[KevO]

You may all recall the article on ASPO by William Stanton re decreasing population to avoid major die off.

Well he now has a weekly full page submission in our local newspaper.
A lot of people do seem to agree with him

remember
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588

KevO

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ell he now has a weekly full page submission in our local newspaper.
A lot of people do seem to agree with him

[julianj]

I second that.

Which newspaper is it?

[KevO]

not sure how to.
Its' the weekly Mid Someret Gazette in the UK, if that helps, but he is being taken seriously.......obviously to be give at least a full page on the subject for at least 3 weeks!
Does anyone have his email?
I'll ask him to post on here
KevO

[BabyPeanut]

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=22942
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')osse Comitatus is just the prelude to widespread Euthanasia!

PHXNews, AZ - Jul 6, 2005
... William Stanton, author of The Rapid Growth of Human Population 1750-2000, contributes the following analysis of how population will have to return to pre-Oil Age levels...

[julianj]

Can't you just scan it in and post it here?

It would come under the fair dealing provisions of the copyright act for discussion and review, I think.

[SHiFTY]

I'm sure the author would like to be in on the killing squads. Maybe he could get to conduct "experiments" like Mengele. Eugenics all the way!

[KevO]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('julianj', 'C')an't you just scan it in and post it here?
.

[aflurry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')remember
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588

[EnergySpin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('aflurry', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')remember
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588

[aflurry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EnergySpin', 'B')lind belief to darwinism is an insult to biology as well. The real world is more about symbiotic rather than antagonistic relationships.

[egoldstein]

My main thought upon reading this fellow's screed reprinted in ASPO was:
"Are you all, absolutely, out of your minds?!".
I then reread the introduction, and realised that they were not - thank God - endorsing what he said at all. They were reprinting it, with the wish that things never came to such a pass. Indeed.

I do really, really wish they had been more cautious in their manner of reference, even if it was to deny it as an option, as they certainly did. If they were going to quote him at such length however, I do think they ought to have commented more on it. It was sloppy editing and nothing more, and I can only assume that this is an aberration on their part, considering the professional standards and level of quality at their website in general.

As for this man's ideas: much as some perverts gravitate toward situations and professions that place them in contact with children, authoritarian control-freaks seem to graviate towards any cause small enough that they might gain personal influence in it. Much as shocked Romans first discovered they had no law against patricide, because no one had thought it possible, I am not sure we even have the vocabulary to denounce what this man is advocating.

What can we even call this? Xenocide?

As one of those sentimentalist throwbacks destined for this man's gas-chambers, I have no patience to listen to piffle about ad hominem arguments either. You don't get much more ad hominem than tyranny and death-squads.

And am I the only one to notice he seems to be lifting this from science fiction - or is it all science fiction gone mad, bad, and dangerously cultish, like Scientology? I am thinking of: the Depopulationist International from "Nature's End"; the nuclear option in "No Blade of Grass" by John Christopher; or hell, the Eloi and Morlocks from "The Time Machine". And for the kind of comfortable, padded-hell he proposes, check out "We" by Soviet dissident Zegenev, and of course "Brave New World" and "1984". I am sorely disappointed, however, that he did not urge the eating of african and arab babies, which would have provided a nice seg-way between Johnathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and "Soyent Green".

"Social Darwinism" my @$$.

Henry George neatly skewered this Malthusian shibboleth for priveleged elites over a century ago ("Progress and Poverty"), and yet this keeps coming back, like the creature in the horror movie, in different forms and shapes.
For the umpteenth time already:
1) For every one human mouth that comes into the world, there come two human hands with it; a poetic way of saying that humans become more efficient at using resources with the division of labour and specialisation of skills - but you do this with MORE people, not less;
2) Chickens are not an endangered species, for the same reason we are not. This is because, unlike foxes, we actively produce our own damned chickens instead of just poaching them out of the wild. We can even eat their eggs.
3) 80-90% of farm subsidies that make it by the civil servants (they skim 30% right off the top), go to subsidise the petrochemical industry (fuel, feed, fertiliser and vet-meds - the farmer is just the shmuck who gets the smallest cut). Thus, if it becomes prohibitively expensive to deploy petrochemicals, we will employ people. Cuba produces 90% of Havana's vegetables in Havana - the "organiponico" system of management-intensive resource reuse and urban agriculture.
4) Imagination is our inexhaustable, ultimate renewable resource. Human ingenuity and knowledge are not a static-pie, of which we all receive an ever-smaller piece. It is an ever-growing form of energy which ever-increases productivity, all the more so with reference to 1. and 2. above.

