by KaiserJeep » Thu 21 Feb 2019, 15:10:10
FWIW, I do not believe in a collapse scenario, either from Fossil Fuels depletion, or from Climate Change.
With FF, the only fuel near peak is petroleum, because of the truly piggish way we have been consuming it. Even after the cost of petroleum spirals into the range where it is too expensive to burn, there will be decades of increasingly expensive petroleum consumption for essential plastics and medicines and pesticides and other petrochemical applications. IMHO, oil is already too expensive and too precious to burn for fuel - and by the time that knowledge is widespread, things will be an order of magnitude worse.
But waiting in the wings behind oil are tar sands and shales. Then there are decades of fracked natural gas. Then (as much as I hate the thought of it) there is at least a century of coal remaining, all of which will be burned. Even if in the next 2/3 decades the USA and the other Western countries were to transition energy production entirely from FF to greener forms of energy, we have such an appetite for cheap consumer goods that we are already selling coal and food to China and the Third World manufacturers.
As for Climate Change: We are not stopping the burning of FF's until they are too rare to use. The cessation of the FF burning which grows at least 3/4ths of the food that 7.8 Billion humans need is too great a price to pay. Face facts - that is what will happen. The entirely debateable impact of burning FF's will be very well understood as we live through it. Note I said LIVE. We are not dinosaurs or other dumb beasts to be killed by CC, we are technological humans. I don't know about the rest of you, but I am planning on my own electric power production, a super-efficient residence, and doubling up on the heat pumps that condition my living spaces. I plan to survive and to leave a comfortable, completely self-sufficient and durable homestead for my descendants to survive in as well.
In the end, all FF's everywhere get burned, even if you end up shoveling coal into the HVAC system that keeps CC at bay.
If the rest of you cannot make similar arrangements - meaning your best guess of what it takes to survive for you and your loved ones in the place you want to live - well, that's gonna be an example of evolution in action. Right now, survival and the ability to accumulate wealth and to acquire land and most of all, to remain out of debt, those are the survival skills needed. Later on, it may be how well you can tinker with your essential tech and keep it going.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0