Peak Oil News and Message Boards

If/when things really go downhill, money/debt/claims on resources and even gold won't mean a rats behind

What problems?

It annoys the He!! out of me to see unclear thinking. If you ever studied History and Philosophy, you understand that the purposes for which we create a society are really rather fundamental and uncomplicated. There are five main goals that a democratic government should supposedly reach that being security, prosperity, equality, justice, and liberty. However for a democracy to work a society must have rule by law, protections for both civil rights, civil liberties, tolerance of dissent and acceptance of majority decisions by the minority. A goal has to be had by someone or some group. Different people want different things for their societies.

We have all of these things. Our Society is a roaring success story. We have wealth and opportunity and you can still go where you want and do what you want, with whomever you want. By all the standards that have been applied in History, we have arrived, we are the very epitomy of success, and few have ever had the freedoms and wealth and opportunities enjoyed by citizens of the modern Democracies.

The crash is highly unlikely, unnecessary, and would not produce any quality of life improvements for anybody. What is happening now is that there are too many people, and they all want a car to drive, enough food to make them fat, a warm place to sleep, and recreation in many forms.

Well, they are most of them going to be disappointed. There are too many people and not enough stuff. There is nothing that anybody can do that will generate the resources needed to give everyone on Earth the same lifestyle that all of us talking enjoy.

That's the problem. The problem won't go away by electing more R's or D's. The problem starts to go away when we outbid the 3rd World for increasingly expensive oil, so that we can haul our overweight carcasses around in A/C 'd vehicles, while they who only existed because of cheap FF energy perish for a lack of food and warmth.

It's as simple as that. You are foolish to believe that you have problems compared to those who live on the edge of starvation already.

KaiserJeep wrote:By all the standards that have been applied in History, we have arrived, we are the very epitomy of success, and few have ever had the freedoms and wealth and opportunities enjoyed by citizens of the modern Democracies.

The crash is highly unlikely, unnecessary, and would not produce any quality of life improvements for anybody.

KJ, an interesting parallel to peak oil since the descent starts right at that moment when maximum production occurs.

Our modern industrial civilization is right there were you just described it, at the peak of success and freedom and wealth.

This by no means indicates some resilience against a crash. It can mean exactly the opposite.

NO! No we are not at the apex of a glorious civilization.. We are on accelerating spiral of degradation and decay because we have created a civilization built on an unsustainable economic, ecological, political and social matrix. And to make it worse is that we as a species are mostly oblivious to all this.

Ibon, there simply is no precedent for a world-wide collapse, in the entirety of recorded history. The most that has ever happened is an entire country has had an economic conniption. Hyperinflationary currency, financial speculations, bank fraud, stock fraud, even famines affecting entire areas within a country, these things have all happened.

Our present economic system and our food and energy supplies are massively redundant. They are not fragile and are not on the brink of collapse. There is tremendous excess capacity everywhere - for example, as much as a third of the food delivered in the USA spoils and is discarded uneaten. Possibly two thirds of our grid energy usage could be saved simply by turning off unused lighting and not conditioning unused living spaces. As for vehicle fuels, I am proof that most people could eliminate most fuel purchases via planning.

The idea that collapse is coming is powerfully attractive to some, especially those who have prepped for such already. But it's simply the least likely scenario.

Furthermore, an obsession with collapse is unhealthy. Michael Ruppert had such.

onlooker, you would appear to have ingested too much of whatever you are drinking, smoking, or whatever.

KaiserJeep wrote:onlooker, you would appear to have ingested too much of whatever you are drinking, smoking, or whatever.

Ibon, there simply is no precedent for a world-wide collapse,--
And no precedent exists for our impacts upon this planet, the degree by which we are on a unsustainable trajectory WORLDWIDE and the type of destructive potentials we now have. Kaiser, you eventually see a very doomerish scenario on this planet, The difference is a see one happening sooner. So, what I believe I am high on is realism

onlooker wrote:NO! No we are not at the apex of a glorious civilization.. We are on accelerating spiral of degradation and decay because we have created a civilization built on an unsustainable economic, ecological, political and social matrix. And to make it worse is that we as a species are mostly oblivious to all this.

We are saprobes, or detrivores, and when we started to live off of a deteriorating resource we began to erode our base.
This is a one way trip. We are going to get to the bottom of the honey pot and then that's it.

Or not.

