[Newfie]

Perhaps I am wrong, here's hoping we never find out.

RE certain "green movements". Yes Occupy was a economic issue, but I also object to a lot of the green movements. At heart many of them, take the wind power and solar power movements, are really more about retaining the status quo than changing anything fundamental in our life style.

Thus I find them very dangerous for they make people thinks they ar doing something and help to extend the lie.

I'm a big fan of naked, brutal truth.

[onlooker]

"I'm a big fan of naked, brutal truth." We are kindred souls so am I.

[ennui2]

Not to disagree with h your well placed fears, the one caveat I have is that the global economy has the potential to collapse FAST.

What doomers often ignore is that economies can recover after crashing. So a crash by itself should not be interpreted as the eternal end of the world.

Also to bring some perspective to things, in the early days of my doomerism I used to frequent here AND Housing Panic. I noticed a lack of awareness about the housing crisis among doomers who were more concerned with biophysical limits. I noticed a rhetorical shift in 2008 to compensate for the drop in oil prices. Now suddenly doomers were much more concerned with economy and fiat currency, since that reflected what the rest of the world was concerned with. But there is still a lack of solid knowledge about how the economy works. Even the most scholarly economists have a hard time predicting how it works. It is much more mysterious than the LTG chart because it's largely impacted by emotions and flock mentality (the stock market in particular).

[ennui2]

the environment has the potential to collapse every bit as fast, if not faster.

Fast is relative. If it takes a couple hundred years to completely bake the planet, then it's fast in geological terms, but slow in human perception. There are very few environmental catastrophes that can occur as quickly as a stock market crash. AGW even with feedbacks (like we are starting to experience) still falls somewhere within the range of "frog in the pot" slow, hence a lack of collective acknowledgment.

At some level all of us know that in order for an issue to rise up the ranks to an existential concern, that it has to be baring down on us in a short-term window, and this colors our predictions. This is why I've become more interested in the LTG chart, because it tries to average everything down.

Back in the early 70s, the datasets that mainframe computers could manage were miniscule. The reason I haven't contributed to this thread very much is that I only have a second-hand knowledge of LTG. I haven't actually sat down and read the book or its sequels. So I can't look at it like a programmer to try to get a sense of how much confidence I have in the algorithm. Even though I code for a living, math and algorithms aren't really my thing. So either way I'm out of my league and I'm left to just kind of look at graphs.

When things radically spike one way, it makes you feel that what goes up must go down. That's the population chart.



But the LTG chart image recently posted doesn't look like this because the time-range is too narrow.



This above chart is particularly sh*tty because it has no numbers on the left hand side. There's no way to really crunch the body-count. Is every blue line a billion people? If so, that's pretty apocalyptic.

It also doesn't show where the population finally bottoms out. It could be at 1970 levels or it could be complete extinction for all we know.

[dolanbaker]

What doomers often ignore is that economies can recover after crashing. So a crash by itself should not be interpreted as the eternal end of the world.

We've seen this in Ireland recently, It appears to me that the current boom-bust cycle where each subsequent boom is higher than the previous one is coming to an end. It is as if the top people treat the booms as the growing season and the busts as harvesting time as after each bust the wealthy are much wealthier as they have been able to buy up the losers assets at a knockdown price.

With the current economic climate making it almost impossible to grow a business the same way as we used to in the past it may actually prevent the next bust. The upward sawtooth trend could be replaced by a downward facing wave pattern.

[onlooker]

I think none of us our privy to the details of the number crunching of LTG and what statistics they put more emphasis on and which not so much. I think though what anyone can glean is the general jist of the dynamics in terms of each category and how they would reinforce each other to accelerate collapse or forestall collapse. I do think most here would agree that we are pretty far down the road towards pretty dire circumstance coming to pass as the more negative scenarios of LTG are where we seem to be on the graph (s). Is their time to head off the most negative outcomes. Well population dynamics seems to suggest that their is still more growing to be done before populations stabilizes. Global warming experts warm that already some extra warming is inevitable because of a lapse between CO2 in atmosphere and actual warming effects and also oceans becoming less a sink. Finally the environmental situation in some respects may be reaching also a kind of tipping point which i have heard also expressed by scientists in describing a critical threshold that ecosystems cannot pass lest they inevitably collapse. So I am sorry but I must be a doomer in terms of possible projections into the future.

[Newfie]

I believe the blue lines are 2 billion in school for population.

I'll say it once again, IIRC, the authors say the projections fall apart once one of the major indices starts to fail. So you shoul not look too hard cat the right side of the breaking curve. All they are really sayin is "once it starts to go bad anything can happen, probably very bad"

[Newfie]

God I hate auto correct

[ennui2]

OK, so we're talking about 1.5 or so billion lost (net) in population between 2030 and 2050. That would be what, maybe 500 million or more in a 10 year period? That is NET population dropoff, so the actual death-rate necessary to offset new births (which I doubt will subside) would have to be well above that. So maybe a billion or more dead in 10 years.

And the caption says due to "economic collapse". That is an oversimplification if ever there was one. I didn't see a mass die-off in any country that has gone bankrupt recently. Not in Iceland, Greece, or even historically in Argentina. I didn't see mass die-off during the great depression.

People aren't going to die at anywhere that sort of rate from "economic collapse". They are going to die from war/crime, famine, and disease*, as brought on from energy/food/water scarcity.

(I did say in a separate thread that the cause of death for a lot of us will be lack of access to medical care. That falls under disease. But that takes a while to play itself out if you're talking about untreated chronic conditions like cancer and heart disease.)

