Global financial system implosion begins

[Crispy]

I can't be bothered to read a whole PDF document. Can somebody summarise why oil production fell so sharply in the course of one year?

It's probably a little bit faster than trend for this one year, but UK oil has been in decline for years now. Decline of oil fields starts slowly, accelerates and then tails off in the classic bell-shaped curve. If you push very hard at a field and use advanced extraction technologies, you can maintain the good times for a little bit longer, at the cost of a much steeper decline rate, once the "last squeeze" methods have done all they can. I think this is what we're seeing now. Falcon can correct me I'm sure

 

[Dr Jon]

The long bust

 

[ayatollah]

???
I'm assuming this is sarcasm.

What...you mean the British Ruling Class DIDN'T use that once only windfall usefully ? Well bugger me with a reciprocating drillbit ! I don't understand how that happened... As an oldie, I remember clearly three claims from our political class when the oil/gas was first brought ashore:

1. Domestic gas prices would be so low as to be almost non-existent.
2. North Sea gas was so valuable that it would NEVER simply be burnt as fuel in power stations.
3. The goverment revenues from oil/gas would be used to fund the reinvigoration of a high tech manufacturing industrial rebirth.

Dearie me !

 

[Dr Jon]

Ha ha...
Like "nuclear electricity will be so cheap it won't be worth metering"...

...
goverment revenues from oil/gas would be used to fund the reinvigoration of a high tech manufacturing industrial rebirth

It was actually used to close down mining and move manufacturing industry to China.
North Sea Oil funded Thatcherism.

 

[Falcon]

I can't be bothered to read a whole PDF document. Can somebody summarise why oil production fell so sharply in the course of one year?

The investment of the 90's accelerated existing resource rather than adding new resource. That is the only thing oil field technology does at any scale, although it is often passed off to the uninitiated as "revolutionising discovery" (the two are indistinguishable without access to the confidential reserves data). We pulled so much oil forward out of this decade that we drove the global price of oil down to $14 a barrel.

Amongst other things, this accelerated the rate at which the system depletes, post peak. (Faster, longer: pick one). It also caused us to sell oil worth $120 a barrel today for $14 a barrel then - Norway conserved its resources via an artificially low development throttle limit, and are making a killing.

Put another way, the rate at which tiny new production units are being added is now substantially lower than the rate at which giant old existing units are exhausting.

It will fall another 20%+ next year. Then another. Which is why there was never the remotest chance of a "double dip recession". As has been sadly relayed previously, the UK Government engaged in a whole series of future liabilities - such as public pension guarantees - which were predicated on oil revenue magically continuing to float upward to service the liability. As a corollary, those guarantees are now worthless.

The UK prefigures the global petroleum system - it's the same dynamic, but at regional rather than global level. If you could delay peak perfectly at global scale, you could sustain existing energy growth rate of 1.65% per annum for another 18 years before you exhaust all discovered and discoverable oil for which there is any historical precedent.

Interestingly, at peak - by definition - things have never looked so good and there is no warning of what will hit you in 5 years.

 

[elbows]

I suspect this was one of the horror of the 1980's Tories that has never received the full attention it deserves. Im pretty sure it was politically noticeable early on in the development of North sea oil since Tony Benn wanted to tax the producers far more than the Tories ended up doing, and I bet the Tories weren't afraid to make a point about this at the time.

In recent years there have been some press articles along the lines of 'how come we haven't got a nice juicy sovereign wealth fund like Norway'. Sadly thats not the way this country has tended to operate during my lifetime, instead preferring the shameless profit parties. The hangover looms.

 

[Falcon]

I suspect this was one of the horror of the 1980's Tories that has never received the full attention it deserves.

It funded Thatcher's disastrous Monetarism experiment, for example. It's primary cause was the decision by the UK Government to establish the UK North Sea as the least regulated and taxed province in the entire petroleum system.

 

[gosub]

It funded Thatcher's disastrous Monetarism experiment, for example. It's primary cause was the decision by the UK Government to establish the UK North Sea as the least regulated and taxed province in the entire petroleum system.

Have an easier ride in Rep. Of Ireland

 

[ayatollah]

falcon quote:

"As has been sadly relayed previously, the UK Government engaged in a whole series of future liabilities - such as public pension guarantees - which were predicated on oil revenue magically continuing to float upward to service the liability. As a corollary, those guarantees are now worthless."

