[StarvingLion]

The Wind Turbine is the Jim Jones Koolaid of our times. Everybody is drinking it and nobody except me thinks it will cause the greatest mass destruction that everyone assumed could only be possible via nuclear war.

The Failed Liberal Academic System believes every single problem can be solved simply by putting up more and more wind turbines faster and faster.

The Adult Children of the Earth's ideology is Liquid Fuel Simply Doesn't Matter

Therefore, there won't be any kind of decline due to Peak Oil.

Any sign of liquid fuels rationing anywhere in the world will trigger it...

FULL STOP and the immediate return of reality of liquid fuels being the only thing maintaining social order...and when that happens...

Every City on Earth being burnt to the ground via rioting within 1 week

The WMD is not a H-Bomb that will happen....its the lowly Wind Turbine.

My Predition: Every single city on earth will be burned to the ground within 5 years via looting and rioting because the liquid fuels catastrophe is guaranteed due to peak oil and mass delusion of renewables Thats what the elite tech con artists are doing right now....looting and rioting the fake money system to be the feudal lords of the industrial afterlife.

The result will be the immediate return of the 13th century

[Plantagenet]

The Wind Turbine is the Jim Jones Koolaid of our times.

My Predition: Every single city on earth will be burned to the ground within 5 years via looting and rioting because the liquid fuels catastrophe is guaranteed due to peak oil and mass delusion of renewables Thats what the elite tech con artists are doing right now....looting and rioting the fake money system to be the feudal lords of the industrial afterlife.

The result will be the immediate return of the 13th century

A return to the 13th century? You're not much of a doomer, are you. Other doomers at this site are predicting the outright extinction of humanity and you're only calling for a return to the 13th century???!?!?

Get with the program, StarvingLion!


The 13th century wasn't so bad! Beats mass extinction!

[sunweb]

We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as fossil fuels desert us. With the decline of available energy, most of us who have sat at the top of the energy pyramid will become the new peasants. With the popular view of the Middle Ages as a brutal and dirty time filled with famine and disease and at the mercy of armed overlords. We cringe at the thought.

With great sadness, we must recognize the direct connection between present day population levels and the use of fossil fuels in food production, medical procedures, medicines and hygiene. With the fall in fossil fuel availability there will be a reduction in population. Population soared with the industrial revolution and the development of industrial, fossil fuel based agriculture. It cannot be sustained.
From: The New Middle Ages
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/ne ... -ages.html

[vtsnowedin]

Will we go back to thinking the earth is flat? Will we forget what we have learned about bacteria and viruses? Will we forget how to fly?Will we forget what plant nutrients are needed to achieve high yields?
No to all of that and much more. We will go to a world where energy comes at a much higher price then today but it will not be anything like the Middle ages.

[Subjectivist]

Will we go back to thinking the earth is flat? Will we forget what we have learned about bacteria and viruses? Will we forget how to fly?Will we forget what plant nutrients are needed to achieve high yields?
No to all of that and much more. We will go to a world where energy comes at a much higher price then today but it will not be anything like the Middle ages.

Did the hunter gatherers and peasant farmers of Yucatan remember how to build Mayan pyramids? Did the farmers and shepherds of Italy in 1000 remember how to make the plumbing in Rome work and maintain all the civic structures?

[Shaved Monkey]

We cant even remember not to get sucked in by the same type of propaganda that the Nazis used.

[Outcast_Searcher]

We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as fossil fuels desert us. With the decline of available energy, most of us who have sat at the top of the energy pyramid will become the new peasants. With the popular view of the Middle Ages as a brutal and dirty time filled with famine and disease and at the mercy of armed overlords. We cringe at the thought.

