To what end do we delay the inevitable?

So we can powerdown and depopulate later?

The longer we remain in overshoot, the greater the die-off and the greater the damage to the ecosystem and carrying capacity.

Mitigation efforts should be aimed at preserving "carrying capacity", not human numbers, morals, sanctity of life, and all the other full-belly ideas we came up with.

Because without an ecosystem to support us, all those things become rather moot and meaningless.

Do we continue our short-term, short-sighted ( and very selfish )end run around nature's limits, and so decimate our environment as to threaten our very existance as a species?

Sure. Mankind could have avoided overshoot. We just chose not to listen to or elect those that championed conservation and ecological modesty.

We insisted on the Tragedy of the Commons.

We insisted on the freedom to breed without restraint.

We insisted that the can must be kicked down the road.

We refused to pay the piper.

Now the bill is coming due...with interest.

We must now acquiesce to nature.

Mitigation may well lead to our extinction.

When you put something on sale that was for sale before, and it sells, consumption of it increases. However, this is not always the case for stuff that has been for sale and continues to sell. How can efficiency increases always lead to increased use?

That's why it is called a paradox. The results are the opposite of what you would expect.

Or, ya know. It's termed a paradox for other reasons.

Regarding this statement you made earlier.According to this, as efficiency increases post peak, use will. But one of the tenets of peak oil is that we will never produce more than we have at peak. If we use 100mbpd at peak, we cannot use 101mbpd no matter how much efficiency increases. That extra 1mbpd is simply not available. Efficiency increases may lead to an increase in the use of something up to the limits of it's production, but an increase in efficiency does not always lead to an increase in use. We cannot use more than we produce, regardless of any improvements in efficiency.

Most cars could be charged once per day, overnight, for about 6-8 hours.

That is for the entire PJM grid. The country is made up of several interconnecting grids.


All reactors currently in service are thermal reactors and have a relatively low fission efficiency of just 0.6%-0.7%. Newer designs such as Breeder reactors can fission about 60% of uranium. Hence, they will not need nearly as much fuel, although I do not believe that this is a real long term problem anyways, but at the least it would stop the "were short on uranium" threads.

It sounds like Hubbert was as wrong about solar as he was about nuclear.

I agree, but at this point there are really no other workable options IMO.


I do not believe that there is any kind of energy shortage, only a FF shortage. If this system were to be adopted, you would see a general transission towads electricity because it would be cheaper.

As far as population goes, one cannot say what it will look like in 30-50 years. I for one, believe that there are far more devastating wars ahead of us. Someone once said, the original goal of technology is the advancement of ones might. Iraq might not have WMD's but others do. Population may not be a concern.

So what makes you so sure he is right about everything else?

You presuppose that human civilization is renewable--i.e., that it has the capacity to self-correct its population growth and resource depletion rates on it own. Maybe it doesn't. Hasn't every other civilization in history fallen? Why would we assume that our iteration is different, that we are somehow more enlightened than any of the civilizations that have come before us?

As Forrest Gump said "stupid is as stupid does". When you look at what the last 200 years or so of civilization has done from a sustainability perspective, maybe we don't even crack the top 10 of great civilizations in history.

I'm just not sure that the human race is capable of doing what you ask of it--i.e., making a rational decision at the group level based upon a subtle and systemic problem like PO.

It seems you are doomed to a state of never ending frustration based upon your belief that the industrialized human populations COULD HAVE done something but didn't. I wonder if that is true.

I can feel the frustration in your words here on this forum, and you SHOULD be more or less preaching to the choir here. If a pastor's own congregation leaves him perpetually grouchy because of their moral failings, what hope is there for the unwashed masses?

I would say lighten up, not because the situation isn't as heavy as it gets, but because pounding the pulpit a little harder sometimes doesn't drive your point home with any more force and actually has the effect of making some people not want to go to church at all.

I do not disagree with most of what you say and appreciate your analysis very much. Human nature just seems to be on your nerves all the time and your irritation may weaken the power of your message.

Civilization isn't renewable or sustainable. But most human societies have not been civilizations.

It might be possible to devise a society which enjoys some aspects of civilization but not others. But it wouldn't be "civilization," it would be something else.


We need to try something else. In fact, to emulate the diversity of nature, we should probably try a lot of something elses.


See the books of Daniel Quinn for more thoughts along these lines.

Thanks for the Daniel Quinn suggestion. It look like he has done some interesting work on the subject of whether we are living in a palace or a house of cards. I look forward to reading his books.

I think a lot of the interesting PO literature is not necessarily explicitly about PO, but rather what about what may lie at the end of the road we as a civilization are travelling.

When I was a kid I remember confidently imagining humans travelling in space, seeking other intelligent beings, gradually uniting as a people on a global scale, etc. As an adult, I not only feel that manned deep space travel is a pipe dream, but that we will be lucky if we can figure out a way that we can continue to live on this planet (for people who talk about populating other worlds, I would like to see a breakdown of what that would cost on a per head basis).

Viewed through the PO prism, the idea of space travel seems like a silly waste of resources (though I find the moon landings now more than 35 years ago to be an amazing achievement--check the Munebuggy in my avatar), and the science fiction portraying aliens as having the ability to travel through vast distances in space with seemingly no concerns about energy may have just been a ghoulish reflection of our own belief that our resources would similarly never be depleted. I think people may suddenly find the probability of aliens much lower when they can't even get any gas for their car to drive to work. Where do the aliens fill up their space ships? Even if its super-advanced alien technology, presumably it's still subject to the same laws of physics and, more importantly, the entropy that surely super-sophisticated alien technology would be subject to.

