It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be.
EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’”
Let’s see what his conclusions are.
She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery.
I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.
The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.
The same thing, but now with 7 billion+ people. It's a lot of deforestation just to feed all these campfires.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-for...
reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are
Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008.
It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg.
Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.
The difference between peak oil and shale oil is the EROI which is very bad (between 1 and 2) compared to conventional (20 to 50). This would make it absolutely useless as an energy source, except we also get free Nat. gas out of it.
Once the EROI on all our fossil energy sources gets below 1 we won't be able to use any, despite some of it still being in the ground.
A better analogy than peak wheat would be: this is like peak fish except we now have better bottom trawling fishing nets, and electric pulse fishing to be able to get the last remaining fish out there.
As technology increases with oil extraction and alternate energy sources come into play, the peak oil scenario will likely not be realized.
No transition. Energy usage is stacking up. Globally, renewable energy sources are built in addition to fossil energy sources. See source below - compare relative vs. absolute :
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Peak oil doesn't care that the relative share of oil as an energy source is decreasing (which is true) . It's the global number of oil barrels extracted out of the ground that matters.
Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$.
Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
So it is and so it does. And while it does, empires collapse, species go extinct...
That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.
Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable.
And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us.
And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.
And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome.
Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it?
One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
The consequences are predictable, and they should be avoidable and unnecessary.
For most of the population there is no downside in avoiding them, any more than there was in mitigating Y2K or making seatbelts compulsory.
This isn't mythology we're talking about, but science.
It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this.
As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem.
And we're not even close to being done yet.
Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
> It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable.
> Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?
Historically, people always have, and sometimes they've succeeded. The Cuban Missile Crisis is maybe a good example of this. During that era, there was a widespread feeling that we were dangerously close to nuclear war. Surely that sense of danger was a critical part of the reason cooler heads prevailed in the end.
No there wasn’t. A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. All actual institutions behaved according to the law.
Here's a list:
* Breaking into congress
* Carrying flags representing a rival (dead) government
* While wearing tactical gear, some carrying blunt objects, handcuffs, mace
* Stealing computers and documents
* Searching for congresspeople
* Killing a police officer, beating others
Not to mention they were doing it while Congress was meant to be counting electoral votes.
What else do you need to make it a coup attempt? Is competence a requirement?
Sticking pins in a voodoo doll isn't attempted murder, no matter how seriously you believe it will kill the person.
So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
By the way, they didn't kill that police officer. It turned out later that he died of natural causes. Be careful of fake embellishments of real news.
Here's how it would work:
The process for electing the president is that states certify their electoral college votes in what's known as the Certificate of the Vote. On 1/6 the certificates are counted and objections are raised. It takes one Senator and one Representative to raise an objection in writing, and Republicans had planned on objecting to Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan at least. Objections are settled by voting in the House and Senate. Each chamber gets a vote, and if they agree the objection is sustained and the votes discarded. If they are split or disagree, the objection is overturned. Democrats had a majority in the House while Republicans had a majority in the Senate, so this would have went in favor of Joe Biden.
To succeed then, the Republicans needed to get outside of the regular Constitutional order. Their main objective on 1/6 was to delay the certification past that day. There is no precedent for this. At first Trump wanted Pence to simply refuse to certify the vote and then force the GOP friendly states to "recertify" their results. Trump only needed a few states to recertify to win. But Pence refused to do this, hence the chants of "Hang Mike Pence".
However, the invasion of the Capitol gave new life to this idea of recertification. The hope here was that if the proceedings were disrupted, we were in uncharted Constitutional territory. This would have given additional time for Trump to try and twist the arm of the various states, as he had been doing before 1/6 to the states of Arizona and Georgia (at least).
Once the states recertified their votes, they would have reconvened the Congress and VP to certify the election. This puts the Democrats in a tough spot. They could have let the "recertified" results stand, in which case Trump would win. Or they could object. If they did, then the Republicans could also object. This would throw the recertified votes out.