With great sadness, we must recognize the direct connection between present day population levels and the use of fossil fuels in food production, medical procedures, medicines and hygiene. With the fall in fossil fuel availability there will be a reduction in population. Population soared with the industrial revolution and the development of industrial, fossil fuel based agriculture. It cannot be sustained.
From: The New Middle Ages
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/ne ... -ages.html

Yes, SOME day this will be a real problem. However, at a time when the supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil are so huge that they are dirt cheap to burn (at the cost of the long term destruction of the biosphere), the idea that they will come anything close to running out, causing the global population to basically burn civilization down within FIVE YEARS is more silly than anything I'd expect the average five year old of average intelligence to expect.

But let's not talk about that, as it interferes with the ("sure thing") short term hard crash meme so popular on this site, despite ALL the economic and scientific evidence to the contrary.

[SeaGypsy]

We cant even remember not to get sucked in by the same type of propaganda that the Nazis used.

That's definitely a keeper.

[ROCKMAN]

Sun – “We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as fossil fuels desert us.” What do you mean “we” white man? LOL. Fossil fuels were behind the big pop expansion we’ve seen in Texas for years. Oil and NG will peter out here eventually but we still have mucho lignite which is about to become much more eco-friendly with respect to GHG emissions thanks to the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet coming on line soon. It will turn the second largest GHG source in the country into an “*” on that list. And now Mississippi is about to come online with the largest combination lignite to syngas and sequestration project ever so it can become more dependent upon its huge lignite resources.

And despite the pissed off kitty’s claim wind power has already provided as huge supplement to our NG sourced electricity generation. If a country Texas would tie with #4 Germany in wind power. In fact a couple of winters ago wind provided almost 40% of the state’s electricity demand for a short period when an Arctic vortex shut down a number of our NG fired power stations.

Of course that just us and maybe Mississippi. You correct: folks need to start preparing for less/more expensive fossil fuels. Actually should have started 30+ years ago but we can’t change history. But we can alter the future to some degree by accepting the inevitable future of oil/NG.

[vtsnowedin]

Did the hunter gatherers and peasant farmers of Yucatan remember how to build Mayan pyramids? Did the farmers and shepherds of Italy in 1000 remember how to make the plumbing in Rome work and maintain all the civic structures?

How many literate people were there among the Incas? And how many books or libraries? Was Rome ever totally abandoned? Sacked? yes, but reduced to non functional rubble?

[Tanada]

How many literate people were there among the Incas? And how many books or libraries? Was Rome ever totally abandoned? Sacked? yes, but reduced to non functional rubble?

My history Prof was pretty clear, in 400 AD Rome had nearly 1,400,000 people living in the city limits. In 1000 AD it had roughly 25,000. Have you checked your local middle school literacy rate lately? The percentage of first graders who graduate with a functional ability to read and write in the USA is pathetic to say the least. My course of study at Uni was education, I gave it up because the parents, students and government didn't care two hoots in hell about actually having an educated populous to inherit the future.

32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/0 ... 80355.html

For the Inca/Maya/Aztec civilizations all three used hieroglyphs in stone. The Maya also used paper scrolls with the same glyphs, but the Catholic missionaries burned them because their snake god featured prominently and they were considered satanic by those who could not read them.

We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

The scrolls might have contained valuable historical documentation pertaining to important episodes in history of the Maya. They surely must have recorded astronomical data and celestial cycles, and would have contained details about the ritual life of the Maya in connection to these cycles. They may have recorded details about past environmental disasters, such and earthquakes and hurricanes, which the Maya found to be spiritual in nature. Ancient myths and religious doctrines might have also been written in these scrolls.

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-may ... ly-12-1652

That means that the Maya who had built great pyramids several hundred years earlier had maintained their own literacy despite the crash of their civilization around 900 AD and kept existing in a city state format much like Italy after the fall of the western Roman Empire. However despite a continuity of writing and language they were changed to an extreme degree after 1000 AD and had a much smaller and less complex civilization.

[Lore]

Regression will happen not because we lack the knowledge, but the lack of ability to utilize it.

