ALL IN DENIAL
Before we start today’s usual waste of time, a thank you to Rawles at www.survivalblog.com for mentioning my site. I’m not positive of his daily readers, so let’s call it 30,000. If one percent, or 300, click on over and of that number one percent aren’t offended or shocked that some problems can actually be solved with almost no money, I’ve just gained another three loyal minions! I’ll go from 1,200 to 1,203! Be jealous, Creekmore ( we’ll forget for a second that he has more readers than me anyway ). The only problem with it was that I don’t think I ever quoted the book he credited me with. Oh, well. My gain.
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You simply must earmark http://americanenergycrisis.blogspot.com/ as another daily read. This is the guy that keeps me up to date on oil import declines ( he also covers other good stuff ). Of course, he is WAYYYYYY overly optimistic, continually telling us not to panic, all is well, we will adjust to oil declines peacefully ( ignoring that we are all stuck in the suburbs without fuel looking at infertile soil and no way to pump water, I guess it could all work out without a die-off ). He would include me in the Doomers he scoffs at. I would counter that most doomers are pussies and are themselves way too optimistic. I still love his site. And he has promised that over the next few weeks to cover whether oil declines are permanent or not. Important stuff. I bring this up as an important heads up, but also to get to today’s article. We are all in denial, every single one of us. Including myself. As I have said before, if I were as panicked as I sound, I would not be living several miles out of town and working everyday. I would find the most inaccessible lot of land I could find and come into town once a month. But I worry about being in jail during the collapse, so I keep paying Satan’s Little Helper her blood money. So I am in a form of denial, hoping that things stay together for just a few more years.
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In the meantime, I’m paying on land too close to town. Yes, I tell myself it is just paying rent so I can live cheaply closer to work. It isn’t actually an investment. But, in my more honest moments, I wonder if I’ll really leave once I no longer need a full time job. It may sound like I live primitively, yet I worry I’m still too attached to some creature comforts. Like refrigerated meats or cell phone service or Internet connections. Lucky for you, because if I was truly out in the boonies I wouldn’t have a way to share my large gleaming nuggets of wisdom with you. I make under a hundred bucks a month for these efforts, and I think the satellite connection is around $60. No way is that worth it. I can’t complain, most of my minions are really generous. For the amount of readers I have, what I make is great. But not enough to pay too much in connection fees. So, in order to pay child support and to write my way out of a mental breakdown ( these ranting are somewhat therapeutic ) I deny the end is as close as it could be. The only thing I have done with my preparations is increase my odds of surviving marginally. Not enough, because I am convinced that a die-off is in the works. Oil decreases mean the Green Revolution will die. Which will take down all our surplus population. And there isn’t enough fertile soil left to feed even a fraction of those mouths organically. Those chronicling the oil declines forget how much more food petroleum allows us to grow. Well, they are in denial also.
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You live in the city? Shop at the supermarket? Have a mortgage? Need a good paying job? In denial. All of it is going to end. If you are looking at history to prop up your soft landing theory, you need to stop going back at about the start of the Gunpowder Revolution. Before that, surplus population died off on a regular basis ( after that, colonialism allowed the west a surplus ). And the last huge die-off was the Roman Empire ( talking about soil infertility and energy declines, not about disease in and of itself ). The problem was that the die off was so complete and social break down so vast, little to no records survive to convince us of this. Leaving plenty of room for denial. I’m not pointing fingers and chastising you, because I’m only marginally less guilty. We almost are forced into denial if we have any hope of functioning in the money economy. Which is the only way we are allowed to live. I’ll try to come up with some strategies to soften this dependency. We’ll see.
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11 comments:
Check out this weeks article at
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
for a historical argument on small political units. Not relivant to todays article here, but to the one a day or two ago.
Jim,
One thing that was between the the carbon fuel glut of the last 200 plus years and the fall of theRoman Empire was the string of Plagues. And do not that a very good case can be made that the the ships that the imports for the "good life" in Europe is that brought the fleas with the plaque.
