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Page added on October 10, 2011
A Time Frame for Systemic Collapse
A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that curve. Then one can look at the chapter on electricity, which as Richard Duncan says will be the first really distinct, “on-off” type of indicator. The next parallel can be found in the chapter on economics, which mentions two “phases,” divided by the point at which money as such is no longer an important means of exchange; past examples occurred with the crash of the USSR, and in Weimar Germany.
In the chapter on famine, the fall of population appears as a parallel to the fall in fossil fuels. Some critics have said that the two do not necessarily go together — or, rather, “fall” together. But they do, for a very simple mathematical reason. Fossil fuels are the source of more than 90 percent of the energy — in the strict “physics” sense of the word — in modern industrial society. If we take away 90 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 90 percent of the population. (If we take away 100 percent of the energy, we necessarily take away 100 percent of the population.) No, we cannot replace that 90 percent with some “alternative” form of energy, as is explained in chapter one, because there isn’t enough of any “alternative” to make much difference.
The same first chapter also illustrates why a voluntary reduction in population cannot work. (For that matter, neither would a mandatory reduction in population, and for the same reason.) Again, it’s simple arithmetic. Oil production will fall, over the next few decades, by about 3 percent annually, and if instead we say 2 percent or 4 percent the final result isn’t much different. But even if every woman on earth stopped having children from this day forward, there would still not be a 3 or 2 or 4 percent annual reduction in population.
It can be seen, therefore, that the curve of estimated past and future global oil production is not merely one of a myriad of problems with which mankind will have to deal. It is the time scale with which most other problems can be measured, and it is the cause of most other problems.
But if anyone really needs a magic number, a good choice would be 2030. That’s the date at which, with a 3 percent annual decline in oil production, the year’s production will be half of that in the peak year. And half of peak oil means half of everything else in human society. A very important “half” will be population, because the other half will have died of famine. And that’s the one item that very few people can mentally assimilate.
Reference:
Goodchild, Peter. The Coming Chaos (abridged).
http://bravenewworld.in/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/CHAOS-ABRIDGED.pdf
11 Comments on "A Time Frame for Systemic Collapse"
Analoggod on Mon, 10th Oct 2011 3:30 am
The main problem with the arguments of when the collapse will happen to me is the notion that one can rationally graph a decline of any natural resource ect and impose that on a fundamentally irrational species.As things get worse people will also get worse and depletion will escalate.The average American is not asleep they are dead, hospitals are primarily senescent zombie pit stops,and as soon as anything upsets this unbelievably fragile system,people will quickly show there true selfish colors.
It all comes down to faith in humanity-being that i don’t enjoy the comforts of the sane way of life,i have zero reason to have faith in filth.
KM on Mon, 10th Oct 2011 1:07 pm
This is moronic. So if tomorrow we lost 10% of our energy supply instead of rationing fuel or electricity, 700 million people would die? I don’t think so.
It’s quite easy to show that there is not a 1:1 correlation between energy and population. What is the per capita energy consumption of Canada vs. Argentina vs. India?
Furthermore, even if all of the assumptions made in this article are correct and that we lose 50% of our oil by 2030 and that is not replaced by any other source, that still doesn’t mean that 50% of our overall energy will be gone and that therefore “half [the population] will have died of famine.”
This article doesn’t even follow its own internal logic.
rangerone314 on Mon, 10th Oct 2011 3:16 pm
I would argue for extreme poverty and food costs being high being the reason for people starving.
A higher percent of the energy pie would be allocated to food production, but prices would be higher.
Paul on Mon, 10th Oct 2011 11:25 pm
KM:
You sound a green when it comes to this topic. I dont’ mean to talk down to you, but let my try to point you in the right direction for more information and let me ask you to not pass this off as ‘moronic’ until you have more information. Please view the following links::
Documentary on Peak Oil
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/7313748
Lecture on Exponential Growth (8 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Hubbert’s Peak – Kenneth S Deffeyes
Book on Peak Oil (quick 180 page book)
http://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-World-Shortage/dp/0691090866
Hubbert’s Peak Theory on Wikileaks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory
This is a very real issue. If you review this information that I posted and you still think it’s ‘moronic’ I’ll be amazed.
