Energy Descent

[John Marshall]

What are the implications for us and our children when we descend from the high energy usage that we enjoy at the moment?

[daybrown]

YYMV depending on where you are on the planet. The price of corn has already doubled in the last couple years, and as agribusiness fuel and chemical costs rise with that of imported oil, it will keep on rising.

If you live in an undeveloping part of the world, malnourished already... Choice #1: clasp your hands behind your head, bend down to put your nose between your knees, and kiss your ass good by.

Then, if you live in a rich part, like the USA, and foreign oil is no longer available, who getsta decide how to share out the remaining 40% that is domestically produced? If gas/diesel supplies are shifted away from agribusiness to the great power centers to maintain the lifestyles of the elite, then the next harvest will be lower.

Food prices will rise faster than food stamp allotments. The good news is that people will shift away from junkfood twards lower cost locally grown veggies. The bad news is that they will loose fat, and dissolved in that fat are deposits of environmental contaminants. We can expect the cancer rate to skyrocket along with miscarriages, premies, and congenital deformities. We can also expect the lifestyle change to have psychological effects, and this could result in civil unrest.

They have been mad as hell for a long time; they mite start dragging the bastards out to be shot.

Which will only add to the chaos. The supply of batteries, fan belts, anti-freeze, lubricants, components, etc to agribusiness will be interrupted and production will drop off dramatically. "TEOTWAWKI"? in which case, if you are in the wrong place, your only choice is, as above, #1.

Perhaps 1% of the population now lives in a remote rural area with the means to grow enough food entirely on local energy supplies. I dont know if they will have the farmers who know how to do it. I expect that there will be enough gardeners to show everyone how to work with hand tools to grow enough veggies to get thru the first year while the local farmers figure it out.

A *LOT* will depend on how fast that descent you speak of is. The rise to Hubbards peak followed a smooth bell curve. The descent wont. As the price of oil rises, greed will set in with violent attempts to steal and take over supply sources. The violence will damage infrastructure reducing supply further, which will drive the price higher which will drive the greed....

The resulting crash will make the 1929 Black Friday debacle look like a fender bender. The resulting global depression will look apocalyptic.

I read of a breakthru in solar panels. I hope it comes online in time. I've had solar panels since 1982, and heard of 'breakthrus' several times that never panned out. It was always fool's gold. But even without a dramatic rise in wind or solar supply, rational political leadership could keep a lid on it while we work out how to live with higher fuel prices.

But we dont *have* rational political leadership do we? As a result, the only vote that matters is that which you make with your feet. Or a U-haul, to some region that will be better able to cope with the dissolution of the Untied States of Denial. The two places that folks are moving to already, as seen in the *continued* rise in real estate prices, are the Arkansas Ozarks and Alaska.

If you can handle cold wet weather consider Alaska, altho gardening to produce enough to get the community thru the winter may be a challenge. With the Ozarks, you can, as I have, take some greens right thru the winter, and be able to harvest root crops covered with mulch all winter long. I also went thru the entire 8 weeks (rather than 8 months) of really cold weather on one cord of firewood.

People seem to have figured this out, and are moving in at a prodigeous rate; starter castles & McMansions are going up all along the paved roads. They seem to be rich, but they may also be reichtard crazies. Course, that may be a problem anywhere. Wallace, in his anthro classic "Culture & Personality" noted that when a system is on the skids, and people's coping skills no longer work, they engage in "magical thinking" (which he coined). Thus all the 'wiccans' doing tarot or astrology, and all the fundies speaking of "The Rapture". Different forms of kidssing your ass goodbye.

But eventually, months or years ahead, we'll figure it out. The Amish grow food with draft animals, some of which are their own kids. Each agribusiness operator grows enough to feed 95-100 people. Each Amish about 20-25. Just adding 12 volt headlites to horsedrawn equipment so you can run 24/7 at peak harvest would move that more twards 30. But even a well run organic operation would max at 50 people per farm worker. Course, by then, half the global population would have starved, so it will be sustainable.

