[evilgenius]

Sheer numbers do have an impact upon potential for survival. I've heard Matt Ridley talk about it. With sheer numbers, and diversity, you get such a complex origin of creativity that even the 'black death' type of world ending events have to be discounted. The biggest danger to that type of counter to hazard is actually stability. When the world realizes as it matures that it should have fewer people, and takes the proper steps (not one child policy) to get there, then, the creative core would shrink relatively. Political troubles would be subsumed under such circumstances, but climate related ones might remain entirely out of hand.

[Tanada]

...$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'G')ood points by both. It also demonstrates how complex the whole system is, how many variables there are. LTG did not model the downward slope and stated that the best their model could do was find the inflection points because after that everything became so chaotic that the model lost credibility. I suspect that is true.

Tanada, one thing I’ve not heard you address is soil depletion.

[ralfy]

LTG may be seen in light of ecological footprint per capita vs. biocapacity. That is, the latter is limited, which means the former will have to go down one way or another. Increasing population and pollution decreases footprint further.

[Newfie]

Tanada,
I’ll bet Ohio gets more cold in the winter than Newfoundland, although our summers are far cooler.

Your poking, which is akin to stuff Ibon says, runs counter to my experience. I grew up in the Pine Barrens of NJ. Lots of sand. It does not improve as you say, quite the contrary you may get a hear or two of crop out of it and th n it’s linked out for generations. Ditto with Newfoundland, you can see where someone has walked two years ago.

I have no clue why yours and Ibons experience is so markedly different from mine. I see a very fragile Earth that does not regenerate easily. I’m sure this isn’t the case in some places. But even here in Dominica I see signs of the earth being played out, greatly r diced fertility. I’m just learning but what I’m seeing is large areas covered with lemon grass, an invasive the locals are trying To burn out. There are whole hillsides covered with the stuff to the exclusion of all else. Back in the Bush there are all kinds of small farm plots, none very productive. What got me that as wet as this place is they are irritating, at great ecfort.

Yeah, I hear your arguments, I believe you are sure of your arguments. They just don’t match what I personally observe. I don’t know how to reconcile our differences.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '.')

I have no clue why yours and Ibons experience is so markedly different from mine. I see a very fragile Earth that does not regenerate easily. I’m sure this isn’t the case in some places. But even here in Dominica I see signs of the earth being played out, greatly r diced fertility. I’m just learning but what I’m seeing is large areas covered with lemon grass, an invasive the locals are trying To burn out. There are whole hillsides covered with the stuff to the exclusion of all else. Back in the Bush there are all kinds of small farm plots, none very productive. What got me that as wet as this place is they are irritating, at great ecfort.

[Newfie]

I get that Ibon, things will grow back not as they were.

What I’m talking about is the soils ability to regenerate while still being used to produce crops. What I see in these manual farming areas is relatively fertile places that don’t produce much, where the folks move there lot ever year or two and let it rest for a few years in between. I see a lot of land that is easily played out for agriculture.

In Germany they seem to use more crop rotation to help regenerate. I’m no farmer and could be mistaken but I think that helps.

My understanding is that our capacity for production relies upon many things beyond fossils fuels such as adequate water (we are now using fossil water) and essentially fossil soil nutrients. These resources regenerate but at a rate much below our current usage. It is really the Peak Oil argument applied to other resources.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'I') get that Ibon, things will grow back not as they were.

What I’m talking about is the soils ability to regenerate while still being used to produce crops. What I see in these manual farming areas is relatively fertile places that don’t produce much, where the folks move there lot ever year or two and let it rest for a few years in between. I see a lot of land that is easily played out for agriculture.

In Germany they seem to use more crop rotation to help regenerate. I’m no farmer and could be mistaken but I think that helps.

My understanding is that our capacity for production relies upon many things beyond fossils fuels such as adequate water (we are now using fossil water) and essentially fossil soil nutrients. These resources regenerate but at a rate much below our current usage. It is really the Peak Oil argument applied to other resources.

[Newfie]

The pine trees in NJ and PNW I believe have a huge tap root that goes deep. There were stories (Ken Keesy) of folks falling into their rotted cavern and suffocating. Ive not experience that but I have STEPPED into the smaller NJ version and gown in up to my hip, painful.