Panhandletex
well i've being living out in the sticks before the 'white flight' thingy started happening here...
believe it or not, once one of the local farmers got 'shouted down' at one of those town meetings by those "educated pukes": "we don't need farms, we can buy our food at the store"...
idot asses everywhere....
It's a tough mental balance,isn't it James? In order to function, denial is necessary. Even good. Allows us to relax, as the ship fills with water and sinks.
The Greer, the Archdruid, is a REAL soft landing guy. He talks about how terrible the slow collapse, will be, but it's still slow in his mind. Plenty of time to adapt and whine about collapse.
A fast shock is a real possibility, but nobody knows the likelihood....
One of the benefits of Europe's population boom was the era of the Renaissance. They figured out time (by way of the clock), how to harvest more food on less land, and they regained some of the lost knowledge they had lost during the dark ages especially in the are of medicine (via some of the early muslims). Being able to harvest more food, allowed for a population boom, which fits nicely into your thoughts on surplus population. Much of these events also dove tailed nicely with the warming of the Atlantic sea currents, which keep Europe relatively warm considering their latitude.
Some of the reasons the Europeans went into the dark ages were due to a mini ice age, social upheaval, lack of food (big time population die off as you have warned)and plagues.
I wouldn't worry about Creekmore. He's too busy writing his book to blog these days.
Just to demonstrate that I'm not the optimistic fool that James might think, here's a copy of a comment I left recently on the American Energy Crisis blog, where I seem to be the resident doomer. Nobody really ever engages the arguments, though:
Greg, you like to tweak the "doomers", I notice. Keep in mind that very few people call themselves doomers, but it is used as a pejorative term against people who have revised the view of reality, their world, to take into account the data. There is a range of views of the results of peak oil on future society and social stability. You would be considered a doomer by some.
So, not all of us predict a Mad Max scenario is likely, but many of think it's possible, in a limited sense, as an outlier possibility. And it is. It always it. Think of all the societies that HAVE collapsed! Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Roman, Easter Island...
The belief that we are immune to radical and catastrophic breakdown is a faith. It's a fine and comforting faith to have, and like all faiths, it has its theologians who cast out those who spout heresy: like so-called "doomerism."
I would like to suggest that our system is far more vulnerable to catastrophic breakdown than is commonly assumed. Just as the Titanic's design made it more resistant to small hull breaches, these same features made it sink faster and more catastrophically when it hit an iceberg that put a long gash in the hull.
Our politicians, Federal Reserve officials, Treasury, etc., are taking huge risks and steps to avoid any gradual adaptation to peak oil, because that adaptation would be seen as capitulation to a new Great Depression, or defeatism, or run counter to Keynesian orthodoxy, etc.
These steps ARE mitigating the immediate effects of the fact of peak oil, but they are going to undermine the foundations upon which our economic and political systems are founded. They also undermine the trust of the people: I doubt it will be politically possible to institute another bank bailout or large stimulus package. To me, that is good, because it will force the coming changes to happen sooner, when they can still do some good. If I am wrong, then they will successfully delay the day of reckoning, which will therefore become more grave.
Finally, I firmly believe that smaller political units will be able to make smart adaptations to a re-localized future.
But not all regions will be smart. The citizens of those regions will suffer. The extent of the suffering is unknown, but the most extreme would be refugee status, or starvation and death.
NOTE: again, these last scenarios are what I see as the low-probability, but significant probability, events. One must still plan for low-probability, high-impact events.
If you don't believe climate change induced by CO2 is hoax, then the potential for extreme outcomes is significantly enhanced. Possible pandemics or food shortages can be thrown in for fun.
Proud but not paranoid doomer
Thanks for the link. James Howard Kunstler was talking about the Archdruid a while back. I meant to look him up, but never got around to it.
Do you read http://www.theoildrum.com/ It's the best energy blog around.
Note that Greg has a farm, grows food, has cows, goats, etc. He talks about soft landings, but he has his retreat set up and running.
Jim,
For some reason JWR considers me competition - I don't know. Would be nice if we could all work together.
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