We've been over this pensions issue many times before, as with the "peak Oil" doomster conclusion that society will have to revert to some sort of non industrial , tiny population, agrarian society, when the oil runs out. Without in any way denying that falling oil supplies is VERY bad news for an industrial society, to avoid constant repitition, I would refer NEW readers to the copious posts on this thread arguing in some detail why oil shortages alone are not necessarily the end for industrial/advanced societies, which can,with suitable socialised restructuring and alternative energy supplies, for instance, continue to pay pensions to citizens. And, again to avoid repitition, there is a LOT of refutation on this thread of the bogus claim of the "Peak Oilers" that the 2008 Crash had ANY connection to Peak Oil....it didn't. But I won't go over ALL that again ... It's too Groundhog Day

 

[elbows]

And, again to avoid repitition, there is a LOT of refutation on this thread of the bogus claim of the "Peak Oilers" that the 2008 Crash had ANY connection to Peak Oil....it didn't. But I won't go over ALL that again ... It's too Groundhog Day

A LOT of refutation? I think not, not at all.

But I agree that this isn't the right thread for this, we already have the peak oil one.

 

[Falcon]

And, again to avoid repitition, there is a LOT of refutation on this thread of the bogus claim of the "Peak Oilers" that the 2008 Crash had ANY connection to Peak Oil....it didn't. But I won't go over ALL that again ... It's too Groundhog Day

To be clear, there is a lot of hot air that amounts to little more than the *wish* that there was no connection between peak oil and the 2008 crash. I don't pretend to understand the motive for denying biophysical reality, other than to suspect it has something to do with the inconvenience of it to the argument there is some ideologically inspired solution to our predicament.

I think it is a step too far to label it "refutation", not least because it failed (as far as I can recall) to advance any plausible alternative explanation. I do recall one of the "refutations" being an argument that flat-line production and rising price was evidence of production *surplus*.

So that we know what we are talking about, here is the relationship between peak oil induced supply stagnation in the face of strong China/India demand, the oil price increase it triggered, the *exact* correspondence between the oil price maximum and the financial crash triggered by unaffordable aggregate transport/heating/cooling/food/mortgage payments at the junk end of the mortgage market cascading through the debt markets, and recessional demand/cost abatement due to the crash.

I'd refer interested readers to Hamilton's ‘Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, which demonstrates causality in exhaustive detail:

some degree of significant oil price appreciation during 2007–08 was an inevitable consequence of booming demand and stagnant production. It is worth emphasizing that this is fundamentally a long-run problem, which has been resolved rather spectacularly for the time being by a collapse in the world economy. (Hamilton, 2009)

Not that academic analysis will make the slightest impression on the armchair economists

Conventional production, of course, has never exceeded its peak in 2005, unconventional production remains unaffordable, the illusion of economic integrity is being sustained only by the process of printing money, pension funds are now declaring that the quantity of synthetic debt that has been created is now diluting value so much they are having to cut back payments, Saudi Arabia has now saturated its export capability and eating into domestic power requirements and is constructing nuclear reactors, the global recession deepens, we've learned that if they ever priced carbon at its mitigation cost, around one half of the UK stock market (oil-dependent stocks i.e. the half that funds most pensions) will revert to junk status, yet we are five years from irreversible climate change on current capital investment trajectories, etc. etc. etc.

Ayatollah would have us believe that this all some remarkable coincidence rather than evidence of a profound biophysical contradiction, and that things can be sorted by the implementation of the political ideology he happens to favour. Hmmm.

 

[free spirit]

I've had a fair few disagreements with Falcon on this and related issues, but tbf his analysis on the last couple of pages has been hard to find fault with aside from the odd very minor quibble.

anyone thinking the 2008 oil price peak wasn't a major underlying cause of the global financial crash is kidding themselves. OK, so much of this rise was actually down to massively increased speculation in the market that turned a drama into a crisis, but the underlying cause of the rise was basically peak oil hitting home.

 

[ayatollah]

We'd all better mug up on your chicken farming techniques then Falcon if the whole world is about to collapse into a new non industrial age with capacity for a tiny population compared to the current one.