Thank you for reading
Paul on Mon, 10th Oct 2011 11:33 pm
KM:
I forgot to point out in my original post that food relies heavily on oil – fetilizer, insectisides, farm equipment, transport (to get it from the farm to the stores across the country), ect. Even a 10% decrease in food production will have a huge impact on population
Food for thought
Feanor on Tue, 11th Oct 2011 12:48 am
I argued about this with Jay Hansen from 1995 until 1998 when I went on to actually start building the new world instead of continuing to argue about the possibility. There is no reason, oil or no oil, that anyone needs to starve because of peak oil. As in ‘the thinking that got us into this situation will not be sufficient to get us out.’ The world could easily build enough aquaponic greenhouse systems to feed the entire world’s population.
Now, I am not arguing that it will happen. It will not, and one main reason is MCR’s tagline about changing the way money works. The seemingly inevitable world war that the money system seems to be creating will also stop it. But Oil itself is not the reason. The reason is that too many people in the world cannot or will not see the beast until we get EMP’d or whatever is in our future.
But those who rebuild from the rubble will build a world we cannot now imagine, without an infinite growth paradign, but also without our current money and mental limitations. There are no inherint limitations on the growth of human consciousness, and the world that the growth in human consciousness will produce is beyond our current imaginings.
Carter on Tue, 11th Oct 2011 5:44 am
I mean no personal offense to the author, but this is a very poorly written article. There is simply not a direct 1:1 relationship between energy production and population, and there is no “simple mathematical reason” to dictate the demographic effects of fossil fuel loss. Obviously there is a powerful relationship between fossil fuel energy and industrial society, but actual population loss as a result of energy collapse depends on a multitude of factors which are difficult to predict without knowing when and how rapidly energy collapse occurs.
Industrial civilization runs on fossil fuel energy, but the problem is that people do not run directly on industry. Energy is used for transportation, communication, and various forms of mechanization/automation in our economy. The economy is a source of wages, which are spent for food; it is not a direct relationship, but one that is mediated by a man-man socioeconomic structure. This is not to say that there are not underlying fundamentals to how society operates, only that those fundamentals are obscured by man-made systems. Current world hunger problems illustrate this: the world produces an excess of food, and has for many years, and yet many go hungry. This because our food system is not rational, i.e., it is not primarily designed to feed people; it is rather mediated by the market forces of commodity capitalism, which introduce artificial barriers to who eats and who does not. Again: the fundamentals of how much food is produced is obscured by man-made systems which, in a social crisis, would necessarily have to change.
Now, you may say: “Yes, that is true, but we sill depend on fossil fuel energy very directly for food production in the first place, because artificial fertilizers are made from fossil fuels, as are pesticides, and the industrial food system could not survive without these.”
But even here the situation is not nearly as simply as one might think. The vast majority of corn produces in the United States, for example, is essentially wasted on ethanol and animal feed. Only a very small portion of it goes directly to human consumption. There are a variety of cultural and economic reasons for this, ranging from farm subsidies to fast food. The point is that the efficiency of the current food system, measured purely in terms of delivering useful calories to human bodies, is hamstrung by economic and cultural structures as much as it is by energy demands.
At the end of the day, what this means is that it is actually very difficult to predict what kind of population crisis we would face in an energy collapse. Yes, fossil fuel fertilizers would quickly become more expensive; but then, the massive percentage of arable land given over to ethanol and feed-based agriculture would quickly be reconverted into producing food for human consumption.