According to this chart, the curve levels off in only 15 years, in which case the death rate should already be spiking to offset births.

[onlooker]

I think the big wild card here is Global Warming. Even here on this site Cid Yama plus others like Guy Mcpherson are predicting truly calamitous events in a quite short time. Guy about 2030 and Cid I believe states 2020. Arctic Methane Emergency Group also sees disaster as imminent when Arctic is ice-free. So I do not discount this scenario as occurring faster then we may presume.

[GregT]

What doomers often ignore is that economies can recover after crashing. So a crash by itself should not be interpreted as the eternal end of the world.

What people in general are ignoring, is that economies are dependant on the natural environment. Economies crash when limits to growth are met. If substitutes can be found to replace those resources that limit growth, or the economy can move somewhere else, then the economy can recover. If there are no substitutes, then the economy and the population that is dependant on that economy, will decline and collapse.

[GregT]

Fast is relative. If it takes a couple hundred years to completely bake the planet, then it's fast in geological terms, but slow in human perception. There are very few environmental catastrophes that can occur as quickly as a stock market crash.

So if it takes a "couple hundred years to completely bake the planet", at what point do you believe that we are at right now?

Ecosystems don't slowly collapse, they reach tipping points and then collapse suddenly and catastrophically. Just like the frog in the pot of boiling water doesn't die a slow death. One moment it is alive, and the next moment it is dead.

[GregT]

ennui2,

I'll try again.

Infinite exponential growth in a finite environment is a mathematical and physical impossibility.

We either end growth, or growth will be the end of us. At this point in time, we are ignoring all of the signs that we are destroying the natural world around us. The natural world that we will not survive as a species without. Yet we continue to pursue economic growth.

The direction that we are heading in is a no-brainer. Unless we stop, tipping points WILL be reached. We can survive as a species without a global economy, but we will not survive as a species without a healthy natural environment.

Curiosity killed the cat, it is greed that will kill the human race.

[davep]

Greg, unless we understand why we apparently need economic growth we aren't in a position to do much about it.

Read the Bank of England report on money creation in the modern economy http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf

TL;DR version - money creation is tied to credit, and the vast majority of that is done by private banks, not central banks. The interest element of any credit needs to be created too, leading to an ever-increasing need for money (as debt) to pay off the current credit and its interest. This appears to be the bedrock of our economy and would explain why growth is important and why banks get bailed out when they fail (because economies would not be able to create money without them). It also explains the silly house prices in places like the UK, where "recovery" is happening.

The main alternative appears to be sovereign/equity money with a transition period moving to 100% reserves. Studies looking at this kind of thing include http://www.themoneymasters.com/monetary-reform-act/ and the IMF's https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.pdf and recently the Icelandic proposal http://www.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/Skyrslur/monetary-reform.pdf.

I don't think we can start looking at steady state or degrowth economies without addressing this problem. The limit to growth in this scenario is the inability to keep increasing real estate prices to increase money supply. And the banks now prefer using the QE money to get better returns in the stock market etc (as interest rates are so low), so they are not even fulfilling their duty as money creators after being bailed out for that purpose. The system is broken (in part due to the fact we can't sustain growth to keep the credit and money supply increasing).

Finally, saying economic doom is less dangerous than ecological doom is incorrect IMO, as the latter is in large part a consequence of the need for growth of the former under its current monetary system (I'm not saying that ecological damage couldn't happen under other monetary systems, but that it is inevitable under this one).

[GregT]

Absolutely agree davep,

Our ponzi schemed financial systems are at the root of the problem, and the cheerleaders of those ponzi schemes have indoctrinated the public into believing in those same systems. Sadly, I don't see anything changing. I see economic and environmental collapse, but if there is any hope of changing anything at all, it will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. People need to understand that economic growth is the threat, and not the answer. In all likelihood it is already too late, but it's still worth trying to get through to people. IMHO.

[onlooker]

I would add that this current type of economic system is inherent in the very nature of capitalism which is a profit-greed derived system. We should have at some point world-wide adopted some sort of socialist-command economy type system whereby production would have been controlled and channeled mostly to the needs of people rather then wants. Alas, greed got the better of us. I would agree that this economic growth model is at the root of our trashing of the planet. I also feel it is getting very late to forestall collapse and in the end money is but paper and resources and the health of Earth or lack of is ultimately the arbiter of satisfying needs and wants not any man-made economic system as we will soon find out.

[davep]

I would add that this current type of economic system is inherent in the very nature of capitalism which is a profit-greed derived system. We should have at some point world-wide adopted some sort of socialist-command economy type system whereby production would have been controlled and channeled mostly to the needs of people rather then wants. Alas, greed got the better of us. I would agree that this economic growth model is at the root of our trashing of the planet. I also feel it is getting very late to forestall collapse and in the end money is but paper and resources and the health of Earth or lack of is ultimately the arbiter of satisfying needs and wants not any man-made economic system as we will soon find out.

I would disagree. The current economic system is the brainchild of bankers. They befuddled politicians to get the likes of the Federal Reserve Act passed. Capitalism can survive perfectly well without an economic system that uses banks to create money as debt.

I'm not necessarily a fan of capitalism, but we need to be clear what the root of the need for growth is.

[onlooker]

I would take it though Dave that you acknowledge GREED as the catalyst of this debt based system?

[Newfie]

The IVER POPULATION thread begat the LTG thread begat the GLOBALISIM thread?

[davep]

I would take it though Dave that you acknowledge GREED as the catalyst of this debt based system?

Of course. But it's greed that benefits a tiny financial elite at the expense of Governments, ordinary corporations and the populace.