There has been considerable discussion lately as to whether or not total collapse of the world economies will happen in the relatively near future. I think that is the wrong question. Let me explain.
Ecological collapse of the world’s ecosystem is a lead pipe cinch. It is already well underway and instead of slowing down, it is gaining momentum fast. Here are just a few examples from recent news.
‘Peak soil’ threatens future global food security
“Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 percent less than they would do otherwise by around 2050.”
Surging food consumption has led to more intensive production, overgrazing and deforestation, all of which can strip soil of vital nutrients and beneficial micro-organisms, reduce its ability to hold water and make it more vulnerable to erosion.
Such factors, exacerbated by climate change, can ultimately lead to desertification, which in parts of China is partly blamed for the yellow dust storms that can cause hazerdous pollution in Asia, sometimes even severe enough to cross the Pacific Ocean and reduce visibility in the western United States.
“If we keep treating our soil the way we do, we will have to convert about 70 percent of the earth’s surface into agriculture to meet demand for food by 2050 (from about 40 percent now), Crawford said.
Crawford also noted that moderately degraded soil could only store about half the amount of water of good soil, adding to pressure on limited water resources.
Cheap fat may ‘spell doom’ for Africa’s great apes
Scientists warned Thursday that a palm tree with an oily fruit might “spell doom” for Africa’s great apes, thanks to demand for palm oil, a cheap fat often used as a replacement for trans fats.
But that land is running out.
“Everything is flattened, often burned. There are scars of burning that is completely devoid of anything. It’s like a biodiversity disaster zone,” Wich said. “It’s quite hard to see.”
The island of Borneo, below, the only habitat of the Orangutan, is almost deforested. The land has been cleared to grow palm oil. Only the central mountainous area remains for them to dwell. And those central slopes are today being cleared to grow more palm oil.
The only great ape, other than humans of course, outside Africa will be extinct in less than 20 years. And soon after that all the other great apes in Africa will be gone also.
Or should I tell you about the Aral Sea:
From Wiki: The shrinking of the Aral Sea has been called “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters”. The region’s once-prosperous fishing industry has been essentially destroyed, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The Aral Sea region is also heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems. The retreat of the sea has reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer.
The rivers feeding the Aral Sea were dammed to grow cotton. Now the cotton fields are salting up and do not produce near as much cotton as the did in the early days of the irrigation project.
The exact same thing, of course, has happened to Lake Chad:
The exact same thing is happening to the other African lakes though Lake Chad is by far the worse… so far.
The world, the entire world is being destroyed in the same manner as the forest of Borneo, Africa and the Amazon. The fertile soils of the world are washing away or being blown away. The rivers of the world are drying up. The Yeallow River of China now reaches the sea only in the wet season. The Colorado River in the US and Mexico never reaches the sea anymore.
The water tables of China and India and other parts of Asia are dropping by meters per year. Many irrigation wells in India are dry and many Indian cities are totally without water. Water must be trucked in. In the US, the Ogallala aquifer that covers part of eight states in the Midwest is being depleted. Soon it will feed only half as many people.
And let’s talk about fish. This article written eleven years ago, says fish stocks have declined by 90% since 1950. And this article written just four years ago says they all could be gone in 40 years, (36 years from now). Is it not blatantly obvious what we are doing to the ocean? And it is not just the fish, bottom trawl nets are destroying the life that grows on the continental shelf ocean floor. And plastics in the ocean are killing turtles. They think it is jelly fish. And even the wandering albatross are being wiped out. They too are eating the plastic trash and regurgitating it into the gullet of their young. Their skeletal bodies cover Midway and other bird islands.
1200 miles from civilization, birds die from eating man-made plastic
And I could go on and on and on about how the world is being destroyed by humans. It is happening everywhere. The ocean fisheries are going away, rivers an lakes are drying up everywhere, forest are being destroyed, cut for timber and cleared for land to grow crops. And even the topsoil we depend on for our very existence is being depleted.
And of course, not the least of problems, is oil, the lifeblood of civilization, will soon peak and then decline… forever. But still people say: “Not to worry, we have technology. We will develop wind and solar power, battery powered cars, trucks and tractors, we will adapt… yes that’s the ticket, it will all happen so slowly we will adapt.”
