editing to add link.
something discussed by aangel & leanan; & i've been thinking about a lot lately.
will financial collapse bring down essential parts of our system; food, electric, etc.?

their discussion begins below here;

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5838/546836

lots agree on a financial collapse approaching. with that as a given, what would be the linkages that would cause a collapse in electricity, food, petro, etc.; or what would be some possible adaptations that would 'firewall' off the collapse of these other parts of the our global systems, or significantly delay/mitigate collapse of that part.

one example i think of is the bailouts, nationalizing fanny/freddie seem for example to have put off the financial system itself from collapsing for now; & i think another round of stimulus could drag out the financial collapse into another presidential term.

Mind Game
Year 30

This is a mind game on what might be at some point in the future. The further out the more difficult this becomes. As we extrapolate further the variables increase exponentially as the information pertaining ever diminishes.

While a good predictive mathematical model would be the ultimate goal, at this point the goal is to hash out the variables using what if possibilities to assist the creative process.

Looking 30 years ahead…

Energy is by far the most important input. The more we exhaust our raw material resources the more energy is need to maintain production. At present there are no realistic in time replacements for the energy derived from fossil fuels. Therefore, we will likely have far less available energy while needing so much more.

To make a good future forecast model we need a good estimate of total energy production. How much energy will we have to work with?

What is going to be rare and expensive that is cheap and common now? Liquid fuels for one will likely be hard to come by. Food and clean water will likely be much more expensive and in short supply. Housing, lots of dark damp cold dwellings but few warm dry homes. Clothing, lots of old worn out clothing but little new. Health care, will we find medical care with many of the durable tools but having few of the consumables.

What type(s) of monetary value exchange tools will be in use? Trust in fiat paper will likely have died an ungraceful death by then… Will it be gold, some other precious metals, barter …?

The population issue is by far the most vexing. The evidence so compelling it seems indisputable, the earth cannot support anywhere near our present much less expanding population.

Just how many of us humans can be supported sustainably is open to debate. I have seen estimates of between .5 to 2 billion. What becomes a sustainable population in 30 years depends not only on the size of the average person’s ecological footprint but on how much ecological damage happens between now and then.

Food production will likely be the primary determining factor unless some wild card factor has its way. Peak food will likely closely follow peak oil on a downward spiral. Food production however has numerous limiting factors that peak oil does not have and food production could well fall faster that oil production.

Along with increasingly limited energy related inputs, food production is limited by declining; water resources, productive soils, soil inputs, seed diversity, beneficial insects, wild food populations, ability to adapt infrastructure to changing conditions … and increasing; pollution, climate variability, pestilence …

The process of this population reduction, how the population reduction plays out will be a critical factor. This process is likely to be ugly.

So in 30 years what population levels might we be at?

Technologies, what level will the average person have access? Will we still have, still able to manufacture cell phones? Will the few have more advanced technology while most have much less…? Many raw materials will likely be in critical short supply and replacement parts may or may not be available. Our landfills may be the best source of these raw materials and replacement parts.

New technologies will they help or hurt. Some will likely help while others may well cause us much grief. Existing technologies will likely have negative/positive effects that we have yet to discover or are under/over estimated. We desperately need a vastly better electrical energy storage device, one that can be made with available resources in a benign manner, can this be done?

Technology in 30 years?

The average Joe has not a clue. Even those of us who have been thinking about this for years are overwhelmed. Can the average Joe be made aware of the coming paradigm change? How is this lack of awareness going to be overcome, can it be considering how commercial TV addicted the average person is.

The average person’s mindset is horribly sub optional if a stable, peaceful and sustainable world is our goal. Long term this changes or game over… Crash and burn looks to be a done deal the question is how hard will be the fall and the goal becomes how do we achieve the softest possible landing.

Any thoughts?

I am looking for assistance in compilling Events that shaped Recent World History, particularly in the following areas Political, Energy, Technological, Climate, Population, General.

Following is a starter list, any & all suggestions or corrections are welcome!

