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Systemic Energy Starvation

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby asdar » Sat 06 Oct 2007, 13:33:44

If the extremities weren't using blood, like fingernails, then the lack of blood to the fingernails never hurts.

Will the 3rd world countries be better off or worse? Certainly it seems like worse because they'll never get to experience traffic filled highways, but maybe better because they already know how to survive without.

Zambia didn't get their crude because of technical difficulties in building a pipeline from Dar Es Salaam. If we suddenly didn't get oil for six months we wouldn't be in very good shape.

I think it's much more likely that countries that require oil to maintain a high standard of living will collapse first because they have a higher system that has a lower order of importance tied to food production and basic needs.

While being short of oil will stop development, there's not necessarily a reverse in 3rd world countries. In larger, developed countries when the economy stalls, the living standard goes down, when it goes low enough crime and corruption go up.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby Ferretlover » Sat 06 Oct 2007, 15:56:36

Decaying Nation
Even as Zimbabwe hovers on the brink of economic collapse, there are some signs of significant political change.
Sept. 28, 2007 - Contrary to popular belief, Zimbabwe was never really the breadbasket of Africa. But at least it could feed itself and have plenty left over. Those days are gone now—the southern African nation is, quite literally, starving. Food store shelves are bare. The wealthiest Zimbabweans now fly abroad to neighboring countries to shop for basic supplies like bread, cooking oil, sugar and meat. The South African grocery chain Pick 'n Pay is taking direct bulk orders by phone and delivering the goods by air freight to the cities of Harare or Bulawayo. Electricity service is down to 12 hours a day, more or less the same levels found in Iraq. Clean water is so scarce that the poorest Zimbabweans have resorted to pumping water by hand from remote wells. "People are pumping at midnight, all hours of the day," says Eddy Cross, a businessman and member of the Zimbabwean opposition group Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Recently Cross ran into a young girl in Bulawayo. "All I do all day is hunting and scavenging," she told him. …
Just when it seemed it couldn't get any worse in Zimbabwe, it has. Officially, the inflation rate is more than 6,000 percent, but realistically the figure is probably closer to three times that. The U.S dollar is trading for 600,000 to one on the black market, virtually the only place left to do business in the country these days. …
Third world starts the ball rolling
"Open the gates of hell!" ~Morgan Freeman's character in the movie, Olympus Has Fallen.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby MD » Sat 06 Oct 2007, 16:12:03

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ferretlover', '.') …
Third world starts the ball rolling


Good one!
From the bottom of page three:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')For ordinary Zimbabweans, life has become a nightmare. A bus fare from Bulawayo to Harare is 2 million Zim dollars—an impossibly high figure in a country that in many parts has moved onto the barter system. Fuel has virtually disappeared. Last month, 3,200 teachers left their jobs. Medical facilities are running out of drugs, cleaning materials and linen.
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby cube » Sat 06 Oct 2007, 18:50:07

This is a good thread.
The next time somebody on this board says:
1) when oil jumped to $40
2) when oil jumped to $60
3) when oil jumped to $80
each step of the way nothing bad happened and the economy still kept on going. (how many times have we heard that argument?)

PLEASE point them to this thread!

Much like every civilization in history that has ever died-off the collapse begins at the fringes and works its way to the core. The poor die first, the rich last. --> I agree 8)
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby JPL » Sun 07 Oct 2007, 19:45:59

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', ' ')Villages all over Africa depend on single tiny diesel engines for food, water, light and refrigeration for the few drugs they afford. We here in the fat West could give up lots of oil before any pain. Those folks living on the edge are already dying from peak oil.


pstarr

I normally flip to your posts first (which is as close as anyone around here gets to 'approval' rating from me) but this is something else - you have pinpointed the key PO issue for the next few years, maybe the next decade or so.

I think the crassness & inhumanity of our lifestyle is going to come out over the coming years, whether we learn from it, or our children, only fate will descide.

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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby Revi » Sun 07 Oct 2007, 22:18:50

The "third world" has always provided food for the more developed nations. Read Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holacausts for a description of the way Britain ate up India and China's food even as starvation set in. The stores of grain that these countries used to avert famine were exported.

We are no different. I saw snow peas growing for the US market, while nearby people were dying of starvation in Guatemala.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby MD » Mon 08 Oct 2007, 08:25:24

http://www.energybulletin.net/34120.html

Definitely worth a look. In order to support my position I would have to challenge most of the growth projections contained therein.