[gg3]

Folks, not to worry about Stanton. I think I have him beat hands-down, as follows:

As I've argued in another topic: In order to achieve equilibrium between population and resources, a deliberate kill-off would have to take down population by the same amount as a natural die-off. It is therefore equivalent to a die-off by "other means."

Die-off is the definitional proof of the unfitness of a society to survive in a given ecosystem: a historic and cumulative track record of lack of capability to make effective decisions regarding population and resource issues. If the past, present, and prospective (competing) leaders have been incapable of preventing die-off, this is a demonstration of their own unfitness; and therefore, their unfitness to make any further decisions regarding population and resource issues, including the decisions attendant to a policy of kill-off.

Therefore those who promote kill-off are a) conceding that their society itself is unfit to manage its population/resource issues, and b) conceding that they themselves are unfit to lead. Point (b) entails that their proposed solution is an unfit one, and thereby destroys the case for a kill-off.

In other words, the arguement for kill-off suffers from Godelian incompleteness (the solution has not been possible from within the system, up to the point of destruction of the system) and is therefore self-defeating.

I could develop this into an essay, "Refutation of Stanton," to submit to ASPO. Feedback definitely welcome.

---

Aflurry, say more about "the process of improvement through degradation." Are you talking about something like Prigogene's dissipative structures? Or something else?

---

Re. "no words to describe" what Stanton is advocating: yes we do, it's called Naziism. The man is a Nazi. Or if he is playing Devil's Advocate, he is doing so most dangerously, and is therefore a fool.

---

Egoldstein, welcome aboard, excellent first post! (What part of the world are you located in?)

However, Henry George's arguement, as you state it, necessarily requires that humans produce more net resources than they consume. This, as somone else pointed out (EnergySpin?), is equivalent to over-unity performance, which is not possible within a closed system.

Unless you assume that the source of human imagination is outside the system, which would imply a dualist-interactionist model of human consciousness.

Short version of complicated arguement:

Solar energy indirectly powers the human brain, but can at most obtain a performance of unity minus conversion losses. If the efficiency of humans as dissipative structures (converting resource entropy-flows into useful form) exceeds the level of "unity minus conversion losses," even after accounting for stored resource capital (oil, uranium, forests, minerals, etc.), this implies an additional input from outside the system, i.e. that imagination -or whatever you want to call it- partakes of an input from outside the system.

"Input from outside the system," in the case of the human organism, is by definition the "dualistic" component of dualist-interactionism.

[EnergySpin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Solar energy indirectly powers the human brain, but can at most obtain a performance of unity minus conversion losses. If the efficiency of humans as dissipative structures (converting resource entropy-flows into useful form) exceeds the level of "unity minus conversion losses," even after accounting for stored resource capital (oil, uranium, forests, minerals, etc.), this implies an additional input from outside the system, i.e. that imagination -or whatever you want to call it- partakes of an input from outside the system.

"Input from outside the system," in the case of the human organism, is by definition the "dualistic" component of dualist-interactionism.

[foodnotlawns]

Foo, we got an infestation of cornucopians!

The arrogance about "the unlimited human imagination" is itself a product of a comfortable, oil based society.

First of all, we aren't using our chance to change to a sustainable situation while we have it. We are squandering it. When there is chaos and shortages we woin't be able to make a smooth techno-fix (even if it was possible to do so now).

Second, proposing a kill-off doesn't mean that Stanton himself is inadequate, it means that the human global collective made a mistake, for example, in providing modern medicine and industrial agriculture to the masses in Asia and Africa and helping them grow their populations.

We were too nice, too charitable, and let the world use our technology to grow itself to 7 billion. It's horrible, there's too many people, too much overcrowding, and too much immigration. Spend a few hours in New York City and you'll be praying for mushroom clouds on the horizing.

[guamanian]

Description: A ridicule-laden broadside aimed at William Stanton's "Oil and People". (ASPO Newsletter, July 2005, http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588)

Keywords: William Stanton, Monty Python, Adolf Hitler, Fascism, eugenics.

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

William Stanton's Essay "Öl und Volk" is best read in the original[1], preferably out loud in a shrill Austrian accent with suitable stiff-armed gestures and much goose-stepping.

