What It Looks Like From Here
It might be a good time to pause and take stock of humanity's situation. Or, at least, what it seems to me the situation is from my perspective. I must confess the current fiasco going on in the Gulf of Mexico (the oil leak from a former deep water well) may be influencing my dour view. But I prefer to think that it just underscores what I have been claiming all along. It just provides more evidence that humanity is in dire straits and headed for a major global catastrophic decline in numbers — a bottleneck. Put simply I think humans are no longer fit for survival as they are currently genetically constituted and given the selective stresses that are being generated by the very environment that they created with their cleverness they must adapt through evolutionary means.
Here is a quick review of the concerns I have voiced in this blog over the past several years, along with some evidence showing those concerns to be well founded.
Population and Carrying Capacity
Humans living the OECD nations are living large. And many humans living in developing nations live modestly by comparison yet nevertheless far above the natural carrying capacity of their land. The combination of too many people living too far above the capacity of the Earth to supply human needs and those of the rest of the Ecos has placed us, and the Earth, in a precarious, indeed untenable, situation.
I very much like the way William R. Catton Jr. framed the problem in Overshoot (University of Illinois Press, Urbana). All animals depend ultimately upon the real-time or current solar influx over land and sea that drives primary production, photosynthesis in plants that produces chemically stored energy — food. Prior to man's capabilities to control fire and develop tools, especially agriculture, this real-time influx defined the carrying capacity of the human environment (taking into account other necessary elements like water, etc.) For most of human history mankind has begun expanding the carrying capacity through technology. First wood combustion (solar energy stored from years gone by) then agriculture (expanding the land area devoted to human food production) and then fossil fuels. He called the natural and agricultural, real-time solar, land needed to support a stable population the real acreage. He noted that because humans can trade for things that are in deficit locally, that they were able to increase the general carrying capacity of the combined lands by redistributing otherwise limiting resources across a broader area. Then he introduced the notion of 'ghost acreage'. This is the acreage that it took a long time ago produce fossil fuels. Those acres are long 'dead' but we have been reaping the solar energy inputs to those acres now.
Thus, with our high energy technological style of living we are completely dependent on acres of land that no longer exist and can therefore no longer capture solar energy for us. Once we have used up the reasonably accessible fuels from those ghost acres, the party is over. Humans will have only the real acreage to fall back on. Unfortunately no combination of technological magic can make more sunlight fall on real acreage than we have now. There is no way to harvest solar energy in such a way as to support our current numbers living their current life styles (or aspiring to do so). Merely appropriating more acres, as has been proposed by some who see sunlight as 'free', is neither feasible economically (due to inherently low EROI values for these technologies) nor desirable ecologically.
Fossil Fuel Depletion
And the fact is that fossil fuels are running out, in a manner of speaking. Recent work on EROI of deep water drilling to recover oil shows numbers approaching as little as 2 to 3! And that was before the accident at Deepwater Horizon. Essentially all of the older fields with EROIs above 20 are in rapid depletion — their production rates are going down every year. New oil finds cannot even come close to keeping up with these decline rates and where oil is being found is in the really hard to get at places, like deep water (1 to 2 miles to ocean floor and deeper for the drilling).
The data support the notion that over the last half decade we have been in what is called a bumpy plateau phase of peak oil. Rather than having a distinct peak we are witnessing a noisy fluctuation due to the feedback effects of temporary oil shortages, rising prices, then demand destruction that brings those prices back down. When prices are low, production activity declines leading eventually to another shortage right after demand climbed back up (due to lower prices). This phenomenon is likely extending the period over which peak oil due to geophysical facts plays itself out. It also makes the signal difficult to perceive in that noise. But some are now saying that by the end of 2011 the signal to noise ratio should be good enough to detect a distinct downward trend. As of now there is a general consensus among people who have been studying the phenomenon for many years that 'the' peak probably came between 2005 and 2008. Among those so-called 'experts' who were previously denying peak oil, they now, for the most part, at least acknowledge that the end is near, even if still denying that we have passed it.
Peak oil is a signature event in that it also represents a prelude to the peaking of all fossil fuels. Coal extraction and transport relies on diesel fuel from oil. It would take a long time to convert the coal infrastructure to run on gasified coal. It could be done but the net effect would be to use up the coal that much faster since the gasification process uses up so much energy to make the gas (low EROI). Natural gas will fare better for a while longer. But the problems with conversion of all of the processes that ran on oil products will take time and lots of energy. And as a side note, we should recognize that there is still many doubts about how much actually recoverable gas is in the gas shale formations.
