[vtsnowedin]

The entire consumerist model was built upon access to HIGH EROEI OIL which is gone...now thats gone means Jobless Consumer.

The price of oil will never go back up to $100.

There is still a lot of high EROEI oil out there in the hands of KSA Iran , Russia and Texas. it is far from gone.
But the price of oil will most certainly go up and beyond $100 as soon as the present glut fades away from reduced capital expenditure.

[vtsnowedin]

According to the establishment SHILLS, there is no collapse unless the...

THE PHONY STOCK "MARKET" COLLAPSES

Never going to happen. The entire stock market is fueled by money printing because FINANCIALISATION is the economy, .... MONEY PRINTING and sticking it in the stock "market" (themselves).

The place could turn into Zimbabwe for all they care and the stock market would still be going up.

Well a collapse of world stock markets is possible and that would lead to a decline in the world standard of living. How much of the stock market is phony is a subject for another thread. Quite a few of your heavy industry corporations are quite solid as long as the entire economy does not crash around them.

[vtsnowedin]

The "world population begins to decline" item would be incontrovertible, though, because in order for that to happen, the death rate would have to skyrocket to biblical proportions (since the birth rate isn't going to go down).

The birth rate has already gone down and will continue to do so. in 1950 it was 37.2/1000 it is now 18.7 and the current projection for 2050 is 13.4/1000.
Death rates on the other hand which have also declined are expected to bottom out and then rise due to ageing population structure. Death rare in 1950, 19.1/1000 in 2014 8.1/1000 projected 2050 9.7/1000
Any good doomer can think up scenarios where deaths exceed births in the near future. How many people in Venezuela do you suppose are proceeding to expand their families just now?

[ennui2]

How many people in Venezuela do you suppose are proceeding to expand their families just now?

Venezuela is just doomer flavor of the month. Those regional screwups come and go, sort of like the the fall of the USSR that Orlov harps on and "Power of Community"-era Cuba that was fodder for the Transition Town movement. None of these are the true leading edge of the LTG Malthusian catastrophe, just an isolated regional cast-study. I'd argue that most of what's going on in the ME is also not the leading edge, as the ME has almost always been some flavor of screwed up.

[vtsnowedin]

How many people in Venezuela do you suppose are proceeding to expand their families just now?

Venezuela is just doomer flavor of the month. Those regional screwups come and go, sort of like the the fall of the USSR that Orlov harps on and "Power of Community"-era Cuba that was fodder for the Transition Town movement. None of these are the true leading edge of the LTG Malthusian catastrophe, just an isolated regional cast-study. I'd argue that most of what's going on in the ME is also not the leading edge, as the ME has almost always been some flavor of screwed up.

By one count there are 37 countries with populations in need of humanitarian assistance including millions that are displaced as refugees. They range from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe but only Haiti is in the Western hemisphere. Things would not have to get much worse to start a region wide population decline from the usual suspects of famine, pestilence and war.
http://www.fao.org/giews/english/hotspots/index.htm

[ennui2]

There's a thread somewhere here that dates to early in the year predicting millions dead from famine this year. If it's going to happen, it has to start soon, I'd say.

I am not like Greer in prediction 300+ years of gradual decline but I don't think we're going to go from no famine to millions dead in a single year. It's going to be more gradual than that.

[vtsnowedin]

There's a thread somewhere here that dates to early in the year predicting millions dead from famine this year. If it's going to happen, it has to start soon, I'd say.

I am not like Greer in prediction 300+ years of gradual decline but I don't think we're going to go from no famine to millions dead in a single year. It's going to be more gradual than that.

No probably not this year due to the favorable crop forecasts for all of the major producers. What it will take is a major crop failure by one or more of the major world producers so there is no surplus to distribute to these countries in need.
That crop failure could come from drought, a new crop disease or insect pest or from economic collapse of the producing countries disrupting the availability of seed , fertilizer and equipment and fuel availability.
Whatever the cause and the benevolence level of the producing countries they will have to feed their own population first and will not be able to export surplus food that does not in fact exist.
Thinking about oil availability and priorities I would think that agriculture production,transportation ,processing and storage would have the highest priority second only to an austere National Defense.

