"The End Of Suburbia" - Peak Oil AKA We're All Going To Die

[kyser_soze]

I was working in a Dickensian supermarket

Is that a theme supermarket? Like, are there 'Pepys Theme' or 'Elizabethan' Supermarkets?

I watched Earthquake 10.5 last night. Christ it was shite, except for the bits where Seattle, SF and LA all fell into big holes in the ground.

Sorry for the minor derail. We are, indeed, all going to die.

Yeah, but we're all gonna die anyway. I'd sooner it be something interesting and exciting like seeing London flood than living out final days piss and shit all over the place, drooling and unable to recognise my own genitals.

 

[untethered]

Yeah, but we're all gonna die anyway. I'd sooner it be something interesting and exciting like seeing London flood than living out final days piss and shit all over the place, drooling and unable to recognise my own genitals.

Oh dear. Are you having one of your glass-half-empty days?

 

[kyser_soze]

...nah, having a 'suddenly not got any work to do' days

 

[untethered]

...nah, having a 'suddenly not got any work to do' days

In my experience, the more time you spend here the more of those days you have.

You strike me more as one of those "technology and progress will take care of all the problems" people, or have I got you wrong?

 

[kyser_soze]

Varies - I think that ultimately technology will be what pulls us out of the shit because that's it's functional role in human culture - from working out how to control fire and improve hunting results using tools, technology and it's ability to help Hom Sap place itself apart from the environment and exert a degree of control over our interaction with it. I'm not completely reliant on it and don't think it's an automatic process, but ultimately yeah, it will be tech of some kind (whether that's high or low) that preserves the human species in the next 2-3 centuries.

 

[untethered]

In outline, that's pretty much how I think.

I'd regard myself as an environmentalist in the sense that the problems we face are critical and aren't going to sort themselves out based on the current direction of things. But at the same time I'm entirely appalled by the pessimism and misanthropy of most in the "green" movement.

 

[Crispy]

We'll fall a long way before we pull ourselves back up

 

[kyser_soze]

Yeah, but hey, shit happens.

 

[shoddysolutions]

Technology will not save us IMO.

The answer lies in our learning to live in harmony with our environment and with each other. Sounds like hippy dippy bullshit but if we can't learn to do it, we're fucked.

 

[kyser_soze]

Ummm, shoddy, what do you think a plough is? Or a spear? Or a flint axe? The Wheel? A potters kiln?

They are all technology. Technology is one of the prime movers in human social development. So whether it's AI and nano that do the job by removing the management side of things from human responsibility, or going back to ploughs and flint, we'll still be using technology and engineering to increase our control over the way we interact with nature.

All that 'harmony with the environment's stuff still requires technology to maintain any kind of recognisably human activity and behaviours.

 

[shoddysolutions]

Ummm, shoddy, what do you think a plough is? Or a spear? Or a flint axe? The Wheel? A potters kiln?.

I see what you mean, I think. Let me rephrase what i said: "I don't think new technology will save us"

What we are probably going to see, over time, is a reversal of globalisation, smaller, more sustainable communities and a necessary return to small-scale, local, labour-intensive forms of agriculture. The consumer society we are currently living in is history and in a couple of hundred years people will look back and either think of it as a golden age of 'progress' or just 'what the fuck?'

 

[kyser_soze]

So what you think is going to happen is depopulation followed by some kind of return to the middle ages?

Don't see it myself. The existing mode of consumerism won't last, but short of catastrphic depopulation in the West, I don't see a return to the swords and ploughshare types society you do. Something of a mixture of a lot of what we have now (don't forget, there are ways to sustain elements of our modern lives, just not the way we live them now) and what you suggest is, IMO, most likely.

Altho long term tech will provide the means to liberate ourselves from the contraints the environment imposes on us

 

[Bernie Gunther]

It puzzles me that people so often characterise any movement towards communities that could plausibly be sustainable as 'a return to the middle ages' as if one automatically gets jousting and the black death along with the PV panels and source-separating toilets. Why does that happen do you think?

 

[Crispy]

It puzzles me that people so often characterise any movement towards communities that could plausibly be sustainable as 'a return to the middle ages' as if one automatically gets jousting and the black death along with the PV panels and source-separating toilets. Why does that happen do you think?