But Tanada, I may need schooling on this, are you saying we can continue farming as we do now, including irrigation, for an indefinite time? I don’t thinks so but sometimes it sounds that way.

[KaiserJeep]

It is interesting to see the many impacts that man and his animals have on the landscape.

The hills above my house are one example of this, aka Santa Teresa County Park. During the period between WW1 and WW2 there was an open pit mercury mine up there in one triangular shaped valley between three hills. This left an unfortunate legacy of contaminated surface water, the Winter rains leached through the heaps of mine tailings from the disturbed ground, and mercury entered the springs and ponds. Then even more unfortunately, with no one thinking of heavy metal contamination, a farmer made those same hills into a dairy farm, and for 40+ years produced milk in the area for human consumption. Sorry, but I can't resist: one of the reasons this state has so many crazy folks is that mercury dementia has been a problem since the days of the Gold Rush. Nowadays all California dairy and produce is tested, but humans unthinkingly consumed mercury-contaminated foods for decades prior to that.

More or less directly above my house.

During this period, the feet of the grazing cattle produced parallel furrows in the soil as they munched the grasses over the years. They walked around the sides of the hills and effectively suppressed the native scub oak and other brush via their hooves and massive weight, while their manure fertilized the grasses they consumed. These furrows are still visible, it had been a good 10-15 years since the farm had existed, but when I moved here in '86 the furrows were precisely parallel and wrapped around the hills, giving the county park an appearance of contour plowing on a slope that was obviously far too steep and rocky to be plowed. These furrows slowed water runoff and the nature of the vegetation changed as a result - the semi-arid vegetation was replaced by scrub and grasses, which incidentally endangered several species of insects that depended upon those native plants, primarily smallish pastel blue butterflys. For the last 32 years I have watched the legacy of those dairy cows changing the landscape above.

Area containing the open pit mine and tailings heaps

Now those slopes are slowly becoming covered in several types of brush, the legacy of the enhanced water retention due to the furrows, and the soil is thickening and covering the broken rocks of the mine tailings. Groundcovers, lichens, and mosses exist where bare rock was once what you saw. The slowed water runoff has produced an abundance of surface water springs that produce beautiful clear, cold water that is lightly contaminated with mercury. It is not particularly toxic in small amounts, yet the legacy of mercury contamination remains, as I will explain in the next two paragraphs.

Not the park, but an illustration of the changes grazing cattle causes.

My morning exercise routine before work was a daily hike up the hill, around a loop of trails, and a return along the drainage ditch. One segment of this was over a section of trail shared by one of the horse trails in the park, which included a spring-fed galvanized horse watering trough. I noticed that a 1/4 inch black plastic tube ran downhill from there, and followed it to several well-disguised marijuana plants, growing on public land and being watered by small drippers. I started watching the area, and recognized one of my neighbors several houses away. I then knocked on his door and quietly explained that he was growing weed in soil that was heavily contaminated with mercury mine tailings, and that consuming such would be dangerous, and that he should be tested for mercury. He ended up getting treated for this for several months. Meanwhile he did not succeed in eliminating his plants in the area, hemp now grows wild there and the park employees regularly suppress the contaminated plants, and there are warning signs posted about mercury contamination.

The former dairy farmhouse is now a park building with displays of native plants and a discussion of the evolving landscape I have been describing. Meanwhile, the park has repeatedly been colonized by the homeless population, who love the grasslands, and pitch tents under the 10' high scrub oak, and gather deadwood for their campfires. These homeless people are absorbing mercury by drinking the water, eating fish from the local ponds, smoke from the campfire wood, and (I do not doubt) from smoking the wild hemp. Every time I respond to my mailbox alarm in the wee morning hours, and I see a figure stumbling down the street, opening mailboxes and casting mail into the streets, it is impossible to tell if he is simply drunk, or suffering from inhaled mercury, that dementia that became known as "Miners Madness" during the Gold Rush days.



The local predators often display symptoms of mercury dementia from eating area game.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')he pine trees in NJ and PNW I believe have a huge tap root that goes deep. There were stories (Ken Keesy) of folks falling into their rotted cavern and suffocating. Ive not experience that but I have STEPPED into the smaller NJ version and gown in up to my hip, painful.

But Tanada, I may need schooling on this, are you saying we can continue farming as we do now, including irrigation, for an indefinite time? I don’t thinks so but sometimes it sounds that way.