William looks ahead at the coming energy descent, and proposes we choose a future of:

- Eugenic killing of 'defectives', the ill and the elderly
- Immigration redefined as a criminal act
- The lavish application of capital punishment for just about everything
- Maximization of the "well-being of the nation-state"
- And, of course, a "strong and alert military" to enforce all of the above

Invoking Victorian-parlour Social Darwinism, and railing against "the Western world's unintelligent devotion to ... human rights and the sanctity of human life", Stanton presents as a solution to energy descent the classic Fascist (or Corporatist) State, in which the powerless individual serves the homeland, for the greater good of, if not all, then at least of some.

It is clear from the policy details of Stanton's essay that peak oil and population reduction is merely a Trojan horse for Stanton's fascist future to ride in on: when faced with a choice, his plan promotes 'genetic improvement' over the ostensible goal of population reduction.

This is most blatant in his 'tradeable child credits' scheme, in which the poor can sell their 'one-child' credit to the rich for food -- a system that clearly is intended to help eliminate the "weak" and "defective" and replace them with the "strong" -- a category that will undoubtably include Dr. Stanton and his offspring: after all, why should we be deprived of such a clear-thinking and far-sighted lineage? Won't we need their guidance for generations to come?

Rather than the obvious alternative of a "one-child and no-dickering" policy -- which would actually accomplish population reduction more rapidly than his 'tradeable child credits' -- Stanton instead prefers the massive application of capital punishment for the old, infirm, handicapped, religious anti-abortionists, animal rights activists, and any other person who refuses to get with the program.

According to Stanton, riding this homicidal merry-go-round will result in a reduction of the UK population by 5-10 million in 10 years.

This proposed genocide is unnecessary and gratuitous: Based on Stanton's own timescale the population reduction required by the energy descent can be easily accomplished through a one-child policy and natural mortality over the course of the 150 year time span specified.

Admittedly this will not be as colorful and pleasing to some as a future filled with torch-light rallies at Nuremberg-on-Tyne -- but it will get us to a very similar demographic place, while allowing us to muddle through with our "unintelligent devotion to ... human rights and the sanctity of human life" relatively intact.

What amazes me about this essay is the blatantly Fascist nature of the project it presents. What concerns me about it is the weak preamble appended to it by the ASPO editors. "Let us hope that it does not come to this..." seems to be more a tacit endorsement than the clear repudiation it deserves.

More on "Oil and People":

View the original essay at: http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588

Comments on Stanton's invocation of Darwin are posted at:
http://www.peakoil.com/post144261.html#144261

An exchange of letters with ASPO from a Christian perspective is posted at: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495hz/id55.html

An energy analysis examining the technical basis of Stanton's proposal:
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2005/04/ ... ey-on.html

Alternatives to Stanton's Fascist Future:

Humane and far more viable and pragmatic counter-narratives on energy descent can be found in the writings of authors such as Richard Heinberg (http://www.museletter.com/) and David Holmgren (http://www.holmgren.com.au/).

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

[1] To savour the full retro-teutonic spirit of Stanton's essay, go to http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr and input the URL http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/588 with English-to-German selected. This will render such classic oratory as:

"Zu in dem jenen sentimentalists, die nicht die Notwendigkeit verstehen können, BRITISCHE Bevölkerung von 60 Million bis ungefähr 2 Million über 150 Jahren zu verringern und die am vorgeschlagenen Wiedereinbau der menschlichen Rechte durch verletzt werden kalte Logik, würde daß ich sagen, "Sie Ihren Tag gehabt haben, Ihr wolliges Denken herauf nicht gerade die westliche Welt verwirrt hat, aber der vollständige Planet, der, wenn Homo sapiens wirklich intelligent gewesen waren, haben gestützt eine kleine Bevölkerung könnte, die fast eine wundervolle Lebensqualität für überhaupt genießt. Sie haben geworfen weg diese Gelegenheit."

For tips on accent and delivery, try this classic Monty Python sketch. (27mb AVI Video File)

[I_Like_Plants]

It's not die-off that shows the failure of a society, it's overpopulation in the first place.

The Empire model, which dictates that cheap labor must be secured by any means, and that fecund foreign populations must imported to keep labor cheap, and that uses pervasive brainwashing and force to overcome people's natural instincts, to turn them into "Empire Citizen, Mark I" no matter what race, intelligence, etc. is a model that has always failed and always will.

