Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[PixyMisa]

No it's not http://countercurrents.org/ananda250410.htm

Yes it is. That page says: We're going to lie. Here is the lie. Here is why we lied. Here is how we lied. Here is the truth, but ignore that bit and concentrate on the lie.

If you don't get from that the point that it's a lie, then you really need to work on your reading comprehension.

Good God, they even present the lie and the truth in pictures, and you still don't get it!

 

[TFian]

Yes it is. That page says: We're going to lie. Here is the lie. Here is why we lied. Here is how we lied. Here is the truth, but ignore that bit and concentrate on the lie.

If you don't get from that the point that it's a lie, then you really need to work on your reading comprehension.

Good God, they even present the lie and the truth in pictures, and you still don't get it!

What the hell are you talking about?

Here's what it says "When it comes to discretionary spending, Congress gives 58% to the military. Here are US budget charts for the years 2009 and 2010, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP)::"

 

[excaza]

Discretionary spending. This is not the entire US budget. It's less than half. DoD spending is about 20% of the federal budget, not 57%.

Honestly...

 

[PixyMisa]

What the hell are you talking about?

Here's what it says "When it comes to discretionary spending, Congress gives 58% to the military. Here are US budget charts for the years 2009 and 2010, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP)::"

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9826/usbudget2.jpg

Right. So saying that it's 58% of the budget is what we call a lie. The true figure is 21%.

If I said I was 17 feet tall, that would be an equally accurate statement of fact.

 

[TFian]

Discretionary spending. This is not the entire US budget. It's less than half. DoD spending is about 20% of the federal budget, not 57%.

Honestly...

21% actually, but yes, I know it isn't 58% of the total budget, I don't think anyone was making that claim.

 

[PixyMisa]

You mean, apart from McPherson's article you just linked to?

As an aside, how long do you think we can maintain a military and a functioning industrial economy if we keep spending 58% of our budget on the former?

He's lying, or he's an idiot.

 

[TFian]

You mean, apart from McPherson's article you just linked to?


He's lying, or he's an idiot.

I'm thinking it's a typo on his end, or a simple mistake.

 

[excaza]

Of course, he couldn't just be wrong. Or purposely doing it for shock value.

 

[TFian]

Of course, he couldn't just be wrong.

A mistake would mean he's wrong...

 

[excaza]

But this is your god, gods don't make mistakes.

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm thinking it's a typo on his end, or a simple mistake.

Okay, let's try this:

Further, the industrial economy is underlain by the assumption of growth: The industrial economy grows or it dies.

This is categorically untrue. A recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative economic growth. Recessions happen all the time, all over the world. How many times has the industrial economy collapsed?

Hint: Zero.

Japan - pretty obviously an industrial economy - has been in a continued deflationary recession for twenty years, since the asset bubble burst. Has the Japanse industrial economy collapsed?

Hint: No.

McPherson is economically illiterate.

We don't like recessions. We don't like deflation, either. But they are not intrinsically catastrophic, as McPherson claims.

 

[TFian]

But this is your god, gods don't make mistakes.

But he's not.

We're not even talking the Grand Archdruid, which isn't my "god" either.

 

[PixyMisa]

Actually, that kind of proves my point. With all of recorded history (and prehistory) to draw upon, there's one recorded example of a society collapsing due to resource scarcity -- Easter Island.

Actually, I just now watched a BBC documentary on the Easter Island collapse. Checked the facts online and it seems to hold up pretty well.

While it's true that they did cut down every last tree on the island, probably in a fit of religious idiocy - more trees were used in the construction of their statues than in everything else they did put together - their civilisation actually recovered and was still holding together, if somewhat smaller and poorer, when the Dutch arrived a hundred or so years later.

What happened later was worse: Between a third and a half of the population was abducted by Peruvian slavers. Something like 99% of them were worked to death in the mines or died of disease, and when the remaining handful were returned after international protest (the behaviour of the Peruvians was considered barbaric even then) they brought back smallpox. A Christian missionary arrived around that time and converted the population to Catholicism and tuberculosis, which killed a quarter of the remaining population by the time he died of it himself.

Then the French arrived. They killed half the remaining population; the missionaries (doing some good for a change) evacuated half the survivors, then the French killed half of those who remained.

At some point they also caught syphilis, which rarely improves matters.

Then the English arrived, and they... Actually did what they could to salvage the situation, though by that time the native population was perhaps 1% of what it had been at its peak and the culture was all but destroyed.

Between 1862 and 1877, 97% of the island's population was abducted, killed, or evacuated to Polynesia.