To hell you say. What’s happening slowly is we are destroying the very earth we depend on for life. It is happening slowly and we are not adapting. We are making no attempt to adapt. We are only making it worse every day. Most will not even admit it is happening. And most of the few who do realize what is happening believe that humans will not suffer that much even if we do wipe out all other mega fauna on earth.
We will do nothing to adapt, slowly or otherwise. Of course we will build battery powered cars but that will only help mitigate the price of oil. We will do nothing to mitigate the destruction of the earth. And trying to adapt with wind and solar power will fall far short of what is needed. It will prove way too expensive and as the peak of oil production will catch us all off guard. A stock market crash followed by a deep recession will likely follow. Private industry will have little capital to convert anything and the man in the street will have even less. But even if they did, that would make little difference in the long run.
The earth, before the industrial revolution, could support, long term, perhaps one to two billion people. Today the earth is so degraded it can support perhaps half a billion, long term. But we are making it worse every day. Collapse is not something that may happen in the future. Collapse is something that is happening today.
Homo sapiens are deep, deep into overshoot. It was just something that naturally happened. It is nobody’s fault. It is just what happens to any species when, for some reason or another, happen upon times of plenty. And as Richard Dawkins put it:
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.
I cannot say when things will really start to fall apart, but they most definitely will. And I cannot say how long the decline in human population will take but I would guess a few decades. And I cannot say how many humans will be among the survivors, but I would guess less than half a billion. And I cannot even venture a guess as to what life will be like after it all settles out, so I won’t guess.
This post is basically an extension to the subject I covered in my essay:
Of Fossil Fuels and Human Destiny
louis wu on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 2:52 pm
No, no, no.Just ask any neoclassical economist and they will tell you that the physical environment is just a subset of the economy and as long as we keep the economy groing with the use of human ingenuitium and technologium there will always be more of everything so no worries.
penury on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 3:06 pm
Yes the human population is going away. Not soon enough to save any other specie but in geological terms very soon, As Bob used to ask on TOD are humans smarter than yeast? I am afraid the answer has to be resounding NO.
Perk Earl on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 3:15 pm
For as long as I’ve been up to speed on peak oil I’ve also thought in terms of a quick collapse at some juncture of declining oil from peak production. However, lately I’m questioning that due to the myriad ways there seems to be to kick the can down the road. From printing money to shorting gold to forgiving debt humankind is starting to seem like they are great at playing collapse dodge-ball. Like Neo dodging a bullet, humans are amazing at bending to new constraints.
Sure on a net energy decline many will have less or even suffer privation, but the have’s will not only make sure they get theirs, but also remain well protected from the disenfranchised. Which leads me to think we are on a long road of degradation. As the article points out we are already degrading the soil, but also just about everything else in the natural world we rely upon for support.
Unfortunately it seems to be a case of degradation until there isn’t much of anything left.
J-Gav on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 4:13 pm
A lot of fairly old info there, Ron, but still well worth repeating for those who missed it while they were playing video games or something….
On the question of collapse we have a veritable embarrassment of riches, don’t we? Financial, economic, ecological, etc. What will be the detonator? And when? I fully agree with you that those are very difficult questions to answer and I also agree that the Big Shift is already underway, though generally unrecognized.
Coming back to your first paragraph – for me it matters less which factor (or convergence of factors) leads to collapse than how ‘total’ that collapse ends up being. I think you’d concur that a spectrum of outcomes exists there. And it doesn’t begin with BAU anywhere in the the picture.
That still leaves several degrees of severity: from the ‘very unpleasant’ but not planet-wide life-threatening, to all-out extinction of many many species, quite possibly including our own. In spite of the fact that nobody I know considers me to be an ‘optimist,’ I’m still not sure that’s it’s already ‘Game Over,’ even if it’s getting pretty close.
wildbourgman on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 4:23 pm
What if a vast reaching and deep economic collapse brings relief to these symptoms of ecological collapse?
Who here is for it?
JuanP on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 4:46 pm
Perk, Dodge we will until we can’t, and I think we will be playing ball for a very, very long time. I used to think it would come faster, too.
JGav, I liked your degrees of severity way of putting it and, no, BAU is no longer an option, like you say.
JuanP on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 4:51 pm
Wild, I’d be for it, but I don’t see it playing out that way. Most likely, it is going to be a long, drawn out process that will last decades and it will not ever get better in our lifetimes. It will wear almost everyone down in the long run.