It failed in the USSR, it failed in Yugoslavia, it failed in Rome, it failed in Egypt, and it will fail in the US.

[reuchlin]

Stanton's vision of society would probably lead to the oppossite of what he proposes, which is a gradual decline of the population to sustainable levels. A society which commits mass murder on its own people would have to be totalitarian, and would certainly become very corrupt. It would lose the active support of the people, who would quite rightly try to undermine it.

Democratic regimes have in fact been much more efficient at utilizing a society's resources to achieve a common purpose than fascist regimes. In World War II, Germany used its resources much less efficiently than Great Britain and the USA, a fact which contributed heavily to its defeat.

William Stanton's proposal would in fact make Britain a much weaker and not a stronger nation. "Darwinism" doesn't fit here, a more appropriate label would be national suicide.

[airstrip1]

Stanton's agenda has little to do with the issue of Peak Oil. Human population size is mainly governed by the availability of food, clean drinking water and certain types of medical care to young children. Whilst there is a relationship between the availabilty of these resources and the supply of oil it is no where near as simplistic as Stanton suggests. For example, most human beings require somewhere between 2000 and 6000 kilocalories of food per day to survive depending on their level of physical activity. Consuming much more or much less than that amount over a period of time invariably leads to the individual succumbing to some sort of disease. These parameters remain pretty much the same regardless of whether a human live a hunter gatherer lifestyle or in a modern industrialised society. Food supply is therefore an essential factor in controlling population size. When it comes to other forms of energy usage the picture is far less clear. Outside of food the average peasant farmer in the third world consumes far less calories than the average US citizen or European. Most of the energy expended by the latter group is related to activities that have nothing to do with food production. It might therefore logically be argued that if there is any population reduction required in the world as a response to Peak Oil then the US and Europe might be the places to start. I suspect that Stanton, with his corrupted Darwinian views, might go along with that argument but I very much doubt whether the idea would really appeal to some of those who express support for his ideas. Their attitude often seems to be
that, if only the teeming hoards of Africa, Asia etc would quietly expire ,then there would be plenty of cheap gas available for them to drive their SUV. Unfortunately, they do not seem to realise that it is their civilisation not that of the rest of humanity that has driven the planet to Peak Oil so quickly.

My personal view on Stantons theory is that if he is so keen on killing people to depopulate the world then he should show the courage of his convictions by starting with himself.

[gg3]

Re. EnergySpin and entropy:

You're probably right; my background is in communications engineering but I also have decent layperson's knowledge of physics, so I may be conflating the two. I think of entropy as both a) decrease in order or information (information-theoretic model) and b) decrease in concentration of matter/energy (physical model). The boundaries may cross from time to time, but this intuitive hint at a relationship between the two may turn out to be useful in some sense.

Re. dualist-interactionist models: It seems to me that information is a "fundamental quantity" in the same manner as are matter and energy.

Information processing and/or storage can be correlated with any number of matter/energy systems, for example the activity of neurons or logic gates, the existence of bits on hard drives or words on printed pages, etc. This is the "interactionist" component.

But the information itself is not *not identical with* any of these matter/energy systems: As you said, a computer consumes an identical amount of energy whether it is displaying visual white noise or solving lengthy equations, and a couch potato consumes no more or less energy than a philosopher. As well, information can exist apart from any particular matter/energy instantiation. This is the "dualist" component.

*Pure* dualism is disproven by the effectiveness of LSD and the correlation between EEG activity and dreaming. And pure materialist monism is disproven by the lack of equivalency between decrease of information entropy and increase of matter/energy entropy within a system. This leaves us with the dualist-interactionist model, which accommodates all of these observations.


Re. Foodnotlawns:

I find your use of "Foo!" far preferable to the usual online cusswords, so consider it added to the vocabulary.

Where do you see all those pesky cornucopians?

And re. "imagination," see also my discussion with EnergySpin.
Imagination is a subset of information-creating activities. Imagination creates information. However, information is a fundamental quantity that is not identical with matter, energy, or inputs/conversions of same.

Beyond the level of calories needed for proper nutrition, there is zero correlation between added calories (energy) and imagination (information output). You can feed a couch potato 2000 calories in a day and get very low information output. You can feed a philosopher 2000 calories in a day and get a very high information output. You can increase the calorie input to both the couch potato and to the philosopher, and it will not change their respective information outputs.

