[cannottell]

Peak oil will affect us, but not in the way we may expect. Many people feel that you cannot grow an economy or sustain a civilization in a peak oil situation. I disagree. If you base your economy on killing people, it does become possible to have growth of the economy within a field of declining energy output. If you have a natural energy decline rate of 3%, then a population reduction of 4% would make up for any lost energy and still allow room for growth. You could push that number further on paper if you make the death industry more profitable than the loss of the person to the economy. And the goods of the dead get redistributed to the remaining community (not proportionately obviously); it becomes a positive financial transaction.

At first, the shear numbers of deaths needed would require means that your ability to target the people to kill would have limitations. The poor always make less of a significant contribution to economic and technological advancement, thus they should have a disproportionate amount of deaths. Moving them into the death industry doubles your economic growth because you get to remove them from the “waste” side of the equation and then reap the economic benefits of placing them in your employ during the process. This effect gets compounded if the person comes from an energy intensive society. As the numbers of millions needed to get killed starts to fall, you would need an apparatus around the people to select which ones will fall within the required 4%. Given the worldwide depletion profile, this apparatus would have to span the globe.

Now few humans would agree to a gradual 4% reduction, so it would behoove you to have a very sharp decline within the shortest possible timeframe. If you could kill 15% of the people in the first year, not only would you reap the cheap energy boon of not having them creating demand on energy, but you would also have the ability of setting up the depletion apparatus due to the fear of future 15% spikes. Even still, an unending war would be needed to continue to keep the people locked up in fear and committed to the decline. If your high percentage die-off had a biological character to it, you wouldn’t even incur the wasting of the infrastructure that supports civilization more than it would otherwise do if cities got leveled.

So you can very easily continue to do civilization in the situation of declining energy reserves, as long as you have an industry of death.

Now, if we only had an industry that kills people headed by a high energy use society with a surprising amount of poor, an unending war with the possibility of biological weapons, and a global apparatus that has a history of dealing with poor countries and poor people we could get saved from peak oil…

[Aaron]

We are saved then...

[trespam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cannottell', 'P')eak oil will affect us, but not in the way we may expect. Many people feel that you cannot grow an economy or sustain a civilization in a peak oil situation. I disagree. If you base your economy on killing people, it does become possible to have growth of the economy within a field of declining energy output.

[azreal60]

Cute, but not very realistic.

One thing i wish to correct. Did anyone ever say u can not sustain a civilization after peak oil? What i believe was said is we can not sustain THIS civilization. Last i looked, there have been alot of types of civilizations before this one, and there will probably be alot after. It is interesting that people seem to believe this is the only way human kind can live and call it a civilization.

Anyone here ever read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn? I think you would find his ideas.... enlightening. And The Story of B is just as good, and probably better for the older audience. My ishmael is a great way to introduce your children to this topic. Just watch them get sustainability in a way you can t get adults to understand if you begged them to study for a year. :D

[Guest]

>one thing i wish to correct. Did anyone ever say u can not sustain a civilization after peak oil? What i believe was said is we can not sustain THIS civilization. Last i looked, there have been alot of types of civilizations before this one, and there will probably be alot after. It is interesting that people seem to believe this is the only way human kind can live and call it a civilization

Amen to that

The first time a caveman swapped a flint arrow for a banana we had an economy, and I would class the animal kingdom as a civilisation!

I would actually agree with the poster if we had exhaused EVERY alternative and converserved all we could. Then we would be royally screwed

But we can conserve 60-80% of our oil
This will buy us time, maybe 15 years to use our technology to get us away from oil

By the end of this I expect our economy and civilisation will be very different and we will still be supporting a 6 billion population

I worked it out, we can do it if we are prepared to embrace change

Martin

[pinou]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f you base your economy on killing people

[Mower]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pinou', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f you base your economy on killing people

[muhandis]

Civilizations seldom end, but they do adapt... for better or worse. Not to say that cities cannot collapse and be abandoned. Just look at the fate of great cities like Aquileae (Italy), Palmyra (Syria), Lepcis Magna (Libya) and Volubilis (Morocco).

While the "kill-off" solution might have some parallels with the ritualized warfare of the Maya or Aztecs--helps keep the numbers down--I think more of the hill tribes of Papua New Guinea. There, I believe the tribes were/are very resource constrained and warfare and cannibalism evolved as cultural elements to keep them within the carrying capacity of the land and add some protein to the diet--not a great existence.

On the more 'civilized' scale, I recall that during the bronze age, it was quite common for cities and nations to sack others over access resources--often the losers were either slaughtered or enslaved.

Overall, I believe that "economic necessity" has always been the catalyst for war. I doubt that within any population there will be move to cull its own population when one can "snuff" one's neighbour--now there are exceptions, but this all depends on who is considered part of the nation--i.e. the case for civil war and genocide.

This then leads to another question, what defines a nation and what glue holds it together? Think Yugoslavia and Zaire/Congo then apply those thoughts to China, India, and the USA. Different pieces, but what about the glue...

Tribalism is alive in most of the world... I'm scared. We are headed for a wild ride as we approach the post-carbon epoch.

[nero]

Cannottell's thoughts were the most depressing reading I've read in these forums. I hope there was some irony in there.

[gg3]

Actually, I think the lead post was a deliberate troll.