Norm on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 5:08 pm
what about Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Its at an all-time low, only time it was lower was original fill-up of the 1930’s.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/getty/article/ALeqM5igsEtvI_ne-bR3HLtf1wBAcDPmWQ?docId=452331950
Looks like everybody too stupid to do anything, about anything. Everybody an ostrich, with head in sand…. Or everybody a Mitt Romney, with head in the personal bank vault, counting gold bars.
The farmers are all using up ‘fossil water’ drilling the well deeper every year. Used to be we laughed at 3rd world countries that did such suicidal stuff. now we do that suicidal stuff here and nobody say anything.
If water shortages cause some food shortages… that might cause some social unrest.
JuanP on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 5:09 pm
This article is very good. I find no fault in it. I give it an A+. I liked the images included, too, they are both educational and impacting.The perfectionist in me is very happy and it was a pleasureable reading. 😉
Nony on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 6:07 pm
Just one more datapoint showing me how the Peaker community was not careful, objective oil analysts but more motivated by a political (antigrowth environmentalist) attitude. Kind of depressed also.
Richard Ralph Roehl on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 6:10 pm
According to the Pope (and right-$wingin’ Jeeezass radio station preachers)… the best way for humanity to adapt… is to stop all birth control on the Earth! Indded! Der sheeple-people must go forth and multiply (always in the ‘missionary position’)… and they should pee-seed the deed in the name of Jeeezass and corp-rat profits.
Needless to say… the Anarchists Society concurs. As we all learned in the $ovietnam war era, we sometimes have to burn down the god damn village in order to save it.
Dredd on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 6:35 pm
“I cannot say when things will really start to fall apart, but they most definitely will.” – Ron Patterson
“One thing is for sure on the subject of global warming induced climate change: if there was ever a time to err on the safe side, it was long ago.” – Dredd
shortonoil on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 7:02 pm
We are in the mist of the Sixth Mass Extinction – that has been confirmed for several decades. However, people seldom listen to science unless it is telling them something that they want to hear. Extinction is not the kind of thing that brings on a warm fuzzy feeling, anyway there is a concert in town tonight, and why worry about something that is not going to happen for years.
Humans are creatures that evolved on the great spreading savannahs of Africa. Our foresight consisted of the ability to realize that up ahead there may be something hiding behind that bush, and it may want to eat us. Beyond that little other was needed. We have advanced somewhat, but planning requires thinking, and thinking requires effort. Our brain already consumes 25% of the body’s energy budget; additional usage brings on uncomfortable feelings of excretion.
Yes, there is a very good chance that petroleum depletion will be the straw that will breaks the camel’s back. There is no way to keep our civilization together without it. Confronting soil, water, food, and various kinds of mineral depletion without it will likely turn out to be impossible. If history is any kind of a road map into the future, when that day arrives we will turn on ourselves. Our vast stockpiles of slaughter machinery will be used to extend our day by one more. We need to worry about the oceans, the fish, the soil erosion, the arctic warming. We also need to worry about the creature that is hiding behind that bush. Most likely – it is human!
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Plantagenet on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 7:09 pm
People who imagine a coming global collapse are having a fantasy. It is far more likely that some regions will collapse some will stay the same and some will grow. The future will be much like now only more so.
BC on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 7:17 pm
world war 3 is coming that should speed up our demise
Northwest Resident on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 7:28 pm
Perhaps in another solar system far away, intelligent beings are monitoring radio signals and other data obtained from observing plant Earth with their highly sophisticated equipment. They are searching for signs of intelligent life, but not finding any. Instead, they are picking up signals that indicate the earth’s biosphere is being destroyed by an overpopulation of primitive and ignorant creatures that have only recently emerged from the trees (in geological time). Those creatures gruntingly call themselves humans. They have become the dominant predator species on planet Earth, but in just one hundred or so cycles of their planet around their sun they have plundered earth’s resources to the point where the massive population is on the brink of dramatic die-off. The distant aliens continue to monitor as they have for millennia, patiently observing, wondering if the human species will ever develop beyond their current state of primitive ape-like intelligence, or if the human race will even survive at all.
Makati1 on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 8:43 pm
“…We will do nothing to adapt, slowly or otherwise…We will do nothing to mitigate the destruction of the earth… Most will not even admit it is happening…I cannot say how many humans will be among the survivors, but I would guess less than half a billion…” Or none.
