[tmazanec1]

http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html

[Trab]

An excellent article. The author brings up a very valid point that the future will likely be somewhere in between the polar extremes a lot of peak-oilers talk about.

One thing I'd like to know is if the scenario laid out in the article represents a 'soft landing.' If it is, it's not terribly soft for those of us walking around right now. We would definintely be fighting to reclaim the future for future generations.

[Jack]

http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html

Please - if you don't read another thing this week - read this article!

[ohanian]

Slow decline or fast decline?

The next three months would tell. Apr-2005 , May-2005 and Jun-2005.

If the price of oil sky rockets in the next three months then it is a fast decline.

[Grimnir]

Excellent, level-headed essay. I have to quote just a little:

A Maya woman born around 730 would have seen the crisis dawn, but the ahauob and their cities still flourished when she died of old age seventy years later. Her great-grandson, born around 800, grew up amid a disintegrating society, and the wars and crop failures of his time would have seemed ordinary to him. His great-granddaughter, born around 870, never knew anything but ruins sinking back into the jungle. When she and her family finally set out for a distant village, the last to leave their empty city, it would never have occurred to her that her quiet footsteps on a dirt path marked the end of a civilization.

...


For his great-granddaughter, born in 2100, the great crises are mostly things of the past. She grows up amid a ring of sparsely populated villages surrounding an abandoned core of rusting skyscrapers visited only by salvage crews who mine them for raw materials. Local wars sputter, the oceans are still rising, and famines and epidemics are a familiar reality, but with global population maybe 15% of what it was in 2000, humanity and nature are moving toward balance. She learns to read and write, a skill most of her neighbors don't have, and a few old books are among her prized possessions, but the days when men walked on the moon are fading into legend. When she and her family finally set out for a village in the countryside, leaving the husk of the old city to the salvage crews, it never occurs to her that her quiet footsteps on a crumbling asphalt road mark the end of a civilization.

Sad and, barring all-out nuclear war, likely.

[Ludi]

around 147,000 per day

What are the current birth and death numbers, worldwide?

[Jack]

Population 15% of what it was in 2000? If I'm doing my arithmetic correctly (and I am using ballpark figures here), that's a decline of about 54 million people per year, or around 147,000 per day, starting now.

We in the U.S. wouldn't notice; by and large, we wouldn't particularly care. Unless one knew some of the people in the recent tsunami, what effect did that have on one's day to day life? In my case...none. If 100,000,000 people in China died right this instant, would you or I know or care? I doubt it.

[Pops]

So of my five living grandchildren, perhaps not one will have a grandchild that lives beyond the year 2100 – if that isn’t hard and fast I don’t know what is either Shannymara.

My mother was taken in a horse drawn wagon to see the doctor after she was born. I fully expect my youngest granddaughter – whose name is the same as my mother, to be taken to the cemetery the same way after she dies. I just hope she has someone to take her there.

[tmazanec1]

But where will we get all the horses?