[Whatever]

There's a thread somewhere here that dates to early in the year predicting millions dead from famine this year. If it's going to happen, it has to start soon, I'd say.

I am not like Greer in prediction 300+ years of gradual decline but I don't think we're going to go from no famine to millions dead in a single year. It's going to be more gradual than that.

No probably not this year due to the favorable crop forecasts for all of the major producers. What it will take is a major crop failure by one or more of the major world producers so there is no surplus to distribute to these countries in need.
That crop failure could come from drought, a new crop disease or insect pest or from economic collapse of the producing countries disrupting the availability of seed , fertilizer and equipment and fuel availability.
Whatever the cause and the benevolence level of the producing countries they will have to feed their own population first and will not be able to export surplus food that does not in fact exist.
Thinking about oil availability and priorities I would think that agriculture production,transportation ,processing and storage would have the highest priority second only to an austere National Defense.

The rapid collapse vs slow collapse debate is how all of this got started for me. Greer is the poster boy for slow, gradual collapse. His so called "Theory of Catabolic Collapse" is pure pseudoscience. When I brought up how just wrong JMG was, I was summarily banned for life from the oildrum.com.

Greer is obviously a fool, but you are both wrong as well. Complex non-linear systems are great at adapting on the way up. On the way down, not so much. Things tend to break. Collapse will be rapid and starvation could begin almost immediately. Here is how:

Market crash/Financial crisis ---> Credit freeze ---> Supply chain cross-contagion ---> Famine

Trade-Off

Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion:
a study in global systemic collapse.

http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/upload ... e-Off1.pdf

There is an acknowledged risk that we are now at the peak of global oil production. That is, the amount of affordable oil that can be brought on stream in real-time time is hitting constraints and will decline. Economic and complexity growth are predicated on rising and adaptive energy flows. Constraints on energy flows that cannot be substituted affordably, adaptively, and in real-time, are expressed through constraints on economic activity.

If the global economy cannot grow and starts to contract, feedback processes drive further contraction. A contracting economy is incompatible with the credit backing of the globalized economy and the value of all financial assets because it undermines the ability to service debt in real terms. Monetary stability, bank solvency, intermediation and credit are all dependent upon confidence in continuing credit expansion and rising economic activity. That is, the financial and monetary systems that we have come to take for granted were adaptive within a particular set of conditions. When those conditions change, the financial and monetary system keystone-hub may slip out of its historical equilibrium.

Generally, we tend to assume that change is gradual; a dependent condition changes and the system responds proportionally. Our assumption of gradual change tends to imagine that the effects of economic contraction, debt deflation, climate change, energy depletion, or biodiversity loss will gradually grind us down, snipping away at our wealth and welfare over years or decades. This may be so. However, all those changing conditions need to do is drive the globalized economy, or keystone-hubs within it, out of their stability domain, after which the system’s internal interdependencies come out of sync with what they have adapted to and the system can be at risk of collapse. The speed of that collapse is related to the levels of integration and complexity in the system.

One of the effects of massive credit over-expansion and/or the peaking of global oil production is the growing risk of a global systemic financial shock. The likelihood, as with so many financial crises of the past, is that the breakdown of the global financial system will be sudden and catastrophic, marked by complacency and hope turning to fear and panic. It would happen over hours and days.

.....

Production flows are enabled by money, credit and bank intermediation. It is this which keeps food in the supermarkets, businesses and production running, and critical infrastructure serviced.

Production flows determine our dependencies and the ability to maintain any form of socioeconomic complexity. As production flows have grown in complexity, de-localization, interdependence and speed, our vulnerability to any form of major financial shock has increased immensely.

.....

The societies that would be impacted most extensively and rapidly are the most complex ones. Being the most complex, they have the greatest number of critical inputs into keeping systems (factories, supermarkets, critical infrastructure) running. They have the highest levels of interdependence and are adaptive to leaner, JIT logistics.