Yeh well I don't for a moment doubt that the oil is running out - never did..but the role of "Peak oil" in CAUSING the 2008 Crash , compared to the usual unravelling of the end of Long Wave Cycle with a speculation/banking frenzy/property bubble, is something we can argue about for ever .. fruitlessly. You claim that "Peak oil" actual shortages was the trigger for the overall crisis itself - but it is NO surprise that at the peak of a boom commodity prices will peak (particularly with the addition of pure speculative pressure), without this needing to be a feature of an actual permanent shortage. In reality it was the financial frenzy and the inevitable collapse and knock on effects of the NINJA loan financed US housing market which "burst" the bubble --

The POINT is , given capitalism is in a Depression which falling oil supplies will make very hard to get out of --- WHERE do we all go from here ? As a Right wing neo Malthusian YOU, Falcon, and your like-minded doomster chums will be fantasising about returning to subsistence agriculture/chicken farming - with much of the world's population doomed to die of starvation. For Socialists , getting society organised more rationally , to share resources more equitably,with much less WASTE, and secure adequate alternative energy sources, so that society can continue to provide a reasonable living for the world's population, has to be the aim. Good luck with the subsistence project. I don't think it's a goer myself ... but then "end of industrial society" right wingers are free to doubt the socialist project too. Each to their own.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

anyone thinking the 2008 oil price peak wasn't a major underlying cause of the global financial crash is kidding themselves. OK, so much of this rise was actually down to massively increased speculation in the market that turned a drama into a crisis, but the underlying cause of the rise was basically peak oil hitting home.

I'd be one of those people. A lack of competent risk analysis and the inscrutable complexities of the derivatives market are more direct and logical places to look for the collapse. It wasn't just the junk end of the market that imploded, that would have hurt, but junk was being bought and sold as AAA and that negated every model and safeguard there was.

The entire system was doomed to fail even more rapidly and painfully than Falcon thinks that peak oil will.

 

[free spirit]

I'd be one of those people. A lack of competent risk analysis and the inscrutable complexities of the derivatives market are more direct and logical places to look for the collapse. It wasn't just the junk end of the market that imploded, that would have hurt, but junk was being bought and sold as AAA and that negated every model and safeguard there was.

The entire system was doomed to fail even more rapidly and painfully than Falcon thinks that peak oil will.

I'm in no way saying that peak oil was the entire cause of it, but I do think it was the trigger that led to the hole house of cards falling over at the point that it did.

It was always going to happen one way or another, but between 2004 and 2008 USA petrol prices at the pumps doubled, which in a country that had based it's entire housing and transport infrastructure around access to cheap oil, and hadn't embraced fuel efficiency at all resulted in many in the sub prime mortgage bracket who had to travel a fair distance to work by car moving from being able to just afford their mortgage to not being able to afford it. They'd also not be spending money in the local shops etc so the entire local economy would collapse in on itself, which it was doing across whole areas of the states before this actually manifested itself into the full global financial crash.

Lots more complex factors involved, but ignoring or downplaying the key role played by the oil price in this would be a mistake.

 

[ska invita]

how did the price drop from $4 to $1.6 in such a short space of time?

 

[free spirit]

how did the price drop from $4 to $1.6 in such a short space of time?

someone else may remember the details more precisely, but in general IIRC there were 3 main factors:-

1 - demand destruction as the economy tanked, and people reacted to the high fuel price (see graph below), both in the US and globally.

2 - Speculators who'd been stockpiling oil in 2007 to cash on on the bubble dumped it onto the market once the price started to crash, thereby releasing huge volumes of oil into the US market, as well as removing a significant source of demand that had contributed to the 2007 bubble. That plus hedge funds making money from the market on the way down as well as up (not my area of expertise, but a hell of a lot of the rise and fall was caused by speculators).

3 - IIRC there was also damage to the oil infrastructure around the gulf of mexico from huricanes the previous year that came back on line in 2008.

something along those lines, plus other stuff.

 

[Falcon]

The POINT is , given capitalism is in a Depression which falling oil supplies will make very hard to get out of --- WHERE do we all go from here ? As a Right wing neo Malthusian YOU, Falcon, and your like-minded doomster chums will be (chunter chunter)

Let's inspect Ayatollah's reasoning here:

(a) If you are a right wing neo Malthusian, then you are concerned about population levels;
(b) Falcon is concerned about population levels;
(c) Therefore Falcon is a right wing neo Malthusian.
(d) Implied: we should discount Falcon's views because he is a right wing neo Malthusian.

An elementary Affirmation of the Consequent type propositional logical fallacy, in service of a synthetic ad hominem attack. I'm sure you have interesting things to say, Ayatollah, but you waste everyone's time with this kind of nonsense and disqualify yourself from the debate. Manufactured and pointless conflict.

