peak centurion

PEAK CENTURION


The Last Centurion by John Ringo is quite a good book, but no way near a post-apocalypse story. Throughout the whole global climate cool down and plague, the government is quite functional or perhaps dysfunctional. Call it a dystopian novel. It is also a militia porn stroke book. It is also a nice Peak Oil Ignorer book ( it doesn’t qualify as a “denier” book since it deftly skates around the whole idea as if it doesn’t exist ). But despite the many and varied complaints I might have about the underlying philosophy ( which might be described as “soldiers as gods” ), the one thing you have to love about this book is the wonderful job it does pointing out problems that will arise from emergencies and then unwrapping the many layers of issues you have to solve, each one with many tentacles branching out in every direction that compound the problems. It is great in a few areas in this regard, mainly producing food. Of course, then you get into another philosophical problem, blaming all problems on “tofu-eaters” ( gotta love that one ) which obviously means the simple answer to all our problems is just “hiring smart dudes”. I could go on and on about that, and I will, but do keep in mind the basic point of my review of this book is, in a complex society every problem is multi-layered, and this is one of the better books illustrating that very well. Should you buy it or use it as a “prepper persuader”? I think so. The writing is quirky and fun ( it gets a bit “gamer fantasy” stupid in the last quarter, but before then it is quite good in peeling back the layers of the onion ). And the story will not frighten away potential converts because it allows them to still grasp the delusional straws of government control, energy supply flow, smarty saviors and other modern fantasies while at the same time perhaps getting them to think of potential problems and all that could go wrong because of all those multiple layers of complexity.

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I’m going to try yet another time to point out our energy issues. I know you are tired of hearing it, and that I harp on it a lot, but I’m also betting the grid will crash before this blog gets too damn lame and you stop reading ( hey, it’s probably on a downhill projection, quality content wise, but since this ain’t no “Seinfeld” I don’t have to worry about going out on the top [ remember the episode where George keeps trying to one up his own jokes and Jerry tells him to walk out after one good one, leaving them wanting more?] ). Until then, I’ll keep preaching to the deaf and blind. Okay, simplifying things can be both dangerous and illuminating. Dangerous because you might leave out something critical that later takes on life threatening importance. Illuminating because by putting it into a one sentence bumper sticker, they have a frame work to judge every other detail involved in the issue. For instance, economics can be distilled down into “supply and demand”. If all detail that follow fit into that framework, they are allowed to stay and help give depth to the idea. If they violate that, out they go. Anthropology can be distilled down into “it’s all about getting fed”. If an explanation into human behavior goes with that basic tenet, it makes sense. If it violates that, you can ignore it as the bleatings of a degreed moron.
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The supplies that keep humans alive can be described as “picking the fruit or chopping the tree down”. If you are picking fruit from a tree, you are leaving the tree there for next season to once again bear fruit ( we’ll ignore such things as locust attacks or lightning or tornado strikes and concentrate on the normal cycle of replenishment ). If you chop down the tree you get both fruit and wood, a huge increase in supplies, but clearly a “one off” action. Non-repeatable in a realistic time frame. Returning some plants to the soil ( directly in green manure and indirectly by grazing cattle and using their manure elsewhere ) keeps the soil productive for next season. Planting extra crops without returning enough nutrients delivers a lot of extra food, but then the yield drop off a cliff and you can’t get much more out of the soil in any meaningful time frame. Extracting ore from a mine, pure mining, is in no way, shape or form sustainable. It is a one time activity. You are chopping down the tree.

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Petroleum is mining the energy we use. Period. You always run out of what you are mining. Always. It has been proven that we are running down decades old super fields, and no others of comparable size has taken their place. All new fields are smaller by orders of magnitude. Today’s exciting finds wouldn’t have gotten the rigs installed forty years ago. As our population has doubled. Thank goodness for the North Dakota frac oil fields. Without them we might be in a collapse rather than a Depression. But they haven’t replaced lost imports, they just make the losses in total available energy a lot less. We are still in total energy decline, but it could be a lot worse. We have, a decade later, less energy to burn ( with more population ). All the effort in the last ten years to replace SOME of those losses has made for a decline rather than a collapse. But opening another mine, or ten mines, to replace the huge one played out, does not replace the ore you used to get. It only gives you some time to adjust to decline.

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Are any of us really getting ready for the global petroleum mine to start producing a trickle rather than a torrent? The torrent has already slowed, yet we continue to act as though the next wonderful find will keep the volume going at the old levels. It ain’t happened in ten years. So, you are betting your life it suddenly will, right? We are not picking fruit, we are chopping down the tree. If we kept discovering new wells to replace what we’ve used, that is one thing. But using two or three times what you are finding is quite another. How far does that can get kicked down the road?

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