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vtsnowedin wrote::( I've gotta say Pops that is one depressing paper and I didn't much care for the writing style as well. Another fine example of polysyllabic verbal diarrhea.

It's damn depressing.

But actually, the fact that he doesn't have a conclusion beyond how it might work or a Big Plan about how to cope are positives for me - his only point is it could come down fast. How many more Futures By Hand job, Green Wizards' back yard gardens, Tranny Town May pole dances, Weed & Bug-friendly Permaculture Edens, Galts Dry-Gulches, Algae-fueled Singularities can you handle!

vtsnowedin wrote:Sometime soon we will have to get into the nuts and bolts of decline so we can begin to make plausible predictions of conditions a few months or a few years ahead. Just saying that the whole world is going to go to S*** in a hurry some time soon isn't much help for those that plan on giving it their best shot.

I've been reading this crap for years and this guy made it more clear to me than any other writer ever has that The Idea of peak energy will kill the economy as equity holders (in their turn) decide to quit the paper and buy dirt. I've been hoping people will come to the same conclusion I have about easy energy and that maybe the government will actually do something to help.


This guy convinced me the government can't prepare for po without bringing down the house overnight just by the admission - so you and I are on our own.

That's why I put this quote from the paper in my sig,
v
v
v

Consequently, I am not sure that Somalia will be the model for a post capitalist planet on a terminal trajectory with the activity of accumulation.

It will not be post-Capitalist, but rather the most rudimentary, crude and brutal form of Capitalism.

You have what I need and it's mine if I can take it. If I can accumulate surplus I will trade for profit, but prefer to take it if possible without fair exchange.

Markets require the expectation of safe mutually beneficial exchange. I wouldn't expect that.

Think District 9. Just watched it again. Awesome movie.

Pops wrote:[But actually, the fact that he doesn't have a conclusion beyond how it might work or a Big Plan about how to cope are positives for me - his only point is it could come down fast. How many more Futures By Hand job, Green Wizards' back yard gardens, Tranny Town May pole dances, Weed & Bug-friendly Permaculture Edens, Galts Dry-Gulches, Algae-fueled Singularities can you handle!

vtsnowedin wrote:That is a great list They mean well though, at least some of them so I'll give them there space as long as they give me mine.

I've been reading this crap for years and this guy made it more clear to me than any other writer ever has that The Idea of peak energy will kill the economy as equity holders (in their turn) decide to quit the paper and buy dirt. I've been hoping people will come to the same conclusion I have about easy energy and that maybe the government will actually do something to help.


This guy convinced me the government can't prepare for po without bringing down the house overnight just by the admission - so you and I are on our own.

That's why I put this quote from the paper in my sig,
v
v
v

Some how not having a lobbyist in congress at my beck and call has always made me feel like I was on my own.

@ Pops

Thanks for posting the link to the article. I reread the paper and it basically coincides with something that has been troubling me the last couple of weeks. When I saw the IEA 2010 chart showing the new policies scenario below, I knew we had pretty much arrived at the crisis that the IEA said in their previous reports was many years in the future. Only a hard core cornucopian would accept that we are going to fill the depletion gap with oil yet to be found and oil yet to be developed.

IMO we have run out of time even if we wanted to do something on a governmental level to remedy what is coming. I'm not even talking about maintaining BAU but maintaining civilization at some level.

As you said, we are on our own.

vtsnowedin wrote:8) From the executive summary in the paper.
"We are at the cusp of rapid and severely disruptive changes. From now on the risk of entering a collapse must be considered significant and rising. The challenge is not about how we introduce energy infrastructure to maintain the viability of the systems we depend upon, rather it is how we deal with the consequences of not having the energy and other resources to maintain those same systems. Appeals towards localism, transition initiatives, organic food and renewable energy production, however laudable and necessary, are totally out of scale to what is approaching.
There is no solution, though there are some paths that are better and wiser than others. This is a societal issue, there is no „other‟ to blame, but the responsibility belongs to us all. What we require is rapid emergency planning coupled with a plan for longer-term adaptation."

