Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Aug 13, 2004 Posts: 1185 Location: Richmond, VA, Pale Blue Dot
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 2:34 am Post subject:
Under the assumption that the human species will not last forever, we have to act logically within a finite environment. Any attempt to leave this earth in search of other places to live will fail if we do not set that goal as the priority of the species. This is unlikely to happen due to the many different goals that humans share.
If we are all trying to survive as long as possible and continue technological progress we have to shift our focus from national, short-term, relative gain(Capitalism + Realism) to global, long-term, absolute gain (i think this would include all the good points of all the isms)
Either way, our finite environment will force us to choose our path relatively soon.
I would love for us to prove me wrong, but as it stands now, i'd say it's a toss up.
Last edited by turmoil on Sun Jun 19, 2005 2:44 am; edited 1 time in total
Power down, in the way you describe, will doom future generations to death, either by an asteroid impact (like that which killed the dinosaurs) or the eventual death of the sun. A sustainable lifestyle did not protect the dinosaurs. You are saying that we should repeat their mistake, intentionally.
This arguments is a bit far-fetched me thinks. Even if we didn't power down there is little chance of us escaping these events unless miraculous technological advances are made. _________________ Hello, my name is Rax. I live in the Amazon jungle with a bunch of women. We are super eco feminists and our favourite passtimes are dangling men by their ankles and discussing peak oil. - apparently
Joined: Jun 12, 2005 Posts: 4189 Location: 1st territorial capitol of AZ
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 2:38 am Post subject:
50 years! Hot damn! I can live however I want!
But I'm selfish, I want to work truly for myself not for the corporations and the banks, so I'm working on getting out of debt.
And I want to spend my money on meaningful things, like good food, enjoyable, not big and showy, but enjoyable, place to live, and savings so dumb expenses like a car are outta my life ASAP.
And, I've been in very good physical shape and it makes you feel GREAT. I want that for myself so my plan is to ride a bicycle everywhere, and take the train, bus, occasional cab or rental car otherwise, because using my own legs will get me back in good shape and I'll feel great.
And what's more luxurious than having your own garden and picking your own greens? The most I can do right here is grow some chard, but I'm considering doing some "guerilla gardening" here and there, plant some stuff for gathering in some odd areas around here, and also learn the local plants. There's probably enough wild and guerilla greens around here to save me a few bux a day if I were buying their equivalents at Trader Joe's.
And nothing spells luxury like free time. Less fixed living expenses means less time running around and hustling to make a living, in fact most ppl around here with million dollar houses are working their asses off. I'll have more free time than them!
Ultimately, I'd like to get up the guts to learn to draw ppl's portraits/caricatures for a few bucks a pop, those folks make decent money and the materials required are very cheap. Between a bit of that and growing/gathering, I'd have a much more luxurious life than the frantically working and worrying hamsters I see running around here.
I don't know if I can do a total Einstein and go without socks, gee I like socks, but he sure had the right idea!
Scientific progress doesn't require growth, only the fractional reserve banking system does. One hundred million years is a very long time. It might be possible for us to extend the life of our planet by strengthening our atmosphere against radiation. We might also be able to build defenses against comets and asteroids. We might learn how to control fusion, or even an energy source we never conceived of today.
None of this requires a growth system. This industrial age in which we live emphasizes quantity, not quality. A system of growth and crash is actually worse in the longer term, because we lose everything in the crash. If we can preserve our knowledge over millions of years, then we stand a better chance of protecting ourselves from nature, and embarking in space travel. Growth is short sighted and bad for the very long term. Imagine if there was never the dark ages. Imagine if the Roman empire never fell. We would have been able to preserve so much more knowledge. _________________ "If humans don't control their numbers, nature will." -Pimentel
"There is not enough trash to go around for everyone," said Banrel, one of the participants in the cattle massacre.
"George W. Bush loves poor people. He keeps making more of them." -unkn
Joined: Sep 25, 2004 Posts: 4721 Location: Boston, MA
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 11:39 am Post subject:
Quote:
Imagine if the Roman empire never fell.
Hail Caeser!
Most of us would be slaves and the world would be one big colony for the glory of Rome. Scientific progress was halted because of the Romans, not helped. Yes, in the early years concrete was invented and the arch was perfected. Architecture did well under the Romans. But the damage they did by introducing cheap and limitless labor (slavery) stopped progress. Why bother invent the steam engine if I can get slaves to carry me around? How important is it for everyone to live a better life if I can sit around, fat and lazy, while the African slave girls dance for my enjoyment? I would argue that the falling of Rome was a good thing for humanity in the long term. _________________ "www.peakoil.com is the Myspace of the Apocalypse."
Scientific progress doesn't require growth, only the fractional reserve banking system does.