Finally, do not look for relief from non-conventional sources such as the Canadian tar sands or the Colorado oil shales. While it is true that these formations contain unbelievable quantities of hydrocarbons it is also true that the extraction processes have inherently (meaning due to physical realities) low EROIs. Though I'm sure we will mount a valiant effort to mine these hydrocarbons to vainly attempt to maintain our life styles, before long the low EROI will catch up in the form of economic chaos. Prices will ultimately mirror the poor return on investment and that will bring that effort to a halt.
In these matters you cannot pay attention to monetary measurements such as price or costs measured in dollars. There has been such a horrendous decoupling of energy value (emergy) and monetary value in the world economy that dollars just don't tell you anything useful any more. The only meaningful measure of economic vitality is EROI. Numbers below 20 (say the average of all sources of energy) signal an economy that might allow about one quarter of current activity. If the actual numbers (once we take into account larger boundary conditions in the analysis) are much lower than that it will be unlikely that we can sustain any kind of industrial economy at all. Perhaps we can maintain a Jeffersonian-style agrarian economy but most adults and older children will be providing the labor.
Weak Sapience in the Majority of People
The reason that humanity finds itself in this predicament has become immanently clear to me over the last ten years. As long-time readers know, I had long been baffled by a glaring inconsistency between our claim, as a species, of being so smart, yet seemingly unable to actually learn anything from our repeated mistakes regarding in how we manage social organization (governments, corporations, even neighborhoods). In spite of two world wars that should have given us pause with regard to our tendencies toward militarism we still think the best solution to apparent problems is using a bigger stick. The election of George W. Bush to the presidency and his subsequent act of taking the US to war in Iraq stand out as the quintessential representations of man's utter foolishness in conducting his own affairs.
Meanwhile the strengthening adherence by many people to ideological principles even as the institutions based on those principles were falling apart right and left, left me completely befuddled and disgusted. Blind faith in so-called 'free' markets to solve all problems (by the more libertarian crowd) is an example of the human propensity to ignore evidence and just charge ahead in the belief that more freedom in markets was the solution. No number of Enrons or burst financial bubbles can dissuade blind faith. And then, when it came to the public's recognition of phenomena like global warming I realized that too many people were not operating on all cylinders.
When I finally got into academia, after years in the private sector, I got an even bigger let down. Here I was feeling privileged to work among the smartest people on the planet. Yet what I saw in terms of decision making and judgment was alarming. PhD's, it turns out, are incredibly smart and exercise great critical thinking as long as they are restricted to their domain of expertise — their so-called silos. But outside of that domain, their judgment abilities appear no better than the rest of humanity. This comes from observations of colleagues in academic administration, committee meetings, and issues surrounding their non-academic lives.
All of these observations prompted me to expand my studies of brain functions and psychology. I had already been engaged in efforts to emulate natural intelligence and learning capabilities for robots by simulating the properties of neurons in a computer. This required a far more detailed knowledge of neurons and their linkages than had been typical in so-called artificial neural networks. And I had a basic biology education (undergraduate degree in zoology). So I commenced on an exploration of why humans could be so intelligent (we put a man on the moon, didn't we?) and creative (the combination of which I like to call cleverness) and yet seem so lacking in wisdom when it came to the big questions of social organization.
You can read my research working papers and consequent reflections on what I learned. The short answer is that humans represent an emerging phenomenon in evolution that is not, by any means, sufficiently developed. Namely, humans possess a modicum of brain function that I have come to call Sapience. This is a complex set of functions that collectively give rise to intuitively-based judgment competence. Put simply it is what gives rise to wisdom in mature individuals. Unfortunately there appears to be a hitch. Given that the capability was newly emergent in our species it is only evolved to a level of fitness appropriate to our late Pleistocene origins. This capacity, along with expanded intelligence and creativity was the basis for our development of language, tool making, and culture. These took on an evolution of their own and at some point created a life style that actually de-selected for any more wisdom, putting all emphasis on cleverness (along with a higher level of aggressiveness to adopt a sedentary, territorial food production system called agriculture!) Humanity has been 'stunted' with regard to further evolution of sapience because our social orders do not require it.
