Collapse

Collapse

“I won’t have to get people to believe it when physics and geology start driving the process.”

Peter Kilde

When electricity stops being something that can be produced cheaply and crude oil is scarce and expensive to extract, some currently habitable areas of our country may no longer be livable and will have to be abandoned. Remote, arid areas with no ready source of water or food currently have diverted and pumped water and or imported food. This would stop with the advent of peak oil. Those populations would have to move to other areas of the country, further stressing the areas that they move to. Our methods of farming would radically have to change. As the desert grow regions stopped producing food, there would be shortages.

Famine is part of the human cycle of history.

All societies eventually collapse. Ours will at some point. No one wants to be around when that takes place. It’s not a fun process. In Russia the collapse of the Soviet system happened with great speed. Six months before the official end of the  Soviet Communist government, people thought that the suggestion of collapse was crazy.

After the old system of government collapsed, the population of Russia dropped due to death and emigration away from the country. Mostly, though, the population went down due to death. Crime was a major factor in this. Economic collapse leads to major crime increases. People become more desperate. People become more vicious. People forget that economics is based on something that isn’t real.

However, the population in Russia was very resilient. Through a massive garden system outside of Moscow in the suburbs, most of the food was still able to be produced for that city. The people ate mostly storage crops such as cabbage or roots, but they were fed. Other cities also had similar systems. No one was evicted from their homes because no one owned the housing. It was all owned by the State. People were still able to travel because there was already an effective public transit system in place. The government was able to keep this system running. People were able to buy what they needed because there was an intricate Black Market system in place due to the former repression of the Soviet system.

From the outside came foreign capital to restart the Russian industrial system. However, that kind of recovery is possible only if help arrives from the outside. On a global scale, there is no outside. Unless alien tourist industry comes to Earth and sets up some stellar hotels and employs lots of hairless simian life forms in their service sector, we’re screwed.

We came very close to a total global collapse of economy when the U.S. economy vortexed downward. If another nation, such as China, were to spiral down and take the U.S. down with it, global collapse may yet happen.

Soon.

It is unlikely that alien tourists would want to visit a burned out shell of a planet. So, we need to be more careful with our world to keep up its tourist appeal for that out side capital to be there when we need it.

Currently in industrialized society, there is a misallocation of resources and time to maintain our way of life. This life, both private and political, is getting more and more complex. Societies collapse when the complexity of their systems becomes too much of a burden on the available resources in their environment. When the resources become unavailable

the systems disintegrate

quickly.

What will motivate a behavior change to modify our priorities and our way of being on the planet? Hopefully not global economic collapse. Hopefully, people can get over their political and religiously self important selves. Humans, especially industrialized humans, have been in control of the uphill process so far using their ingenuity, technology and greed. But, soon the earth and its processes are going to take over the steering for the downhill slide using physics, chemistry and geology. And the earth doesn’t care if you believe what is happening or not. If you want it to happen or not.

Climate change data is public. But if you would like to have data on how much oil there is available to extract, you can’t. That’s secret. Why is that?

Using one resource to get at another is only as effective as what you get out of it. Ethanol, the savior of the corn midwest, is a 1.3 to 1 ratio of energy in to energy out, a 1 to 1 ratio at best. Tar sands are also very close to even to extract the oil found in them. Hydrogen is a 3 to 1 energy in to energy out process. When it takes a barrel of oil to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground the companies pack up and go home.

There are no vast oil wells in the midwest. But, an ethanol plant ensures that there will be economy. The parts and machinery of the production plant have to be built by a company, creating jobs. The ethanol plant itself creates jobs. The corn farmers get to sell their corn to the ethanol plant. The truckers that haul everything get jobs. Making ethanol burns up as much or a little more energy than the ethanol itself will put out. Then, the ethanol gets used to power vehicles at a lesser rate of BTU return than gasoline. Ethanol is cleaner to burn than gasoline. But, we are burning fossil fuels to make this plant based fuel to burn it in cars. Fossil fuels are burned to make the fertilizers and pesticides that are applied to the corn. Fossil fuels are used in the machinery to harvest and truck the corn. Eventually, when the oil is scarce enough and costly enough, the ethanol plant will close. All the jobs will go away. That’s the temporary benefit of “creating jobs” instead of actually benefiting our society. But, someone along the way made a profit.

And it’s all

“green”.