Perhaps BAU will persist for decades, with oil supplies slowly waning. Perhaps food will gradually become more expensive, annoying 1st World citizens and rapidly starving the 3rd World. Perhaps expensive energy will make everthing more expensive over time, until the share of their income that US citizens spend on food increases from 6% to some more significant number. Perhaps enouugh to seriously impede our acquisition of fine wines, latest generation smart phones, video games, cars/boats/motorcycles/planes, and big screen HDTVs.

Think of all the resentment that would cause. Yet still, nothing resembling collapse.

Really folks, this mono-maniacal obsession that says something entirely without historical precedent must and will happen very soon - it just does not make any sense.

KJ said; Really folks, this mono-maniacal obsession that says something entirely without historical precedent must and will happen very soon - it just does not make any sense.

Population levels without precedent.
Consumption levels without precedent.
Per-capita consumption levels without precedent.
Complexity levels without precedent.
Levels of debt without precedent.
Ability to destroy each other in warfare without precedent.
Food consumption requirements without precedent.
Waste streams without precedent.
Environmental destruction, globally, without precedent.
Rate of global climate change without precedent in modern human history.

None of this portends consequences that have no precedent, does it KJ? But keep whistling past that graveyard.

onlooker, as long as civilization persists, and we are able to exchange opinions in the forum, I'm right and all you Doomies are wrong.

It's not like the 1% will get what's coming to them, because of greed, while the rest of you righteous souls feel satisfaction about being correct about TEOTWAWKI, either. One thing is certain, the 1% will outlive us all.

Why don't we re-visit this thread annually until then? Until TEOTWAWKI I can rub in the fact that I was right and you were wrong. More often than that would be gratuitous. Of course, I think we can keep the thread going for decades, should I live that long.

Hmm, interesting perspective K. Suffice to say, I hope you are right and I am wrong

I notice some are saying "we" are doing just fine, never better. Collapse can not happen, matter of fact it has never happened to the whole world at once.
I wonder if our group included a good number of its posters from the nations we have attacked for their oil, or tried to hurt economically to keep them unaligned with our "enemies" , - Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, etc ----- what would they say?
I think a lot of them would say that the collapse has already happened. Personally I believe that a good percentage of the population of the world has already collapsed, or is on the verge of collapse.
Yes, most of us are fairly comfortable in the good old USA, but is it possible we have delayed our collapse by standing on the bodies of other nations?
"We" ain't everybody.

And now for something totally different....

I'm always going on about eusocial animals and how humans share some traits. I came across this TED Talk about how ant colonies make decisions. I find this stuff interesting.

https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordo ... #t-1209543

My suggestion is that humans work on similar principals to ants. We reach out and touch the people we are close to and depending upon how we perceive them we make our decisions.

It may sound funny until you think of advertising. Ads are some of the people we touch in every day life. And the more we are exposed to an ad the more influence it has on us. And the ad normally does not try to prove or convience us of anything, most likely it simply makes the association. It says "Hello, I am here, your friends use me, attractive people use me." Then WE make the association that if my friends and attractive people like me us this product then we should also. Attack ads to something similar but identify the enemy.

I hold that these kind of subliminal processes have more weight on our daily living, and our long term planning, than the 1% or TPTB.

Newfie wrote:And now for something totally different....

I'm always going on about eusocial animals and how humans share some traits. I came across this TED Talk about how ant colonies make decisions. I find this stuff interesting.

https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordo ... #t-1209543

My suggestion is that humans work on similar principals to ants. We reach out and touch the people we are close to and depending upon how we perceive them we make our decisions.

It may sound funny until you think of advertising. Ads are some of the people we touch in every day life. And the more we are exposed to an ad the more influence it has on us. And the ad normally does not try to prove or convience us of anything, most likely it simply makes the association. It says "Hello, I am here, your friends use me, attractive people use me." Then WE make the association that if my friends and attractive people like me us this product then we should also. Attack ads to something similar but identify the enemy.

I hold that these kind of subliminal processes have more weight on our daily living, and our long term planning, than the 1% or TPTB.

Funny. Maybe that's why pretty much the only sane people I know are basically hermits.

KaiserJeep wrote:It's not like the 1% will get what's coming to them, because of greed, while the rest of you righteous souls feel satisfaction about being correct about TEOTWAWKI, either. One thing is certain, the 1% will outlive us all.

I met a guy who does excavation and earth work. He was working for a guy who was asking him to fix up an old farm surrounded by mountains with rich bottomland soil. He asked him why he was doing this, and the guy who is a one percenter said "you don't want to know" Eventually he found out that the oil guy was making himself a little hideaway for when TSHTF. The one percenters are already making plans, and they have the means to do it.