This is a bit of truth that escapes many here. No group planned this to rip you off. The rich will lose all just as you will.


The diatribes such as this." Whitefang

Peakoil and about everything else has happened, no more growth, paper money or stock not backed up, western global empire bankrupt.
Global war on terror, worldly elites using home made fantasy of OBL beating Pentagon with knife and cellphone from cave , arming themselves against locals to hold palace and Benz. Using fear to make people give up car and mass consumption, their priviliges and freedom. The end game starting with global fin.crisis, riots and Gulags, FEMA camps for the whole family, with playgrounds for the little happy campers!
Also plastic coffins for the dead where the chipped bodies can be transported to the local mass grave, RIP.
Our management east and west, have been extremely busy making preps for peakoil and the life after, only 911 involves a great deal of planning for the future, London bombings, Madrid etc etc.....the whole economy ponzy scheme, wars in Africa, Middle East, Far East....idiocy that takes tonnes of energy and did accelerate that human die off-tipping point by years."

are a waste of time.

+1

Xenophobe wrote:

Cog wrote: Only a hard core cornucopian would accept that we are going to fill the depletion gap with oil yet to be found and oil yet to be developed.

The IEA has admitted their peak oil inclinations. Your graph is an IEA graph. And total liquids is still going up. So...would you say they are cornocopian, or Peaker?

Up until this year, the IEA has not admitted such a thing as peak in production. I invite you to check out their projections for 2008 and 2009. Totally unrealistic. They hardly have peak oil inclinations. By admitting a conventional oil peak in 2006, they are simply admitting what many who have followed this for years already knew. They still are showing steady growth in total liquids which I'm sure you believe but at much lower levels then the previous years models.

There are other assumptions in the 2010 IEA report that make no sense either. They show the OECD countries using far less oil down the road so that developing countries can use the excess. Unless you know of some master plan by the USA and other OECD countries to cut their oil usage, that I haven't heard about, this is a ridiculous assumption. Chart below.



I also would remind you what Pops said in his intro post to this thread.

Of course, feel free to pull your usual opinion out of your butt without expending any effort but be advised, this thread is about the ramifications of the end of energy/economic growth, therefore "there will be no energy shortage" is off topic and will be deleted.

Cog wrote:They show the OECD countries using far less oil down the road so that developing countries can use the excess. Unless you know of some master plan by the USA and other OECD countries to cut their oil usage, that I haven't heard about, this is a ridiculous assumption.

Its called OECD countries have trade deficits and developing countries have trade surpluses. Therefore, when push comes to shove, the developing countries will use their trade surplus to outbid us for the available oil. Its already happening.

.
I agree with pops on the three basic form a deep ( and permanent ) depression can take
- The cliff
-The slope
-The stairs
some comment
It would be different for each country or regions , some might do much better
it also will hurt different population sectors diferently
and each activity would have different prospects
farmers would be coming out better than city pensionners, tertiary jobs would be hammered
public servants would be whittled down

country with good food or energy exports would be somewhat OK
Taking those possible variations in account the worst place could be Europe
but their governance would probably implement a rigid state rationning
and mercilessly squeezing their folks
After all they have see things like that before
so for them it would be a slope ( more or less )

The U.S. has more advantage but not much governance , there is a strong chance of a cliff
especially since it's not easy to squeeze people armed with guns

sparky wrote:.
I agree with pops on the three basic form a deep ( and permanent ) depression can take
- The cliff
-The slope
-The stairs
some comment
It would be different for each country or regions , some might do much better
it also will hurt different population sectors diferently
and each activity would have different prospects
farmers would be coming out better than city pensionners, tertiary jobs would be hammered
public servants would be whittled down

country with good food or energy exports would be somewhat OK
Taking those possible variations in account the worst place could be Europe
but their governance would probably implement a rigid state rationning
and mercilessly squeezing their folks
After all they have see things like that before
so for them it would be a slope ( more or less )