We now face a conundrum. While our numbers were small and our impact on the environment little, the whole cleverness-dominating thing worked out pretty well. We were, by evolutionary standards, extraordinarily fit. And we prospered. But all good things come to an end. As smart as we were as a species, we were not wise enough to take lessons from the rest of nature regarding limiting our own growth. We did not learn how to settle into a stable population having a wonderful life support system in our technologies, but not overstepping our boundaries. Indeed there have been many 'seers' (such as Catton, mentioned above) who have understood what the problem was and tried to bring our attention to it many times. This is, perhaps, the greatest piece of evidence for the lack of wisdom for the species as a whole. These people, who represented the right tail end of a probability distribution for sapience, were completely ignored and even mocked by the merely clever but, as it turns out, wrong majority. The vast numbers of humans have been unable to grasp the situation because they were so enamored with their own cleverness as well as their wealth that they simply could not understand the nature of the situation. They have been exceedingly foolish.
The end is looking more and more like a population bottleneck (see further arguments below). We have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the Earth by five or six times over. We did this by foolishly believing that fossil fuels would last forever. Or we foolishly believed (rationally knowing that was impossible) that a new technology would give us access to limitless energies and we would simply transition to rely on those new sources before the fossil fuels (in the ghost acres) gave out. Even our experiments with nuclear energy (which still has a relatively low EROI) and the problems we found could not dissuade us from believing. That is a classic example of foolishness, the opposite of wisdom.
Now that we have essentially, if not actually, passed the peak of oil production, it could be too late to find that magic energy bullet. Even if we could find some fantastic breakthrough (say in nuclear fusion) there is not likely to be time to ramp up production before the fossil fuel energy infrastructure falls apart. Minimally sapient humans spent their energy bank account without investing in new energy production and now it is probably too late. We have too little energy capital to work with.
Strong Dependence of Every Individual On High Energy Civilization
The reason a population bottleneck appears inevitable is that most humans on the planet, even those in pockets of indigenous life styles, rely too heavily on the use of high powered fossil fuels and the industrial economies of the world for sustenance. Specifically, food production has become almost fully dependent on fossil fuel inputs in the forms of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and fuels for tractors, combines, and transportation, plus energies put into food processing. There has been a world-wide concerted effort to increase food per farmer productivity by substituting machine work for human labor where possible. Even in developing nations that have arable land loans are advanced so that they can automate more and more of their food production under the theory that that is the path to wealth generation. Moreover, people all over the world aspire to lifestyles, such as the American version, that can only be produced by high energy flows. Even now, peoples from every part of the developing world are anticipating owning their own automobiles, for example, as a sign of increasing prosperity. The currently buy, whenever possible, goods and clothing styles that come from mechanized manufacturing. Even if their dependence on fossil fuels looks minimal by American standards, it is only because what does come to them is via a less obvious route. And, perhaps more importantly, they have developed a psychological dependence on modernity arriving, and that may make them just as vulnerable to the loss of the dream. It could result in social upheavals as much as the actual reduction in support from the developed world as resources deplete everywhere.
How will OECD citizens react to the situation as food production falls off due to diminishing availability of oil? No country today is self-sufficient in any meaningful way. The American miracle of abundant food production depends entirely on oil and natural gas. Without extensive pest control and fertilization American food production (indeed all OECD food production) would grind down to below the level at which even the American demand could not be met, let alone producing surpluses for other nations. Once the availability of fossil fuels declines our cornucopia will fail. Moreover, fossil fuels are needed to distribute whatever food is produced. When the flows of energy were growing due to expanding our oil exploration and extraction, when we could find ever more oil to pump, the relationship between the price of a tomato (for example) and the energy required to produce and deliver it to your table, was hidden from view. Dollars largely took on a life of their own and no one paid particular attention to the energetic costs involved. But now that energy flows are declining that relationship will be brought back into focus. As energy resources become scarce the role of the supply-demand and price mechanisms will again force us to grasp how foolish we have been. The cost of that tomato from Mexico, on the table of someone from Seattle, will be beyond what most people will be able to afford. The cost of energy will dominate all production.