...Unless the aliens are travelling telepathically or have otherwise shed the bonds of the physical world. As I recall, that's what the Martian elders had done in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Wow. Why don't you understand human frailties for once - and come up with some better ideas? This world that you are entering is only inhabited by one person. But perhaps that's the way it should be. One death, so frail, so simple, one bullet. Beautiful, in a way...

JP

The trouble I have with the notion of "carrying capacity" is "who decides?" My idea of carrying capacity may be different than yours. How do we know that our carrying capacity decision makers are not corrupt and giving a little more capacity to their buddies than to their enemies?

It's a legitimate question, and is related to the comments I had about the Communist elite--no matter how well the SYSTEM is designed or how pure its conception, if there are people running it, it's going to get political and it's going to get human nature footprints all over it.

China's one child policy LOOKS like a pretty good idea from a carrying capacity maintenance perspective. What has the reality been? Selective breeding for boys so that there will be a whole generation of pissed off single Chinese men who have to go the Phillipines to get a wife.

I wonder why the notion of carrying capacity preservation is not also subject to Jevon's Paradox--i.e., as we become more efficient in our allocation and preservation of carrying capacity, what prevents the world from having a dramatically lower population that still finds a way to consume way more than it needs?

The issue I SO wish Monte would address is whether his ideas may simply be inconsistent with human nature, especially human nature as it is expressed in large groups, in governments and in other institutions. That is, maybe the tragedy of the commons is not a tragedy so much as it is a foreseeable and obvious result of putting competitive creatures in a setting where survival is based upon enlightened notions of equitable sharing and preservation. It's kind of like telling your kids to play the "quiet game." You would like it to work, but it rarely does.

Although people can be very clever and insightful at times, the one large blind spot that the human race seems to have is appreciating LARGE problems that unfold SLOWLY. The frog in the pan of boiling water is a good metaphor for human beings' failure to see and attempt to avoid obvious long term problems like overpopulation, the impossibility of endless economic growth, the certainty that any weapon that is created will eventually be used, the finite nature of natural resources, etc. These problems seem obvious, and yet most of the world seems utterly indifferent to them. Why? You could say it is because most people are stupid, or you could say it is because the human brain and human society are not designed to recognize or deal with these kinds of problems. These problems are too subtle to tap into any human survival instinct. Think about it, up until very recently in human history, what would have been the survival value of the mental capacity to recognize problems that began long before you were born and that were going to continue long after you are dead? I see no survival value to the individual in being able to recognize and formulate solutions to these kinds of problems to begin with; therefore, when humans began to be the ones creating these big long-term problems, no one was able to see the consequences or stop the march of "progress."

I'm not as certain as Monte that failure to stop expanding the population, resource depletion, environmental destruction, and other foibles were simply bad CHOICES on the part of humanity. I'm not sure we could have done anything different. It may just be our nature to make these kinds of miscalculations and pay the price because we have not yet developed a group instinct for subtle and/or long term problems that threaten the long term survival of humanity. Will we develop these instincts in time? I don't know.

When we read about a bunch of reindeer on an island that destroyed their habitat and died off, we say that is a good illustration of die off. We don't say "those reindeer were sure a bunch of dumbasses to keep reproducing and eating everything in sight."

Imagine if all the male reindeer on the island had gotten together and the leader had said "Deer, we're going to have to stop shagging the lady deer because there are too damn many of us and we are eating up all of the food. Now I know how much you like humping the ladies, but we are going to have to change our ways. Now who is with me?" Even if all of the deer agree to go against their instinctive desire to hump the lady deer, it only takes one male who decides to break the rules to mess up the whole setup, and therefore endanger the whole group. For this reason the reindeer were obviously doomed, even if they had been smart enough to institute the no lady deer shag policy, because the policy went against reindeer nature.

Am I concluding that we are doomed no matter what? No, because I don't know what will happen. Saying that one particular doom prevention plan doesn't seem to work--i.e., focusing exclusively on preserving carrying capacity to the exclusion of all other instinctive human desires--doesn't mean that NOTHING will work. It just means that rather than arguing that we all need to subject ourselves to a dogma of carrying capacity preservation, maybe someone should come up with an approach that is both innovative AND consistent with human nature.

In my reindeer example, it might be something like "Hey, instead of the no shag policy, how about a few of us get jobs flying sleighs for Santa and we can drop a bunch of gift wrapped reindeer feed on the island every Christmas? How about that?" Would this plan work? It would if Santa Claus helped.

In a nutshell, my questions to Monte are these: Is it possible that your maintenance of carrying capacity argument is unworkable because it simply asks too much of human nature? Are you basically suggesting that it is within human nature to perform the same function on ourselves that predators do for other populations--i.e., limit population growth? How is this different from that episode of Star Trek where the people went and checked into the death chambers because they had gone to "virtual war" to minimize suffering?

Just trying to move the conversation forward.

BigTex, you are confusing human nature with the nature of our culture. We are not humanity.


I feel like I have to say this stuff over and over and over and over.


Here's where expressing anger isn't helpful. Patience is needed.


So I'll say it again. Most human cultures kept their populations and consumption within the carrying capacity of their territory. They did this not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they had to. They knew with absolute certainty that their resources were finite. Our culture is used to always going over the hill for more resources. We've done it for many thousands of years. It is even part of our culture to believe that this behavior is "human nature" even though it is not, it is rare among human cultures.


Please see the books of Daniel Quinn for more details about these anthropological facts.