Obviously there would be hunger. Populations that are merely vulnerable today would likely see, in a complete collapse of our energy system, mortality from starvation particularly among the young and elderly. Yet as dire as this might be, it is certainly not a 1:1 ratio between fossil fuel energy loss and population loss.
The reality just wouldn’t be that simple.
KM on Tue, 11th Oct 2011 6:24 pm
Paul, I’m not arguing against Peak Oil. I’ve been registered on peakoil.com for several years and am well aware of the issues. My point is that the math and logic supporting this article are both bogus, as Carter points out. This should not have been published on the site, as it is flawed in several ways.
JHByrne on Tue, 11th Oct 2011 9:17 pm
To KM/Carter: Both of you sound like reasonable, logical men of civilization. And that is the problem with your analysis. There is a point at which fancy graphs, statistical analyses, or cleverly worded logical sequences do not work: that point is reached when a society collapses. To understand this fundamental aspect of reality, it is not enough to have studied it, quoted from a learned author, etc. Logical analyses will not suffice. Only reality counts.
Let me point this out: Societal Collapse is not a pretty thing, nor can it be neatly tied up in a box, with a ‘we’ll figure our way out of this somehow’. Societal Collapse is Russia, 1992/1993. I was there. Russia still had most of the modern tools of society — their civilization came close, but did not quite go over the edge. They still had a ‘government’, still had electricity, still had a healthy global economy to send them money, food, and foreign aid. Yet still, Russia suffered. People did not ‘starve’, but they did drink themselves to death, die of freezing, die from crime, suicide… the numbers were so enormous that the country lost millions of people WHO WOULD NOT HAVE DIED BUT FOR THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR. And remember, that was just a political-social collapse.
Now, let’s take a better case: an economic collapse. That is Haiti. That is Somalia. People die in these countries before age 50, of chronic health problems. Let me restate: Carter/KM, if you are over age 50 in Somalia or Haiti, YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD. Take this stark, real world example… compare the population of Haiti to that of its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, on the same island. Compare the population of Somalia to that of Kenya. There’s your population drop, in terms of people who died in childbirth, before age 5, or after age 50. Now, remember, this is just Somalia, or Haiti… they’re ‘lucky’, because there is still an outside world to send them charity.
What is an ‘energy collapse’ society like? No one knows. This is because the closest analog to it does not come close. However, we DO know from history that when giant, high-population empires collapsed, millions died. The collapse of the Roman Empire took centuries, so the ‘shock’ was lessened. Yet still, the population of Europe after AD 500 was less than half of what it had been. The collapse of the Babylonian and Hittite Empires (due to agricultural systemic collapse) likely caused the deaths and misery of millions (and caused shock waves through history). The collapse of food reliability in Central Asia, for instance, caused first the Huns (about AD 200) and then the Mongols (AD 1100) to invade and terrorize their neighbors out of desperation for their own lives. Central Asia had become a dust bowl.
But, do these analogs suffice? For most of human history, the population of the entire planet was less than 1 billion — this is the carrying capacity of planet Earth for people, unless there is some other factor, such as cheap energy, which can be leveraged to make up the difference. Even in an agrarian (that is, pre-industrial, pre-cheap energy world) most labor is done by slaves or serfs. That’s YOU, Carter and KM. If you don’t believe me, look at Somalia and Haiti: most people live at subsistence level, little removed from being slaves.
So: flash forward… no cheap energy = no cheap food = vastly increased prices… first for luxuries, then for essentials. Forget complex analyses. You want reality, look at people kick and scream over a sack of grain, donated by a global charity, in modern day Somalia.
More cold water: All analogs fail, when cheap energy does. 7 Billion people cannot survive without cheap energy. Of those who do, most will find themselves living as subsistence serfs. Someone, after all, has to provide the muscle energy that gasoline once did. There aren’t enough horses or cattle to do the job, KM and Carter. That someone is YOU. How long do you think you’ll last if, to get a sack of food, you have to walk 20 miles to get it, fight off bandits, and then somehow get it ‘home’ long enough to hide it and preserve it? This is not hyperbole: this is Haiti, this is Somalia. This is YOU, in a world where college book logic does not suffice.
