Fumbling Towards Collapse

“So, the real issue hidden in plain sight is how America — indeed all the so-called “developed” nations — are going to navigate to a stepped-down mode of living, without slip-sliding all the way into a dark age, or something worse.”

My hypothesis is that The Powers That Shouldn’t Be have decided on a course of wholesale depopulation to solve this problem. Because they are dedicated Marxists, and because Marxism will always result in economic failure, growing the pie is impossibly problematic within their ideology, so instead they inevitably will work to reduce the number of pie slice recipients. Get rid of the vast majority of retirees and the social security crisis is easily solved. Get rid of the unhealthy and infirm and the health care problem goes away. Environmental problems… kill a few billion useless eaters and you’ve saved the planet. Falling energy-return-on-energy-investment problem? Again knock off a few billion useless eaters and problem solved.

The institutional promotion of chaos and instability, inflaming the masses to be at each others throats, civil unrest leading to civil war. Rising international tensions with the threat of WWIII looming on the not too distant horizon are all indications of the future they have planned for us. Now you have Bill Gates out there “predicting” a massive pandemic. The economic collapse is a mathematical certainty, not a question of if, but when. When that house of cards falls in on itself it will be the spark that ignites the most epic conflagrations in the history of mankind. When the smoke finally clears it is not hard to imagine the human population on the planet Earth being the half billion that TPTB have publicly stated is their ideal goal.

Mix a cocktail, pop some popcorn and sit back and watch the fireworks right up until the moment that they start landing on your front porch. If you are inclined toward spirituality you may want to put that house in order. I really feel sorry for the kids that will suffer through this coming shit storm.

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/02/18/illegal-immigrants-detained-nyc-include-gang-member-rapists-sex-offenders/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

Jim Kunstler wrote: Krugman actually knows zip about what afflicts us in the present disposition of things, namely the falling energy-return-on-energy-investment in the oil industry>>>

I agree he has the same blind spot as almost all of today’s economists do. Nevertheless, it is hard, if even possible, to disentangle the effects of falling EROEI from the effects of rising consumer indebtedness. Household debt is near the levels that preceded the Great Recession, and with wage growth anemic, the spenders who drive GDP growth are getting tapped out. Further, the Baby Boom’s bigger earners (and spenders) with desk jobs, who tend to marry, reproduce, send their kids to college, and retire at later ages than their less well-heeled peers, are finally hitting the time in the lives where they begin to rein in their spending and think more about retirement.

But back to EROEI: I think the EROEI of oil is less important that the EROEI of all energy consumed. In a sense, oil can be “subsidized” by other, higher return energy sources for a while, although I do not disagree that it is an economic drag.

I also think peak oilers have laid too much stress on the eventual day when the EROEI of oil falls all the way to one–1 barrel out for 1 barrel in. We need to look at the EROEI of the total energy mix, and we need to focus on a much higher number. Most of the research in this area has been done by Charles Hall (by the way, he has a good lecture on youtube), and apparently the critical number for total energy is somewhere around 11. Below this approximate level, life as we know it will be over.

Still, I do agree that falling supplies of transport fuel will create a crisis in its own right. I think America’s economic center of gravity will then begin to shift towards areas with the cheapest transportation costs, especially the navigable stretches of the vast Mississippi River valley complex, and the intracoastal waterway that stretches from Corpus Christie to Chesapeake Bay.
And maybe that canal to connect the Mississippi with the Great Lakes will finally get dug. The project was killed in the 19th century because the railroads opposed it, for obvious reasons. Water transport is always cheaper than land transport, but the gap will grow as the price of oil rises inexorably.

Although there has been a modest increase in crude and condensate production (and a big increase in NGL production, although they are just an extender, not a one-for-one substitute for gasoline and diesel), the world has basically been on a crude (I can’t resist the pun) plateau since 2005, and the math says the longer the plateau, the steeper the fall off on the other side.

There are three giant oil producers in the world today. One is Saudi Arabia, which can’t find new fields and keeps production up in its giant main field, Ghawar, by pumping in water to float the oil on top of it–an ominous sign.

Another is Russia, which has been reworking Soviet era fields, resorting to horizontal drilling, and drilling for more oil in its difficult Arctic regions.

Finally, there is the USA, whose oil industry has been revived by costly hydrofracking technology (which was developed and demonstrated experimentally way back in the 1960’s) among shale rock formations. Those experts whose livelihoods do not depend on employment by the drillers say this area of production will go into decline early in the 2020’s.

When any one of these three giant producers clearly “rolls over,” we will likely be back to the same spiking oil prices that we saw in the 2006-2008 period, and major price spikes in oil have always triggered recessions in the past. We should also remember that the spike that climaxed in 2008 also drove up the prices of other energy sources at the same time.

At the time of the OPEC-engineered crisis in the early seventies, we already had the discoveries in the North Sea, the Alaska north slope, and western Siberia in the USSR, and we already had the technology to develop them. It was just a matter of investing the capital and, presto, within a decade, global oil supplies were abundant again. This time there are no giant fields just waiting to be exploited.

I don’t rule out the hope that some miracle-like breakthrough in nuclear power might save our electricity based industrial system (and I really hope it does), but, once made, it would take decades to fully deploy; further, electric batteries will not replace oil for tractor-trailers or planes, which will continue to need carbon-based fuel to pull their heavy loads; and building enough batteries for all our passenger cars will soon lead to bottlenecks in other critical materials, which already require increasing amounts of costly energy to mine as their concentration in the ground becomes ever more dilute.

And although I think Mr. Kunstler is on the Man-made Global Warming True Believer bandwagon, a position I regard as both deluded and wildly optimistic, my own worries are about how our modern infrastructure will hold up under a return of Little Ice Age conditions, which I think are as imminent as our fall off the oil plateau. I can’t help but notice from time to time how relatively minor extremes in weather events collapse roofs, wash out roads, burst water mains, or cause other, fairly serious disruptions to modern life. Everything built since 1870 seems to be built for the climate conditions of the post-1870 period and I worry how it will hold up to a return to the conditions that generally prevailed from 1300 to 1870, roughly. And coming at the same time as a bona fide energy crisis and a global debt crisis and an aging crisis in the developed world (and even in some poorer countries), the total effect will be without analog in the historical record.

I don’t even think about the less likely (in the near future) repeat of a Younger Dryas-like event. We can harden our grid against an EMP attack or a Carrington Event, we can invest in replacement transformers in the event of a low-tech terrorist attack on multiple major transformers at once–we have not taken these precautions, but at least they are possible–but a Dryas-like event would just be “lights out” for civilization outside the tropics, and the tropical countries might be hard-pressed to cope with their less severe climatic changes (droughts and floods, followed by famines, epidemics, and uprisings) with the rest of the world effectively “gone.” But that is probably some generations away yet. Probably. Living near the end of an interglacial can make a fellow gloomy at times.

Fragility times change equals trouble.