[Newfie]

That matches much more with my observations.

[KaiserJeep]

Re: Nuclear energy and Coal energy after cheap oil is gone.

Both of these energy sources depend heavily upon petroleum fuels for the machinery that digs them out of the ground. In fact the nuclear fuel cycle is very FF dependant, after mining it uses grid energy to refine uranium and then enrich the fuel via high speed centrifuges spinning uranium hexaflouride gas to seperate U235 from U238.

By my off-the-cuff estimate, nuclear energy still produces about 15% of the carbon as coal, because it uses both oil (for mining) and coal (for grid power used to refine and enrich nuclear fuel). That figure would be even higher except that fission reactors produce rather a lot of energy for each fuel cycle.

Similarly, solar panels and wind turbines use a lot of embedded energy from FF's when they are fabricated.

The most correct view of a future without cheap petroleum fuels is that we will have whatever energy sources we have before we run out of such fuels. That is why it is so critically important to transition to renewable energy before we run out of cheap oil.

YES it is possible to design electric powered mining machinery, and electric transports for ores, and electric alternatives to whatever we use fossil fuels for today. Some (but all too few) machines have been designed, most such systems remain concepts, detailed designs don't exist, nor do prototypes, much less available electric machinery substitutes. The longer we wait, the more painful the transition and the more difficult the task and the more we suffer from energy shortages.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'R')e: Nuclear energy and Coal energy after cheap oil is gone.

Both of these energy sources depend heavily upon petroleum fuels for the machinery that digs them out of the ground. In fact the nuclear fuel cycle is very FF dependant, after mining it uses grid energy to refine uranium and then enrich the fuel via high speed centrifuges spinning uranium hexaflouride gas to seperate U235 from U238.

By my off-the-cuff estimate, nuclear energy still produces about 15% of the carbon as coal, because it uses both oil (for mining) and coal (for grid power used to refine and enrich nuclear fuel). That figure would be even higher except that fission reactors produce rather a lot of energy for each fuel cycle.

Similarly, solar panels and wind turbines use a lot of embedded energy from FF's when they are fabricated.

The most correct view of a future without cheap petroleum fuels is that we will have whatever energy sources we have before we run out of such fuels. That is why it is so critically important to transition to renewable energy before we run out of cheap oil.

YES it is possible to design electric powered mining machinery, and electric transports for ores, and electric alternatives to whatever we use fossil fuels for today. Some (but all too few) machines have been designed, most such systems remain concepts, detailed designs don't exist, nor do prototypes, much less available electric machinery substitutes. The longer we wait, the more painful the transition and the more difficult the task and the more we suffer from energy shortages.

[KaiserJeep]

Sub,
1) I don't doubt this, but France also has a huge looming problem. Over 3/4ths of the existing French reactors are early second generation designs, which can no longer be built given the current safety standards. These plants remain in operation because of expensive life extension modifications, but are approaching that time when the reactor vessels themselves will have to be replaced due to crystallization and the resulting loss of strength of the steel alloys. There is a massive expense when large numbers of obsolescent reactors are scrapped and replaced with more modern, safer fourth generation designs which are modular in nature and can be replaced one module at a time. It will cost slightly more than building entirely new plants from scratch, in fact - because you scrap the old plant in it's entirety, then build a new modern design, and re-use only the fuel itself and the electrical distribution structure of the existing site.

I admire the French commitment to nuclear energy, and their record of safety. But their cost of electricity will at least double in years to come.

2) You are describing ISL (In Situ Leaching) which has recently been applied to uranium, but has a longer record with other minerals. In fact the practitioners of such techniques have always described their practices as "much safer", with little actual evidence. But as with other forms of fracking, the water table at the site is typically destroyed, and surface water percolates to a much greater depth and even if you drill a deep well, is hopelessly contaminated by the fracking fluids. This techniqque is undoubtedly cheaper, but also results in less uranium yield than a conventional mine, and with long term safety as yet undetermined.

Not trying to be a downer, but this practice should not be pursued on a large scale for uranium until we have a grasp of the overall and long term risks.

3) My whole point about FF powered machinery was that electrical versions of such mining machinery have not been designed and need to be to hasten the transition when the time comes. And BTW, just because any healthy ICE can be converted to burn hydrogen gas does not mean that it is economical to do so or that the fuel can be handled in a safe manner and stored safely in any system (pressure tank or sintered metal sponge or whatever) that fits in the space of a liquid fuel tank.

