[dohboi]

What Newfie said.

The Ehrlich's predicted the population would explode with eventual dire consequences.

Borlaug and the 'Green Revolution' enabled that explosion to go one that most could have imagined possible, and the consequences (already dire for the billion or so who have inadequate food and the two billion or so who have inadequate clean water) will be ever more dire for ever more people with every 70 million we add every year.

If their warning had been heeded, and the main emphasis had been on reducing birth rates as rapidly as possible, and especially if we had also heeded warnings from the Club of Rome report on hyper-consumerism, we would not be in the dire straights that we in fact find ourselves.

But their warnings were not heeded at the level they should have been, and even at this late, as we see, many are still dismissing them.

Sad, the depths of our ignorance and hubris.

[Plantagenet]

The Ehrlich's predicted the population would explode with eventual dire consequences.

No...they specifically predicted mass famines would occur in the 1970s and 1980s---things that didn't happen.

their warnings were not heeded at the level they should have been, and even at this late, as we see, many are still dismissing them.

When people like the Ehrlichs have a history of making wildly inaccurate predictions, its only natural that their credibility should be questioned.

The Ehrlich's current predictions of doom are really just a warmed over version of the same inaccurate predictions they made in the 1960s. Perhaps they'll be right this time----or perhaps not. Time will tell.

[Plantagenet]

You'd better reread your Tainter, because Tainter believes that societal collapses can be avoided when new "energy" is found.

In his most famous book "Collapse of Complex Societies" he states "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124).

Thats exactly where we are now in the global economy. New energy inputs from the technological innovation called "frakking" are becoming available, including more oil and huge amounts of new natural gas. These new energy inputs are producing local economic booms in North Dakota and other areas where frakking is being applied-----just the opposite of the collapse the Ehrlich's dystopian prophecy foresees. The knock-on effect is an increase in manufacturing due to the cheap power from NG, spreading the positive effect of the new energy into the society.

We now know the Ehrlich's predictions of mass famine in the 1970s and 1980s were wrong because they ignored the effects of new technologies on increasing food production. Time will tell if the Ehrlichs are wrong again now with their latest prediction of doom because they are ignoring the important effect of increasing energy supplies created by frakking. The next 20 years may see mass famines and societal collapse, as the Ehrlich's predict, or they may see continued global economic growth fueled by new development of shale oil and shale gas in the US and other countries. Time will tell.

[Plantagenet]

...sometimes we need a personal savior. Will you be mine?

Only if you stop blubbing.

[Newfie]

Well, yeah, you just keep feeding the monkeys in the cage and they will keep reproducing.

More food, more monkeys. Infinite food, infinite monkeys. Right, I got it.


So, uh, just a thought here, who is shoveling the monkey shit?

And where is it going?

[mmasters]

I used to be convinced we were going to be in a crash now but there's plenty of infrastructure to prevent it from happening in the US for at least 20 years. There's plenty of natural gas to be had and people can learn to be a lot tougher and work harder.

Accepting the inherent negativity of it all has made for a happier life for me. I learned to selectively not care for the human race as a whole and have moved on for the most part. Caring for the group is a nice thing but when it comes to survival it's every man for himself.

I think the humanitarian problems 2020 and beyond and the way the media handles it are going to make for interesting viewing in the future. But I'm guessing people will learn to be in their bubbles and not care, people can only handle so much negativity, the africa problem will become global and most will learn how not to care about it. The save the whales types will have a real problem with it all and some will probably self destruct. I'm sure civil liberties will be removed further to better shield those at the top and society will become more feudal.

The tough times will demand better leaders and hopefully this will give us a chance to make things better but we could just go the path of Rome again.

One thing's for sure with the current crop of college graduates the younger generation will largely fall to the wayside, most don't have the ambition or drive to succeed in these coming times or make something of themselves. We're probably going to have to wait 30 years to see drive and ambition return more.

Probably 2030-2040 - TSWHTF for the bottom levels of society and take out a couple layers. The US will probably remain the best place to live.

[Tanada]

You'd better reread your Tainter, because Tainter believes that societal collapses can be avoided when new "energy" is found.