I watched a video about a man in the US south west who contracted the Black Plague recently. I thought it was gone long ago. It isn’t. Rodents in the southwest still carry the disease. About 1/3 of them, according to the video. The man was lucky. He had modern meds and a hospital to keep him alive 90 days in an induced coma. He did lose two legs to it though. Lucky guy! (Cannot imagine his hospital bill!)
“…In the United States, the last urban plague epidemic occurred in Los Angeles between 1924 and 1925. Since then, human plague in the United States has occurred as scattered cases in rural areas (an average of 10 to 20 people are infected each year)…”
http://plague.emedtv.com/plague/is-the-plague-a-health-problem-today.html
Mother Nature is waiting with her army to erase the human species from the earth. Collapse is slow and then all at once.
DMyers on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 8:59 pm
The evidence is before us on the matters discussed. I don’t see how anyone could argue that these phenomena were not significant. The images of the lake and Aral Sea make a vivid case for an exponential trajectory of the current wave of depletion reality.
“The future will be much like now only more so.” Plant, that is either an accurate statement or wishful thinking. I tend to believe the latter.
The long or short of collapse remains to be deciphered. Our common hope that it will be long tends to bias conclusions in that direction. Just speaking from my own sense of things and with no proof whatsoever, we are approaching an unprecedented acceleration.
Davy on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 9:03 pm
There are just too many number to crunch to know the particulars of collapse. These particulars would be when, how, how much, how long, and where. Yet, we can discuss the symptoms. These symptoms would be food insecurity, energy shortages, social unrest, pandemics, financial crisis, production/distribution failures, and mass migration. We can point to geography and urbanization. Mega cities especially the poor ones are fail points. Cities dwelling in hostile locations for example Las Vegas are another. Areas far from food production and lacking ample water are in for a ride. Areas requiring energy intensity to heat or cool a large population are in trouble. Areas that are in political, social, and religious tension will probably explode. The coming bump in the road will be the bump that finishes off the front end of that old worn out car called globalism we all are riding in. This car is carrying us all and soon all of us will be walking instead of riding.
Northwest Resident on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 9:13 pm
A long slow collapse can only occur if BAU, or a reasonable semblance of it, can be maintained. Enormous amounts of oil are required to keep BAU going. In the meantime, the economy can not shrink — it must grow or die because without economic growth loans don’t get repaid, credit is not given, business as usual which has always been based on acquiring debt and paying that debt off with future profits cannot continue. There will come a point in time where confidence in the system begins to rapidly erode. Upward pressures on food prices haven’t even hit us with their full force yet, but they will, and those upward pressures will only continue. Other rapidly depleting resources will only make matters worse, especially water shortages. This is all coming to a head, there is a breaking point approaching beyond which this world will enter a period of absolute chaos. It is inevitable. Simple minds won’t see it coming until it is upon them and there is no escape. They’ll blame the president or lay blame everywhere else except on the actual causes of our predicament. Isn’t that right, Plant?
Northwest Resident on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 9:18 pm
“The coming bump in the road will be the bump that finishes off the front end of that old worn out car called globalism we all are riding in.”
I like it! I’m going to use it! (Note to self: Replace “car” with “jalopy” — more colorful and makes me look smart)
Joe Clarkson on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 9:53 pm
Since collapse is indeed inevitable, the only important uncertainties are when it will start and at what rate it will proceed. While some will argue that it has already started, I think most people see BAU continuing for a little while longer.
My hope is for collapse to start very soon and be as rapid as possible. I think a long, slow collapse will be very disorderly and violent, with a good chance that the number of eventual survivors would be less than via rapid collapse. Hence my following the peak oil phenomenon; it gives some hope for a cascading failure of the world market economy.
Even considering that a rapid collapse will kill at least 90% of the human population and mean that nuclear weapons and power plants will not be controlled or maintained, it will greatly reduce carbon emissions and resource depletion. The sudden drop in human activity will take a great deal of pressure off the natural world and thereby give those few remaining humans the best chance at a livable world.
Of course the best thing would be for us to batten down the nuclear hatches right away, but I don’t see it happening before or after collapse begins, whether fast collapse or slow.
GregT on Sat, 19th Jul 2014 11:44 pm
Albert Bartlett had it right. Mankind’s biggest shortcoming is his inability to understand the exponential function. Hockey stick shaped graphs describe our predicament. We are one more doubling period away in many of them, to cause catastrophic results for the human race.