Most of our intellectual backgrounds are invalidated now because the various axioms and assumptions upon which they were founded are no longer valid. Before we work out what to do, I think we need to work out how to work together, given our different historical backgrounds. Ayatollah couldn't be a more vivid example and warning of why.

 

[Falcon]

how did the price drop from $4 to $1.6 in such a short space of time?

Just overlay free spirit's graph and this graph. It's oil price.

Fuel price is the sum of oil price, refining cost, and tax. Fuel tax is only 14% of pump price in the US (it is about 65% in the UK). So pump price is very sensitive to oil price in the US. Rising oil price drove the petrol price up. Since the price of petrol/diesel is a significant cost factor in industrial agriculture (the only type of agriculture system that can temporarily bypass areal diminishing returns limits and therefore expand exponentially with exponential population growth), it also drove food prices up. The collective burden crashed the global economy. The oil price fell from $140 to $40 following the collapse of the world economy (demand collapsed) driving down the petrol price. It has subsequently risen to $120 as synthetic growth (quantitive easing stimulated) stresses the physical offtake limit of the global petroleum system which is failing to yield increased production, driving the petrol price back to it pre-crash level. The economy is being stressed again and propped up with more synthetic debt "borrowed" from our children without any prospect of repayment.

The next global crash will bring it back down, probably further as it will be deeper and demand will be even lower. These cycles repeat until the financial system can no longer support the divergence between the expanding quantity of synthetic, bad, and interest debt in the financial system and the contracting matter/energy system it proxies.

 

[Falcon]

A lack of competent risk analysis and the inscrutable complexities of the derivatives market are more direct and logical places to look for the collapse.

Hamilton does. It isn't.

The key intellectual challenge for such an explanation is to reconcile the proposed speculative price path with what is happening to the physical quantities of petroleum demanded and supplied...

The two key ingredients needed to make such a story coherent— a low price elasticity of demand, and the failure of physical production to increase— are the same key elements of a fundamentals-based explanation of the same phenomenon

- Hamilton, "Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08"

In short, speculation amplifies it, but does not explain it, and there is a simpler explanation which readily fits observable data and accurately predicts system behaviour - supply stagnation (i.e. "fundamentals").

There is no getting round it - there is now no price at which the stuff can be made to come out the ground fast enough. And we are dependent on a system which was designed on the assumption that --- and only works if --- there is such a price.

 

[ayatollah]

Let's inspect Ayatollah's reasoning here:

(a) If you are a right wing neo Malthusian, then you are concerned about population levels;
(b) Falcon is concerned about population levels;
(c) Therefore Falcon is a right wing neo Malthusian.
(d) Implied: we should discount Falcon's views because he is a right wing neo Malthusian.

An elementary Affirmation of the Consequent type propositional logical fallacy, in service of a synthetic ad hominem attack. I'm sure you have interesting things to say, Ayatollah, but you waste everyone's time with this kind of nonsense and disqualify yourself from the debate. Manufactured and pointless conflict.

Most of our intellectual backgrounds are invalidated now because the various axioms and assumptions upon which they were founded are no longer valid. Before we work out what to do, I think we need to work out how to work together, given our different historical backgrounds. Ayatollah couldn't be a more vivid example and warning of why.

This really is extraordinarily pompous drivel , Falcon, You really must lay off the "using big words" bluster mate .. to cover up your profoundly Right Wing politics. You have throughout this thread, and others, NEVER offered any cogent perspective for what YOU think about WHERE WE GO FROM HERE -- other than gloomy hints that the future beyond "Peak oil" is for world society to collapse into some sort of non industrial agrarian society with a tiny population. As other indicators of your Right Wing politics, you are obsessed with "pensions liabilities" , you are against industrial action by workers to defend their living standards.

If you really think the future is some non industrial agrarian society, and suggest people who want to survive post "Peak Oil breakdown" buy a ploy of land and raise chickens, then FFS say so. Be honest for once about your politics Falcon. All that your obsessional "Peak Oil" theory does in the absence of a broader POLITICAL contribution as to where we all go from here is to shift responsibility from the capitalist system to the apparently "non-political" excuse of "resource depletion". That's why you ARE indeed a neo-Malthusian, Falcon, providing an ideological excuse (but NO solutions) for capitalism for the world crisis and mass poverty/austerity, just as Malthus provided an ideological cover for mass starvation amongst plenty in his era.

You want people to be "friendlier" to your views, then you should try being honest and up front about your politics. But you've been challenged again and again to outline them ... but you won't - hiding instead behind a wall of pure verbiage . Cowardly , AND dishonest, Falcon.

 

[Falcon]

As other indicators of your Right Wing politics, you are obsessed with "pensions liabilities" , you are against industrial action by workers to defend their living standards.

Excuse me?

(1) Right Wing politics is obsessed with pension liability
(2) Falcon is obsessed with pension liability
(3) Therefore Falcon is Right Wing?

or, even more tenuously,

(1) Right Wing politics opposes industrial action by workers
(2) Falcon observes that industrial action cannot be successful
(3) Therefore Falcon is Right Wing

Is that what you bring to the debate? Your inability to conceive that there might be critiques of the pension system other than Right Wing? Your inability to differentiate between an argument that industrial action is wrong, and an argument that industrial action cannot be successful?

When your argument requires you to deny biophysical reality, and to coerce the person who disagrees with you, through manufactured ad hominem, into being a eugenicist/fascist/whatever, it's time to reconsider its merits. Ironically, you are forced to do what the Tea Party does in denying Climate change to preserve the internal consistency of their argument.

OK. For what it's worth, I distinguish between problems (which have solutions) and predicaments (which don't). We are confronted every day with predicaments (e.g. pancreatic cancer with its 2% survival rate). There is no basis for assuming that the exhaustion of the critical resource around which our particular form of civilisation has co-evolved is not a predicament. Merely wishing it to be solvable, or the inability to conceive of its failure, is no guarantee that it actual is solvable. In my view, we are in the grip of a predicament.

I don't offer my opinion on political or technical solutions because I don't think one can be devised. I don't offer that opinion casually - as a man with three children and as much at stake as anyone else in there being a solution, I abandoned my previous career in the oil industry to study at Masters level to identify if there were solutions, and failed to discover any. I think Capitalism and Socialism are morally and intellectually bankrupt. I think pretending there is a Socialist/Capitalist/Scientology solution to our predicament is as unhelpful as pretending that taking your pancreas out is a solution to pancreatic cancer - it just squanders what limited resource we have left.

I have adopted the personal view that there is no "Big Government" solution, or technological solution, that waiting for one is foolish, and that the best prospect of mitigating the worst effects of decline is arrived at by increasing personal resilience i.e. reducing personal consumption and dependence on the industrial manufacturing system, and increasing personal energy and food production and skills, and participating as fully as possible in your immediate community (NOT stockpiling AK47s and ammunition, to head off one of your tedious assaults). It is entirely possible for you to disagree with that viewpoint without assuming I am a eugenicist. While I don't pretend yet to understand them, I'm very interested in some of the views of Marxism, particularly in its conception of the relationship between labour and natural resource. Your uninformed and self-serving speculation about my politics are so far off the mark as to be comical.

I engage in debate on that basis here. Our difference is easy to articulate. Your view, rooted in pre-Peak narrative, conceives of some discretionary surplus (guaranteed historically by the transitions from wood to coal to oil to the point where the assumption of continuity is now implicit), the purpose of politics of which is to distribute as equitably as possible. My narrative, recognising peak, also recognises the lack of discretionary surplus for which politics devised under conditions of surplus are now incompatible. They lead to fundamentally different outcomes which your inability to conceive of peak compels you to map into your outmoded, pre-peak narrative of Left/Right. We cannot engage.

I have no interest in whether people are friendly to my views, other than a general desire for the general good. If they make sense, do it, if they don't, then don't. Unlike your viewpoint, which requires some critical mass of support, neither outcome affects me in any way. I fail to understand what motivates you to invent all this intrigue and ulterior motive.

 

[yield]

I abandoned my previous career in the oil industry to study at Masters level to identify if there were solutions, and failed to discover any.

What did you study? Systems theory?

Also if you think society is going to collapse and most people are going to die. Why are you worried about unfunded pension liability?

I don't know what I have against the doomer lifeboat thing but it just seems blinkered.

 

[A Dashing Blade]

. . . I'd refer interested readers to Hamilton's ‘Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, which demonstrates causality in exhaustive detail:
. . . .

Tbh, all I see is a lot of non-linear regression analysis demonstrating a link rather than causality.
Plus, imo, current crisis started before 2007 but that's another story.

 

[frogwoman]

referring to yourself in 3rd person - always the sign of a wrong'un.

 

[Falcon]

What did you study? Systems theory?

Yes, and industrial metabolism and energy economics.

Also if you think society is going to collapse and most people are going to die. Why are you worried about unfunded pension liability?