So, lessons we can learn from Easter Island:

• If you're going to take up competitive ancestor worship, compete in something abstract, like haiku reading, rather than building 80-ton statues to commemorate every minor personage.
• If you're living on a tiny island a thousand miles from anywhere else, and there's exactly one freaking tree left on the island, post a 24-hour guard and kill anyone who even looks at it funny. Actually, try to do this while there are still enough trees left to pollinate each other.
• If the Peruvians or French show up at your door, shoot them.
• If it's not on, it's not on.

 

[Dancing David]

Here

So he didn't say the petroleum based infrastructure wil collapse by 2013, you did.

 

[Dancing David]

The pre-Columbian buildings constructed by the Pueblo People (aka Anasazi, to whom drkitten referred) were, until the 19th century, the largest buildings in North America. That culture began its decline before European diseases were brought to the Americas.

The decline of the Chaco culture coincided with a multi-decade drought during the 1100s. Mesa Verde was abandoned circa 1275, leaving a major clifftop temple only partially completed; drought is one of the leading hypotheses for that abandonment. Canyon de Chelly appears to have been abandoned, for reasons unknown, before contact with Europeans; the area was later settled by Navajo, who referred to the original inhabitants as "Anasazi". Similar statements can be made about Hovenweep, "Aztec" Ruins, Bandelier, et cetera. (Acoma (Sky City) was an exception, and may be the oldest continuously inhabited town within the United States; it was settled during the 11th century.)

Summary: Explanations for the decline of ancient Puebloan culture within the Four Corners area remain controversial and may be complex, but droughts and concomitant exhaustion of resources are leading contenders.

BTW: Jared Diamond may be wrong about many things, but he may also be right about many things. He is not a lunatic.

I was just making on off comment, not meant to discuss the fall of the sothwestern societies.

The measles and small pox did cause the collapse of many native societies.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I was just making on off comment, not meant to discuss the fall of the sothwestern societies.

Okay. Their relevance to this thread is that droughts, climate change, and resource exhaustion are believed to have contributed to their pre-Columbian decline.

It's worth mentioning that their regional decline covered centuries, with local declines often taking decades, unlike the highways-empty-by-2013 decline that TFian has predicted for the United States.

I wrote myself a note to bump this thread in 2013 (provided the Internet survives until then).

The measles and small pox did cause the collapse of many native societies.

Agreed.

 

[TFian]

So he didn't say the petroleum based infrastructure wil collapse by 2013, you did.

Here

So how do we go from this list of economic issues to the notion of economic collapse? I’ve moved from imperialist city educator to economic doomer rural sharecropper in one (damned difficult) step. This move was driven by many factors, including the profound (and profoundly late) realization that we live immorally, buying and selling nature’s bounty at an imperialist whim. Another contributing factor was my strongly held suspicion that we’re headed for a collapse of the industrial economy by the end of 2012. If the industrial age does not end soon, we’re headed for the complete absence of habitat for humans on Earth. Obviously, there is plenty of disagreement with me on both points, and I’ve been asked to make my case. What tea leaves do I read?

I restrict this essay to economic collapse, thus leaving the issue of environmental collapse to previous posts (and perhaps future ones). The data on collapse are clearer than the rest of my guides, so I’ll start with them.

The data interact with other elements: History indicates 10 of 11 recessions since World War II and all 6 recessions since 1972 were preceded by a spike in the price of oil. The lifeblood of civilization, and its price, dictates the direction of the industrial economy. At some point, the priand more ce of oil becomes too great to maintain the industrial economy. In fact, a per-barrel price of $147.27 nearly brought the industrial economy grinding to a halt. Only massive, and massively illegal, intervention by the executive branch of the U.S. government kept the lights on in your grid-tied house, the trucks coming to the grocery store, and water coming out the taps. These actions have been written about widely. A quick search on “plunge protection team” is a nice starting point, although the issue is far broader than even omniscient Google reveals

My interpretation and synthesis of these many essays and the data on which they rely suggests the industrial age is near its terminus. How near? Recognizing the difficulty of predictions, and the animus they elicit, I’ll go out on the often-wrong limb of forecast and give us a 99% chance of “lights out in the empire” by 21 December 2012. And I didn’t even look at my Mayan calendar.

Source http://guymcpherson.com/2010/04/surveying-the-field-and-charting-a-course/ Read more there. Seems I was wrong, he said 2012, though very near 2013.

 

[PixyMisa]

Let's take a look at that, shall we?

The U.S. national debt rises every day, and it already exceeds the value of all currency ever produced and all gold ever mined.

A sure sign of economic illiteracy. Printed banknotes are no indicator of the wealth of a society, and nor is gold; it has little intrinsic value apart from being a good conductor and resisting corrosion.