The U.S. has more advantage but not much governance , there is a strong chance of a cliff
especially since it's not easy to squeeze people armed with guns

Having all the guns in the world won't get any more oil or food delivered to your doorstep or keep your bank accounts from being drained from the inside by the government.
The US is such a waster of oil I think the first step here will be to drop per capita consumption to European levels by tax and price increases sooner preferably to later. This will of course make Suburbia a Katrina zone but we might as well get started somewhere.

We were doing pretty good staying focused on the paper, lets keep it up!

--Sparky, I agree, local effects will vary.
In fact, I was thinking this morning how some of the worst hit areas of the great recession (& Oil Shock '08) in the US were also the ones most dependent on car culture and how they fit the outline of this paper perfectly.

The San Francisco Bay bedroom towns had boomed in phases during the dot.com bubble as real estate in and close to the city skyrocketed. These bedroom towns continued to boom even after the Dot.bust as fuel stayed low. The phenomena moved in 40 mile spurts, each new mini bubble inflated existing home prices so the old residents moved another 40 miles down the valley to buy a bigger/newer house - I had a developer client who had sold 3 houses to the same family - each one 40 miles further away from the city than the last!

When gas prices went to $4 from $1 the commuters crashed and burned and so did home values and the ATM that had been driving spending on everything from pools to TVs. Now business (and sales tax receipts) that had nothing to do with RE are BK.

Our management in lowlands prepares folks to do preps for disaster, to keep panic under control.
There is lots of activity, army trucks...police vans with dark windows...crisis is near.

Okay:
About all writing is but talk no action, therefore a waste of time, including mine.
For that opinion out of my butt.....agree we are on our own, outnumbered and outgunned, see special forces and thier toys, sound and heat guns for mass control, martial law.
We are all on the same boat, no matter if you can read or write.

Sane thing to do is to have a backup plan just in case this collapse comes to your door, stay or go?
Prepare for war!!! How to stay warm and hide.
Wide awake, with respect, with fear and trust in yourself.
One can learn to sustain oneself in the forest, not a bad spot to weather any storm.
Just see that doomer movie "the road" , when hunger strikes....worst in us comes up.

Whitefang wrote:Our management in lowlands prepares folks to do preps for disaster, to keep panic under control.
There is lots of activity, army trucks...police vans with dark windows...crisis is near.

Okay:
About all writing is but talk no action, therefore a waste of time, including mine.
For that opinion out of my butt.....agree we are on our own, outnumbered and outgunned, see special forces and thier toys, sound and heat guns for mass control, martial law.
We are all on the same boat, no matter if you can read or write.

Sane thing to do is to have a backup plan just in case this collapse comes to your door, stay or go?
Prepare for war!!! How to stay warm and hide.
Wide awake, with respect, with fear and trust in yourself.
One can learn to sustain oneself in the forest, not a bad spot to weather any storm.
Just see that doomer movie "the road" , when hunger strikes....worst in us comes up.

Whitefang, rest assured that your worst fears will never be realized. What you posted here provides a good mix of common sense and emotional reaction. You are absolutely right that much writing and posting is a waste of time. I think that reading and learning in general are still highly valuable, since if everyone is correct, generally, about future circumstances, you'll wish you had spent time with resources abundant now. And the human brain is the most efficient and valuable thing you possess. So use it. Glean your information from sources offline, from books written and edited by somber, sober, and dispassionate observers.

Forget about "The Road". Forget Dmitry Orlov's pessimistic projections. Empty your mind of every fantasy, every movie, book, or otherwise imaginative invention. Question and learn and know what is front of your eyes every day, and you will have all the answers to your questions and fears that you will need.

