KaiserJeep wrote:
We pretty much eat petroleum is what this amounts to. Without cheap oil, many will starve. Even though we will be using farming practices that are more sound than what we have today, and depending largely on human labor, the reduced yields are going to hurt, and potentially we are farming just as much area, if not actually more.
Early on in my engagement with peak oil I believed exactly the same. I applied what I learned in ecology about carrying capacity and how in any ecosystem you look at the energy available to support the biomass contained therein. The energy of prairie grasses in a given hectare to support x amount of buffalo for example. Then you look at the graph of the glaring parallel of oil consumption and population growth in the past 200 years. Yes, once fossil fuels decline the population will as well. So far so good.
Now what happens moving forward? I mentioned in another thread about how opulence is making us degenerate. This degeneracy is actually directly correlated to all the non essential usages of fossil fuels. I don't have the figures, I don't know if anyone has even attempted to tease out essentials from non essentials, but I highly suspect that the amount of fossil fuel energy required to run mechanized agriculture and transport finished goods is quite small compared to the incredible waste of energy in the manufacture and distribution of all the products that modern humans entertain themselves with. Built into this degenerate opulence is a huge infrastructure of waste and discretionary energy consumption. And this will recede dramatically as fossil fuels constrain in the decades and centuries ahead.
Now to the most important part of this whole dynamic. What directly changes in our culture when fossil fuels decline is this culture of degeneracy. The pendulum swings. Generations start to emerge that are not raised in the opulence of degenerate entertainment. And this creates it's own dynamic in relationship specifically to energy. As Matt Simmons said years ago the biggest problem we have as a modern civilization regarding peak oil is that we do not cherish this amazing gift that fossil fuels provide. We don't cherish this resource because we have become degenerate. It is just that simple.
When the pendulum swings the whole cultural orientation swings. This is what I think you do not consider when you make this bold prediction that 3/4 of the worlds population will die due to the upcoming fossil fuel constraints.
Also, this process is a couple centuries long, not within a single generations lifetime.
In conclusion, this whole dynamic is beyond the time horizon of our current modern political cultural paradigm to incorporate into any specific action. This is why I no longer give peak oil or climate change or any of the other factors of human overshoot much importance. Actually, activism is irrelevant until the pendulum of cultural degeneracy swings the other direction due to the bite of constraints. Until then we are stuck in a degenerate quagmire.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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