There is simply no connection between the amount of money printed and the amount of gold held by the US and its national debt. The numbers do not connect.

If the notion of a Soviet-style default doesn’t give you pause, consider still-rising foreclosure rates, still-falling home prices, massive unemployment, financial bankruptcy at all levels of government, ballooning entitlement programs, and collapsing pension programs. This is merely the short list of economic issues we face. Needless to say, every single one of them is a profound surprise to the vast majority of neoclassical economists, few of whom saw this economic recession coming (as if passing the world oil peak didn’t provide sufficient warning, well in advance).

This is better, except that there is no correlation between oil production and any of these problems.

What we have is (a) long-term and ill-advised government manipulation of the mortgage market, (b) dismal state financial planning and (c) unfunded entitlement programs.

People have been sounding the alarm about (b) and (c) for years; probably decades. People twigged to (a) years ago as well, but legislation to bring it under control failed to pass Congress.

Now, how do we know that these are not related to oil?

Because they are problems of the United States.

Are these happening in Australia or Canada? Nope. Japan or Germany? No, though Japan has its own problems. These are all oil-based economies; they all suffered the same oil shock; none of them had the same problems as the US.

These problems are the result of idiotic financial policies, not of resource shortages.

At some point, the price of oil becomes too great to maintain the industrial economy.

The article he links to is a solid analysis of the correlation between oil shicks and recessions.

Unfortunately for McPherson, it doesn't support his assertion in any way whatsoever. Indeed, it says the opposite: That as oil prices increase, consumers adjust. Adjust their spending habits, adjust their choice of vehicles, adjust their travel plans. In fact, they over-adjust, so that the economy slows and the price of oil falls again. That's why (at least, it's a major reason why) there's a sawtooth wave overlaid on the generally rising price of oil.

Only massive, and massively illegal, intervention by the executive branch of the U.S. government kept the lights on in your grid-tied house, the trucks coming to the grocery store, and water coming out the taps. These actions have been written about widely.

Written about widely, but he cites nothing whatsoever. Economic illiterate and conspiracy loon.

In addition to the near-term price of oil, our empire is threatened by the ever-tightening grip of globalization, which ensures that economic collapse in any of the world’s large economies will lead, domino-like, to economic collapse throughout the industrialized world. This grip was allowed and facilitated by cheap oil, and it’s no coincidence that the end of the cheap-oil era resulted in financial crises throughout the civilized world. Today, Greece is the word. But Portugal, Spain, and Japan hover on the brink (Japan is the world’s second-largest economy).

Again, this is pure economic illiteracy. Oil has nothing to do with the financial problems in Greece. Rather, they are due to the Greek government borrowing enormous amounts of money at low interest rates and then flushing all the paperwork down the toilet. They used this money to run the country, with the end result that no-one in Greece works for a living any more.

Spain and Portugal are in a similar situation - low worker productivity compounded by incompetent governments - but not nearly so pronounced as Greece.

Japan is different; they are contending with the fallout from the late 80's asset bubble and with a demographic crisis - the birth rate is well below the replacement level. The latter problem makes it hard to simply grow out of the former, but Japan's economy, though not thriving, is stable.

It's unmitigated tripe.

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm going to go back to one of your earlier posts too.

I think by 2011, we'll see a defined crash of the united states economy.

Define "crash".

Double-dip recession? Depression? Runaway inflation - or deflation?

When you say "by" 2011, I take it you mean by the end of 2011, not by the beginning.

A double-dip recession is certainly still a possibility for the US, though you have to remember that countries like Canada and Australia haven't had a recession at all; the current US recession is really largely local. The global financial crisis was global, but it was also short-lived; countries with sound fundamentals recovered rapidly. Countries with less sound fundamentals, or less sound responses, did less well.

By 2012, oil will have peaked to the point where there's not enough for the car culture left.

That is just extraordinary. You do realise that there is absolutely no physical or economic reason for this to happen? Oil production is simply not diminishing that fast, and it's sufficiently widespread that no one or two or three local surprises will change that.

Current predictions are for an oversupply situation to continue through 2015. After that, we'll likely see prices on the rise again.

By 2013, empty freeways.

By 2013. Riiiight.

How? Where did all the oil go? Where did it go? It's there right now. It's not going to run out by 2013; that's impossible. Where did it go?

What do you think of TheOilDrum and EnergyBulletin?

They have as much understanding of economic theory as a a dead armadillo on a West Texas highway.

 

[drkitten]

Because they were stuck on an island.

And because they didn't have the necessary technology to solve the "stuck on an island" problem.

As I said earlier, no iron-working civilization with more than 10,000 people has ever collapsed due to resource starvation. Stuck on an island or not.