1712 - British ironmonger Thomas Newcomen invents the first widely used steam engine, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution and industrial scale use of coal.
1800 - World human population reaches one billion
1823 - Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially
1859 - Worlds First Commercial Oil well began producing, in the US.
1861 - American Civil War Began
1865 - American Civil War Ends
1868 - Louis Pasteur Discovery of the Germ theory of disease
1886 - Karl Benz unveils the Motorwagen, often regarded as the first true automobile.
1913 - The Federal Reserve is formed
1913 – Ford introduces the assembly line.
1914 – Start of World War I
1917 - Lenin's Russian Revolution
1918 – End of World War I
1919 – Treaty of Versailes to settle affairs after WW1
1927 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach one billion tonnes per year
1928 - Penicillin was discovery by Alexander Fleming. It was later developed as Medicine by Walter Florey
1929 – The Great Depression starts, Stock Market crash begins October 24
1930 – World human population reaches two billion
1939 - Start of World War II
1944 - The Bretton Woods agreement
1945 – End of World War II, U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1946 - The baby boom begins
1948 - The rebirth of Israel as an independent nation
1949 - Proclamation of the People's Republic of China
1955 - US researcher Gilbert Plass analyses the infrared absorption of various gases & concludes that doubling CO2 concentrations would increase temperatures by 3-4C.
1957 - Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community
1960 – World human population reaches three billion.
1962 - October Cuban Missile Crisis
1963 - Assassination of John F. Kennedy
1965 - A US President's Advisory Committee panel warns that the greenhouse effect is a matter of "real concern".
1968 – The Personal Computer (PC) was first advertised for commercial sale
1969 – Man lands on Moon
1969 - Woodstock – Summer of love, the end of innocence
1970 - Peak Oil in US
1973 - US decouples US$ from Gold..
1973 - First “Oil Shock”
1975 - World human population reaches four billion.
1975 - US scientist Wallace Broecker puts the term "global warming" into the public domain in the title of a scientific paper.
1985 - The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered by British scientists Joesph Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey
1987 - World human population reaches five billion
1987 – Stock Market crash October 19.
1988 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed to collate and assess evidence on climate change.
1989 - Fall of Berlin Wall
1989 - UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher calls for a global treaty on climate change
1989 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach six billion tonnes per year.
1990 - IPCC produces 1st Report. It concludes that temperatures have risen by 0.3-0.6C over the last century
1991 - End of the Soviet Union
1995 - IPCC 2nd Report concludes that the balance of evidence suggests "a discernible human influence" on the Earth's climate.
1998 - Strong El Nino conditions combine with global warming to produce the warmest year on record.
1999 – World human population reaches six billion.
2001 – 9/11
2001 - IPCC 3rd Report finds "new and stronger evidence" that humanity's emissions are the main cause of the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century.
2005 - World Peak Oil (Effectively, according to me)
2006 - the Stern Review concludes that climate change could damage global GDP by up to 20% if left unchecked - but curbing it would cost about 1% of global GDP.
2006 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach eight billion tonnes per year.
2007 - IPCC 4th Report concludes it is more than 90% likely that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for modern-day climate change.
2007- Global Financial Crisis begins in October
2008 - The Keeling project at Mauna Loa shows that CO2 concentrations have risen from 315 parts per million (ppm) in 1958 to 380ppm in 2008.
2008 - Oil Price Peaked at $147 per barrel.
2009 - Barrack Obama elected - America's first black president
2009 - 192 governments convene for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen
2050 - World population is projected to reach 9 Billion

Here's what I think would make for a good in house article:

The disparity between different viewpoints as to when peak oil occurred or when it will occur. In particular, I've noticed numerous articles linked to TOD that estimate peak oil occurring in 2030, yet most on TOD seem to have designated July 2008 as having been the date for Peak Oil. Now I realize like everyone else that the actual date for Peak oil may have passed or it may be in the future - we will not know with absolute assurance until more time has passed.

In any case, it makes for an interesting analysis as to why there are so many reporting on the topic of oil that kick the can down the line two more decades until we hit peak oil. Twenty two years (2008-2030) is a big chasm between estimates of peak oil. I'd love to know why there's such a big spread.

Here is a link to an article that just came out on Science Daily. Previously only the last 800,000 years of climate had been catalogued from ice layers. However their team has taken this back to 20 million years ago! This is the latest information on global warming and it is shocking!!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland,"

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."

One must wonder why our climate isn't as different as the past record shows when CO2 levels were as high as they are today. One explanation might be the increase in CO2 has occurred too fast for the thermal energy in the atmosphere to have altered the temperature of the oceans enough to cause such a big difference in temerature and sea level - something scientists call the thermal inertia, which takes 30-40 years to take full effect. So we have until 2039-2049 to find out what the level of CO2 in our atmosphere today will portend, which may be exactly what the above article is pointing to from the distant past. 5-10 degrees F higher and seas that are 120 feet higher!!!

Now there's some campfire talking points.

OK, here's an upbeat notion to discuss.

The incredibly annoying 'Glad Game'

When I was a kid, and was angry or disappointed, my dad would ask me to play the "glad game" and come up with things I was glad about. For instance, if my bike was stolen, I at least could be glad my house hadn't burned down. If some other kid hit me, at least he didn't shoot me.