Food will become expensive and scarce. Of course many people have already started attempts to grow their own, but the majority of people now live in urban or suburban settings where the available land (and water) is simply too little for effective self-sufficient food production for year-round sustenance. At best they will be able to augment their food shopping but never fully replace it. The far fewer numbers of people who have land may be able to come closer to self-sufficiency but unless they are saving seeds and practicing the best forms of permaculture their efforts might come to neigh.
As I think about this situation I have difficulty imagining the vast majority of people in urban areas being able (perhaps not even willing) to sustain themselves. People are going to die from starvation (or from winter cold or summer heat or thirst) in large numbers. That is the bottleneck event. There is no way to predict (at present anyway) how narrow this bottleneck will be. If, on top of mere starvation, you add diseases, conflicts, crimes, etc., the numbers succumbing may be greater still meaning that there will be fewer survivors and a narrow bottleneck. A lot depends on how the majority of humans react to what will be a completely new experience for humanity — the decline of energy flows available to sustain an industrial-style civilization on a global basis. And unlike in past collapses of civilizations due to temporary overreach, there can be no recovery from this decline. There is no other lands to which one might migrate. Since our economies are based on ghost acreage that will be gone forever there can be no eventual recovery. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is an entirely new set of selection conditions for humanity. What will be selected for and what against?
Inability of "Official" Leaders to Provide Wisdom
Back when Barrack Obama was inaugurated I still held out hope that things might change. The evidence available to me at that time did not preclude the possibility of a major shift in both our energy use and its production. He mentioned sacrifice in his address. Indeed, humans are going to have to sacrifice a great deal in terms of material (discretionary) wealth in the near future. It is hard to call the forced relinquishing of wealth a sacrifice (which implies voluntary response). A wiser course of action for humanity would have been to voluntarily give up most of what passes now for wealth in an attempt to conserve energy flows and invest a lot of that energy into constructing alternative energy sources that would be self-sustaining for the long haul (see the series: Steps Toward An Energy Solution in this index). The relinquishing of over consumption would prepare us to live with lower energy flows that would be inherent in alternative energy sources. We would simply never again have the power provided by fossil fuels when we converted to real-time solar energy (PV, thermal, wind, and hydro). We would have to reorganize our entire way of living, how we produced food, how we organized communities, etc. We would give up capitalism, profit motive, global markets, and so many of our current BIG institutions in favor of long-term survivability. That would be the sacrifice. And we would adapt.
But it didn't take long for me to realize that even this president was not wise enough to understand what needed to be done. As soon as he appointed his financial advisory team I knew cleverness was still in the driver seat. Wisdom was lost. The financial meltdown that started under the Bush administration needed an entirely new kind of response since it was actually caused (at a deeper level) by the beginning of decline in the flow of net energy to the economy. All of the financial bubbles were predicated on attempts to create monetary wealth even while the production of real physical wealth was in decline. Financial instruments no longer were based on the real wealth, as productive capital, but on speculation that one day real wealth would be in the ascendancy again and we would be able to service all debt and cash in on the bets. But, of course, because the problem was due to declining energy flow that future would never arrive. The steady increase in fuel costs over the prior decade followed by the severe spike in oil prices (and oil product prices) acted like a pin prick in bursting the sub-prime mortgage bubble. What followed was the domino effect on all financial institutions that had overextended their liabilities on their beliefs in something that could not ever happen — that happy days would come again when more energy was available (of course most people don't think in terms of energy, but they do understand that real work has to be done in order to produce real wealth; this was the model for the housing industry after all).
The president's response to the financial crises was exactly the wrong thing to do. Sacrifice and leading the world (by leading the country) toward a low-energy form of economics would have been the wise thing to do. I realize that is easy to say. And, in fact, I should acknowledge that such a course of action might have been completely impossible given the lack of general wisdom in the population. Perhaps not even the wisest philosopher king could have managed to get people to voluntarily give up their consumption and high living (or their aspirations for doing so). I have said that leadership requires followership and if the would-be followers are too foolish to see the wisdom of their leader, then all is lost.
But then one has to consider the moral obligation of the elected leader. If he truly understood that the world would be forever changed and that attempting business as usual recovery was a vain and wasteful endeavor, then didn't he have a moral duty to at least try to point this out, to at least try some course of action geared toward the right thing? Clearly not an easy moral dilemma. But I wonder if the president even recognizes the rock and hard place situation he is in. He certainly couldn't have guessed it when he decided to run for president. What fool would want the job under these circumstances?
