I am fascinated with people who have elevated technology and human ingenuity to the level of belief, if not further.As always, this site is about backing up opinions and beliefs with facts as much as possible.
I am very pragmatic about technology and simply insist that anybody who wants to extrapolate dreams of a high-tech future needs to at least consider time, scale and cost.
As someone who has actually been in the business of producing things with my hands (construction) I suspect that I have a more viceral feel for the vast gap that exists between a concept and a physical thing than people who haven’t.
But that’s not the main point. The main point is that extrapolating future miracle productiviy and technology gains is to make the explicit assumption that a vigorous and complex economy is there to support those gains. Which means that the implicit assumption is being made that sociey has more net free energy available to it than it does today.
In short, it is not I who is linearly extrapolating from the past into the future, it is the person making the argument that the future will be just like today, only with more productivity and more amazing technoloy. I am allowing for the possibility that the future might not resemble the present and that our collective failure to appreciate the role of net free energy in the advance ofsocietal complexity is a glaring blind spot.
We do not have unlimited resources and energy and this is not ‘gloomy’, it is simply reality.
If you really want to impress me with the idea that new batteries will magically arise to solve our problems, then please bust out a pencil and paper and calculate the rough realities of production. How many will be needed? How does this compare to the largest conventional battery factories currently in existence? What materials will they need? Any limits there?
Chris doesn’t need me or anyone else here to carry his water, but your statement here is idealistic and utopian.
Not to mention that until such “solutions” become evident they don’t exist.
It seems like you are waiting/hoping on one of these “solutions” to fall from the sky before taking action to mitigate what is coming.
The rest of us are not counting on the magic beans - instead we are extrapolating what we see now into the future, developing a picture of how we think that future is going to impact our lives and planning to meet that future.
Should a sack of magic beans show up on my doorstep tomorrow I can only hope they are heirloom beans and not Monsanto GMOs.
You might call this a pessimistic approach to the challenges we face.
Just remember that pessimism is the same thing as optimism, only with a lot more reality.
Hice 420 -
Why would the solutions be exponential? Technological innovation tends to follow an ‘S’ curve, not an exponential function.
IMO it’s not that innovation cannot solve problems, but rather we shouldn’t make our plans assuming new technology and innovation will solve our problems. If something new comes along down the road that happens to solve some of our problems then that’s great; but to have a plan for the future that assumes and is dependent on such an innovation involves a lot of risk. How many people who were alive 4 decades ago after watching the first Apollo moon landing assumed that we’d have routine space travel, moon bases, and vast orbiting space stations like in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey? Ok that was before my time, but even having grown up in the 80’s and 90’s I myself figured we would at least have had manned missions to Mars by this date. And this didn’t mean our society lacked innovation; we merely saw innovation turn in unexpected and new directions with the exploding growth of the Internet, huge advances in computer and telecommunications technology, and exploring new frontiers in genetic research. All great things, but it just happened to turn out that the space program wasn’t the primary beneficiary of those innovations. If I’d bet the farm 20 years ago that continuing innovation would allow me to create a mining business on the Moon by now, I’d be one unhappy entrepreneur
The point is that in the presence of many unknown variables, it’s reasonable to be conservative in making long-term plans or assumptions for the future. Assumption is the mother of all… er… ‘screw-ups’.
(Edit- Dang, everybody beat me to the punch. I could have saved time and just wrote “yeah, all that stuff they said” )
Once enough small groups of people are already making what changes they can, 'society as a whole' will start to shift.
Yes, but the question still remains whether there will be enough small groups before society starts to collapse. I have no confidence that there will be. My situation is a case in point. My family (wife and two adult children) understand the problems we face but still don't "get it". Although they're supporting what I'm trying to do (become as self-sufficient and as sustainable as we can) the support is weak and they are still firmly ensconced in the current society (i.e. almost no change in the way they do things and view the world). It almost seems as though they think they should make use of what society offers now, because it ain't gonna be there in future. Of course, until people make real changes, in their own lives, then nothing will change in society.
Unfortunately, I see a similar lack of conviction in those who tend to green policies. They want public transport and renewable energy but both at a scale that allows more or less the same activities to go on as now.
"Once enough small groups of people are already making what changes they can, 'society as a whole' will start to shift."
Viva -- Sager
i appreciate your optimism, and your genuine desire for change. Certainly we all can do something on the micro level and things have been done on the micro level and will continue to be done. Unfortunately the things you seem to be promoting are amounting to having the same affect as a flea on an elephant.