.....

Consider briefly a 'soft-to-mid-core' (Spain, Italy.....Belgium, France?), disorderly default and contagion in the Euro zone, coupled, as would be likely, with a systemic global banking crisis. There would be bank runs, bank collapses and fear of bank collapses; uncertainty over the next countries to default and re-issue currency; plummeting bond markets; a global market collapse; and a global credit crunch.

Counter-party risk would affect trade, just as it would affect the inter-bank market. However, production and supply-chain networks are far more complex than the banking and shadow banking system.

Within days there could be a food security crisis, health crisis, production stoppages and so on within the most directly impacted countries, and the number of such countries would rise. Those with access to cash would clear out supermarkets in panic. Many would immediately suffer as we now hold little cash and have small home inventories.

Supermarkets could not re-stock, and even if they could, there would be declining availability of fuel for transporting goods. Hospitals adapted to JIT would also run low on critical supplies and staff might not be able to get to work. Pandemic modelling has shown that removing at random only small numbers of a population can cause cascading failure of functions across an economy. Lack of inputs and people required for production would also begin to shut factories within days. Governments, emergency services, and the public would by and large be shell-shocked. Without serious pre-planning, a government would be unable even to provide emergency feeding stations for weeks. There would be growing risk to critical infrastructure.

Imports and exports would collapse in the most exposed countries and fall for those as risk. It would also cut global trade as Letters of Credit dried up. The longer the crisis went on the more countries would be at risk. But once the contagion took hold, it would be very difficult for the ECB/IMF or governments to stop; it would be a large-scale cascading failure at the heart of the global financial system.

But the countries at the center of the crisis are amongst the most trade-central in the world. That is, they are ‘hubs’ of global trade; there is concentration in production flows just as there is in banks. They also produce some of the least substitutable products in the world. What we know from real-life examples is that supply-chain contagion could be fast.

The collapse in trade within some critical trade hubs would mean missing critical inputs for production processes across the world, stopping further production, which could cascade through production globally. The more supply-chains that were ‘infected’ the greater risk that any uninfected supply-chain would become infected. That is, supply-chains would start transmitting global contagion, which would accelerate and expand. Factories from Germany to China and the US would shut down, helping to spread further financial and economic fears within those countries.

Supply-chain contagion would feedback into deepening and spreading financial system contagion, which would in turn feedback into further supply-chain contagion. It would impact on the various key-stone hubs we shall consider later including critical infrastructure. It may mean that if the keystone-hubs were not re-stabilised, within weeks an irreversible global economic collapse could be underway.

Our modern industrial civilization is not nearly as robust as most people believe (and hope). It is actually quite brittle and fragile. Civilization cannot gradually adapt to the coming crisis. As total energy continues to decline, critical systems will begin to fail. When that happens, the contagion will spread rapidly. Our just in time delivery systems will come to a halt. Modern cities have about 3 days worth of food on hand. People will starve.



---Futilitist

[ennui2]

The rapid collapse vs slow collapse debate is how all of this got started for me. Greer is the poster boy for slow, gradual collapse. His so called "Theory of Catabolic Collapse" is pure pseudoscience. When I brought up how just wrong JMG was, I was summarily banned for life from the oildrum.com.

I've never heard of anyone being banned for life at theoildrum.com. I have to imagine you did something more than just voice your opinion.

Collapse will be rapid and starvation could begin almost immediately.

You're entitled to your opinion but I just don't buy into fast-crash theories anymore. I've been down that road enough and seen too many bad doomer predictions come and go.

Market crash/Financial crisis ---> Credit freeze ---> Supply chain cross-contagion ---> Famine

Note that we had a market crash in 2008 and we're still alive to tell the tale.

The moral of the story is that even a very bad patch (like a recession or a war) is not necessary the leading edge of a domino effect that ushers in a Malthusian catastrophe.

I've learned that BAU is altogether more resilient than doomers would like to admit.