I will do so when time allows. If anyone else cares to jump in, I welcome your input.
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby MD » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 05:03:19

just more shameless bumpness
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby yesplease » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 05:56:37

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', 'I') am proposing "systemic energy starvation" as a significant factor in explaining our current plateau. Our global energy consumption engine is designed to operate through burning sweet light crude, and has been for almost 100 years. The system loses efficiency as soon as you attempt to fuel it by other means, and therefore any efforts to change will be constrained by the very nature of the system.
It's actually the opposite AFAIK. For the most part, fueling it by other means tends to be more efficient. You're also forgetting about increases in oil's efficacy/efficiency of use, which also has quite a ways to go up.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Professor Membrane', ' ')Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby MD » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 06:38:29

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', 'I') am proposing "systemic energy starvation" as a significant factor in explaining our current plateau. Our global energy consumption engine is designed to operate through burning sweet light crude, and has been for almost 100 years. The system loses efficiency as soon as you attempt to fuel it by other means, and therefore any efforts to change will be constrained by the very nature of the system.
It's actually the opposite AFAIK. For the most part, fueling it by other means tends to be more efficient. You're also forgetting about increases in oil's efficacy/efficiency of use, which also has quite a ways to go up.


Nah...it's easier to toss Americans aside. Make mine with peanut butter please.
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby ReverseEngineer » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 07:40:52

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', '
')A simple premise. I look forward to your response.


The Earth is not starved systemically of energy to support life. Clearly true since life exists on the planet. Enough energy rains down on the earth from the Sun every day to support a huge biomass all the time.

So why is it then that there is not enough energy to support the top of the food chain? Its that other variable in the thermodynamic equation called Entropy or the drive toward Disorder.

For human beings on this go round, society became ever more complex and ordered. To make all the machines run that maintain such an ordered society required increasingly more heat to do it all the time. Good grief, the energy required to pump out the water from New Orleans after Katrina was enormous, but really every day just to run, every big city in the world consumes an enormous amount of energy. The cars and trucks are only a small part in this equation, though a highly essential one for the delivery of goods.

Once we hit the midpoint of oil production, every part of this complex society we run became systemically starved of enough energy to overcome the drive toward disorder. The dependence on the machines to do work for us instead of human labor required increasingly more energy all the time, expanding exponentially as the population expanded exponentially. Hitting the midpoint is the equivalent of reaching Critical Mass in a thermonuclear blast, except many times over worse, it is hitting everywhere at the same time. Well, its not QUITE that fast, not travelling as a shock wave at the speed of sound, but the wave is rippling outward rapidly now.

Organized systems are breaking down all over the place, from the financial system to the transportation system to the energy production and refining and conversion systems. Although Gustav and Ike certainly helped the process along, we were well on our way toward this end before they ever hit. They themselves are the product of the increasing heat in the atmosphere, they self-organize up, hurricanes get anthropomorphic names because they are a life form all their own.

Anyhow, we now no longer produce enough oil to keep up with the drive toward disorder in our own society, and increasingly less all the time as we lose production facilities to nature, and to strife and warfare in places like Nigeria.

It was for this reason the Amish and Mennonites foreswore the use of machines to replace human labor out in the fields. As long as human beings only depended on themselves and their animal helpers, they remained in balance with the ecosystem. Politically however, such societies only exist when there is enough land around to provide for all, and gradually creeps in starvation as the land is depleted and warfare begins. This can take a population through a few generations of boom and bust cycles, but eventually the land itself they live on becomes depleted because its too organized a society. This brings you to the end of civilization in a given neighborhood. When the neighborhood is the entire surface of the planet, you get the picture of what happens now.

How far back this takes us in the drive toward disorder is anyone's guess, perhaps down to single cell organisms living in the depths of the ocean. However, once the Heat portion of the Thermodynamic equation becomes sufficient again to overcome the disorder of the system as a whole, it will begin to organize up again into ever more complex life forms. This would be the creation of life, and how LONG it actually takes depends on your interpretation of time spans. Time is a relative concept of course, and once human beings are no longer around to TELL time, just how long is an instant? In geologic terms, an instant could be a millenia.

The philospher Descartes put it this way "I THINK, therefore I AM". But wherefore from comes sentience? In more common parlance, "Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?" Such is the nature of existence, it starts from a thought and expands outward from there in a Big Bang, then collapses on itself eventually in increasing entropy as the single thought breaks up from the One to the Many. However, where did that first Thought originate? You can't know that because its self-referential, unless you are of course God.

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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby ReverseEngineer » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 21:10:53

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ReverseEngineer', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', '
')A simple premise. I look forward to your response.


The Earth is not starved systemically of energy to support life. Clearly true since life exists on the planet. Enough energy rains down on the earth from the Sun every day to support a huge biomass all the time.

So why is it then that there is not enough energy to support the top of the food chain? Its that other variable in the thermodynamic equation called Entropy or the drive toward Disorder.