But here's the catch. If no candidate has 270 electoral college votes after the counting, then the matter is put before the House, but not in the normal way. Instead, each state delegation gets 1 vote, for a total of 50, with 26 to win. State delegations are decided by the states, and Republicans would have a 26-23 majority in this scenario (PA would have tied, if they don't agree their vote doesn't count). The House would then vote for Trump, and he could have been President despite losing the popular vote and the electoral college.
There's a lot that needed to go right for Trump for this to work, and that's why it didn't. But it went a lot further than it should have, and definitely broke a 240 year streak of peaceful transitions of power in the US. In fact, it seems like the only reason the vote was able to be certified on 1/6 is because Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol with the Secret Service. Had he left with them when they wanted him to, the proceedings would have been delayed indefinitely.
Analogies aside, if you don't think it was an attempted coup... what would it have made it one? I'm legitimately curious (I don't think incompetence is an excuse, and courts usually don't either).
Thanks for pointing out the disparity about Sicknick. To anyone else who isn't aware... the autopsy determined he died from a stroke the day after. These people still assaulted police officers to gain access to the Capitol.
USA funds several media outlets so that they publish a precisely mixed mash of truth and lies. People mindlessly consume the mash and start to get a feeling they live in an imperfect society that can be very easily improved ("just get rid of your current president and you'll start living awesome life the same moment! it's so easy, folks! no other effort required").
Then they start publishing a real recipes for starting a turmoil (via figures like notoriously known Navalny).
Then, when the coup fails, USA start pressuring: "It's an agression against democracy! It was a peaceful protest! Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!" (if the coup succeeds, the only result is that people start living in worse conditions - check Arab Spring countries or any other country where color revolution succeeded - they're doing much worse economically and in all other areas of life, including "democracy").
When the protest which was much milder happened in the US itself, it's suddenly "totally different thing".
BTW, just this week mercenaries from USA trained in USA killed president of Haiti.
What a bunch of hypocrites...
The US has certainly inflicted coups abroad, and I also disagree with those... but I suspect you weren't commenting to get my opinion on the matter.
Oh is this referring to the so called "insurection"? That was like a mild protest compared to other recent ones.
Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.
And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it.
An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts.
The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct.
[1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:
> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand.
That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?
Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse.
Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do?
Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do?
"Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it.
In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".
Move. Our difficulty to move is a new phenomenon and isn't created by any of the variables on those simulations.
Essentially no one can afford to lose the value of their house. That's the point: you're going to take a 100% loss on the value of the land and building.
I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances.
That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).
> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).
I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).
> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.
I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.
For what it’s worth, the fact that you’re denying being self-sufficient, tells me that you’re not a nutjob, no matter what other people say.
The Netherlands are also a fine example of this, for now at least.
Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions.
Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.
I’ve come to believe fraction of of the workforce could keep the economy going at current levels and much employment is only marginally productive and exists only to distribute the wealth of society.
A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.
This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.
The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.
Most natural disasters tend to be local..
It's actually hard to imagine something more global than a pandemic.
Many doomsayers point to the fall of Rome as a supposed example of a major power falling and descending people into some kind of 'dark age'. There are two problems with this.
Firstly, the Romans didn't feel like they had actually fallen. As far as the people of the empire were concerned they were Roman even after the old roman imperial system went away. Instead of one exact 'date' of the fall of the empire, the empire slowly faded, and didn't really completely end until 1354 AD. By some people's imaginings, it still hasn't ended (namely the Hapsburgs who still claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor).
Secondly, the dark ages as we imagine it didn't exist. The dark ages were not a time of sudden societal collapse. Rather they were a time of major growth. Lots of things happened during the 'dark ages'. Lots of discoveries made. Lots of voyages undertaken. Lots of empires arose and fell (but the people didn't really notice much).
The idea that suddenly everything we know is going to go away and we're all going to have to huddle inside is, in my opinion, not founded in reality. It's sure fun to LARP though.
The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty close:
As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece.
That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.
We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.
But it's not that bad!
Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall.
Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing?
I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine...
[3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century
The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.
A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
I don't think so.
Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom.
These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?
If you might get hit by a car tomorrow, why bother with anything at all?
We assume the best and keep going. Make contingency plans.
At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach.
(Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)
It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down.
As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.
At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times.
Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone.
Buckle up!
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.