by KaiserJeep » Mon 03 Jul 2017, 10:33:20
I for one would just LOVE to see us manage our birthrate, but I take your point, it's not going to happen, absent some massive external stimulus such as a global famine.
A global famine is however one of the "baked in catastropies" in that other current thread. Even if we manage to run the grid on 100% renewables, both transportation and agriculture still depend almost exclusively upon liquid and gaseous FF's. Without mechanized agriculture, without cheap petroleum-sourced fertilizers/pesticides/herbicides, food production plummets to a fraction of former output. Without cheap transportation, one is reduced to eating what grows within a few hundrded miles, the range of BEV's.
Now let's talk about "we". Those societies that have a chance to survive the human famine are those that both can and do adapt to the loss of cheap FF energy. It is a popular misconception around here that the 3rd World is better prepared to ride out the famine because they have less of a dependance upon cheap energy. That is rank foolishness.
The residences of the 1st World countries are habitable even without FF power generation, and would continue to be so with a grid running on renewable energy. (Granted, your heating bill will increase.) Food processing and food preservation derive from grid energy. When food production plummets from the fossil fueled apex we are at now to some lower level, Americans and other 1st World countries will still be eating in the midst of severe economic disruption. 2nd and 3rd World countries will starve. Such countries are where FF's already make the difference between malnutrition and famine.
I contend that the present slump in oil prices is winding the spring tighter and tighter. When such prices inevitably increase in the approaching oil shortage, the 1st World will be positioned to survive, not those on the edge of starving already. As 1st World citizens, our own worst problem will not be finding enough food, it will be coping with starving refugees. Have you noticed that we already have that problem?
As I have said before many times, TEOTWAWKI is a long drawn out process that will last a century or two. I have come to believe that TEOTWAWKI actually began in the 1950's, and is now becoming more noticeable. Since then, we have more than doubled World human population, and are well on the way to tripling it.
Save yourselves, the government is not going to do so. The government exists at the beck and call of the 1%. The 1% has already positioned themselves to survive, save for the clueless trust fund babies. The next priority the government has is to save themselves, which is in fact hopeless. Saving the Middle Class is priority #3, and it will never get started, much less happen.
As to the topic of this thread, running the grid on 100% renewables is possible, in the opinion of this EE. It is also necessary to save the Middle Class. But the Barack Obama's, the Donald Trump's, the Hillary Clinton's, the Bernie Sanders, and the rest of the Criminal Class are not going to do this unless you force them to do so with your vote. There was in fact not a single major candidate who even talked about the topic. Some Greenies who never made it past round one, perhaps.
Save yourselves. Live next to food production, because even Donald Trump can't save any of the cities, including especially NYC. The global famine coming our way is a Darwinian sorting of our species. Think of it as evolution in action.
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