Last edited Wed Jun 4, 2014, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

... I haven't been wrong for 40+ years. I'm just not right yet. Any second now I will be (and the delay in being right just means that the collapse will be that much worse).

That's a known thing in investment circles. Not when it comes to Malthusians though. They've been "early" for 200 years. Any day now... (along with Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.)

Anyway, one more time:

1. World Bank: "remarkable declines in global poverty"
2. Commodity chart. It's a point and figure chart, which shows only price, not time, although you can see time noted on the bottom as a helpful guide; this covers from 2000 on:



Scale is percent to make price changes equal. As I said last time this stuff was posted, the first thing you'd have to see is a rapid rise in poverty globally (not just in the First World) accompanied by/caused by a rapid rise in commodity prices. Neither is happening.

One more time: neither is happening.

That's based on data, not anecdote. There is a difference.

The problem with that, of course, is that if you're a true believer, any data supports your thesis.

New increases in oil production don't mean that "peak oil is here!" was wrong... it just means that the decline that starts any second now will be all the more severe.

The CRB is the Commodity Research Bureau's index of ALL commodities, not just oil. Data, not anecdote. Because any one commodity can be substituted by another.
What you want to know, for this theory to be correct, is if generally, across ALL commodities, there is rising scarcity.
There isn't.
What you want to know, for this theory to be correct, is if generally, poverty is rising GLOBALLY.
It isn't.
Stephen Pinker even thinks this is the most peaceful time for our species, ever. I don't really know how you can figure something like that out, but this isn't the worst of times, not by a long shot.

"They" are only able to avoid extreme scarcity by further production far beyond a sustainable level. In this case, it's probably the fracking pushing a glut of oil/gas making it possible to overproduce all the other commodities. But that production is really just robbing future production and shifting it into the present. So prices fall as the short-term supply exceeds demand, but it just means that the any-second-now contraction in supply will be that much worse.

< /channelMalthus>

...for it to be correct, you, once again, would need to see a sustained rise in commodity prices caused by having to use extraordinary means to push production past that sustainable level. Fracking, we know, is way more expensive than conventional drilling, and probably more damaging. But it's not worldwide; it's confined only to the US, and the effect of it on price is confined to the US. The rest of the world is mostly still using conventional means to extract oil and gas.
Once again, this theory posits GLOBAL effects on ALL commodities. The fact that for a couple of commodities in a single country some fraction of those are being extracted by an extraordinary and expensive process does not prove the point.
For it to be correct, you'd have to see extraordinarily expensive processes having to be used and the expense of that causing large numbers to be priced out of being able to use the commodities being extracted by those processes, causing a sharp rise in poverty and more than likely the kind of mass conflict and brutal dictatorship we saw in the first half of the twentieth century.
None of which is happening.

The time frame may be different as to when but it is easy to see where we are headed.
I think some day after I am gone anyone striving to become part of the 1% will be killed in the streets.
Since we can see it coming and know how to change but resist change it will be the agent of change.

Many observers protest that such apocalyptic scenarios discount human ingenuity. Technology and markets will solve problems as they show up, they argue. But for that to happen, contends economist Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge in the U.K., policymakers must guide technology with the right incentives. As long as natural resources are underpriced compared with their true environmental and social cost—as long as, for instance, automobile consumers do not pay for lives lost from extreme climatic conditions caused by warming from their vehicles’ carbon emissions—technology will continue to produce resource-intensive goods and worsen the burden on the ecosystem, Dasgupta argues.

air pollution( acid rain) caused similar amounts in additional costs for repairs vs gains by industries that created the acid rain.
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300 billion was the number I think...decades ago

so we don't call it that, because we think of collapse as a sudden event, like a building imploding.

On Sunday morning, I was sitting out with my coffee looking affectionately at a SINGLE butterfly in the garden, noticing some small flies floating in the air and feeling lucky they were there, since there are no honeybees any more. It occurred to me that if, 50 years ago, I had learned that there would be no honeybees and almost no butterflies, I would have thought of it as an unbelievable catastrophe. Now we just think of it as normal.

That's just one relatively minor example. I can't even stand to think about the state of the fish in the sea.

Come back here when you can point to wars that take tens of millions of lives, punctuated by worldwide economic collapse, and followed by dictatorships that took even more as a follow-up.
That happened in living memory you know. Nothing remotely like that is happening now.

Between WWI and WWII, we witnessed approximately 75-80 million deaths due to the wars.

Today, we're looking at 100 million excess deaths due to climate change by 2030, and that's just the beginning: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/25/climate-inaction-idINDEE88O0HH20120925

Since climate change, even under the best-case scenarios, will keep getting worse for the rest of the 21st century (if not far longer), how many deaths will we hit by 2040? By 2050? By 2075?

The good thing about wars is that they end in relatively quick terms. No nation can sustain a massive war effort for decades without themselves collapsing in the process. Even the Cold War only lasted for less than 50 years.

With climate change, the damage we've done is ongoing and increasingly self-reinforcing, and will be measured in MILLENNIA. Depending on how these positive feedback loops play out, and how high the temps finally climb, the eventual damage to the planet could be worse than the global nuclear war we all worried about during the Cold War.

I have no real quarrel with that. That is IF things don't change, and IF everything happens as laid out in that report. Complex systems are subject to very wide swings from predicted paths based on very small changes to their initial inputs, so it could be either worse or better than that projection. What I object to is saying, without equivocation, collapse WILL occur because of X, especially in just a few years, when well before any collapse the symptoms in human societies would be far worse than what we're presently seeing.

The failure may seem inevitable in hindsight, but foresight rarely helps to avoid an eventual breakdown. Countermeasures to avoid a given risk may help with respect to that particular risk, but there are simply too many failure points in any large system for them all to be foreseen, analyzed and covered off.