In his most famous book "Collapse of Complex Societies" he states "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124).

As far as you go the idea is correct, and the same thing I have argued on here repeatedly for 7 long years. The difference is I recognize that each energy/resource addition only delays the inevitable because every system we have ever studied be it in nature or in history goes through cycles.

You add energy to the system and it grows, you keep adding energy and it keeps growing until it hits the limits of what it can do with the energy it has access too. Take away part of that energy due to natural or man made disaster and there is not enough to keep the system going. The more complex the system the harder it is to keep it going in the first place, and once it stops working it falls to a lower level of complexity. Lack of resources in human systems lead to chaos and war, not necessarily in that order.

Look at a historic example, the USA was a major producer of fossil fuels before and during World War II. Many homes in the USA of that era heated and cooked with coal stoves. The war caused severe coal shortages as materials and manpower were diverted to the war effort. People substituted wood for the coal they would normally have been burning.

Now look at the same kind of scenario today. Chaos breaks out from war or disaster. Workers stop getting paid to drill and frak wells because the banking system is disrupted. For a few months the existing wells and stockpiles keep things looking normal to the consumer, but they can't pay their heating bills because the banking system is disrupted. They can get some food and medicine by falling back on barter, just like people always do, but without functioning banks they can't pay for gas to heat their homes. Government, at least in Michigan, doesn't allow utilities to cut off gas during the heating season, but in spring lots of people start losing their natural gas supply. Not only are reserves depleted but without a trusted banking system nobody can pay for what they get. Because natural gas is so easy and clean it dominates the heating market in most of the country, people no longer have working fireplaces or wood/coal burning stoves most places. Also without those gas reserves a lot of the electric grid starts to go down.

That is just one example of one resource that would be severely effected by a banking system failure and/or general chaos. Coal for the power plants and fuel for the food delivery system are in the same boat, and if any one of them fails it causes a cascade failure across the whole system.

We are dancing on the edge of the cliff while juggling Fabrege' eggs wearing a blind fold.

[SamInNebraska]

Does anyone think the USA is going back into mass consumer mode soon?

Who has claimed that they ever left it? People are busy buying real estate and cars and iphones and I bet the flat screen TV season this Christmas was pretty good and so on and so forth.

[SamInNebraska]

We are dancing on the edge of the cliff while juggling Fabrege' eggs wearing a blind fold.

Yes, but we've been doing it for a century, and have gotten very, very good at it. We manage to fight wars while dancing, we get hit with hurricanes and shortages, and keep dancing, we have various economic dislocations and disasters and keep on dancing. And we drop an egg on occasion, who cares, we can still keep on dancing and it is one less thing to worry about (screw the poor people, young college graduates, others who will have to buck up on their own).

[Cloud9]

I think we have been in the collapse for the last forty years. Peak oil raised the price of production so we shifted production to countries where the cost of energy inputs was offset by cheap labor. We shifted from a producer economy to a service economy and set up a system where we exported paper to rest of the world in exchange for real products. This has enabled the consumer economy to develop to unimaginable heights. That expansion ran into a wall in 2005. Miles driven and gas consumption tells the real story.

[Plantagenet]

You'd better reread your Tainter, because Tainter believes that societal collapses can be avoided when new "energy" is found.

In his most famous book "Collapse of Complex Societies" he states "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity" (p. 124).

As far as you go the idea is correct, and the same thing I have argued on here repeatedly for 7 long years. The difference is I recognize that each energy/resource addition only delays the inevitable because every system we have ever studied be it in nature or in history goes through cycles.

You add energy to the system and it grows, you keep adding energy and it keeps growing until it hits the limits of what it can do with the energy it has access too.

Yes. AND peak oil appears to be a critical limit on available energy.

Take away part of that energy due to natural or man made disaster and there is not enough to keep the system going. The more complex the system the harder it is to keep it going in the first place, and once it stops working it falls to a lower level of complexity. Lack of resources in human systems lead to chaos and war, not necessarily in that order.

