EconomicsFood ShortagesPeak OilSociety
Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union
Those who appreciated the very interesting articles by Dmitry Orlov (recommended reading!) will appreciate this clip also.
Those who appreciated the very interesting articles by Dmitry Orlov (recommended reading!) will appreciate this clip also.
Thank you Craig. Very wise words made all the more powerful by the visual element.
People, it is time to prepare. Forget about your ‘careers’. There will be no place for ‘specialisation’ in the days to come. Dump your plans to ‘get ahead’. You can’t barter much with ‘paper wealth’.
People, if you don’t see this, then I pity you. You are trapped in a dark world of self or externally induced delusion. Lift your nose from the grindstone for a second (or have your ipod/iphone/newspaper/television or other social comment source surgically removed from your body) and take a look around you. Separate yourself from the group mentality and start to think your own thoughts. See for yourself the obvious signs around you of what is really happening.
If, as I suspect, you are reading this as someone involved in permaculture, then I congratulate you on taking that step in the right direction, but trying to fit permaculture into a business as usual lifestyle with a things will always be the way they are, trust the government with the big picture, god will intervene (whatever form of god you have), or she’ll be right attitude, is simply not going to cut it.
Simplify your life and learn how to obtain for yourself the basic necessities of survival if you want to be among the, conservatively estimated, less than one in seven people who might make it.
No I don’t give any supporting references. As part of the awakening process and as others have, find your own. There are plenty out there.
…but there also is a lot of nonsense out there, Bernie.
I still remember how Mike Rupert predicted that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would lead to a cataclysmic catastrophe along the lines of the big mass extinction events. Quite clearly, he should spend some time recalibrating his judgment skills. (And I mean this the way I write it.)
Actually, the point is, pretty much no one has a clue how to predict in what form the crisis will unfold. Two nasty-case scenarios are (a) political tensions between India and Pakistan leading to nuclear war between these countries that throws so many hot particles into the upper atmosphere that we get a major temporary shift in world-wide temperatures, apart from destroying the ozone layer, and (b) madmen in power getting funny ideas what to do with WMDs to turn the inevitable collapse into a fast one that just kills a lot of people but will leave some form of society. It may happen, it may not. On the other end of the spectrum, there are water and energy saving measures which only today are perceived as “radical”, but would be quite effective, and would buy us sufficient time to re-structure society.
My perspective is that things would be perceived differently if people were aware of the fact that anyone predicting population in 2100 should better add “but I could easily be wrong by a factor 2 or even 5”. Quite likely, the outcome depends very strongly on what happens now.
I thought about commenting on some of the points you raise Thomas but I choose not to do so. Suffice to say that Dmitry, at least in this particular article, made no specific predictions as to the way things might play out in the future and likewise for myself.
The only prediction that I (and I believe he also) made is that at some stage, in order to regain a steady state situation on this planet, six out of seven people alive now, or whatever the adjusted proportion is at a later date, will have to die by some means. This is my view on the basis that the planet cannot sustain a human population more than somewhere between 1-2 billion and probably closer to 1 billion. That is around the number present at about the time when we, or at least our impact and activities around expansion of our domination of the planet, started to become a hazard for the rest of the planetary bio-community. I believe that this level of population is quoted in a number of sources and while I have to admit having seen other and higher figures quoted, it seems logical to me (it may be said, rather simplistically) that if this was the level at a point when things started to go wrong then this is the level to which the situation must be restored in order to regain equilibrium.
Now, six out of seven people are not going to volunteer to die for the cause, but there are many, many scenarios under the general categories of: natural, super-natural(if you like), extra-terrestrial or man-made events which could, jointly or severally, bring about a result of that dimension.
That is all I am going to say on this subject, hopefully to clarify my position, as I agree with you that it is unwise to make specific predictions based on individual current events but I disagree that ‘the outcome depends very strongly on what happens now’. My own view is that forces are now in play that were initiated decades, perhaps more than a century ago, that cannot now be reversed no matter what actions we take either individually or as nations and goodness knows no nation on Earth is doing any where near what they would need to do to have any meaningful effect. There is also no technology whether current or future, including the idea that some may still entertain of escaping to some other planet, which will make any difference. That doesn’t mean that we should do nothing, just sit and wait to die, and that was the basis of my earlier comment, that we should prepare as best we can for the inevitable, whatever form that takes.
Bernie,
I actually expect that a drop in life expectancy due to the combined effect of (a) a collapse of medicine, (b) drug resistant germs, and (c) insect mediated diseases may quite likely become a bigger killer than the immediate impact of food shortages. Food shortages might contribute, say as people with a weakened immune system are more susceptible to diseases, and this may have played a major role with the H1N1 flu pandemic after world war 1. In such a multicausal scenario, people by and large might not even realize that mortality has markedly gone up. Remember that, especially in western societies, without medical support many people would not have even lived to their present age. (This quite likely would include me as well – so in a sense, I am as much “living on borrowed time” as most other people.)
The problem I have with this “1-2 billion reasoning” is that much of it can be traced back to reasoning from 70s which was based more on ideology than any sound analysis. But let us suppose for a moment that it were correct – then I still think that there is as much an uncertainty of an order of magnitude in these guesses as in any other guess, i.e. it’s well conceivable that even if 1 billion would not be much of a problem, we do something so utterly stupid that we end up with less than a population of 100 million.
The Cost of Sprawl: https://newurbannetwork.com/news-opinion/blogs/steve-mouzon/14273/cost-sprawl-part-1