So, what does it all mean? Let’s say that there is just a 10% decline. KM suggests that there is not necessarily a correlation. Well, Somalia should not be starving right now, but they are. And, that ‘country’ exists in a world where there is still sufficient economic health outside Somalia’s borders that some food aid gets through the bandits, survives the journey over rutted roads, survives the heat and the flies (no refridgeration in Somalia, after all) to reach a population… which is in the midst of yet another famine. Somalia’s population is probably 1/4 of what it would have been, but for their political/economic collapse. So, that 10-20% drop in Somalia = 75% drop in population.
KM says that a 10% drop in energy availability does not necessarily = a 10% drop in population? I agree: from my experience, it is a lowball figure.
Just because you cannot see people eating each other in the streets does NOT mean that there is not a huge population drop. Energy decline is more insidious, and more certain than any zombie horror movie.
Carter says ‘market forces’ dictate food availability. That’s because he’s never been hungry. I mean REALLY hungry. A man who is really hungry, whose family is starving, or has no heat, or hope or prospects… that man does not worry about civilized economics. He picks up a hoe, and tries to grow a garden, or he picks up a gun, and takes what someone else already grew. That is reality, and that is what they DON’T teach at the Harvard Business School.
The population crisis we face is simple, NOT complex. Ethanol production doesn’t matter. Even if the USA grows corn just for eating, there is still a shortage of fertilizer, fuel for the tractors, fuel for the trucks, hydrocarbon packaging… and how would you get any food surplus to China/India without cheap energy? The reality is, you don’t.
China is mostly a desert. So is India. Just look at pictures. Their populations of 1.4 billion and 1 billion exist because of CHEAP labor, which uses cheap energy, to manufacture cheap products, to build a false economy on exports. Historically, China and India had populations of about 200-300 million, before the industerial age. They ‘survived’ as subsistence farmers. They compromised. Their entire mental outlook is based on individual compromise and endurance for hardship (that is, confucianism and the caste system are a means of keeping an entire population in check, and working in manual labor).
Manual labor must make up the difference if there is no cheap energy. That means, no more Harvard MBAs for the common man. No more summer vacations. No more computers for the commonization of democracy. No more ‘democracy’ itself. And no more capitalism. Just ask any Somali warlord.
JHByrne on Tue, 11th Oct 2011 9:49 pm
To reinforce the last point, Carter:
You state that in the event of energy collapse, all that vast, arable land which is currently growing ethanol corn would be converted to feeding human populations, and that therefore, there might be starvation mortality among the young/elderly only, but most would muddle through.
What makes you so sure of this?
In modern global economics, people already starve by the millions. What makes a difference if a few more million die in faraway India? How about a few hundred million? Well, who cares, so long as we don’t have to witness it…and before you know, the 2011 global population of 7 billion = 5.4 billion… then 4.2 billion… then 3.6 billion. And that’s if the hungry countries are already destitute and weak enough to quietly allow their populations to wither away.
And that’s the rub. Energy collapse, like social/political/economic collapse will be a CASCADE collapse. One year, there’s food to feed 7 billion, the next year, after a series of cascading disasters, there’s not. It probably won’t be gradual enough to gently decline. Instead, we face a world where the USA has the fertile fields, and China and India do not.
You might say that ‘market forces’ will dictate that we sell them food. What will they pay for it with? If we could grow the food, how will we get it to them? How will China and India build exportable products in a broken global economy? How would they get them to us, if they could build them?
So, I submit this analytical tool to you, Carter. Put yourself in the Mao-suit of a desperate member of the Chinese politburo, circa 2020. Your population is either starving to death, or rioting, and threatening you with death, unless you do something, anything, to feed them. Do you rely on ‘market forces’, or do you use your military, while you still have one, to forcibly take as much land and resources as you can?