I doubt the value of "prepping". There are lots of definitions of it. I basically see it this way: don't bother learning something now that you will have plenty of time to learn then. Now is the time to just maintain the daily discipline of developing yourself, physically and mentally.

For example, in the last 5 years, some of the people on this board bought guns and ammo and dug holes and filled them with food. But some invested and learned and trained. Today they can still obtain the guns and ammo and food and still dig holes.

But $1000 worth of food, after 5 years, is pretty much worthless, while the same money, invested, earned interest. See Maddog78 on how to make a bazillion dollars betting on the premises of energy use everyone agrees is prevalent. Energy prices were going up. One person used that information to dig a hole and fill it with food. The other person invested money and now has enough money to buy food and dig holes.

One person nervously awaited armageddon, and at the end of the period, had $1000 of food that was too old to eat. One person was not nervous, invested in what he believed would happen, and now has enough money to buy several caches of fresh food, with enough left over to reinvest.

One guy grew his wealth. One guy threw it away. These are the vagaries of Peak Oil so far. Eating each other is just a scary story.

BlisteredWhippet wrote:

Whitefang wrote:
I doubt the value of "prepping". There are lots of definitions of it. I basically see it this way: don't bother learning something now that you will have plenty of time to learn then. Now is the time to just maintain the daily discipline of developing yourself, physically and mentally.

For example, in the last 5 years, some of the people on this board bought guns and ammo and dug holes and filled them with food. But some invested and learned and trained. Today they can still obtain the guns and ammo and food and still dig holes.

But $1000 worth of food, after 5 years, is pretty much worthless, while the same money, invested, earned interest. See Maddog78 on how to make a bazillion dollars betting on the premises of energy use everyone agrees is prevalent. Energy prices were going up. One person used that information to dig a hole and fill it with food. The other person invested money and now has enough money to buy food and dig holes.

One person nervously awaited armageddon, and at the end of the period, had $1000 of food that was too old to eat. One person was not nervous, invested in what he believed would happen, and now has enough money to buy several caches of fresh food, with enough left over to reinvest.

One guy grew his wealth. One guy threw it away. These are the vagaries of Peak Oil so far. Eating each other is just a scary story.

Another way of looking at it is that one guy bought a one time pay insurance policy that is good for 25 years (see shelf lives of freeze dried foods), and one guy is waiting for the accident to happen before he tries to buy insurance.
I've beening paying State Farm for 40 years and never had a claim. I consider my preps more of an insurance policy than anything else.

I've been pretty much on the dark side of the moon for about a week (unplanned family business in Newfoundland) so I'm not up on my reading, but I did just print this out for later consumption.

However, from the quick survey I did it concentrates on the "normal" downward slope that would occur should no untoward events happen. So, in that sense I see it as a bit of a "best case scenario" or a "slow squeeze" on the trigger that cause a bang. One can conger up other events that would cause a "fast yank" on the trigger.

The one bit of news that got through to me was that the Wiki leaks had published some dispatches of Saudi Arabia requesting the US to "do something" about Iran, perhaps calling for an attack. I can see this causing all kinds of mayhem in Riyadh (isn't the boss man out of the country and in the US for an operation?) with the folks there revolting a la Iran during Carter????

Or some stupid guy in North Korea decides to start a hot war......

Or Mexico slips into civil war because of the drug cartels and the central governments lack of projected income.......

Or...............whatever.

So, even if this paper not completely correct there are still other things that could happen that could cause kind of collapse envisioned.

I'm now off for another few days sans email. Hope y'all are here when I get back.

.
riding the down slope of energy is like slipping down a wire to the bottom of the grand Canyon ,
for a government , It's do-able
with a fair amount of skill , solid nerves and a good amount of luck crosswind wise

Blistered whippid,

Thank you for the input, you are kind.
I'd like to clarify a bit, it is not so much fear that drives my babble on collapse, more a case of self motivation to get going as I have the idiocy of internal talk instead action. I see the whole affair as an opportinity for part of humankind to grow, being cast into the wild with only our wits and will to live, back to the bare huntergatherers lifestyle to learn from nature again.
Why we left that forest 10000 BC? 3 hours work, rest time to play in fields of the lord, learning to expand our perception and find out who we are.