Makati1 on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 12:07 am
Joe, I would say that we are in the collapse right now. If you have ever watched a controlled demolition of a building, first you see puffs of smoke and then a few cracks appear. The roof starts to drop and then, almost immediately, the building is down. I think we are at the puffs of smoke point in collapse. We see the signs and hear the small explosions, but nothing is very visible outside. I see the roof starting to drop by next year and then…
Arthur on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 2:27 am
Collapse of BAU is indeed inevitable. Globalism will be gone, the dollar as a global reserve currency will be gone, the Olympics will be gone, Walmart will be gone, development aid will be gone, the car and plane will largely be gone, mass tourism will be gone, a life in the cubicle will become rare, energy rationing will be the norm, societies will be ethnically based, food and energy production will occur largely locally. If you want to have a kid, you will need permission.
Human civilization will carry on, but in the 2nd rather than the 5th gear.
Mike in Calif. on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 2:42 am
Historians in the future may well look back and call it the (singular) collapse just as we look at the Western Roman Empire and say “It collapsed.” The matter was far more complex than that. So I believe we will see many collapses in many areas, of many systems, with time offsets and with many different trigger events. It will not be one synchronous collapse.
During the early crises (which may be happening now), the international community will respond as best it can. But systems, both natural and human, will fail at an increasing rate. Economies will crash hard and a cascading collapse will ensue. Authoritarian governments will rise. Wars. Oil will still be available in quantity, but it may not be delivered. Economy and tech level will continue to descend.
Some countries will manage collapse far better than others. Denmark is not in huge overshoot, can feed itself and is small. Pakistan will starve.
Of interest to me is the US.
I think it will start with an economic collapse. But the US is well-endowed with oil, coal and food. If the central government survives it will be able to keep the farms working and heavy transport running. But it will not be able to revive the economy. Real unemployment will top 50%, “benefits” will be rationed and discontent will explode. Civil War, then deep collapse as the intricate systems are destroyed or disrupted by factions.
Davy on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 7:12 am
Mike, if we have historians in the future. It is quite possible with the degree of disequilibrium and excessive interconnected complexity our descent will be beyond a level that will support academics. There will always be grandfathers telling their grand kids what happened I guess as long as there are people.
Makati1 on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 9:22 am
Mike, I think you are incorrect that the US is well endowed with oil. ONLY if the capitalist system prevails and there are enough suckers to keep the oil companies profitable. No profits, no oil.
And who is going to make the replacement parts and maintain the lines and the refineries and the trucking and the… See what I mean? They ALL require a huge infrastructure to even exist. An infrastructure that is already crumbling. Not to mention that many of the materials to make the parts come from all over the world. You need to look at imports today to see that I am correct.
50%+ unemployment means that there are less than 50% of today’s employees to tax. You cannot tax someone who has nothing. But by then, local and state governments will be gone. Your local police will be gone. Ditto, all other public services. If there is any fuel it will go to the government, military, and necessary services, not to you or I.
There is no half-way collapse. It will be all out and total. As I said, the cracks are visible and the roof is starting to fall…
JuanP on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 9:57 am
Mak, I agree that the USA’s infrastructure is in bad shape deteriorating rapidly, inadequate, and badly in need of repair and changes. I think it is a crime that we don’t spend more money in boats and trains and less in cars and planes, for example. Every country in the world has inadequate, deteriorating infrastructure.
I disagree with you about how fast the collapse will be in the USA. As you well know, there is a lot of fat here, no matter how athletic Davy and others may be 😉 I believe the government will nationalize and militarize oil production, refining, and distribution. They will take over the railways in the process. They will do the same with food and electricity production aand distribution, including nuclear plants. I believe it will be a long process lasting decades and it’s going to be messy and painful every step of the way.
I lived once for 13 years in a military dictatorship where the government had partial or total control over fossil fuels, concrete, steel, electricity, water, housing, health, education, transportation, communications, food, and all the other important things. It would take a small fraction of the resources we use today to manage something equivalent in the USA. I don’t believe democracy will remain an option.
shortonoil on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 10:10 am
“If the central government survives it will be able to keep the farms working and heavy transport running.”