I think a lot of the speculation about near-term collapse is being driven by informed intuition about developing world situation. While the exact failure mechanism is unpredictable, the fact that there will be one is virtually axiomatic.

Here's an excellent short paper on the topic: How Complex Systems Fail.

Failures are inherently unpredictable in cause and in the point of time at which they occur. Additionally, in the consequences they engender. Your posts are all of the flavor "collapse is inevitable", when that document you posted is actually telling you it isn't. System failures <> collapse. Catastrophe <> collapse. Collapse is a different order event, something we came close to in the Great Depression, and again in 2008 with the financial system. For the entirety of human society the Great Depression came about as close as anything ever has to causing actual collapse of human society. For Europe from Germany eastwards starting in 1914, and China starting with the Japanese conquest in the thirties, one can argue pretty persuasively that what happened was in fact collapse, with effects that reverberated around the world.
Look around you today. Nothing like that is happening now. It's possible we're in a pre-1914 moment, but that's one of those things you can only know after the fact. No one can predict it and no one can possibly know how it will turn out in the end.

But you have to look beyond simply politics and economics to see it clearly.

First there are the ecological factors:

» Climate disruption and the couple of dozen positive feedbacks that are already in play;
» Ocean acidification;
» Desertification and deforestation;
» Loss of fresh water aquifers;
» Loss of soil fertility;
» Loss of topsoil;
» Increasing soil and water pollution with chemicals and garbage;
» Accelerating species extinctions on land and in the oceans;
» Increasing human appropriation of the biosphere's Net Primary Productivity: ~50% at the moment;
» Human overshoot of over 50% according to the Global Footprint Network;

» Increasing instability of global financial system;
» Increasingly extended and fragile supply chains;
» Rising fuel and food costs;
» Loss of economic opportunities around the world due to slowing growth;
» Increasing disparity between rich and poor;
» Increasing disenfranchisement of the poor;
» Increasing authoritarianism by governments in order to suppress growing dissent (or the potential for dissent) due to the previous four points.

Number three I already showed is false, with actual data.
Number four is absolutely not true, globally. This is actually a period when more people have risen out of poverty, both absolutely and as a percent of the global population, than any other time, ever.
Number five is completely and utterly untrue. The poor are far more enfranchised now, in both India and China, than they were in the first half of the twentieth century.
In South America, most of the continent is now ruled democratically.
Number seven was far more true in the first half of the twentieth century than now. Mao, Stalin and Hitler are all dead and gone, and the countries they ruled are in various states of better governance now than they were under these dictators. That covers well more than half of humanity. Throw in India and you have three quarters of the world population who's governance is much better than it was then.

The first part, about the ecology, is likely true, but I'm no expert, so I'm wary of agreeing categorically, given that the politics and economics don't show the stresses you say they do. Overstating or simply repeating, in the face of obvious evidence you're wrong, doesn't make me trust that first part.

Food and fuel prices are rising:





On inequality, I tend to side with Piketty.

On disenfranchisement, the effect I'm talking about isn't simply the "right to vote". It's the loss of influence over social policy that happens whenever the control of the levers of policy pass to corporations or centralized authoritarian political organizations. Perhaps "disempowerment" would be a better word - people can be disempowered even with the right to vote, as is happening in the US today. It's also happening in some of Europe, along with most of Asia and the Middle East. This is hard to quantify, but it's showing up everywhere, as far as I can tell.

Regarding creeping authoritarianism, I see this happening even in the USA. I'm surprised that someone who posts on a progressive blog wouldn't have noticed.

The data on the ecological points is easily available, if you care to look.

On commodities:

1 - Oil is the only commodity that over the very long term rises faster than inflation. This probably has to do with the dizzying number of uses it has (besides being burned, it's also used as a lubricant, for cosmetic oil, for asphalt, as a feedstock for fertilizer, in synthetic fibers, for plastics; the list goes on and on).
2 - Food going up faster than inflation just means, as I'm sure you're aware, that people's diets are getting better as they get richer ("842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 17 percent since 1990." - source is the World Food Program). This is intimately related to that World Bank report that worldwide, poverty has declined at a record rate. It would be more surprising if prices hadn't risen when so many people were finally getting enough to eat. When the number of people who are hungry worldwide starts to rise again, you'll have a point. Right now, you're proving that things are getting better, not worse.

The problem is when your reality is influenced by your worldview... rather than the other way around.

Believe it or not.

If he's allowed to continue on the course he has set, it will wind up being another hydrocarbon supply region, with all the nasty outcomes that implies. What he's doing is insane.

The Titanic was having a wonderful time before she hit the iceberg, and the band played on as she sank.

The more complex the system, the more likely a failure will occur and the more redundancy is needed. Living on the hook on a sailboat, this is a huge part of my life. No matter what redundancy measures one installs, no matter how diligent one is with maintenance, no matter how good a sailor one is and how well informed as to weather and sea conditions, shit can and will still happen. And when it does, it invariably comes in threes.

So, I think the key is to keep things as simple as possible, rather than bolstering existing systems with even more systems. More shit to go wrong. I recently spent some time traveling through rural Mexico. I stayed with subsistence farmers in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Campeche, who will hardly feel a blip if and when the global economy collapses. Their redundancy consists of calves, eggs and seedlings. They are rich, yet have no money.

That's a strawman.

The group whose conclusion in the latest summit was that all elites and corporations must strive to paint a rosier picture of global as well as local economic, political, and environmental conditions to appease the ever restless underlings. The underlings have the silly idea that they have no future... oh posh.... we must help them feel that things are better for them than they think they are. This will preserve the power core we so thoroughly enjoy and ruthlessly desire.

The desire to downplay what's going on is present at every level of society - even here.