My true feeling is that I am detached from whatever people do, my link with them is controlled folly, rest only a hunt for power, saving energy to do what is needed. Sobriety is what I need to get body in perfect schape, erase routines that drain my power and weaken my attention.
My strenght lies in shutting off my dialogue with myself, keeping sober reasoning vital and learn to move that other tool that we possess to make sense out of the unknown.....

Preperation is a must, calculate all that can happen, what I can do and choose path that gives peace and pleasure. Refuse all unneeded, no more crappy, ugly draining habits....a relief!
We are all with our backs against the wall here, nobody is going anywhere, therefore useless to keep up our self pity, importance and the me me me, manageable world we create, which by the way is but a handy description, a limited routine itself bodymind are constantly involved in.
True road to power and our nature lies in storing silence and strategy, action to save energy to start learning again like we were young, escape our self made prison, our self domestification, everything we have a word for, everything we know but a flimsy position, an island in the vastness of unknown, sea of awareness.

Investing? hihi!!
That will fairly soon be meaningless unless it makes fine tindle.
Invest in bug out bag, places to go, tools and knowledge to make it out alive with grid powerdown.

Sparky,

we could have stepped down orderly if we were committed decades ago...time is gone, we humans did not and result is what we get, what everyone earns children excused.

Newfie,

Check fast yanking good ol' Jimmy Boy Carter the peace lover, surrounded by criminal Carter regime in past, they laid foundation for wars on terror, Kissinger advise, project for the new American Century, a handy new Pearl Harbour, CIA/FED coke/opium/oil/arms trading company. Together with Bilderberg banking media mob, Lucky Larry S. Bush/Cheney/Clinton/Obama...American Institute for Alien Relations......
Florida admiral navy mutiny treason episode, the tipping point, start yr 2000 US military dictatorship taking control over government, with force and bribing judges. After that the 911 success story.
Wikileaks part propaganda to further agenda New World Order.
Even M.Moore connected, Bowling for Columbine in the 90's, disarming local opponants with help of wackey events and bring solution, create problem andd offer solution, like question and answer...no competition.
Create your Fahrenheit opponent so your control is optimal. Years, decades in advance, great Karl Rove stunt, they can be at thier best in strategy.

.
White fang ,
I don't think anything could or will be done , this a basic biological problem ,
success => increase => depletion => die off
it work for bacteria and it work for civilisations

The maths relate to chaos theory and a branch of pure mathematic called "catastrophe theory "
developed by a French math Nobel prize
It state the form a collapse can take but give no predictive result
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory

For the artistic minded , salvador Dali a deeply misunderstood man and catastrophe theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swallow%27s_Tail

The only political organization cappable of dealing with the world current problems would be an authoritarian one , China show it is possible to change the birthrate
Electoral Democracy is excellent to live in but is not well suited to solve problems with hard answers

We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas.

Ludi wrote:We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas.

Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Once again, I am going to relate this short story. During the run up to Y2K, I bought fifty pounds of rice, one hundred pounds of corn, a generator and a drum of gasoline. As we all know, the world did not end. My extended family ate the rice. I fed the corn to the compost bin, burned the gasoline and left the generator in the plastic wrap.

When the 04 hurricanes came over the top of my house, I was the only person in the neighborhood that had a generator.

Bottom line: preparations are not disaster specific. The can goods you have may do nothing more than feed you through a bout of unemployment or add to the bounty of the food bank in your area. Not to prepare puts your fate in the hands of others.

I just bought a set of wood gas plans from Mother Earth News. Am I going to build a gas generator? Not this week, but when the time comes, I don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel.