Systemic Collapse: The Basics
- Thread starter Falcon
- Start date
free spirit
more tea vicar?
good that he uses european standards as a starting point, as that'd really be my speciality.
So, on the food side of things...
Over 50% of food grown for the european food chain never gets eaten, so sort this problem out (which is mainly a distribution, and perfectionism issue) and that 2 billion can be increased to 3-4 billion straight away.
Halve meat consumption and that's probably another billion or so... say 4.5 billion
Probably another 20% from eating the amount of calories we actually need instead of becoming increasingly obese... 5 billion.
etc.
But then the original figures are a stab in the dark anyway, so it probably could as easily be 10 billion using the above measures to reduce European levels of consumption to more sensible levels.
I do find it interesting that Americans somehow think of us Europeans as being the lowest level of consumption that would be acceptable to all, but yet Europeans are still pretty wasteful.
I think it's true that most people basically hate their working lives, and a good percentage hate their home lives as well. I think these are recent phenomena too--maybe the last 3 centuries or so...
Lemon Eddy
Disliked by dwyer
Probably best if you end it now, eh. Why prolong your suffering?
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
What are you assuming about land use for energy and materials production when you make that jump?
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
I think this goes here:
Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat
Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'm guessing you're restricting yourself to 'western' culture here.
Georges Minois wrote a very good book on the history of suicide in which he dispels this notion. Suicide out of despair has long been with us. On top of that, add the fact that murder rates in the middle ages were many times higher than they are now - about 20 times higher in Germany; probably similar here, but I don't think the figures have been worked out. You seem to have an absurdly romantic idea of life under feudalism. If you were not a free man, and most weren't, life was not only hard, it was often miserable. And the idea that domestic disharmony is a recent thing is simply absurd.
But you know this...
free spirit
more tea vicar?
that in 1998 Europeans were, and still are massively wasteful of energy as a whole and if that's our starting point, the 60-80% per capita energy consumption reductions could be achieved with minimal loss of quality of life (many would argue better quality of life).
Basically if he's using 1998 european consumption standards as his starting point, then it's blatently obvious that even if his calculations on the carrying capacity were correct, then there's a serious amount of potential to reduce the waste that was inherent in the european system in 1998 to allow many more than the 2 billion to live at a decent standard of living.
Quite a lot else wrong with his assumptions as well, but I'm off out so will have to delay that response. TBF, at least he was having a decent attempt at it, unlike some.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I dispute this. Both Angola and Guatemala have suffered appallingly in recent decades from wars that have been egged on by outside forces. Had Guatemala been allowed to develop on its own without the US scuppering their chances, who knows how the country would be now. Similarly Angola. These are particular cases. Why did you not choose Malaysia or Thailand? What about Brazil? India is a difficult case to assess, as is China. Given China's history of extraordinary human disasters on almost unimaginable scales, I'd rather be Chinese today than in the 19th century, for instance.
Pakistan? I genuinely don't know. Somewhere like Pakistan you also have to look at sheer numbers. How many people were there in the area now called Pakistan in 1500? A few million perhaps. Certainly nowhere near the 180 million of today. How do you judge? Do you add together the 180 million of today to the perhaps 10 million of 1500 to get 190 million, then give a person an equal chance of being any one of those people? This seems the only fair way to do it. That gives just a 1 in 19 chance of being a person in 1500.
As for greatly increased misery for the vast majority, again, I dispute this. Worldwide, hunger is actually on the decrease. The population is growing in absolute numbers, but the numbers who go hungry at the moment at least are falling in absolute numbers. What we are seeing across the world in many places is rapid urbanisation. By 2030, it is estimated that half the population of Africa will be urban, up from around one third now. Many of those moving to the cities are living in awful circumstances, and are likely to continue like that for a good while yet. Yet, despite this, life expectancy in the favelas of the world is higher than that of the poor rural areas where these people are moving from. They're not stupid. They are moving to the cities for a reason.
I really hate the kind of passive defeatism shown by many on this thread. Things can be and are being done to address the massive challenges of today and the near future. But there has never been a time when there have not been massive challenges of today and the near future. Harking back to a non-existent utopia is simply incorrect. That utopia did not exist.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'm not quite sure where to begin with this. Suffice to say at the moment that it is three years old and already out of date.
Really? Two years to go on that prediction. We shall see what the next two years bring, but no sign of this yet.
As for this
Not heard of the New Deal, then? The massive work programmes started specifically in response to the Great Depression. JM Keynes had the ear of the US president at the time, and was giving clear instructions about what needed to be done to get out of the depression. 'everyone lived on his own little island'? I don't doubt that there was shame to be poor, but this kind of overstatement of the case makes the case worthless. Millions were on the move in the US in this time. They were not their own little islands. Far from it. That kind of alienation is generally a characteristic of times of plenty, not times of hardship. In times of hardship, people tend to cooperate more with each other - because they have to. Rich people can put a buffer of money between themselves and all the people they depend on and pretend they don't need others. Poor people don't have that option - the ways they depend on others are an immediate everyday reality.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Yep.
Economic migrants during The Great Depression
Economic migrants in 21st century Britain:
Not much changes does it?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Right. Hadn't spotted that. He's not doing very well, though, is he? He appears to have a very poor grasp of the larger issues of history. In particular, his characterisation of the way we moved to agriculture is poorly researched. And that is leading him to bad predictions. Hand-wavy stuff about how we evolved to live in small groups is not good enough. Hard facts about how this fact affects the way we are able to adapt to larger groups are needed. Specifically, a look at the ways in which we have adapted to living in large groups is needed, because the idea that we are all at sea in large groups is nonsense. Just visit any city and you will see the myriad ways we have adapted to large group living.
How many predictions does he have to get wrong before you stop listening to his half-baked nonsense?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
One more thing about this utopian idea that living in small hunter-gather groups was better suited to happiness.
Again, I take issue with this. Looking at other primate groups shows various ways of organising a group that all involve both cooperation and conflict. Something that virtually all primate groups have in common is the phenomenon of status-striving. These are hierarchical societies in which those at the top must watch their backs and those at the bottom are constantly looking for ways to rise through the group. Sliding down the hierarchy in such societies, normally due to high-ranking kin being killed, is not a pleasant experience. There are periods in the lives of many individuals when the group does not treat them well.
At the very least, this idea needs justification. It is not self-evidently true. It strikes me that most people who put it forward are working backwards from the conclusion that modern society is wrong and constructing a story to fit with this conclusion, which actually isn't a conclusion at all - it's the starting premise.
Again, I take issue with this. Looking at other primate groups shows various ways of organising a group that all involve both cooperation and conflict. Something that virtually all primate groups have in common is the phenomenon of status-striving. These are hierarchical societies in which those at the top must watch their backs and those at the bottom are constantly looking for ways to rise through the group. Sliding down the hierarchy in such societies, normally due to high-ranking kin being killed, is not a pleasant experience. There are periods in the lives of many individuals when the group does not treat them well.
At the very least, this idea needs justification. It is not self-evidently true. It strikes me that most people who put it forward are working backwards from the conclusion that modern society is wrong and constructing a story to fit with this conclusion, which actually isn't a conclusion at all - it's the starting premise.
Kropotkin Was No Crackpot
Stephen Jay Gould 1997
Stephen Jay Gould 1997
Whenever a person uses the language of ideology to complain about the presence of ideology, I feel a chuckle coming on.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
The article you started the thread with was rubbish, though, Falcon. The bits I know enough about to comment on contain inaccuracies, unjustified generalisations and assertions, misunderstandings and plain untruths. There's lots in there that I'm not qualified to comment on, but I would be surprised if the author saved up all his bad bits for my areas of knowledge only. And others such as free spirit seem able to demolish much of it.
It's ironic that something describing itself as 'the basics' should get so many, um, basics wrong.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
It sounds like you're talking about what I had in mind when I characterised some of Pimentel's assumptions as 'business as usual'
There is an advantage there though I think. The less things he has to assume are different to business as usual to arrive at any sort of numbers for sustainability, the less room for argument and inaccuracy he introduces.
So for the set of assumptions he's using, and which he's pretty clear about, he's much more likely to be on target than he would be if he introduced some totally different assumptions (e.g. everybody lives in an eco-village with a small fusion reactor)
This makes his efforts extremely useful in my view.
If I want to try to figure out what the sustainable global population is assuming eco-villages instead of 'business as usual only sustainable' I'm still likely to start by taking his stuff as a baseline and the trying to work out the differences.
If you know anything that tackles the global case better, I'd love to hear about it.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That's a fair point, bernie, as long as it is remembered that this is what he's doing, that it isn't a definitive 'this is the carrying capacity of the Earth'-style analysis. Worth doing if only to highlight just what kinds of changes we're likely to have to make to reach something approaching current population levels. Also worth remembering those dastardly unknown unknowns of Donald Rumsfeld fame ( if only he'd stuck to philosophy...). I do think all of us should remember just how badly people predicting the future have fared over the years.
It's hard for those of us without attachment to those belief systems for which the denial of biophysical reality is a necessity to understand how it can be maintained with a straight face.
Industrial (hydrocarbon powered) agriculture allowed us --- temporarily --- to bypass the areal limitation of solar agriculture. Specifically, it is a form of agriculture which has allowed calorific output to increase exponentially with exponentially increasing population. The population under conditions of industrial agricultural output (7 billion) now stands far in excess of the population that stood the last time we tested the capability of solar agricultural system (2 billion).
Meanwhile, climate instability and the impairment by various overrides in the industrial agriculture system that compensate for its numerous biophysical contradictions (e.g. the imminent pesticide-induced collapse of the bee population and associated pollination service) mean it is by no means certain that we could achieve pre-industrial calorific output, let alone any substantially greater one.
Moreover, the goal is not merely to replace current industrial agricultural outputs with solar agriculture output, but to ensure substitution takes place at least as quickly as the hydrocarbon system depletes (currently 10% per annum / 7 year half life natural depletion) and population grows (currently 1% per annum).
It may be possible, but to assert that any questioning of that possibility is "a pathological belief system feeding off growing petty bourgeois craziness at the capitalist crisis" seems, to me at least, evidence of a certain lack of confidence in the argument.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Yep and the latter point is quite important.
If someone doesn't like the figure for carrying capacity that he gets with his assumptions, then you can say 'well ok, which one are you proposing to change and how?' and by using his stuff (I'm thinking about his book 'Food, Energy and Society' here more than that article) and other stuff that takes the same approach (using actual numbers, stating assumptions clearly) as a baseline, you can model the changes being proposed and start asking questions like 'OK, so we get rid of supermarkets and telecommute from eco-villages saving huge amounts of food system energy, fine. How are we envisaging the chip production etc necessary for our telecommuting to work?'
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is partly a case of a known unknown. If quantum computing gets off the ground - and the principle has been demonstrated already - that could solve this particular problem almost at a stroke. We can't know how long if ever it will take to develop quantum computing, but it is a very possible future development that could entirely change how we view computers - machines millions of times more powerful, perhaps made and run using less energy.
I know that sounds insanely optimistic, but it isn't just pie in the sky. It's an example of one way in which futurology is so fraught.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Sure, but very difficult to quantify, which illustrates precisely what I mean about the advantages of a baseline model that changes the absolute minimum to get to a sustainable state.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
Yep.
Economic migrants during The Great Depression
Economic migrants in 21st century Britain:
Not much changes does it?
Actually the modern 'migrants' seem considerably more wealthy.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
We're just about to fall over the cliff, in other words. Any workings you can show for that graph?
No. We started falling off the cliff in 2008, when conventional hydrocarbon offtake rate stalled at its historical maximum. Liquid production has subsequently and temporarily been maintained flat by, amongst other things, converting food into biofuels (at an energy debt).
Of course. Historical oil production is taken from BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Historical and projected future population is taken from UN figures. The International Energy Agency's "World Energy Outlook 2008" (link- PDF) pages 221 - 248 provides a very accessible tutorial for the layman on current and projected Natural Depletion Rates:
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
1 thing: Quantum computers cannot replace regular computers. They solve different problems.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
it is claimed that a quantum computer has been able to factorise the number 143.
For each calculation, you need to manipulate the conditions so that the lowest energy state gives the right answer. For now, it is very limited in its application, but its potential is enormous. It is possible, for instance, that brains operate in a similar kind of way, the most efficient path giving the 'answer'. There could be huge potential for combining quantum computing principles with artificial neural networks.
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
iGod.
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