During recent 4-year testing of hydrogen combustion urban busses by the Santa Clara VTA, the price of a single bus fell from $3M to about $1M, but with such extensive design changes that the durability and maintenance expenses part of testing was invalidated. The hydrogen fuel cell versions were cheaper but still not ready for prime time, the software to monitor and manage fuel cells is not yet mature.

Undoubtedly, such technology will improve over time. I'm anything but opposed to technological change, but the gist of what I was saying is that we cannot switch to a new type of tech until the R&D is finished, and some of this stuff is pretty half-baked still.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')he pine trees in NJ and PNW I believe have a huge tap root that goes deep. There were stories (Ken Keesy) of folks falling into their rotted cavern and suffocating. Ive not experience that but I have STEPPED into the smaller NJ version and gown in up to my hip, painful.

But Tanada, I may need schooling on this, are you saying we can continue farming as we do now, including irrigation, for an indefinite time? I don’t thinks so but sometimes it sounds that way.

[Ibon]

Something related to these past posts.... At a certain population level humans can afford the luxury of slash and burn in the tropics , poor soil management, industrial monoculture agriculture, etc etc. Everything we do today that falls under the umbrella of being "unsustainable" is actually "sustainable" at a certain population density. Just an important point to remember.

[onlooker]

Ibon, makes a good point above. Our species needs a brand new do over, I think in many ways. I think looking deeply at how we arrived at this juncture showcases a multitude of ways that we have erred. The culture of rich countries demonstrates the crass self indulgent morass that has come to define the "depraved" Western culture. The addictions, the narcissism, selfishness, greed, indolence, all these suite of vices product of the excesses of the rich countries made possible of course by the abundant energy from FF.
Then you have the poor countries missing out of the excesses and material abundance and thus not markekly deformed of character like rich world citizens. But they in turn have been set up as baby factories by sufficient food, some basic health care and lack of the normal natural constraints. So in summary, upon going through the bottleneck we shall experience both material constraints which will bring our character back to a more stable and healthy mode and we will also have the harrowing die off of numerous people which will bring our worldwide population back to a manageable level. All in all, perhaps precisely the growing pains that our species needs to get on a more sustainable track.

[Ibon]

One of the reasons our culture at large cannot discuss these topics is because of the belief that everything that will come during the contraction will hold us collectively under the tyranny of constraints.

It does not have to be that way. At a low enough managed population density a surviving population can free themselves to a degree from "THE TYRANNY OF CONSTRAINTS".

Dare one say that there may still be abundance. Managed abundance.

[KaiserJeep]

That's true. However we had best start managing that abundance soon.

A primary key to managing any limited resources of any sort is to first manage the demand side by limiting - and over the long term reducing - the population of humans.

That means two very things that are obviously going to be very hard and very unpopular:

1) Managing the birthrate to limit the existing population to replacement rates alone. That would mean that most families were limited to but two children. Some would get a thrird birthright (because of those that never reproduce) and there is a prolonged debate about how those extra birthrights are awarded. I do not see how the government could ever not be involved, and I simply hate that idea.

2) Closing the borders to immigration, and enforcing the closure rigorously. There may be 30+ million "undocumented" already in this country, that's a large and growing problem. Again, a government function, but an already existing one that they are totally screwing up.

[onlooker]

I agree with Kaiser. The consumer side of the equation will take care of itself as natural restraints are kicking in to consume like resource shortages. The population issue is more tricky. I think you have to motivate somehow people to have less children but then also provide them a means to do so. The motivation part would be economic as people would respond to this quite readily. The means to prevent pregnancy I think is going to have to me some sort of medical procedure. It should involve both men and women as it would be seen then something not sexist but necessary for society. A permanent procedure to disable the ability to contribute to the onset of a pregnancy. Again, I do not see any other way than it being a top down approach ie. Govt. But, we know that anyway Govts are going to reflexively seek more Authoritarian powers as both a way to keep law and order and in the process allow the upper class to maintain itself at this level. So, people should have no problem with this mandate if it can be presented as a reasonable solution to the problem of overpopulation and environmental degradation. And of course if people see a net economic benefit to this.