Our assumption of gradual change tends to imagine that the effects of economic contraction, debt deflation, climate change, energy depletion, or biodiversity loss will gradually grind us down, snipping away at our wealth and welfare over years or decades.

Exactly.

One of the effects of massive credit over-expansion and/or the peaking of global oil production is the growing risk of a global systemic financial shock. The likelihood, as with so many financial crises of the past, is that the breakdown of the global financial system will be sudden and catastrophic, marked by complacency and hope turning to fear and panic. It would happen over hours and days.

Hmm.. Sounds like Peter Schiff doom. This is nothing new.

Guess what? Argentina, Zimbabwe, Russia, they're still standing. Defaults like Iceland and Greece, still no blood on the streets. Financial crises are no cakewalk but they have a way of just kind of working their way through the system. At any rate, none of that is the same thing as TEOTWAWKI. This emphasis peakers place on bank runs and currency collapses is a sort of an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach from 2008 onward, since oil depletion talking points don't resonating anymore.

[vtsnowedin]

The whole world is a house of cards ready to fall theory is to me no more likely then the BAU will return to growth theory. Both have major flaws in them and the future lies somewhere in the middle.
BAU needs oil production to keep rising to match the growth in population and demand. I don't expect that to go on much longer.
The house of cards thinks every transaction is accomplished with borrowed money and that no one has a positive net worth. Again not reality.
I expect real declines in oil exported to be the catalyst for declines in oil importing countries with the percentage of the countries energy coming from oil imports being the measure of the severity of the problem.
The fact remains that the USA imports some 7.5 million barrels a day but wastes much of this in suburban commuting and heating poorly insulated houses. The country could get along quite nicely on our own production and perhaps some from Canada.
Other countries with higher import ratios will not fare as well and they may well invade producing countries to seize all of their oil thereby depriving the local population of it's use. That will not be pretty.

[JV153]

Other countries with higher import ratios will not fare as well and they may well invade producing countries to seize all of their oil thereby depriving the local population of it's use. That will not be pretty.

Yup. Oil Fields As Military Objectives: a feasibility study, Congressional Research Service, 94th Cong., 1st sess., August 21, 1975, (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1975)

It's a bit old, though.

[AdamB]

I've never heard of anyone being banned for life at theoildrum.com. I have to imagine you did something more than just voice your opinion.

Oh please. Folks are banned forever all the time, and TOD wasn't any different.

[ROCKMAN]

e - "I've never heard of anyone being banned for life at theoildrum.com. I have to imagine you did something more than just voice your opinion." Actually the Rockman was by one the editors. Just like here the Rockman offered opinions from time to time but most often just posted FACTS. Facts that sometimes contradicted some opinions at TOD. Eventually was invited back but the Rockman doesn't tend to hang around where he isn't welcomed. So I rolled back here to PO.

Some folks can handle opposing opinions OK but being presented with facts that show they are full of sh*t is more difficult. LOL.

[ennui2]

BAU needs oil production to keep rising to match the growth in population and demand. I don't expect that to go on much longer.

I also expect drivers in negative demand like EVs and alternatives to start to counteract the rise of Chindia.

Facts that sometimes contradicted some opinions at TOD. Eventually was invited back but the Rockman doesn't tend to hang around where he isn't welcomed. So I rolled back here to PO.

I finally have to bring this up, but why the heck do you insist on referring to yourself in the 3rd person like Elmo?

[vtsnowedin]

I also expect drivers in negative demand like EVs and alternatives to start to counteract the rise of Chindia.

Perhaps they will start but I don't expect EVs and alternatives to ever balance out the rise in demand from Chindia much less keep up with decline of crude production once that takes hold.

[ennui2]

Perhaps they will start but I don't expect EVs and alternatives to ever balance out the rise in demand from Chindia much less keep up with decline of crude production once that takes hold.

I don't either, but it is likely to act like a cushion in the early days. It feels like a different world we're moving into vs. the one I remember 10+ years ago when I first took a red pill. The pros are some serendipitous moves that could lower oil demand (in conjunction with more viable unconventional than the pundits once thought) and the cons are a much more rapidly deteriorating biosphere.