I agree look at the russians they have 19000 nukes apparently and growth wasn't happening under communism and they managed space travel too. If scientfic progress is valued in a community it doesn't need growth. _________________ Hello, my name is Rax. I live in the Amazon jungle with a bunch of women. We are super eco feminists and our favourite passtimes are dangling men by their ankles and discussing peak oil. - apparently
The Roman empire definitely had it's faults, but I'm sure we would be much more advanced in science and understanding the universe if we didn't have those civilization crashes over the past few thousand years. 2 steps forward, 1 step back. Sometimes 2 steps back, hehe. _________________ "If humans don't control their numbers, nature will." -Pimentel
"There is not enough trash to go around for everyone," said Banrel, one of the participants in the cattle massacre.
"George W. Bush loves poor people. He keeps making more of them." -unkn
Scientific progress doesn't require growth, only the fractional reserve banking system does.
FOF, I believe we agree then. You are proposing power-stabilize, not an anti-technology powerdown.
So lets get back to the topic of the thread, and discuss the idea of non-growth economic systems. One thing we can be sure of is this: positive real returns in the form of interest cannot be sustained indefinitely in a system which is not growing. In other words, the real interest rate in a non-growing economy must be zero.
How do you organize the investment necessary for scientific progress if investors can derive no monetary gain from their investment? If you are going to abolish our current financial system, what will you replace it with, so that investment and technology can continue? And how will you prevent growth from happening?
Joined: May 20, 2005 Posts: 204 Location: Austin, Tx
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 6:47 pm Post subject:
Falconoffury wrote:
Scientific progress doesn't require growth, only the fractional reserve banking system does.
Actually science very much does require growth. It is not coincidence that science, as we know it today, tended to grow in parallel with modern economics and the boom in fossil fuels. Modern day science is a very energy intensive endeavor that requires huge supply lines, vast amounts of energy and resources. We're able to do so much science today specifically because of cheap energy and cheap resources made possible by fossil fuels and the aforementioned fractional reserve banking system.
Most science is funded, after all, either by private capital or by the government--both of these require growth.
In the absence of these things we can persue field biology, theoretical physics, and a little bit of chemistry. Basically about the same things we did before we had fossil fuels and a runaway growth economy. Not a big loss though since I tend to agree with people like John Horgan who argue we've already reached "peak science".
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It might be possible for us to extend the life of our planet by strengthening our atmosphere against radiation.
Against a red giant? Not even remotely possible.
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We might also be able to build defenses against comets and asteroids.
Slightly more probable, but still unlikely.
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We might learn how to control fusion, or even an energy source we never conceived of today.
Fusion still doesn't look likely and it is even more doubtful there is an energy source we haven't conceived of yet. It would be totally outside of the realm of physics as we understand it.
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None of this requires a growth system.
All of the above totally requires a growth system. In order to build a shield capable of deflecting a red giant's radiation, the world would have to have an incredible amount of extra capital lying around. In a non-growth economic system you are not going to generate the necessary extra capital to build a world wide shielding system AND keep everything else running. Asteroid and comet defenses, which are generally just glorified missile defense, require growth economies (and the US has not even gotten remotely close to missile defense and has spent billions on it). Fusion requires a growth economy. Any of these advances are not really possible by people living on a solar budget as it were.
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This industrial age in which we live emphasizes quantity, not quality.
This depends entirely on what things you are talking about. We can do a lot of things at a lot higher quality and quantity than we could in the past.
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A system of growth and crash is actually worse in the longer term, because we lose everything in the crash.
How do you lose everything? We have the knowledge we got via growth and cheap energy--we can't do as much with it, but we don't lose everything by any stretch of the imagination.
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If we can preserve our knowledge over millions of years, then we stand a better chance of protecting ourselves from nature, and embarking in space travel.
Again, you can't have space travel without growth economics. The space program is a huge drain on national economies. It isn't going to get cheaper and you can't support it without growth economies.
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Growth is short sighted and bad for the very long term.
Yes, but people don't think in the long term. They think of short term interests. And growth has given us so much in such little time. We're probably going to blow it because of all that growth, but better to have had the time we had than live in the stone ages for millions of years. In any event, specifically because we have gained all this knowledge we can actually use it to live in a more responsible, efficient manner.
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Imagine if there was never the dark ages. Imagine if the Roman empire never fell. We would have been able to preserve so much more knowledge.
Eurocentric aren't we? The "dark ages" was peculiarity of Europe. All that knowledge was, in fact, preserved. It just so happens that it was preserved in the Islamic world. And China was doing just fine technologically and scientifically during the dark ages of Europe. Nothing was lost. Europeans were just being stupid for hundreds of years. I mean they forgot how to bathe--something that was pretty basic for the rest of the planet. A great deal of European discovery after the dark ages was just the dumb Europeans rediscovering things that were pretty common knowledge in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Nothing was lost, just all the interesting stuff in the world didn't have to do with white people. It'll probably wind up like that again not too long from now.
Sucks for us, but the knowledge will still be there.
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13177 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 7:08 pm Post subject:
Quote:
but better to have had the time we had than live in the stone ages for millions of years.
Better for whom, I wonder? All the cultures that were extirpated so we could get to where we are today, with global climate change, and the rest? I'm not so sure it's "better." Maybe, just say," this is how it has been, let's try to be more responsible from here on out."