Frankly, it always p*ssed me off when my dad did that. The last thing you want to be told when you have a badly skinned knee is how much worse it could have been.

But it does come to mind now, because the situation the human race now finds itself in, once you take the time to understand it, seems like a nearly perfect storm of converging crises.

We have brains and an evolved culture which seem hell-bent on following a yeastlike growth trajectory.

That's normal enough for a species, but we evolved thumbs and tools in an oxygen atmosphere, and made fire our symbiote, part of our "extended phenotype" in Dawkins' terminology.

That that would have been bad enough if all we'd had were trees and plants to burn, but it just-so-happened by the perversity of the universe that there were huge amounts of fossil fuels accessible to make vast overshoot possible, causing us to overpopulate while dissipating a planet's worth of the most accessible mineral resources and messing up the natural capital we started with, including pretty much all other species.

And THAT would have been bad enough if we'd just needed enough food to live, but we were able to abstract our needs for dopamine hits in order to basically justify burning energy as fast as we could get flammable stuff out of the ground, grinding up netted sea life to raise the kittycat biomass, and creating markets for "medicines" made from endangered species.

That would have been bad enough, but due to basic laws of the universe, CO2 is a greenouse gas and the environment we and other extant major species evolved for is very sensitive to being perturbed by its increase.

THAT would have been bad enough, except that is also just-so-happened that at this moment in history, there are apparently huge amounts of frozen methane which may be a loaded climate trap, a positive feedback waiting to be tripped.

and THAT would be bad enough except our species is so delusional that the huge majority of it thinks that this is all part of some grand plan of invisible gods.

And of the very tiny percentage of humans who come to realize this, most are storing ammunition, trying to grow tomatos, or starting their own blogs.

So. How could it be worse? Humorous answers appreciated just as much as true ones, and answers which are humorous AND true are the best.

There is no peace through strength, but rather true strength is developed through peace.

E. M. Forster: "The Machine Stops", 1909

A cascade of problems, increasingly damaging, and then The Machine Stops.

I think we are there. At a certain point in the current collapse The Machine Stops. Everything goes local, travel too dangerous, Towns and small cities with fresh water and farmland will find a way to survive. Isolated groups of farms in the Ozarks, Adirondacks, upper Rockies, Smokies, etc. will survive. Everybody else in the US dies, disease, starvation, or murder. There will be no food going into big cities.

Years ago I thought the wind-down from peak oil would be painful, but do-able. This monster of debt created by Wall Street and international banks ensures that the machine will stop. Golden Goose and all that.

It's a terribly black outlook and I struggle to live with it every day. I get by to a large degree by reading some older posters here. (I'm a young 66) Darwinian, Lynford, and Airdale. Airdale, please, if you're out there: Your posts were so real and down to earth; please reconsider posting again.

i got a house in Kentucky, found a home made solar heater, here: http://www.jrwhipple.com/sr/solheater.html

anybody made one? seen one? i am about to build this. I have fireplaces, just curious about heating the house without using the fireplace.

thanks

How did I miss noticing this site all these years?
http://www.resalliance.org -- Resilience Alliance

Resilience: the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing the ability to function. Can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic change? In April 2008 natural and social scientists from around the world gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for a first-ever global conference applying lessons from nature's resilience to human societies in the throes of unprecedented transition. http://aworldofpossibilities.org/program/resilience-adaptation-and-trans...

Embracing uncertainty and valuing resiliency seems to be the key. I happened to catch the links on this very good radio program that I listen to occasionally. Coincidentally, I have been thinking a lot about reliability and resilience recently. http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2009/10/failure-is-complement-of-succes...

Would somebody please tell me what's wrong with this, my standard song here?

1) there's gobs of energy- clean, lasts "forever" -in solarthermal, wind, geothermal.

2) We have lots of ways to capture this copious energy for us, right now, and people like me are thinking of lots of things that will do it better in the NEAR future-and do it fast. (and I am NOT advocating BAU!)

3) we can store and spread this energy by HVDC and hydrostorage. We know how to do it. Fact is, we are doing it- and have done it.

4) (fact for those who keep saying "but what we need is liquid fuel") Anything you need doing, you can do with electricity for starters- eg, electric cars (switch out the battery, don't waste time charging it). Electricity is pure available energy.

5) We can pay for this new energy infrastructure by diverting resources from crap we do today that costs hugely and does nothing worth doing- favorite examples, soda pop, fat cars. mansions, big bonuses to wall st. paper shufflers, on and on.

