of which we have.

I see your point and I agree to a large extent - except the part about this vast luxury liner making even a gradual about face.

We'll see.

Cheers.

The point I am making is that the UK would be a net ecological debtor in the absence of fossil fuels even if it were to use all available land to grow food. You would have to reduce the GDP to about 1/4 of what it is now and massively reorganize the economy. The UK standard of living would become about equal with that of Albania, assuming that the transition could be managed.

Countries which are ecological creditors could become much richer than the UK by exporting food. It almost makes you wish that the UK had been a bit nicer to those unwashed East Europeans.

That's a fair point, and you may well be correct. All I am saying is that there's a big difference between the standard of living of Albanians and a 'die-off', and this is a distinction a lot of catastrophists don't seem to be able to make.

i know it was a potato pathogen, which makes it a little more complex than simply saying it was nothing but, and nothing more, than british policy. in any case, it doesn't matter why the limiting resource became scarce. what matters are the consequences.


do you understand the concept of ratio, proportion, percentages? if a 100 out of a population of 150 die, that's a significant event for that population--that's a die off. in your hypothetical w/modern cities, 100 people suddenly dying would be a nearly insignificant number of the total. if 100 out of every 150 people were to die in LA, that would be a death toll of 6,887,959.33 people. how does that sound?

the mayan collapses occurred in the tenth and ninth centuries, not the fifteenth. many cities were abandoned and their empire collapsed because they simply could not sustain their numbers.

what percentage of the population died? was it enough to cause any collapse?

i ve seen any number of people give you a good definition. die-off doesn't necessarily mean extinction, although it can. it's simply a population collapse.

for some reason you're having a hard time understanding the following: you can have a die-off without an extinction event occurring, but you cannot have an extinction without a die-off. a die-off is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an extinction. the two are not synonymous.

Personally I am not a doomer. The dieoff scenario could be localized to places such as Africa and South Asia.

However this raises geopolitical questions, most importantly migrations and wars. Propagation of diseases due to increased poverty and reduced medical assistance is another aspect.

It would be truly ironical if we ended up with the British queuing to migrate East, and Eastern Europe putting in place a high-skilled visa program for the former.

Welcome back Petrodollar.

Could you comment on what you think will happen to the currencies of GCC countries in this thread:

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic40715.html
Paulson Travels To Arabia Over Dollar Pegs

I agree and use this as an answer to the doomers. When you say die-off you are implying a massive number of deaths. If you were to say a massive lowering of the standard of living then I could agree with you. There might be localized mortality in great numbers but again that is nit-picking in my estimation, especially when applied globally.

I believe there are two much bigger problems facing us, one related to PO and the other not related to PO except in a very indirect manner.

First there is the problem which a few have touched on and that is how the population is going to adjust (notice I did not say adapt) to a more rural lifestyle. How many of the young yuppies and generational Xers will accept having to do manual labor to grow, prepare and store their food. I am 70 years old and can remember spending hours preparing and caning the produce from our garden. Along those lines how many people today, especially in the US, even have the rudimentary skills needed to produce their food on a year round basis, let alone the surplus to feed the urban population, especially with animal power? Also where is the equipment to be found which can be used with simple horsepower, not tractors. These are problems which will greet us here in the US with the decline in oil, possibly not so much in Europe which still has a more individualized farm population.

The second problem I have, which is even more immediate, is that of water. What happens to the urban population when the pumps stop. Look at Los Angeles. It gets a large percentage of its water from several hundred miles away. Without the use of electricity to pump that water to them, death will come quickly. Most of the California farmland is dependent upon irrigation. Whoops, without the water, it returns to a dusty, sandy desert.

It is my turn to chastise this entire web site about PO. You are concerned with PO for a valid reason, i.e., the decline of our way of life. But I think you are basically doing the same thing the environmental global warming people are doing. You are wringing your hands about the UK, Europe, and the US. These countries are already doing much, either correctly or incorrectly, in the alleviation of the problem of climate change. But the real culprits (if there are any) are across the Pacific and could care less what you are saying. The same is true of PO. So you are all basically blowing into the wind for your own self satisfaction. You are lambasting our governments about changes you think need to be done to stop the impact on climate change and/or PO. You are talking to the wrong people. You are wringing your collective hands, woe is us, but are really doing nothing to stop the effects from China and India. If you want to get their attention, QUIT BUYING THEIR GOODS. That will a whole lot more than simply complaining to Parliment or Congress. Also quit using the petroleum products on a daily basis. Don't buy the products made from petroleum. Quit the fast food places. Recycle or better yet use things over and over instead of throwing them in the land fill, especially plastics. Reduce the usage of oil now, not when it becomes more scarce. Learn how to be more self-sufficient. Do ride the bicycle. Walk. Turn the lights out. A million things done by 340 million people will make a statement. START LIVING AS THEY DO IN ALBANIA (or select your own chosen 2nd world country).

Start worrying about where your next glass of water is coming from. That will becoma a more important result indirectly of PO than how you are going to get to grandma's house. No water and you die in a few days. There is where the ultimate die-off could come from, not starvation or even disease.

Thank you for letting me be on the soap box. I live in the southwest desert and have seen the effects of the local water supply going empty due to the failure of a pump. It is not pretty.

Well things are more complicated in that we will also be hitting other resource constraints, such as water.

So I do think that there will be a dieoff on some rather large areas of the planet.