Because most people in Western cultures view progress in material terms. Therefore any curtailment of that exessive materialism is seen as retrogressive.

 

[bluestreak]

It puzzles me that people so often characterise any movement towards communities that could plausibly be sustainable as 'a return to the middle ages' as if one automatically gets jousting and the black death along with the PV panels and source-separating toilets. Why does that happen do you think?

i've often wondered it myself. i think they're trying to illustrate something.

 

[kyser_soze]

It puzzles me that people so often characterise any movement towards communities that could plausibly be sustainable as 'a return to the middle ages' as if one automatically gets jousting and the black death along with the PV panels and source-separating toilets. Why does that happen do you think?

Sorry, turn of phrase more than anything else, altho I'd prefer it if people were clearer when they refer to 'agri intenisive self sustaining communities' they specified whether they are neo-prim types or 'Hey, this isn't too bad - we've still got t'interweb and decent loos and TV'.

I don't think gloabalisation will be reversed either, just transform into a different form - why does everyone simply equate it with economics?

 

[salaryman]

I didn't see the show (anyone got a torrent for it?) but I finished this astonishingly good book last week:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0865714827?v=glance

Everyone should read this book. It paints a rather gloomy picture of the future, but the author does stress that it doesn't have to be this way. It's late, but not *too* late. However, given everything he describes it's fairly clear that no government is going to do a single iota to actually help - in fact, they do the opposite!

Basically, we're all going to be fcked in the next 30 years and there isn't anything we can do about it other than learning permaculture and moving to a self-sustaining commune in the middle of Wales

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The problem being of course, there aren't all that many eco-village communes in mid wales for e.g. the entire population of greater london to move to.

Here's an online book that's I think offers a fairly helpful perspective on this.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/contents.html

 

[shoddysolutions]

I don't think gloabalisation will be reversed either

Import costs will skyrocket because of the scarcity of fuel, making local produce the cheaper option.

I'm not advocating a return to the Middle Ages. I think in the future we will be best served by high density, urban communities utilising the best of what we already have in terms of mass transit systems, local markets etc. with a high degree of interdependency.

The 'rural idyll' is just as much of a myth as suburbia IMO.

 

[kyser_soze]

Doesn't matter - gloabalisation is as much about exchange of ideas and culture as it is about import/export of goods and services! Plus you're ignoring the possibilities offered by the next generations of ships etc - for example the re-introduction of sails onto diesel powered supertankers which could save up to 2/3 fuel consumption.

I think the main social effect will be to slow things down to a more human/humane pace of change and development.

 

[shoddysolutions]

I didn't see the show

It wasn't on TV and it's not likely to be. Fior some reason the mainstream media seem to be a little slow in picking up on this issue and outside of a few interested politicians (michael meacher for example) political interest is zero.

 

[shoddysolutions]

Doesn't matter - gloabalisation is as much about exchange of ideas and culture as it is about import/export of goods and services!

You're not getting it. The instantaneous exchange of ideas and information and global travel that we have got used to will no longer exist! There will not be sufficient fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy to power planes for everyone, produce microchips for everyone etc etc. We are talking about a radical rethink of everything we know and take for granted.

The end of the oil and gas era will hopefully move us towards a fairer world, where resources are more equally distributed. For those of us living in highly industrialised, Western economies it will mean a hell of a lot of sacrifice.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I'm a bit sceptical about the picture you're painting there shoddysolutions.

What's the impact of peak oil likely to be? My guess is that inexorably rising oil prices hits us in the form of something like a really long, horrible economic depression. This has the impact of making us less wealthy relative to what we've become used to, but it's not an instant plunge into barbarism. The tough part is that because we're getting less and less wealthy, we have less ability to mitigate the situation, because we have less resources to invest in building solutions. So the transitional period is key. If we mess that up, and fail to invest our wealth in sustainability while we're still relatively well-off, then we're going to be in serious trouble.