6) "We" means us. All of us, not just the fringe here on TOD.

7) We get "we" together with the same hook and line we get people to buy beer. Selling survival ought to be pretty easy.

8) and don't go on about "impossible". History shows It ain't. Nothing in the laws of nature says that. (The Greeks defeated the Persian invasion. They ("WE") had to give up Athens to do it. And then they used their heads- we have heads too.)

Need some help!

I'm searching for an ancient civilization that didn't collapse after it supply chains became too long?

Any suggestion is welcome.

Hmmm open tread let's take advantage.

thought:

Modern medicare helps people to live as healthy as possible.

Modern madicare is a means to inflate our gdp.

Consider the Connection to:
The Big Picture
Going in a NEGATIVE (-) or POSITIVE (+) Direction
(-)___R___(+) Direction?
The choice is ours.
Our economy, health, & planet R N D balance!!!
Search 4 me:
CTC123GREEN

General post here to see if there might be more interest in something like this and possibly if the staff at TOD would be interested in putting the prestige of this site behind such an effort.

A couple of days ago in response to the posts about the Energy Export Data browser at http://mazamascience.com/OilExport/ I had made an off the cuff comment about maybe putting up a billboard about the consequences of Peak Oil in a strategic location that would attract MSM attention.

Over the weekend I received the following private email I have only removed the personal information for obvious reasons though I did receive permission to post the message.

Hi Fred-

I am a long time reader of TOD (although I don't post) and I noticed your suggestion of a energy reality related billboard in a prominent location, paid for by donations from TOD readers. Being one such, I am volunteering both money and time to get this done, if there is any interest. I'll pledge a hundred bucks; and it may be possible to get a billboard for free or cheap right now, if a sympathetic owner can be found. I'd be willing to dig into that; I have a long history of activism and got pretty good at putting things together on very little money. People might get real interested in a discussion about what the billboard will actually say. That would be worthwhile all by itself: what is the most effective thing that can be done with that billboard?
Seems to me that the first requirement is to get one some someplace that will compel attention from a reluctant media........

Anyway, I think it's an excellent idea, and with the right placement and message could actually do some good. Please let me know if you'd like me to send a check?

Is anyone else interested in doing something like this? If so please contact me at the email address listed on my profile. BTW I be willing to do the graphics for the billboard and contribute money as well.

Just a personal story from the weekend. Too bad I missed ASPO. I couldn't make the trip, and our Transition initiative had a weekend long training class; lots of great ideas and organizing for Transition.

And then I bought a new car Sunday evening. The irony isn't lost on me. The old Miata was just way too impractical with its limited trunk space, and I traded it in for a practical sedan. As Kunstler said, it may be the last car I buy in my life, and hey, it's as safe an "investment" as anyplace else I can stash my dollars.

Comments please on:

The Global Oil Depletion Report: Launched 08.10.09
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/Global%20Oil%20Depletion

UKERC’s report is the first study to take an independent, thorough and systematic review of the evidence and arguments in the ‘peak oil’ debate. It addresses the following question: What evidence is there to support the proposition that the global supply of ‘conventional oil’ will be constrained by physical depletion before 2030?

From the Exec Summary:
1. The mechanisms leading to a ‘peaking’ of conventional oil production are well
understood and provide identifiable constraints on its future supply at both the regional
and global level.

2. Despite large uncertainties in the available data, sufficient information is available to
allow the status and risk of global oil depletion to be adequately assessed.

3. There is potential for improving consensus on important and long-standing
controversies such as the source and magnitude of ‘reserves growth’.
...approximately 3 mb/d of new capacity must be added each year, simply to maintain production at
current levels - equivalent to a new Saudi Arabia coming on stream every three years...
...more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030, simply to prevent production
from falling. At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.

Technical Report 7:

...This implies that a peak of conventional oil production before 2030 is very likely, and a peak before 2020 is probable. To reach a different conclusion, it would be necessary to argue for either a significantly larger global URR and/or a more rapid post-peak decline rate (which has implications of its own). However, there are a number of caveats to this conclusion, including the following: ... etc.

--
Well worth a read. Solid middle ground, in my view. Robust enough to use for policy; with enough information and clear assumptions to let the nervous and concerned ones among us feel that there is reasonable support for the view that sometime well before 2020 it is fair to be very afraid.

Nigel

Events that shaped Recent History (Political, Energy, Technological, Climate, Population, General)

I am still looking for 20 more, please???