There have been many groups, communities, communes etc that have tread that path. The Amish for one come to mind as well as the Mennonites, the Branch Davidians, the Elohim community, the Shakers, the Covenant Arm and Sword of the Lord, The Farm to name a few. Some have gone down in flames in places such as Ruby Ridge and Waco without much of a change in the dynamic on the Macro level. The landscape of America is littered with the remains of the communes of the 70's back to the land movement.
If Mayer Amschel Bauer really said it or not the truth of the statement " Give me control of a country's money and I care not who makes its laws." is irrefutable. Or put another way "He who has the gold makes the rules"
As long as "they " have the gold "they" will continue to make the rules. The rules will continue to be enforced by the most powerful military the world has ever known.
I have yet to hear any "big ideas" that will make a difference ..............in my lifetime anyway. The Matrix is subtle, ubiquitous, seductive and VERY powerful.
Chris,
As astonishing as it my be to you, I’m not particularly interested in impressing you. You seem to think that rolling out your resume as a guy who “produces things with his hands” qualifies you as the arbiter of what is and what is not a fact. It is this hubris that demeans you and your message. The “fact” is that you don’t know what the future will bring. I would suggest that you ponder Einstein’s admonition that No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
We live in a world where scientific discovery is increasingly in conflict with our experience. Let’s assume that you are sitting at a heavy oak table. You know from middle school physics that the table is mostly empty space; the mass of the atoms in the table is minute while the “empty space” consists of electromagnetic fields. Your head, its bones, skin, and the brain itself have the same characteristics. However, if you bang your head on the table the solid density that you, I and everyone else perceives will become more “real” than the facts that we know. So we continue to act as though things are solid when we know that they are not and we learn to live with the paradox of our perceptions being out of kilter with what we know to be true. Invention is the attempt to reconcile these two experiences. The impossible becomes possible and prior experience seems quaint.
I think your contribution is useful; it helps people gain a different perspective. It is your dismissal of everyone who has a different perspective as not dealing in what you term “facts” that is discouraging. No doubt you will continue to cultivate a following and no doubt there will be some benefit but in the long run I’m afraid you are insisting on being a marginal player.
(this is where Hice produces his Mr. Fusion power unit [can run a small town on a 1/2 kilo of used coffee grounds a day] or an internal combustion engine that runs on water…)
Hice -
I don’t think your example of an oak table is adequate. I don’t know of anyone that has reasoned it to be a pleasurable experience to bang their head into the table.
More than anything else, I think it’s clear that Chris is identifying challenges that we face. If anything he’s the one warning us that the oak table will hurt if we bash our heads into it. Chris has refrained from presenting specific solutions but rather calling attention to problems that are not getting the attention they deserve. He’s warning of risks without forecasting the details of the future.
Perhaps you can provide a better approach? Perhaps you have evidence of technologies that will bail us out and can be developed quickly and cheaply? Perhaps you think using “quads” as a unit of measure should apply to debt as well as BTUs? If so, I would be interested in hearing you clarify your thoughts and vision. This is an open forum, show us that you are not a “marginal” player, please.
Hice
Good to hear from you, but for the life of me, I don’t understand what you are trying to say.
If you have some good and/or better ideas, please enlighten us. You seem to be saying that you agree that there is a problem, however not a hint as to how we can better approach the issues other than to suggest we need a higher level of consciousness.
Dogs, let me begin by saying that I love your comments. They have helped me a lot in the last year. But on this one I have to ask a question: When? When is what going to happen? Why are we different from Japan? Japan has managed a shipwreck for two decades with fewer resources than we have. There is at least 4 million barrels per day of excess oil production capacity in the world at the moment. That can buy us a year of two and we might stumble along for a while after that before reality begins to sink into world consciousness. In the meantime we have our man Ben manning the printing press and catastrophic global warming will reduce our need for fuel to nothing . Why does the party have to end before, say, 2015?
And I don’t particularly care either, so we share common ground.
Time.
Scale.
Cost.
When you are ready to include some data to back up your beliefs and opinions and have an actual conversation rather than an emotional outpouring you will find that this is a quite reasonable place.
I have not “dismissed” anyone or anything. I only dismiss claims and opinions that do not include data, facts, calculations or anything else that reasonable people can use as a starting point for a neutral discussion.
Here’s a learning of mine - if you find that someone is making you angry, it usually means they are challenging a belief of yours, not a fact-based view.
The fact that you are inappropriately assigning a tone of dismissiveness to my writing tells me that you are operating from such a position of belief. That’s fine, I think you have that right and I have compassion for where you are, but we’re not even remotely having the same conversation here.