We're still in considerably better shape in the UK than many other places though. We'd still have way more resources, technical know-how and wealth at our disposal than most of the places that will be worst hit. Our heavy glacial soils haven't been particularly badly messed up compared to those of other nations. We've got a decent amount of rainfall, although climate change is likely to mean drier summers and wetter winters. We've got quite a large population, but it's not so large that we couldn't possibly feed it, assuming we took the appropriate measures. We've still got the skeleton of pre-industrial settlement patterns. Outside a few shithole areas, most people still have access to shops within walking distance and actual farmland within cycling distance. We're still going to be a lot better off than people in places that are fundamentally uninhabitable without lots of oil energy, like most places in the US south west for example or which are simply too financially poor to cope with the consequences, like places too numerous to list in the developing world.

 

[kyser_soze]

Just to add to BGs comments as well...we still have the benefit of Europe's accident of geography - one of the reasons opur soecieties developed the way they did at the pace is because Europe is a pretty flat, settled place with lots of good soil, as well as good geography for transport - if you look at a map, it's the America's and Australaisia that are the two true 'Islands' in the world - the Eurasian landmass consitutes the vast bulk of land and population on the planet!

The instantaneous exchange of ideas and information and global travel

What exactly is going to stop things like the telecoms grid existing? What is going to stop peope building ships or breeding horses to travel with?

 

[joeds]

Read these sites

I've spent the last 3 years researching this issue as deeply as I can. If you want to understand the science of what's coming check out http://dieoff.org

another good site is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

one looking at solutions is http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php

The British government was briefed pretty thoroughly about this on july the 7th 1999 http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/commons.htm

It's been common knowledge in some circles since the 1970s due to the Club of Rome report "Limits to Growth"

I expect we'll begin to see major infrastructure failures in the west within the next year or two. Globally the collapse is already in progress at the periphery (See Zimbabwe North Korea etc)

It's a case now of get self sufficient or die. The reason we hear nothing about this on the main stream media and why our government is doing nothing but get authoritarian is because this event means the end of global capitalism and industrial civilisation and they not only don't want to acknowledge reality but they will kill anyone who tries to get them to come out of La La land and actually do something realistic about the situation.

 

[jæd]

I expect we'll begin to see major infrastructure failures in the west within the next year or two. Globally the collapse is already in progress at the periphery (See Zimbabwe North Korea etc)

I'd think those two regimes are collapsing more because dictators don't work...

It's a case now of get self sufficient or die. The reason we hear nothing about this on the main stream media and why our government is doing nothing but get authoritarian is because this event means the end of global capitalism and industrial civilisation and they not only don't want to acknowledge reality but they will kill anyone who tries to get them to come out of La La land and actually do something realistic about the situation.

Yaay...! Another consiparloon theory...!

 

[shoddysolutions]

The key things recommended are


(1) Clear your debts.


(2) Make sure you are multi-skilled to have a chance of employment when the economy starts to buckle.


(3) Have emergency rations on hand in case of a sudden oil shock disrupting oil supplies (remember the fuel protests of 2000?) and also in case of things like Bird Flu – you do not know what could happen.


(4) Begin living as ‘green’ a life as you can as that is basically the low-carbon society we’ll be moving towards. Change your electricity supplier to ecotricity, juice or another green electricity provider. Remember the 3 'Rs' - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. In that order.


(5) If necessary begin to change your expectations – we cannot expect a lifestyle as affluent in 2025 as in 2005.


(6) If you are in your 20s or maybe your 30s it might be worth considering cancelling your pension plan.


(7) Begin forming strong social bonds with friends and family. Oil has allowed us to become a very atomised society – reliance on friends and family will be increasingly important in the years ahead.


(8) If you can, hook your house up with electricity micro-generation, insulate your house and learn gardening!


(9) If you have not had children you will need to weigh up the gamble on whether it will be a benefit or a burden to you.


(10) ENJOY YOURSELF! The party is almost over but it isn’t yet. We live in one of the most exciting times in human history, I suggest you enjoy it!

From www.powerswitch.co.uk

Yay! I was looking for an excuse to cancel my pension!

 

[Agent Sparrow]

It wasn't on TV, but you can get it on DVD.

Hmmm, I ordered this before Xmas and it never turned up...

 

[shoddysolutions]

Hmmm, I ordered this before Xmas and it never turned up...

That's because they don't wnat you to see it - it's a kkkonspira$$y i tells ya!

 

[aurora green]

Must look out for this. Haven't heard of it before.