[Permanently_Baffled]

Thanks Monte for the response.

Ludi - I wasn't suggesting any sort of coercion or enforcement by the state - I was just trying to understand what the "market" will try and do with the potential masses of cheap labour available post peak/economic shock (my fault - I didnt explain this to well!)

[Ludi]

Unfortunately, I think we can expect coercion by "the market" (or the state), as that is what the market (and most states) is currently doing to billions of people - coercing them to be virtual (or actual) slaves!


Ours is a coercive system, a pyramid scheme.

[Ibon]

When it comes to corporate and government coercion, greed, corruption, we notice today the general public's apathy and paralysis around protest. Considering that the general public is increasingly struggling to make ends meet and considering that the majority of people are employed by corporations, what happens when massive unemployment breaks the chains that have turned the public into complacent sheeples?

I can imagine that when consequences hit home this long asleep complacency of the general public will end and we will see massive protest against corporate and government self interest.

We will have huge numbers of people unemployed. We will have huge requirements to rebuild our infrastructure torward sustainability. And we will have massive protests from displaced people. And we wont have money and resources to make some techno fix. All of this will force a whole new approach to our economic system. A whole new approach to people living in community. A whole new approach to how people get compensated for their work.

This may all start out as government programs like the WPA during the depression and end up morphing to a more permanent arrangement.

The massive protests of displaced people will create a huge threat to the corporate / government elite. Todays complacent shoppers will turn into tomorrows revolutionaries once they lose their jobs.
I know that seems almost impossible to imagine at the moment.

[xrotaryguy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('veritas', 'I') was under the impression you need petroleum to lubricate the ball bearings of wind mills, and that petrochemical products are necessary to create photovoltaic cells... is that not accurate?

[Veritas]

Finally had a chance to catch up on this thread.

I don't get how you (believe it was montequest) come to the conclusion that energy use = irreplacable jobs and economic activity. It seems to me like you are saying we just can't reduce energy demand that much because people will lose jobs, sectors will collapse. Sure, they will and then they will be replaced by other jobs and the growth in other sectors.

If we reduce the demand for cars by 90% a whole string of economic sectors are no longer possible. Now we take all those people who were flying planes, managing hotels, running conveience stores, and tell them to go do something useful, problem solved.

It's not like you flick a switch overnight and the world changes right? You'd see a gradual decline in demand for these products and services, and a commensurate increase in demand for other products and services. If people aren't spending their time flying around staying in hotels, they're presumably doing something else.

Hey, now the demand for recreational facilities is up 90%. So take all those hotel managers and put them in charge of rec facilities. Take your airplane pilots and have them drive whatever the public transit is in cities (obviously not literally the same people - but those who would have been the next generation of pilots instead become a new generation of something else).

One would imagine that a sustainable future involves localization and de-mechanization of a lot of things. So all those people who were driving trucks to deliver milk across the country can now go work on local dairy farms producing the good for people in a reasonable radius. Demand for skilled trades would surge right? If you can't mass produce everything for ikea and walmart, somebody has to make that stuff locally.

So just because you cut your energy demand by 25%, does not mean your unemployment rate goes up by 25%. People get redirected from service into primary production of goods.

It doesn't mean its easy or quick, but I don't believe that just taking conservation seriously will trigger economic collapse.

So to me the questions are:

1) how much energy could reliably be provided from renewables?

2) what is the gap between that supply and current demand?

3) Can conservation efforts address that gap?


If we're talking about renewables providing 10% of current energy supply in a best-case scenario, then yeah its probably not gonna happen. But if its 30%? 50%? It strikes me that the vast majority of our energy consumption is basically waste and we should be able to reduce it dramatically if we were so committed.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Veritas', 'I') don't get how you (believe it was montequest) come to the conclusion that energy use = irreplacable jobs and economic activity. It seems to me like you are saying we just can't reduce energy demand that much because people will lose jobs, sectors will collapse. Sure, they will and then they will be replaced by other jobs and the growth in other sectors.

[Veritas]

Not quite, he's talking about a domino effect.

By reducing auto use it chain reacts into motels, tourism, etc etc.

The combined impact may reduce energy consumption by more than is necessary (i would imagine taking all or most of the cars off the roads would go a long way in bringing demand down to a level that renewable supply could meet), and those jobs could be reconstituted somewhere that still uses energy.

Also, there is no appreciable decline in employment associated with changing building materials, construction practices, home design, urban planning. A colleague who works for the national research council here in Canada suggested new buildings can be made to use 60% less energy than their 1990's counterparts without adding any meaningful cost to the construction.

Switch all the lightbulbs to more efficient ones, who loses jobs? Old lightbulb manufacturers can make the new ones instead.

Overall demand (in terms of GDP) doesn't have to mvoe at all. You just change the products and services being produced from energy intensive to low energy, economy continues to chug along and reduced demand comes in line with a renewable supply.

I'm not saying I have figures on how much renewables could produce, or how much we could reduce demand without radically reducing population or changing lifestyles/settlement patterns. But ultimately this should be the question we are asking ourselves before committing to some apocalyptic future collapse.

[Ludi]

The difficulty I see is that it takes more energy to retool for a new product. It takes a lightbulb manufacturer more energy, not less, to retool for energy efficient lightbulbs. Same for all other transitions from one set of manufacturing tools to another. And remeber you need to have the retooling done before you lay workers off from their energy-intensive jobs to avoid an impact on the economy.


How do you build mass transit without using more energy? Remeber, you need to have the mass transit in place before you stop people from driving private cars.


What I'm wondering, and what I'm not seeing clearly form your examples, is when the conservation actually begins, and how you prevent the conserved energy from being used by other sectors? How do you just plain take it out of circulation without affecting jobs?


I'm just not seeing it clearly, sorry to be dense.

[Veritas]

Okay lets use a hypothetical (since im void of actual) example.

Company X is producing cars that get 25 miles per gallon.

Company X designs a car that gets 50 miles per gallon and starts producing that.

Who loses jobs? The oil people? Big deal.

Yes they have to retool their factories to produce the new design, but we're not talking about an astronomical amount of energy to do it, more like a virtually insignificant amount.

Another example

Say we work in a textile store that uses 100 kilowatts/hr to make its product.

The manager decides one day that if we use new material X, and reconfigure our workspace, we can cut that to 50 kilowatts/hr.

Who lost a job? You switched a input moving the cost around, but ultimately you're spending the same $ in "gdp". Just spending it on something that saves energy.

Suppose we jack up the price on electricity so people actually think about turning their lights/air conditioners/ whatever on. And the result is a 20% drop in electricity use. Who lost a job?

[mkwin]

I believe there could actually be an economic boom post-peak as government in the developed world correct the market failure and build a non-oil based energy system, and build trains and buses and other forms of public transit.

If you look at WW2 - annualised US GDP from 1940 to 1945 was 17.08%! Even inflation adjusted it was 11.55%.

In the UK, despite rationing of food and consumerables and a 90% reduction in oil use, annualised GDP was 6.64%.

I think there will be massive demand for engineers, nuclear engineers, construction workers, construction professionals, agricultural laborers, police officers, technical manufacturing workers and many more.

It all comes down to aggregate decline rate, if there is a plateau and substitution or a moderate decline rate this type of transition is not only possible but likely. However, if the aggregate decline rate is large, say 5% plus, it will surely be far more chaotic.