Looking toward governments to keep the wheels grinding is probably a misplaced hope. Sovereign governments are one of the most susceptible institutions to petroleum depletion, and they will be one of the first to succumb to its decline. More than half of the cost of producing petroleum is born with societal cost. Roads, military, judicial systems, education, and regulation are immensely expensive processes. They are also necessary to keep petroleum production functioning. The impact of petroleum depletion is already being felt by governments around the world.
Since 2008 total world debt has grown by 40%. This has been in response to declining tax receipts, and increasing expenditures. Central banks have attempted to alleviate this decline by printing huge amounts of currency. This is debt that has been taken on by those banks, and it will never be repaid. Because of petroleum’s present depletion state, growth will never again return, and without growth debt can not be serviced for long.
We have prepared a report that describes why our oil based society can not be maintained for more than an additional twenty years. The rapid decline now observed in world economies supports that claim. Ron says that he has no idea as to when the collapse will occur. The present state of petroleum depletion, and the deteriorating state of the world’s economy should give him ample evidence that it won’t be far into the future.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
JuanP on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 10:32 am
Short, I’ll take those twenty years. Thanks for your work!
I believe the collapse has been occurring since the 1970’s. I think it has been accelerating exponentially so far, but it could become linear or slow down for a while before regaining strength again.
We agree that BAU will not last another twenty years and that debt will not be repaid.
I admit that debt, being an imaginary, immaterial thing doesn’t bother me much. I don’t have any, personally. It will grow until it can’t, just like everything else.
Northwest Resident on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 12:31 pm
I can imagine a scenario where at some point:
1) The president whoever it is gives a nationally televised speech explaining that we face dire times and that dire measures are required, but to keep calm, the government has a plan to deal with the situation
2) Martial law is declared. Troops freshly returned from Afghanistan are deployed to key major cities and other areas where riots are already occurring or threaten to occur
3) Oil production, transportation, electrical grid and other key infrastructure are taken over by the federal government in accordance with plans that have long been in the making
4) America either creates a new currency or resets the value of the current currency
5) Homeland Security acting together with the military and local law-enforcement enact plans to deliver food where needed, assist local communities to implement local food production and other programs designed to localize economies
6) Wipes out all debt as other nations do the same
7) Enact jobs programs to revive damaged infrastructure, to remediate land that has been damaged by pollution, to cannibalize materials from no-longer useful structures, and other worthwhile projects
8) Keeps the propaganda pumping to calm and ease the fears and the uncertainty
9) Disconnects from most of the global economy and instead focuses on becoming a non-import/export driven economy and more of a self-contained national economy
10) Deals harshly and with deadly force against various attempts to secede or otherwise disconnect from national government
I’m sure the U.S. government, military, security/intelligence services, oil and transportation industries and other entities are working on a plan to implement something like that right now, and have been for quite a while. If they aren’t, then they are incompetent. Given the above scenario and the degree to which it is successfully implemented, I might be able to envision a long slow collapse.
But America does have all the food production, oil and other resources it needs — America does not need any other country to survive and to prosper. Once all the millions of automobiles get more or less permanently parked, America will finally have that glut of oil that Forbes has been talking about and will truly be energy independent. It would be a tumultuous transition, very uncomfortable and threatening for most, sure to be accompanied by mayhem of all types. Those in nursing homes and highly dependent on medications or advanced medical treatments for survival will probably perish rather quickly. Those who are incapable of physical labor may find themselves in serious trouble if they don’t have family/friends willing to work to support them. Employment will revert largely to local food production, crafts and trades facilitated by local government programs and initiatives.
I can see all that happening, more or less.
JuanP on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 12:49 pm
“Those in nursing homes and highly dependent on medications or advanced medical treatments for survival will probably perish rather quickly.”
NWR, 50% of our medical expenses in the USA go to the last six months of life and I think life will become six months shorter on average. 😉
I hope they have a plan as good as, or better, than yours, but they can always improvise as necessary. I believe the government has contingency plans for all kinds of disasters and catastrophes. No idea how bad they are!