Imagination has existed in vast measure long before petroleum. You can't discount Plato, Aristotle, et. al., and more modern contributors such as DaVinci, Shakespeare, the Founders of the American republic, et. al.

Imagination is a subset of information-creating activities, and as such, it does not correlate with a change in the energy-input to the information-creating entity. That is, the degree of imagination shown by humans has zero correlation with their level of calorie consumption: as long as a human is getting sufficient calories for proper nutrition, that human can exhibit any degree of imagination from zero to the maximum degree observed through history.


You're mistaken about "too nice and too charitable." In fact we have not been nice enough, nor charitable enough.

If we had been nicer, we would have legal & economic equality for women and gay people world wide, and free availability of all forms of contraception world wide. These steps would constitute a net increase in "niceness" because they would enable a greater degree of sexual pleasure without reproductive consequences. These steps would also reduce the birth rate to below-replacement level, which would have eliminated the risk of population overshoot.

If we had been more charitable, we would have extended the electric power grid to every corner of the world whose inhabitants voted for it. Doing this also reduces birth rate: villages that get electricity for the first time show a 50% drop in birth rate (since the grownups have something else to do after the sun goes down!).

Also, if we had been nicer and more charitable, rather than mean and selfish, we would have had a far greater degree of sharing of economic resources. (You can call this "Christian communism" or "voluntary communism" if you wish, to differentiate it from the not-nice type that's done at gunpoint.) This in turn would further reduce the birth rate, as it's well known that people who are economically secure breed less.

And as part of our niceness and charity, we would want to be nice & charitable toward future generations, and preserve for them an abundant world, by keeping our own resource consumption within sustainable boundaries. And to the extent that we used nonrenewable resources, we would only do so to create things that served the future as well as the present.

I have spent more than a few hours in NYC. It is by & large a reasonably civilized place, and I was surprised at the level of niceness and charity I saw there as a routine matter.

I do agree that we are squandering our opportunity to achieve balance between population and resources. Not-nice people from the Pope to the various Mullahs prefer to shackle the pleasure of sex to the burden of pregnancy. Un-charitable people who revel in greed monopolize the efforts of vast numbers of humans only for the purpose of enriching themselves beyond all reason. And a lack of imagination obviously prevents the vast masses questioning what they are told by all of these not-nice and not-charitable people.

Stanton embraces "die-off by other means." By embracing die off in any form, he concedes his own failure and the failure of his own position. He and it, are both unfit. (Hey that even rhymes!:-).


Guamanian, excellent stuff; though I wouldn't demean modern Germany nor its people or language by way of the horrors they endured in the last century; as they are presently a leading example of the potential for good in a society. Fascism does not depend on a particular formalism such as a language or accent; it pops up as a wolf in the local sheeps' clothing; and very often sneaks into the flock precisely due to its camouflage.

"Victorian-parlour Social Darwinism": delicious phrase, I shall use it early and often!

You have an excellent point about tradeable child credits there. In fact I've personally favored the concept of tradeable child credits, but you found quite a hole in it indeed: the poor trade their children to the rich for food, which is very very bad, clearly violates the categorical imperative on both counts. Yet it seems to me terribly wasteful to allow child credits themselves to be squandered; far more humane for example, if someone who has no desire to reproduce could make their kid-cred available to e.g. a couple whose one offspring was squished by a bus at an early age.

Perhaps the way to do this is via a charitable exchange: the nonbreeder could simply *give* their kid-cred away (or perhaps do it in exchange for a tax abatement?), and the parents of the squishling could wait their turn for an allocated kid-cred so they could try to make one that survives.

I-Like-Plants: Yes, the overpopulation is the failure, each day it occurs, and each additional mouth it produces. The die-off is the final exam, where the failure becomes evident. Interesting point about the Empire model being the underlying cause of the desire on the part of the rulers, for humans to breed like little mice.


Reuchlin: Excellent point about "national suicide." Excellent phrase in fact, that one goes into the vocabulary.


Last but not least, re. "a strong and alert military..."

There is nothing inherently fascist about that, in and of itself. In fact any society that achieves sustainability will tend to become a target for invasion by surrounding socities that are still breeding and consuming far beyond their own resources. So a strong and alert military, with a purely defense-oriented mission, could be considered a necessary condition for sustainability over the long run.