Foraging cultures, even horticultural societes, don't really have capitalism as we understand it. Basically, without agriculture - the intensive cultivation of crops (usually grains) that can be stored as wealth - there's no point in trying to accumulate more wealth than you can use. Sweet potatoes only last so long, so growing more than your family can eat is pointless. They'll just rot.
What do you bank, when you can't store wealth? The good will of your neighbors. Share your food with your neighbors when you have an excess, and they will share with you when they have extra. It's not idealism, communism, or the Noble Savage...it's pure pragmatism. Without money and without a way to store food for long periods, investing your surplus in your neighbors is the smart thing to do.
I don't think we'll fall that far back, though. I suspect we'll maintain agriculture, but without capitalism. Which is basically feudalism. That lasted centuries in Europe and Asia, as well as here in the New World, before we started using fossil fuels, so there's no reason we can't go back to it.
But it won't be capitalism. The bright side of capitalism is growth, because it means that one day, the have-nots will be the haves. We accept sweat shops and other unpleasantness because we believe that if you work hard, you will rise at least to the middle class, if not the outright wealthy. Everyone has a shot. It's the American dream.
Without cheap energy, I suspect we'll end up with more like a caste system than anything resembling capitalism. No growth means your kids won't have a better life than you had. As capitalism unwinds, it will be the opposite: each generation living worse than their parents.
Science doesn't require capitalism, but I suspect it will be very hard to maintain without cheap energy. It's cheap energy that allows us to maintain our complexity. Rather than everyone working on the farm, growing food, we have a lot of highly educated specialists, who never actually produce any food, or anything really practical for society. That is a true luxury.
Capitalism - lending money at interest - was seen a grave sin in the ancient world, and one of the reasons for that was that those societies could ill afford capitalists...that is, people who did not produce anything. Interest was "unearned income," money that you did not do any work or produce anything for, and therefore dirty money.
Will capitalism exist post-peak? In a sense, yes. Loan sharks have always existed in the dark corners of society. But it will no longer be an important or acceptable part of society.
Again, you can't have space travel without growth economics. The space program is a huge drain on national economies. It isn't going to get cheaper and you can't support it without growth economies.
This is true, and it's why growth per se is not bad. We need to stabilize our on-earth growth, while moving growth off-planet. Note that I am not talking about moving people off the earth in the near-term. I'm talking about developing space, primarily with robots and teleoperation, so that we can harvest the massive flows of space solar (through space mirrors or lunar space power).
Clearly we don't have to worry about running out of room or resources in space, so all the standard anti-growth arguments don't apply there. We're not going to suffocate in the petri dish if we are gradually extending our tentacles outside of the petri dish. I don't believe there is an argument against growth into space, except self-loathing (i.e. the view that people are a disease).
Leanan, peak oil is not going to be the end of cheap energy. Coal is anywhere from 5 to 20 times cheaper than oil per btu. Gas is also cheaper than oil, per btu. Even electricity is only slightly higher, per btu than crude oil, and electricity can be supplied in volume for many, many years from gas, and (after gas depletes) from coal, and (after coal depletes) from nuclear.
Joined: Apr 06, 2004 Posts: 257 Location: Sydney, Australia
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 8:39 pm Post subject:
I've just finished reading a book delving that delves into these themes. Poison Darts by Russ Finlay. I must say it was a bit of an eye opener, I really was swayed by the authors logic, though many people in is thread would disagree with him.
The book is divided into two parts, the first is an action packed adventure story that acts as a populist vehicle for his theory on protecting bio-diversity through the free market. The second is a collection of essay's on the same theme.
His main point is that the problems we face (and discuss on PO.com) is not running out of energy, or capitalism or socialism or anyism, eating meat instead of being vegetarians etc, but over-population. The answer to this problem is a pretty radical one (though not as radical as JohnDenver's theoretical death camps ), a take once and forget contraceptive. Once taken men and women are effectively infertile, until they take a temporary antidote. The goal of this contraceptive is to reduce populations carefully and in a controlled manner back down to say 2 billion people. While this policy is in place the last remaining wilderness reserves and intact ecosystems would be protected through private ownership by NGO's instead of states and governments.
This would fit more into JohnDenver's idea of Power-stabilize. By reducing population you can increase per-capita wealth and food - therefore sustain lifestyle here and improve it elsewhere. Thereby giving Mother Nature some breathing room. Russ Finley makes the point that technological development is exponential because technology begets technology. We don't need 6 billion people on the planet to have growth in science and technology... we came up with the atomic bomb with only 2 billion!
Consider that 55% of babies born in the U.S.A are unplanned! That is a ridiculous statistic! What the hell is going on over there?
Some of the chapters from his book are available from the above website.
BTW this is a pretty lame outline of Russ Finley's ideas. Sorry, just read the book! You can purchase a PDF version for $US5 on his website... _________________ Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. - Aldous Huxley
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), a take once and forget contraceptive. Once taken men and women are effectively infertile, until they take a temporary antidote. The goal of this contraceptive is to reduce populations carefully and in a controlled manner back down to say 2 billion people. While this policy is in place the last remaining wilderness reserves and intact ecosystems would be protected through private ownership by NGO's instead of states and governments.