First, the obvious moral issue. Second, incorrect reasoning: redistributing the goods of a shrinking market does not equal economic growth. Third, it doesn't operationalize; people don't just sit around waiting for MassMurder Inc. to knock at the door, they defend themselves.

Fourth, democratic free market societies don't wage war upon each other; they have more to lose than gain that way, even in resource scarcity. Cooperation and competition produce a net increase in value, regardless of energy input (i.e. this dynamic works even in energy scarcity). Predation and parasitism do not; they merely siphon value from one place to another and destroy a portion of it in the process. This stuff is axiomatic and well known to anyone who has taken first-year college level political studies or economics.

[cannottell]

I’ll put this in the voice of the controller of this process.

If I allow the people to grow in a time of energy crisis, I cannot control their fall. It sits beyond my power. I must control their fall, or they will loose faith in me, I will loose my power, and the systems which I rule will collapse. I have already decided the moral issue. I have the only way to live and I can kill to keep that right. Now we face a problem that will require a population reduction. By controlling this process, I can pose as the savior of mankind.

People could call me the apparatus of despair. People face decline and will demand an apparatus to control it. I consist in the people who believe in the strongest apparatus. With this apparatus, I shall use it to control the entire globe, because the problem has become global by my design.

I played a trick with economics and politics. I have devised them in such a way as to need constant growth. They do not survive without that growth. Then I take over to manage the decline. Economics and politics will not be very interesting issues in these times. I will have written the rules and I will not allow any deviation.

What you can learn in a first year college textbook has come from the policies that people who believed in me have set up to work. In the universe, only one law exists. The winners and the losers have already been determined. The simple power relationships dictate it so. Who succeeds is he with more power. If you really wished to know my design, you would study history. I put my plan in plane sight, for the few who looked beyond my lies.

So, I have no moral issue, economic growth for me comes from when I steal the dead peoples stuff, and you certainly seem to have sat around while I have executed the first phase of my plan. You will all question how you could not have seen my plan soon enough. Read up on how your US Central Bank got formed. If anyone of that time would have figured out that I set up a central bank, there would have been riots. Now, tied to me for so long, having given me all the wealth, I will discard this fiction and you will see what power looks like.

[lowem]

Power is relative. It may appear superior - until it meets a higher power.

... you never know.

[trespam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cannottell', '
')So, I have no moral issue, economic growth for me comes from when I steal the dead peoples stuff, and you certainly seem to have sat around while I have executed the first phase of my plan. You will all question how you could not have seen my plan soon enough. Read up on how your US Central Bank got formed. If anyone of that time would have figured out that I set up a central bank, there would have been riots. Now, tied to me for so long, having given me all the wealth, I will discard this fiction and you will see what power looks like.

[trespam]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cannottell', '
')So, I have no moral issue, economic growth for me comes from when I steal the dead peoples stuff, and you certainly seem to have sat around while I have executed the first phase of my plan. You will all question how you could not have seen my plan soon enough. Read up on how your US Central Bank got formed. If anyone of that time would have figured out that I set up a central bank, there would have been riots. Now, tied to me for so long, having given me all the wealth, I will discard this fiction and you will see what power looks like.

[cannottell]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('trespam', ' ')
This is all babble and nonsense. One poster already pointed out that your definition of economic growth is DOA. Your ideas about secret plans and world conspiracies assumes that people are smart enough to organize and think long term: they aren't. That's the problem.

[RIPSmithianEconomics]

Why get rid of the poor, when the rich are more likely to flee the country? Knock off the rich first before they realise what is happening. Actually all this makes war, famine and plague look like more humane ways of reducing the human population. At least they don't kill on class distinctions. Who knows what the ruling oligarchs will do?

[Synergist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RIPSmithianEconomics', 'W')hy get rid of the poor, when the rich are more likely to flee the country? Knock off the rich first before they realise what is happening. Actually all this makes war, famine and plague look like more humane ways of reducing the human population. At least they don't kill on class distinctions. Who knows what the ruling oligarchs will do?

[Dustin]

ok, what I think the original poster was discussing was war. The only mechanism which can systematically take people from lower classes and place them into a position where the weak die and the strong survive is a war on small nations (mostly with large oil supplies)

This will not work because the assumption is that the mass killings (war) do not use gas. Look at strategies and logistics of every war, especially world war two. Waging war takes up lots and lots of hydrocarbons in the form of fuel for tanks, planes, bombs, ships, et cetera. I think any benefit from losing citizens would be majorly compensated from the war.

On population control of overpopulated third world countries, most citizens use a fraction of the energy an average American uses, so their deaths will not add to the energy surplus.

On invading countries to gain their oil supplies, as Iraq shows, invasion lowers the oil output, meaning less energy to go around.

So war is not a good idea


The only other thing which can happen and not tell set off the holocaust alarm would be a virus breakout which only the rich and powerful have the antidote to and give to people they deem worthy of living, and I do not think that is a good idea either.

[cannottell]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dustin', 'o')k, what I think the original poster was discussing was war. The only mechanism which can systematically take people from lower classes and place them into a position where the weak die and the strong survive is a war on small nations (mostly with large oil supplies)

[Sedona]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('trespam', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cannottell', '
')

This is all babble and nonsense. One poster already pointed out that your definition of economic growth is DOA. Your ideas about secret plans and world conspiracies assumes that people are smart enough to organize and think long term: they aren't. That's the problem.