For human beings on this go round, society became ever more complex and ordered. To make all the machines run that maintain such an ordered society required increasingly more heat to do it all the time. Good grief, the energy required to pump out the water from New Orleans after Katrina was enormous, but really every day just to run, every big city in the world consumes an enormous amount of energy. The cars and trucks are only a small part in this equation, though a highly essential one for the delivery of goods.

Once we hit the midpoint of oil production, every part of this complex society we run became systemically starved of enough energy to overcome the drive toward disorder. The dependence on the machines to do work for us instead of human labor required increasingly more energy all the time, expanding exponentially as the population expanded exponentially. Hitting the midpoint is the equivalent of reaching Critical Mass in a thermonuclear blast, except many times over worse, it is hitting everywhere at the same time. Well, its not QUITE that fast, not travelling as a shock wave at the speed of sound, but the wave is rippling outward rapidly now.

Organized systems are breaking down all over the place, from the financial system to the transportation system to the energy production and refining and conversion systems. Although Gustav and Ike certainly helped the process along, we were well on our way toward this end before they ever hit. They themselves are the product of the increasing heat in the atmosphere, they self-organize up, hurricanes get anthropomorphic names because they are a life form all their own.

Anyhow, we now no longer produce enough oil to keep up with the drive toward disorder in our own society, and increasingly less all the time as we lose production facilities to nature, and to strife and warfare in places like Nigeria.

It was for this reason the Amish and Mennonites foreswore the use of machines to replace human labor out in the fields. As long as human beings only depended on themselves and their animal helpers, they remained in balance with the ecosystem. Politically however, such societies only exist when there is enough land around to provide for all, and gradually creeps in starvation as the land is depleted and warfare begins. This can take a population through a few generations of boom and bust cycles, but eventually the land itself they live on becomes depleted because its too organized a society. This brings you to the end of civilization in a given neighborhood. When the neighborhood is the entire surface of the planet, you get the picture of what happens now.

How far back this takes us in the drive toward disorder is anyone's guess, perhaps down to single cell organisms living in the depths of the ocean. However, once the Heat portion of the Thermodynamic equation becomes sufficient again to overcome the disorder of the system as a whole, it will begin to organize up again into ever more complex life forms. This would be the creation of life, and how LONG it actually takes depends on your interpretation of time spans. Time is a relative concept of course, and once human beings are no longer around to TELL time, just how long is an instant? In geologic terms, an instant could be a millenia.

The philospher Descartes put it this way "I THINK, therefore I AM". But wherefore from comes sentience? In more common parlance, "Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?" Such is the nature of existence, it starts from a thought and expands outward from there in a Big Bang, then collapses on itself eventually in increasing entropy as the single thought breaks up from the One to the Many. However, where did that first Thought originate? You can't know that because its self-referential, unless you are of course God.

Reverse Engineer


I thought I might add a bit to this regarding why a Civilization Collapse is accompanied by such things as earthquakes and torrential rains and flooding, whether the Civilization used Oil to build up the Order as ours did or Slave Labor to build up the Order as the Roman Civilization did. Took from the time of the Babylonians to the time of the Romans (a few thousand years) to accomplish that ordering up but it was only a portion of the world, not the whole world. We performed the same task inside a couple of hundred years utilizing Oil with a population several order of magnitudes higher.

The reason is that in either case in the massive release into chaos of everything once ordered up, to keep the overall equation in Balance you must also have an enormous release of Heat. All the Heat energy captured up and ordered basically gets released all at once. The atmoshpere does part of the work here, but the actual earth itself strains and fissures. Chinese society already has descended into chaos, thus the earthquakes registered over in China this year.

With this in mind, I am going to make another prediction. Los Angeles will suffer a major earthquake inside the next 4 years. Put a clock on it.

When the end really does come here, it will be truly Biblical in its scale.

See you on the Other Side

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Re: Systemic Energy Starvation

Unread postby yesplease » Sun 28 Sep 2008, 22:35:44

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesplease', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', 'I') am proposing "systemic energy starvation" as a significant factor in explaining our current plateau. Our global energy consumption engine is designed to operate through burning sweet light crude, and has been for almost 100 years. The system loses efficiency as soon as you attempt to fuel it by other means, and therefore any efforts to change will be constrained by the very nature of the system.
It's actually the opposite AFAIK. For the most part, fueling it by other means tends to be more efficient. You're also forgetting about increases in oil's efficacy/efficiency of use, which also has quite a ways to go up.
Nah...it's easier to toss Americans aside. Make mine with peanut butter please.
The easiest thing to do is implement different avenues for fear/greed mongering to encourage people to behave in a way that's profitable, at least for those who are doing encouraging and in a position to profit the most from it. :razz:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Professor Membrane', ' ')Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
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