Yes. But the world isn't facing a sudden lack of resources. The world us facing a slow decline in one kind of resource (oil) stretching over decades. AND in the USA, because of frakking, we are actually INCREASING the amount of oil and NG we produce---both valuable energy resources. Its not going to last forever, but because of frakking we appear to have quite a nice batch of new increases in energy to work with for perhaps the next several decades.

Look at a historic example, the USA was a major producer of fossil fuels before and during World War II. Many homes in the USA of that era heated and cooked with coal stoves. The war caused severe coal shortages as materials and manpower were diverted to the war effort. People substituted wood for the coal they would normally have been burning.

Now look at the same kind of scenario today. Chaos breaks out from war or disaster. Workers stop getting paid to drill and frak wells because the banking system is disrupted. For a few months the existing wells and stockpiles keep things looking normal to the consumer, but they can't pay their heating bills because the banking system is disrupted. They can get some food and medicine by falling back on barter, just like people always do, but without functioning banks they can't pay for gas to heat their homes. Government, at least in Michigan, doesn't allow utilities to cut off gas during the heating season, but in spring lots of people start losing their natural gas supply. Not only are reserves depleted but without a trusted banking system nobody can pay for what they get. Because natural gas is so easy and clean it dominates the heating market in most of the country, people no longer have working fireplaces or wood/coal burning stoves most places. Also without those gas reserves a lot of the electric grid starts to go down.

That is just one example of one resource that would be severely effected by a banking system failure and/or general chaos. Coal for the power plants and fuel for the food delivery system are in the same boat, and if any one of them fails it causes a cascade failure across the whole system.

We are dancing on the edge of the cliff while juggling Fabrege' eggs wearing a blind fold.

Yes. Economic disruption and depressions or political incompetence or war or plague or terrorism or any number of things can disrupt the operation of complex modern societies. But that risk has always been there---.

I also quibble with the idea that complex societies are somehow fragile because they are so complex. In fact, the complexity in many cases provides redundancies, reserves, and resiliance because it is very hard to simultaneoulsy take down all parts of very large complex modern societies----we get a hurricane Sandy and the rest of the USA rushes to pour money into the devastated areas---we get a bankrupt Greece and the rest of the EU ponies up to help, and so on.

------------------------------

For these reasons, I just don't see the "rapid collapse" scenario happening.

[Tanada]

Yes. Economic disruption and depressions or political incompetence or war or plague or terrorism or any number of things can disrupt the operation of complex modern societies. But that risk has always been there---.

I also quibble with the idea that complex societies are somehow fragile because they are so complex. In fact, the complexity in many cases provides redundancies, reserves, and resiliance because it is very hard to simultaneoulsy take down all parts of very large complex modern societies----we get a hurricane Sandy and the rest of the USA rushes to pour money into the devastated areas---we get a bankrupt Greece and the rest of the EU ponies up to help, and so on.

------------------------------

For these reasons, I just don't see the "rapid collapse" scenario happening.

Collapse is always a risk in any society but people are very resilient in the general sense of the word. When the Black Death killed 20% of the population of western Europe the society didn't collapse. However the Norse settlements in Greenland did collapse, as did Easter Island, as did the Western Roman Empire in the late 400's as did the Maya civilization in the Yucatan.. Each of them went through a collapse that had lots of warning signs suddenly.

Sometimes a stress like the Black Death causes a society to reshape itself into a different meme that thrives under the new conditions. I used to think our global culture would do just that, I was actually pretty optimistic about it. Now I look around and I see the people in charge just propping things up to hang onto their power just a little bit longer. The EU propping up Greece is a perfect example, nothing has fundamentally been changed to rebuild the Greek economy in a way that it can sustain itself, all that has happened is money has been dumped into the economy keeping it from complete collapse and ultimately only delaying the inevitable while damaging the more sound members of the EU. Instead of demanding that the government of Greece make real reforms and helping to create a sound future they have rewarded a failed system with more resources.

Hurricane Sandy really only severely impacted about 1% of the US population, it is easy to help 3 million people when you have 300 million sharing the load. If a real nation wide disaster happens who is going to come rushing in to help restore the USA? The EU is already majorly stressed propping up tiny little Greece, do you think they have the resources to assist the USA? China has the theoretical capacity, but could they help us without damaging their internal political stability?