I think the net result of this is effectively an extension of the plateau of relative normalcy out for a while longer.

[vtsnowedin]

I think the net result of this is effectively an extension of the plateau of relative normalcy out for a while longer.

The problem with extending the plateau out further is that it makes the cliff that much steeper. Think Wylie Coyote holding an anvil at the tip of an overhang on the Grand Canyon Beep Beep!!

[Whatever]

The whole world is a house of cards ready to fall theory is to me no more likely then the BAU will return to growth theory. Both have major flaws in them and the future lies somewhere in the middle.
BAU needs oil production to keep rising to match the growth in population and demand. I don't expect that to go on much longer.
The house of cards thinks every transaction is accomplished with borrowed money and that no one has a positive net worth. Again not reality.

Did you read through the Korowicz paper? There is no assumption that "every transaction is accomplished with borrowed money and that no one has a positive net worth". The BAU return to growth theory obviously has major flaws but the rapid collapse theory does not. I notice you said that both theories had flaws. You did not support that claim at all. Then you go on to claim that the future must lie somewhere in between. That is an example of fallacious averaging.

Rapid collapse is inevitable because complex non-linear systems cannot scale down uniformly. If the total immediately available energy continues to fall, eventually critical systems like the financial and monetary keystone-hub will begin to fail. When that happens, all hell will break loose.

http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/upload ... e-Off1.pdf

The financial and monetary keystone-hub has virtually no general system diversity, which is always a danger in an ecosystem. Whatever bank one cares to consider, whatever form of country financing, whatever monetary system - they all share the same platform of fiat money and credit-money creation by fractional reserve banking. The whole of the financial and economic system is dependent upon credit dynamics and leverage.

Such credit dynamics helped to entrench the imbalances that built up in the global economy between countries running trade surpluses and those absorbing ever-rising credit flows. Without the level of de-localization, complexity, and open connectivity, it is doubtful that such high levels of debt could have built across so many countries. Debt is now not just a feature of countries and banks - it is a system stress in the globalized economy as a whole.

The banking system has become less and less diverse too: there are many banks in the world, but banking activity has become more concentrated in only a tiny fraction of them; these are the ‘too-big-to-save, too-big-to-fail’ banks. The connectivity between retail banks, merchant banks and the shadow banking system has further removed system diversity and buffers to the spread of contagion.

Further, the response to the financial crisis has been to stave off a global banking collapse by releasing some of the tension onto sovereign states, where credit expansion could be maintained, at least for a while. This is particularly true of countries within the Eurozone which cannot print their own currency. This has reduced the system diversity of the financial system, and removed buffers to the spread of contagion, by coupling sovereign financing and the banking system ever more tightly. By enabling further credit expansion, which is part of why there was a problem in the first place, the risk of systemic failure has increased. The risk of systemic failure is further increased by the process of debt deflation, itself the direct result of credit over-expansion.

Once the financial and monetary keystone-hub begins to fail, contagion will rapidly spread to critical supply chains. The process of rapid collapse, once begun, will run it's course.

Adaptations can only delay the onset of collapse, but once collapse begins, it must be rapid. How could it be otherwise?

I would recommend that everyone read the Korowicz paper. It is a real eye opener. It is a lot harder to make sweeping statements like "Both have major flaws in them and the future lies somewhere in the middle" when you actually look at the details. Good luck.



---Futilitist

[vtsnowedin]

Well if things are as bad as you say they are you should dig yourself a hole six feet deep by five feet long and five feet wide placing the excavated dirt above the hole so that the next rain will wash the dirt back in. Then at the opportune time you should enter the hole and crouch down in a fetal position then hyper extend your neck so you can kiss your arse goodbye.

[ennui2]

The problem with extending the plateau out further is that it makes the cliff that much steeper. Think Wylie Coyote holding an anvil at the tip of an overhang on the Grand Canyon Beep Beep!!

I'll just take this as the glass half full that it is and enjoy whatever normalcy remains, thank you very much.