For the same reason I would be worried if I saw a tonne of bricks was about to fall on your head. Standing by with my hands in my pockets and whistling sounds autistic to me. I've liquidated mine and converted into something of real value. I occasionally encourage others on these forums to be certain they understand the assumptions upon which their personal pension liability was supposed to be discharged, and to relate it to observable deficiencies in those assumptions. You'll understand I have no view about your decision, or your opinion about mine. If it sounds bonkers - don't do it.

 

[Falcon]

referring to yourself in 3rd person - always the sign of a wrong'un.

I'm sure it is. Since I was summarising his position, not my own, I was conveying how he might refer to me, not how I actually refer to myself. As you were.

 

[Falcon]

Tbh, all I see is a lot of non-linear regression analysis demonstrating a link rather than causality.

Possibly. And, had the hydrocarbon supply not stagnated, that might yield interesting insights. But since it has, it doesn't - there is no amount of "fixing" the derivatives mechanism that is going to correct the global economy's sensitivity to scarcity-induced oil price rise. Meanwhile, the assertion that it can amounts to misdirection, in my view.

 

[elbows]

I don't know what I have against the doomer lifeboat thing but it just seems blinkered.

Well like all beliefs it imposes constraints, and some of these constraints are based on assumptions that are not well tested.

I should be on the doomer lifeboat due to my expectations of the future, but I have reservations. These are down to the aforementioned assumptions, and the politics of some of the others who are on this boat of woe.

I'm thankful to Falcon for clarifying his stance, because at times in the past he has said specific things which made me rant, and I wasn't too clear on exactly where he stood on a variety of details. As it is relatively uncharted territory and their are some existing political ideologies which are shitty and think this kind of doom will be their ticket to widespread acceptance, its quite important that people go into detail about their beliefs so that we can differentiate.

My main interest is in what is actually going to happen, rather than what I think should happen. So although I can see the sense in the idea that existing political ideologies and large-scale institutions, big government etc, are a very poor fit for many of the sustainability challenges, that doesn't mean that big government and older kinds of politics are just going to go away. Even if no decent and humane solutions are to be found by following the old ways, I expect old habits will die hard.

So as I've said for a few years now, Im currently stuck in a holding pattern. Until I actually get to see how masses of people from various segments of societies all over the world actually react to a more acute phase of the crisis, how can I begin to see where this is going, or how me & my family might position themselves to survive and even thrive.

Even in a society with a huge amount of cynicism about institutions etc, I struggle to imagine people quickly giving up on the idea that some kind of higher power is going to solve some of the big issues that affect their lives. Yes there is always something attractive about the local, the immediate community, that which is firmly routed in our own daily lives and is not obscene in scale. But so much of what we are used to is built on the large scale. We expect food, technology & entertainment from various parts of the world, lots of travel, lots of consumption, lots of gloss and lots of centralisation. Only once such expectations have been shattered will we catch a glimpse of the directions people are going to push towards. This might happen rapidly via a series of extreme shocks, or it might happen as a result of decay and austerity over a much longer time period.

But however it happens, I really doubt that people will suddenly shun the energies and possibilities that come into play from very large collective forces. This includes the very crude politics of the state where we either willingly give or have taken from us our individual powers, which are pooled in a fairly brutal manner and used to power some new regime/ideology as it sets off to conquer, win, dominate. The belief that states and other powerful actors of today are powered by a form of energy & economics thats days are numbered, should not automatically lead to the belief that states and corporations etc are doomed. They are adaptable too, and although it is possible to imagine them imploding in a pretty dramatic way that leaves a void, I don't see any reason to exclude the possibility that the same scale of entities and political forces will remerge in a different form to refill the void. Indeed the desire to pool what resources are left may well be even more compelling in an era where these resources are more scarce. The gap between what the small players and the large players can achieve may grow larger, not smaller. The individual may become less important rather than more so.

 

[Dr Jon]

Peak Oil (and peak everything else) essentially makes politics (and most of our ideas about how to organise ourselves) obsolete.

We have painted ourselves into a very tight corner: we have built a system for organising human affairs that is fundamentally unsustainable on many levels. Whether this system is run for the benefit of the bosses or the workers is irrelevant.

It is estimated that a sustainable global population is about 1 billion - less than 1/7th the present number - and that's assuming there remains a natural environment that hasn't been trashed by overpopulation and industrial exploitation.

I am wondering whether any system is truly sustainable...