Update
1712 - British ironmonger Thomas Newcomen invents the first widely used steam engine, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution and industrial scale use of coal.
1775 - The first fully developed version of the Watt Steam engine goes into production
1776 - The American colonies sign the Declaration of Independence
1781 - The American Revolution ends, as the British surrendered at Yorktown on October 17
1798 - The Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus was first published
1800 - World human population reaches one billion
1823 - Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially
1859 - Worlds First Commercial Oil well began producing, in the US.
1859 - Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published November 24
1861 - American Civil War Began
1864 - Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease
1865 - American Civil War Ends
1886 - Karl Benz unveils the Motorwagen, often regarded as the first true automobile.
1886 – US Supreme court decision in Santa Clara CA allowing corporations to have 'personhood'
1893 – New Zealand became the first country to grant Women the Right to Vote
1895 - Marconi receives the first Radio signal
1903 – Wright Bros first powered flight
1905 – Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, within a few months, Einstein wrote a series of papers, including E=MC2 that would transform the way we see the universe
1909 - Chemist Fritz Haber first synthesized ammonia, which has since been used to fertilize world food production.
1913 - The US Federal Reserve is formed

1913 - Ford introduces the assembly line.
1914 - World War I Starts
1917 - Lenin's Russian Revolution
1918 - World War I Ends
1919 - Treaty of Versailes to settle affairs after WW1
1927 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach one billion tonnes per year
1928 - Penicillin was discovery by Alexander Fleming. It was later developed as Medicine by Walter Florey
1929 - The Great Depression starts, Stock Market crash begins October 24
1930 - World human population reaches two billion
1938 – Burgan, the world’s 2nd largest Oilfield was discovered. Production Peaked in 2005.
1939 - World War II Starts
1944 - The Bretton Woods agreement
1945 – World War II Ends, U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1946 – THE BABY BOOM begins
1948 - Israel is reborn, as an independent nation
1948 – Ghawar, the world’s largest Oilfield was discovered. Production Peaked in 2005.
1949 - People's Republic of China is Proclaimed
1955 - US researcher Gilbert Plass analyses infrared absorption of various gases & concludes that doubling CO2 concentrations would increase temperatures by 3-4C.
1956 - M. King Hubbert predicts Peak oil production
1957 - Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community

1960 – World human population reaches three billion.
1960 – The Oral Contraceptive Pill was approved for use
1962 - October Cuban Missile Crisis
1963 - Assassination of John F. Kennedy
1964 - THE BABY BOOM starts to Decline
1965 - A US President's Advisory Committee panel warns that the greenhouse effect is a matter of "real concern".
1968 – The Personal Computer (PC) was first advertised for commercial sale
1969 – Man lands on Moon
1969 - Woodstock – Summer of love, the end of innocence
1970 - Peak Oil in US
1972 – The Club of Rome publish The Limits to Growth
1973 - US decouples US$ from Gold..
1973 - First “Oil Shock”
1975 - World human population reaches four billion.
1975 - US scientist Wallace Broecker puts the term "global warming" into the public domain in the title of a scientific paper.
1981 - Humans start using more oil than they find
1985 - The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered by British scientists Joesph Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey
1986 – Disaster strikes at the nuclear facility at Chernobyl
1987 - World human population reaches five billion
1987 – Stock Market crash October 19.
1988 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed to collate and assess evidence on climate change.

1989 - Berlin Wall falls
1989 - UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher calls for a global treaty on climate change
1989 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach six billion tonnes per year.
1990 - IPCC produces 1st Report. It concludes that temperatures have risen by 0.3-0.6C over the last century
1991 - Soviet Union Collapses
1995 - IPCC 2nd Report concludes that the balance of evidence suggests "a discernible human influence" on the Earth's climate.
1998 - Strong El Nino conditions combine with global warming to produce the warmest year on record.
1999 – World human population reaches six billion.
2001 – 9/11
2001 - IPCC 3rd Report finds "new and stronger evidence" that humanity's emissions are the main cause of the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century.
2005 - World Peak Oil (Effectively, according to me)
2006 - the Stern Review concludes that climate change could damage global GDP by up to 20% if left unchecked - but curbing it would cost about 1% of global GDP.
2006 - Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and industry reach eight billion tonnes per year.
2007 - IPCC 4th Report concludes it is more than 90% likely that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for modern-day climate change.
2007- Global Financial Crisis begins in October
2008 - The Keeling project at Mauna Loa shows that CO2 concentrations have risen from 315 parts per million (ppm) in 1958 to 380ppm in 2008.
2008 - Oil Price Peaked at $147 per barrel.
2009 - Barrack Obama inaugurated - America's first black president
2009 - 192 governments convene for the UN climate summit in Copenhagen
2050 - World population is projected to reach 9 Billion