I will continue to insist that anyone holding out for a technological miracle to please provide at least a minimum of real-world calculations that inlcude time, scale, and cost. If this cannot be done, then perhaps this tells us something.
I think you’re too hopeful that we would have the attention of those who currently don’t get it.
People will be afraid. If government still functions they may look for comfort in that. If government begins to fail they will look to populist messages. They’ll look for an enemy and a cause of their problems.
[quote=Hice 420]We live in a world where scientific discovery is increasingly in conflict with our experience. Let’s assume that you are sitting at a heavy oak table. You know from middle school physics that the table is mostly empty space; the mass of the atoms in the table is minute while the “empty space” consists of electromagnetic fields. Your head, its bones, skin, and the brain itself have the same characteristics. However, if you bang your head on the table the solid density that you, I and everyone else perceives will become more “real” than the facts that we know.[/quote]Poor example. Scientific discovery will tell you why you bang your head on the table, why your head can go no further than the table surface, so why is that in conflict with the fact that you’d bang your head on the table?[quote=Hice 420]I think your contribution is useful; it helps people gain a different perspective. It is your dismissal of everyone who has a different perspective as not dealing in what you term “facts” that is discouraging.[/quote]An alternative perspective? Chris spells out, and explains in detail, how the economy works and how energy and the environment are causing problems. What Chris is doing is trying to describe our situation accurately, instead of with unfounded opinions.
The only thing I’d disagree with Chris is that he tends to water down his message in some of his talks. Only a little, but enough to probably leave most of his audience able to justify not changing to any significant degree. For me, he hasn’t really convinced me of an optimistic outlook that he claims to have.
Thanks for the link Plato.
I learned more listening to Dr. M for that one hour than I have learned from the site in 6 months. Audio is a superior method of communication and unlike video its cheap to distribute. Someone as well spoken as Dr. M is doing his message a disservice by not using podcasts.
The when is the $64K question (oops, thanks to Ben and Friends it’s more like $18,500)
Two thoughts about the when, really more of the “How” of the “When”.
First, the system collapses rapidly. This could be to some external stressor like China calling in our debt, or enough people realizing what is going on that they force the change or whatever it might be. Regardless, it’s a rapid unwinding and such a shock to the system that meaningful change comes out of it almost immediately. Of course, there will be a lot of chaos and upheaval, but for those of us who have been preparing, we are a bit better off and in a position to help ourfamily, friends and neighbors who were a little slow in getting the message. I dare say we will have their undivided attention if the rapid collapse scenario happens.
In terms of enacting meaningful changes, I would prefer to see a rapid collapse. Like Chris told us at the Lowesville seminar, no meaningful changes come about unless there is a significant shock to the system. I just don’t see a total collapse happening any sooner than 5-10 years.
The second “How of the When” scenario is a gradual decline into a lower state of energy and resource consumption. What this does is it allows those who aren’t impacted (yet) to kick the can down the road - they won’t make any changes until it affects them personally. Let’s face it, oil will always be around to some degree. You just might have to pay $15/gallon for gas to drive to work. You will probably make changes in your lifestyle to accomodate $15/gallon gasoline, but you will still buy it so you can go to work. I would probably sell my Denali and start riding my bike - I am only 13.7 miles from work and it’s a nice bike ride (yeah, yeah, I know, why not do it now).
The specifics of this slow unwind don’t matter since the when really isn’t important here. As it happens, people react to it and are forced to adapt. Their lives will change to the degree that it needs to and at some point we will look around and find ourselves on the “bottom” and see that we are doing okay. I would guess that most of us will be pretty good gardeners; most of us will know a lot more about our neighbors; most of us will lose some weight and be healthier.
I think the slow decline will also hurt people, but not as many as in the rapid collapse scenario. A slow decline will to some degree force a real occurrence of “community” on us and it will allow more time for the unprepared and uninformed to “get it”. In that light, a slow decline would be preferred to a rapid implosion. One could argue we are in the slow decline now.
What it comes down to is whether or not you want to see a softer landing in a slow decline over immediate changes following a rapid collapse. Given the chaos and emotion that would rule following a rapid collapse, perhaps a slow decline would be better. This might be the only time where pulling the band-aid off slowly is better.
Either way, I plan on being around to see whatever course we take. I believe we have at least 5 years to get ready and that’s what Cat and I have based our planning on.
Of course we could be wrong - but then all we have to do is change our plan.