Those scenario's are just the disaster type, I am far more concerned about the monetary system/ banking system having a breakdown than I am a physical disaster. Fiat money only has value because people trust the issuer to stand behind the currency. Full faith and credit and all that. People around here are a lot less trusting in the government than they used to be, we have been promised for a very long time that the economy is going to start zooming again any day now and things will be 'back to business as usual'. Except it hasn't happened and it shows no sign of happening. Most people expect politicians to lie to them, it has become the accepted norm, but now they are coming to think the banks are lying to them. If we lose trust in the banks and the system can collapse in a day, unfortunately the Federal Reserve isn't doing anything to prove themselves trustworthy. Bernanke swore that they would never monetize the debt, but they started doing that three years ago and keep doing it at an increasing rate every year. The Federal Reserve was nominally created to be the clearing house for transactions between local banks in different states and to stabilize the currency. They function very well as a clearing house, but at managing the currency they stink on ice. If a fiat currency is not respected by its creators and those that are needing to use it you get Argentina, Zimbabwe, Weimer Germany, hyperinflation to uselessness. Saying It Can't Happen Here is nice and everything, but in reality it can happen anywhere there is a fiat currency and the currency is not respected by those who issue it.

[mmasters]

I don't see the US people having any trust issues with the banking system. I see total acceptance of it. They will just print more money as necessary, there wont be any shortages of it and the inflation will be spread out across the global economy.

With peak oil the economy will shrink with the US and China being the remaining powerhouses.

[Lore]

Just remember you can be wrong about the timing a thousand times, you only have to be right once. Extinction is forever, no restarts.

[Dybbuk]

This thought has been bouncing around in my head the past few days. If there's a huge die-off this century precipitated by fossil fuel depletion, maybe it won't be starvation, but rather pandemic.

It's often feared that some bioengineered pathogen could be the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. It's assumed that it would only be used in the context of war or terrorism. But suppose that a die-off starts happening, and it's apparent that it will drag on for a long time. Someone might release the bio-weapon not out of malice, but actually as a humanitarian measure. They might figure that we might as well get the die-off in one fell swoop, rather than prolonging the agony, so that we can get on with rebuilding in the aftermath.

Then the big question becomes whether anything resembling modern civilization can be sustained into the aftermath. Or would we necessarily have to regress into a pre-technological state?

[SeaGypsy]

I'm with Tanada that the most likely scenario (read inevitable) is a banking collapse. The US is very inward looking when it comes to money. I doubt most Americans have the slightest idea of how the USD$ evolved to become The Reserve Currency of our planet. Without such understanding there can be no comprehension of the cause of value or it's vulnerability to faith collapse outside the USA. To my mind much is just running on inertia, belief based on experience, experience based on generations of mostly similar experience. There is an enormous global unwarranted faith in the Greenback. There is Reserve Currency Status and it's various treaties. There is the backbone of both: Oil. As oil fades, it simultaneously becomes more vital than ever to the USA and weakens the Reserve Status protection. This already being well underway, the unwarranted faith of the minions becomes the last pillar holding up the roof of the temple.

How many times will- can the world tolerate the Reserve Currency producer monetizing it's debt? Who's currency will replace the toilet paper USD? Euro in the toilet, GBP oversold, Yuan manipulated utterly, the rest relative minnows; inertia again. Inertia and brainwashing.

[Cloud9]

Half the population think dollars are produced by the U.S. Government. They think the Federal Reserve is the Treasury. The other half is buying silver eagles and the mint is out. Half the population wants gun abolition. The other half bought every thirty round magazine and AR part on the planet. They also bought up all the ammunition. The country is cleaving along urban and rural lines. Look at the voter map by counties. It is pretty obvious that the survival of the cities depends on the government. The rural areas not so much.

If J.P. Morgan implodes they implode the clearing house for SNAP cards. It is my understanding that J.P. has considerable exposure to the European crisis. I think the system is like a drunk walking the edge of the precipice. It can go on for a very long time or it can collapse in an instant. Contrary to popular belief, the outcome is much more a matter of luck than the construct of central planning.