How many here can single-handedly make the sophisticated tools around us that we take for granted everyday? My guess is none. Pull a few key people out of the mix on every technological stepping stone along with access to resources and you get a pretty basic if not primitive lifestyle. Doesn't matter if I can still read it in a book. Then again even reading may eventually be considered unessential by many like it once was.

[AgentR11]

Any sign of liquid fuels rationing anywhere in the world will trigger it...

Hate to stomp on some good apocalypse doom... but...

We've had liquid fuels rationing for quite a while now.

Current world situation: producers produce all they can; and they sell it to the highest bidder, more or less. (details and contracts, blaah blah).

Price is the rationing tool; and people are extremely sensitive to the price of fuel; much more so than I ever expected when I first joined this site. The price went to $100+ for a bit, and people stopped driving as much. Populations measurably changed behavior at a measly $3/gal.

The dynamic of price, supply, and demand (think of as a 3 variable+time surface in 4space; not some f(x)=y stock graph) *IS* rationing. It is the invisible hand, and for oil, liquid fuels, at least... it works like a champ. Works far better than I ever imagined it could...

So... if supply-max is half of what it is today; the demand and price will be different, but there will still be fuel at the gas stations, and diesel in the tractors that grow, harvest, and deliver the grain we all depend on. Thus, there will be no cities burning to the ground in some global event. People will just get poorer, and poorer, bit by bit; but no industrial citizen who is mentally competent will starve, and even most of the incompetent will end up being chased down by do-gooders and fed, under the glaring eyes of the charity cook.

The result will be the immediate return of the 13th century

We like to think we're very different from the 13th century. Guess what. We aren't. 13th century life still had large cities, trade, laws, rulers, oligarchs, armies, navies, injustice, agriculture, wealth, and luxuries. We have more toys is all. They had toys back then too, and they were as novel to them, as our new toys are to us.

Someone mentioned "flat earth"... no technically inclined person of that era thought the world was flat. But just as it is impossible to convince an "intelligent design" ding-dong today, it was impossible to convince Bob the Potter that the Earth really is a spheroid. And if you poke Bob the Potter enough with "proof", he'll hit you with a stick, and you'll stop. Just like today.

To information preservation. You can't undo the fact that people know to look through a piece of shaped glass to see tiny things. You can't undo the knowledge recorded in millions upon millions of copies of "Handbook of Chemistry and Physics"; you can't undo knowledge that numbers work best when you have include a zero. Its just unrealistic to expect a return to a prior state of ignorance; even if an ignorant, pre-ag version of human life consisted of greater freedom, truth, and dignity than any modern human can experience. We just can't get there.

Could such knowledge end up compartmentalized in guilds or other social structures? Sure. But is that really all that different than the "guild" alluded to by possessing a "registered engineer" stamp?

In short, no apocalypse from fuel shortages; *AND* no return to a pre-industrial but post-agricultural world is possible.

Peak Oil simply turns poverty-with-food for half the humans, into poverty-with-food for 90% of the humans. Well fed humans do not riot.

[Subjectivist]

Did the hunter gatherers and peasant farmers of Yucatan remember how to build Mayan pyramids? Did the farmers and shepherds of Italy in 1000 remember how to make the plumbing in Rome work and maintain all the civic structures?

How many literate people were there among the Incas? And how many books or libraries? Was Rome ever totally abandoned? Sacked? yes, but reduced to non functional rubble?

We are vearing pretty far off topic here, my only point was you need more than basic knowledge to maintain a complex civilization. You need resources and the will to employ them as well as the knowledge of what to do.

[hvacman]

Unfortunately, we can't "exactly" regress back to the middle ages. That was the time of PD - Peak Dragon. Without a thought at all of the heroic needs of future generations of knights-to-be, the knights of the middle ages ignored the pleas of some for "sustainable" dragon-slaying practices and killed them all, driving the noble fire-breathing species to extinction.