In 2011, China is still using ‘market forces’ and diplomatic bullying to take control of land-tracts in Africa, maritime zones in the Pacific, and so forth. But, subtlety only goes so far. If the world is whining today, about a 1-2% decline in energy availablity (which equates to the current global economic crisis), imagine the world where the situation is a ‘mere’ 10% decline.
The 1:1 ratio you doubt would likely wind up being a 1:2 ratio or more. Just because you cannot fathom a dark truth, does not mean it does not exist.
Carter on Fri, 14th Oct 2011 1:06 am
I’m not sure what your point about “fancy graphs, statistical analyses, or cleverly worded logical sequences do not work”; I see no graphs or statistical analyses in my reply, nor any particularly impressive feats of logic, although I do admit that some logic is there. If you are saying that you are right because facts and logic do not apply to your assertions… well, one obviously can’t argue with that. 🙂
My central point, though, is that we simply don’t know what the effects of an energy collapse would be. You agree with me. In your own words:
“What is an ‘energy collapse’ society like? No one knows. This is because the closest analog to it does not come close.”
There’s a lot of “huffing and puffing” in your two responses, but nothing to justify the absurdly specific assertion that there is a 1:1 relationship between energy loss and population. You admit this is speculation on your part, yet you seem to deride anyone who disagrees with this particular conjecture as denying that societal collapse is possible or that population loss may result from it.
You remind us that social collapse does happen, and that it does cost lives. But this is not something anyone in this discussion has disagreed with. Lives will be lost; lives are already being lost. Even the best years of commodity capitalism have produced millions of death as a result of the way commodity pricing works. Repeating what has already been agreed upon by all parties does not seem to strengthen your argument that there is a 1:1 ratio between energy loss and population — again, a very specific claim which has not been defended.
Whether people take back the land with guns and tools, or pay others to do the same, the point is that one way or another the world has a certain amount of arable land which is being wasted on inefficient forms of agriculture, and that one way or another, those populations will either pay or commandeer that land back into food production for the very reason you point out (and apparently claim to understand better than anyone else) — hunger.
It’s been proven at this point that, over a certain number of years, farming methods that do not use pesticides and fertilizer can reach yields equivalent to “conventional” crops. Now, those farms still use machinery and amendments, and perhaps more importantly, they utilize a certain expertise in building and maintaining healthy soil. Presumably both of these things will be in short supply in a collapse of the petro-food system. Still, the waste in industrial agriculture is staggering. Something like 40% of worldwide grain goes to feeding livestock. I’m not sure what the number for ethanol would be — in the US it is high, globally it is more limited — let us be conservative and say 15%. The point is that however inefficient unmechanized organic agriculture might be, there is already considerable “slack” built into our agricultural system in the sense that anywhere from 40% to 65% of overall production is being diverted to “first-world” needs, rather than usable calories. When the “first world” disappears, as you admit you think it will, it is not an illogical leap to suppose that people will start growing things that they can eat. Whether they use investment banks or their own hands to grow it, it hardly matters. Fertile land is unlikely to sit idle as people starve.
It is true that a spike in fertilizer costs will reduce agricultural output in a major way. Notice I say “spike in… costs”, not “loss” or “disappearance” of fertilizer. Peak oilers have a tendency to think that the unsustainability of a resource means that it is there one day and completely gone the next. But the real world tends not to work that way. It is just as likely, if not more likely, to see the price of a limited commodity rise, plateau, and rise again as a result of shortages, price spikes, falls in demand, followed by renewed shortages as production continues its decline path. All of this is actually described fairly well by Hubbert and Colin Campbell. The point is that energy descent is likely to be a messy process, one that could easily take decades to be fully felt. While not impossible, the chances of it looking like the zombie apocalypse you imply are, I think, more a projection of fear and less a reflection of the facts.