Northwest Resident on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 1:04 pm
JuanP — Agree. At least six months shorter. That last six months is a humiliating and painful ordeal anyway, hooked up to tubes, having some nurse wipe your behind for you, laying around in semi-vegetative state taking all kinds of drugs just to drag it out a little longer. I hope we advance to a point where they have a little happy goodnight and good riddance pill that eliminates the need for that last six months.
energyskeptic on Sun, 20th Jul 2014 1:49 pm
Oil is the master resource that unlocks all others – allows you to go to the ends of the earth to scoop up the last school of fish, drill 500 feet down for aquifer water and live in an otherwise uninhabitable desert, plants and harvests food, constructs roads, bridges, electric power plants, mine and deliver coal, extract natural gas. The collapse of the financial system, breakdown of supply chains, blackouts, end of being able to make computer chips, and so on are symptoms of the underlying cause: less oil available to do millions of essential tasks. Whether the house of cards goes from the financial shock of a natural disaster overwhelming the system, or blockage of the Suez canal, blowing up of the Saudi Arabian refinery, Export Land Model, nuclear war — there are many triggers to a sudden dislocation, perhaps not the “last” dislocation, but just because we don’t know how it will unfold doesn’t mean we can avoid collapse.
theedrich on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 2:50 am
“On July 1, 1916 General Sir Douglas Haig began the Battle of the Somme. By the end of the first day, the British had lost nearly sixty thousand men including half of all of the officers assigned to the battle! … By the end of the year, the British offensive was a complete failure. The British lines had moved only six miles forward. Four hundred and ten thousand Britons, 500,000 Germans and 190,000 Frenchmen were dead, and for nothing.…“[The generals of both sides] were chosed because they were trusted to make the right decisions. Those decisions were accepted. Both the British and the German generals made the same decision: their country’s young men were expendable.
“We can only ask, but so much of the history of the twentieth century points in the direction of one answer, that we must wonder whether at some level Von Falkenhayn [the German general] and Haig [the British general] were moved by hidden forces in themselves and their societies to preside over a mammoth bloodletting, the slaughter of their own men. We must also ask whether the ultimate objective of the attackers at Verdun and the Somme was to use wartime conditions to bring about what could not have been done under any other circumstance, the massacres themselves. … Is it not possible that some automatic, self-regulating mechanism in European society was blindly yet purposefully experimenting by means of war with alternative means of population reduction? It has been observed that population control mechanisms often come into play when the number of animals in some species begins to get out of hand. Could it have been that both the Allies and the were in the grip of historical forces that were acting behind them without their conscious knowledge?…“Is it possible that one difference between the Nazi elite and the World War I elites that chose Haig and Von Falkenhayn for their respective posts was that the leading Nazis knew why they had really chosen the path of war?
“The mass death that took place in the West during World War I was prelude to the carnage that took place in the Russian sphere as a result of revolution, civil war, demographic violence, and large-scale famine. Exact figures are unavailable but an estimated two to three million died as a result of hard violence and six to eight million as a result of long-term privation. … Nor ought we to neglect the Turkish massacre of about one million Armenians during World War I, perhaps the first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practice disciplined, methodically organized genocide.”
— Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the American Future, (NY: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 9ff.
Rubenstein, a Jew and at the time of writing a former professor of religion at Florida State University, went on to list many other examples of mass murder by government, of which the murder of European Jews was only one. (He somehow neglects to mention Anglo-American carpet-bombing of urban civilian populations and the U.S. nuking of Japan.) While there have been countless publications on the latter topic, The Cunning of History may be the only one to have postulated an overreaching “population control mechanism” which becomes operative when ecological limits are being reached. Most holocaustiana depends for its emotive impact on readers of Judaeo-Christian background and morality. Readers without such a background (e.g., Hindus or animists, let alone Muslims or Communists) are largely unmoved thereby.
Long ago, scientist and inventor James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis. In its modern formulation, this says that the earth has myriad feedback loops which make it operate as a single living organism. This concept fits in very well, of course, with the notion of population control by nature. But there is an additional possibility as well.
In today’s hyper-materialist society, most of those who regard themselves as “scientific” in outlook deny any reality of the deeper aspects of the human self. In their view, the human beings and all other life forms are simply complex machines. (The current metaphor is “computers.”) Many even view the whole subject of psychology (based ultimately on the German word, Seelenlehre, literally, “soul-lore,” “[body of] doctrine about the soul”) as of little value, a vapid subject for lesser intelligences to dabble in. Even more despised is any mention of those deeper aspects of psychology (Tiefenpsychologie) which treat of the paranormal. It is all nonsense, in the materialist world view. Thus, reports of any seeming paranormal connection between close relatives (mother and daughter, identical twins, etc.) are dismissed out of hand. Never mind even stranger things which seem to occur with distressing regularity in history.