[vtsnowedin]

Did the hunter gatherers and peasant farmers of Yucatan remember how to build Mayan pyramids? Did the farmers and shepherds of Italy in 1000 remember how to make the plumbing in Rome work and maintain all the civic structures?

How many literate people were there among the Incas? And how many books or libraries? Was Rome ever totally abandoned? Sacked? yes, but reduced to non functional rubble?

We are vearing pretty far off topic here,

All of our best discussions do.!

my only point was you need more than basic knowledge to maintain a complex civilization. You need resources and the will to employ them as well as the knowledge of what to do.

But we will not be without resources. They maybe in much shorter supply and we will have to find ways to make do with less but I do think large groups of people do have the knowledge and will to do that.
That is not to say that we are not on the verge of a population crash which will change our world dramatically and at the same time reduce the demand for resources but it will be nothing like returning to the thirteenth century.

[Lore]

There is no going back, only going forward. Trying to compare any kind of future world with the past is a fruitless exercise since all the parameters have changed.

It's not going to be Kunstler's vision of a world made by hand, or Little House on the Prairie. Either will it be some post apocalyptic Road Warrior society. That, I can be reasonably sure of.

In the course of human lives things happen slowly with intermittent periods of life changing events. While it's human nature to believe things will always get better, reality often tells us a different story. I would say for the most part though humans are much better off today then in the past hundred years. Thanks to unconstrained utilization of our planets resources. Then again we've been discussing those limits here and we all know they cannot go on indefinitely.

I can only personally predict the inevitability of somethings, but not the exact time, or circumstance as to how it will affect most individuals. Which leads to endless arguments depending on your age and disposition as objects in the mirror maybe closer then you think.

[ralfy]

We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as fossil fuels desert us. With the decline of available energy, most of us who have sat at the top of the energy pyramid will become the new peasants. With the popular view of the Middle Ages as a brutal and dirty time filled with famine and disease and at the mercy of armed overlords. We cringe at the thought.

With great sadness, we must recognize the direct connection between present day population levels and the use of fossil fuels in food production, medical procedures, medicines and hygiene. With the fall in fossil fuel availability there will be a reduction in population. Population soared with the industrial revolution and the development of industrial, fossil fuel based agriculture. It cannot be sustained.
From: The New Middle Ages
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/ne ... -ages.html

Yes, SOME day this will be a real problem. However, at a time when the supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil are so huge that they are dirt cheap to burn (at the cost of the long term destruction of the biosphere), the idea that they will come anything close to running out, causing the global population to basically burn civilization down within FIVE YEARS is more silly than anything I'd expect the average five year old of average intelligence to expect.

But let's not talk about that, as it interferes with the ("sure thing") short term hard crash meme so popular on this site, despite ALL the economic and scientific evidence to the contrary.

We can look at real data during the last four decades compared to forecasts made four decades ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... g-collapse

then explain how the trend line for resource availability will reverse significantly, thus allowing for continuous increase in food production, manufacturing, and service output per capita needed to meet the estimated global population increase.

[JV153]

AgentR11 has got it right.. and one other rationing method is called licensing. See you have this plastic card with your picture on it before you go pick up the pump at the gas station. When I got my license in Canada, before the driving test for a G license I went to get an extra accreditation on defensive driving since it knocked down the cost of insurance. Accreditor had has watch Disney cartoons for a few hours (with Goofy and about not getting angry while driving) as well as a couple hours where he gave pointers and a brief written test, and then told us something important about the driving test.. the driving test route goes through a zone where the speed limit changes from 40 to 50 kph.. so if you go through the 40 zone at 47 you give the driving tester one out of two reasons to fail you, and usually they were eager to fail you since it meant you had to redo the test.

[Ibon]

I can only personally predict the inevitability of somethings, but not the exact time, or circumstance as to how it will affect most individuals. Which leads to endless arguments depending on your age and disposition as objects in the mirror maybe closer then you think.

Lore, your maturing, a bit more nuanced, a bit less sure, a bit more able to accept the unknowns of the future.