[Johnny Electriglide]

Very good. Here's another one from a friend
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty249.htm
I've been telling people about it since the 1960s.<rockon>

[daybrown]

I think I've seen Frosty's work before, but think we'll have a revolution before we add another 100 mil.
Consider the Machiavellian spin on Yugoslavia, I posted a couple years ago, stil up at http://www.dc-pc.org/machveli/machveli.html bot to save the click, a rundown...

When a republic [Yugoslavia] has an intractable political problem [Catholic clerics & Muslim mullas were trying to ban birth control so as to increase their numbers at the polls and thereby disempower the Serbs who were Eastern Orthodox and used birth control], it will find a man of flawed character [Malosevic], to do what is necessary [dissolve the union and form Serbia for the people who limit their brith rate]. Then, after the fait accompli, they will disover his faults, and send him away, he taking the guilt for the action away with him, while they get to enjoy the fruits of the new status quo.

In 1980, the Serbs were 34% of the population and thereby could prevent a 2/3 majority from changing the constitution. They are now 31% of the same region. They saw what was coming. Malosevic killed 10% of the Croats and Albanians, which Machiavelli suggests is adequate to drive the rest out of the area.

For the Serbs, it was the only solution. With only 1-2 kids, they wanted to upgrade the school system to meet west european standards so their kids could go to college and earn enough for the western middle class lifestyle. But, the Albanians and Croats were flooding the school systems with kids, and the education level was falling. The Serbs tried establishing their own schools, but the majority in the legislature raised the taxes on the middle class to pay for building new schools, and the Serbs saw they were loosing contol of the situation needed to ensure the future of their own kids. What would you do for yours?

Its worth considering that the followers of 'be fruitful and multiply' religions set a very low priority on environmental issues. At some point, WASP women in America will come to the same conclusion that the Serbs did. You cannot run a republic with a decent respect for civil rights without a strong and prosperous middle class.

Both Gibbon and Machiavelli saw that the aristocracy encouraged immigration into Rome from tribes that lacked sound republican traditions to drive down the cost of labor and increase the numbers of the lower classes. They funded the campaigns of demagogues pandering to religion & ethnicty while making hidden deals to reduce the taxes on the rich.

As Mach noted, this works for a while, but the middle class goes broke, the tax base shrinks, and since the government cannot tax the people with the money, they *borrow* it. But eventually, some creditor sees that the tax base will no longer service the debt much less pay it off, and refuses to lend more. At which point there is economic crisis, riots in the streets, and they need to call someone in to restore order. In Rome, this was Caesar.

And his replacement, his nephew Octavian, was like Putin & Musharif, less corrupt and more competent than the oligarchs who had been running things. What's really different today is the internet. Octavian inherited Caesar's fortune and used it to dissemble his spin on events to the public. He also slandered the reputations of all senators who rose to speak against him, and appointed all the judges. Bush would tried to do the same, but he's nowhere near as smart as Octavian.

Which is not to preclude some smart demagogue using the new media, the internet, to get his message across, and suceed where Bush failed. But any such insightful leader will recognize there's no way to control the internet, so like Putin, he will try to avoid abusing the rights of the citizenry, and in fact set himself up, as Machiavelli says, as the representative of the citizens against the oligarchs.

Its worth considering that Malosevic was put in before the internet. And it was the US Air Force knocking out his TV and radio stations that eliminated his control over the media which was then replaced by voices more in keeping with American sensibilities.

I dont know if this historical analysis will be persuasive, and make the middle class break out of group think to examine the situation rationally. You not only need a middle class, you need one that is *rational*. But they were mostly raised on sugar cereals, junkfood, and sodapop, and did not receive the right trace elements and micronutrients during child hood for maximal mental development. Trying to figure out what irrational people will do is nearly impossible.

A rational middle class would not have let Bush get into the Oval Office. If the above analysis is right, crisis looms, and that sometimes wakes sheeple up. But sometimes they pick a Hitler. Thus, for some time now, I've advised moving to a small town or rural area as far away from the great power centers as possible. Things could get messy.