But if one does hold that there is something real about the soul or psyche or unconscious, one is driven to wonder where its limits might be. In the view of the major eastern religions (sometimes classified as “wisdom” in contrast to the “prophecy” of the west), consciousness is merely the tip of a “mental” wave whose inframental body is the wave’s main part. Below this is a yet larger wave which extends to relatives and close acquaintances. Yet further depths encompass the species as a whole, then the planet and, finally, the All. The difference of this All, or cosmic inframind, from commonplace experience is so great that Buddhism even refers to it as “nothingness.” But it is the kind of “pregeometrical” utter void out of which arose the quantum event we now call the Big Bang. (For details on role of life in all this, see Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of formative causation.)
This is not the nicey-nice God of American Christianity. It is not exactly the mathematical Calabi-Yau-like hyperspace that the materialists envision, either. But neither is this nihility the “loving Father” depicted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling who directs evolution unswervingly upward to modern socialism, culminating in a divine emperor who condescendingly provides bread and circuses for the insatiable masses. Under certain circumstances the inframental undergirding responds to human petitions (for which, see the history of religions). But more often, it governs life with an iron dynamic which contravenes human wishes.
Today homo sapiens is destroying the entire biosphere. Anyone who has kept up with the news about mankind’s ignoring of the limits to growth is aware of this. This is completely aside from global warming, which is a subject of political manipulation and is therefore unknowable at this point, despite the heated arguments about it. Rather, desertification, deforestation, extermination of species, overfishing to exhaustion, poisoning of aquifers, and on and on, are killing the planet. The planet. Third World overpopulation is the main culprit, but the West’s political correctness and insistence on “growth” conceal this and promote the death process.
So what is Gaia doing in response? We note that very recently there has been an explosion of murderous Mohammedan hatred against the White West. In the Maghreb there is even a warring group that calls itself “Western Education is a Sin,” or Boko Haram, in the local dialect. Thanks to American dementia, Libya is now falling apart, and oil is not expected to rise to pre-regime-change levels for a long time, if ever. The new Islamic State (in the Levant) is purging northern Mesopotamia outside of Kurdistan of all Christians as well as Shiites. The remainder of Iraq is a question mark. Afghanistan is also threatened with a return to chaos as soon as American troops leave. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, those WMDs or their technology may be sold to the highest bidder to revive that nation’s economy.
China is claiming sovereignty over large parts of the South and East China Seas in order to secure gas and oil sources for itself, while the U.S. is encouraging Japan to develop nuclear weapons to take the defense burden off of us. The Central American faux-nations are sending their disease-infested minors en masse, along with their criminals, into this country, where the current money-printing emperor plans to enlist them as future Democrat voters for him and his party. Meanwhile half of the U.S. populace is already on the government dole in one way or another. In six years, the regnant DC regime has already committed too many crimes and blunders to mention. Yet the infantile electorate is too hypnotized by official rhetoric or trapped in its own neuroses to notice or care.
Then there is the issue of Putin. This intensely skillful manipulator intends to resurrect the Stalinist empire. Opposing him in Washington is a dunce who, however, does know how to tap dance and read prescribed scripts. Outside of the U.S. and its vassals, he is considered a joke at best. After Ukraine, how long will it be before Vlad occupies Azerbaijan and its oil fields? That will seal completely the fate of western Europe.
All of these things, and more, point to one thing: Gaian population control — by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Mankind has exceeded its limits, courtesy of the U.S. and its “good intentions.” We are now on Peak Oil’s “bumpy plateau”; as we start downslope, we can expect to see Rubenstein’s “population control mechanism” operate as never before.
Davy on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 7:14 am
T, man is an evolutionary dead end. Knowledge eventually leads to starvation by its inevitable dualism with nature. Dualistic naturalism equates to exploitation of nature. Exploitation of nature creates disequilibrium and ultimately bifurcation, chaos, and dysfunction. In any case you cannot argue with Nature. She has always found ways to work in extinction in her creation. There is no evolution without extinction. We see the whole process of change in earth geology. Without plate tectonics, climate change, and volcanism the earth would no longer support life. It is only by this flux, the battle with entropic decay, and the tendency to equilibrium that life thrives. It does not matter that man may kill most life and itself. Nature does not mind a million years to rebuild something new. I imagine in the right conditions intelligent life may reappear if we go extinct but it will be a long time down the road.