Which leaves us where? If not even the President of the United States of America, even if he were wise enough, has the power to lead the country and the world in doing the right things that will minimize the pain and suffering in the coming bottleneck, then who might? I have no idea. But one scenario that comes to mind is that as the full force of the bottleneck descends on us, we will turn to anyone who appears to know how to save our butts. We will give up our individual rights to a strongman (in all likelihood a man unless Margaret Thatcher wants the job), a dictator, just as the Germans did with Hitler after the economic collapse post-World War I. In fact the pattern of rising dictators in times of crisis is an old one. But here is the catch. Such a dictatorship would rely on high energy flows that he could command in directions he thought best. That is, in order for a dictator to have any kind of success at all, he would need to commandeer energy for his purposes. But we will be living in a steadily declining energy world. Over time any such dictator would have less and less power (literally) to work his will. And that is as it should be.
'Official' leaders will never be able to provide wisdom and direction for the masses since, by definition, the masses can no longer exist. As energy flow falls below a certain minimum the only viable social response is local, generally isolated, communities of agrarians practicing high permaculture. So it is the unofficial leaders, the ones who will actually have followers wise enough to recognize the lead, who will provide the wisdom needed for the future world. Survivors will find themselves back in the social order of having tribal elders providing guidance and the practice of the only true democracy that has ever existed on this planet, that of the tribe.
The Way Forward
As soon as you accept the inevitability of the coming bottleneck you are then free to start thinking in whole new ways about the survival of humankind. Declining energy flow will trigger the bottleneck but climate change and general resource constraints will further shape it in terms of how wide and how long it will be. My conclusion (still open to revision when evidence is available) is that the hope for humanity is evolution. Humans must continue to evolve and my personal bias on the issue of what traits should be most useful leads me to hope for greater sapience. This is the path we were on when the genus first emerged and came to fruition in the species (possibly several species like neanderthals). But the fruit needs to ripen further. Sapience needs to catch up with cleverness and surpass it so that future humans will grasp the need for self-containment in the larger Ecos.
I think this is feasible if there is some kind of effort to assure that higher sapient individuals of today (the right tail of the sapience distribution curve) are among, and perhaps dominate in numbers, the survivors of the bottleneck. Thus my villages of 500. Organized, sited, and peopled before too much longer, these could be havens for sapience greater than exists in the general population today.
The new situation for humanity, the decline of energy flow, may put new selection pressures on human evolution. I would hope that such pressures would be selective for greater sapience. It was the continually growing availability of energy to our forebears and to us that in large measure selected for cleverness that succeeded in exploiting the potentials. Now if that is reversed, is it possible that the evolution of sapience would compensate for declining energy by keeping mankind cognizant of the need to live within boundaries? That is my surmise and hope.
Yea,... I agree that there are practical and logical reasons for us to "rise to the occasion" and "grow up" to begin to "think for ourselves". I'm afraid that takes generations of cultural development our culture thought it was doing, but was just faking and didn't get done.
How do you explain the inexplicable timidity of all the environmental movement leaders. They seem completely satisfied with their commitments to piece meal solutions that directly make the problems they say they're solving worse.
The world consensus "green economy" policy that making energy resources ever more productive for creating wealth (what efficiency is used for) can be relied on to reduce our demand for and use of energy, is so bizarrely backward and misguided. Another example is the clear indication that relieving any one resource constraint just shifts our growing pressures onto all other depleting and conflicted resource uses. Still everyone is busy busy about finding new resources to throw into the fire. Thirdly, I raise these two problems and other related ones over and over, and get immediate response showing that people understand. Nothing ever happens!
I think we have arrested development, as a culture, for maintaining the domestication of a people as servants to an ideology, keeping them from maturing enough to feel free to question their own domestication. That the ideology is one of "be fruitful and multiply" and remains unquestioned even as it clearly stopped working as sold helps confirm that. We're just "good servants" waiting to be told what to do, rejecting every hint that what to do is think for ourselves.
We seem just too domesticated to object, like grazing cattle, on principle, that we have no right to object. We were all taught the natural law, and would like to be treated nicely. So we shouldn't object (overlooking that having leaders be servants to the same ideology means being culturally addicted to a fatal disease).
phil
Posted by: Shoudaknown | June 06, 2010 at 01:30 PM
Interesting lecture on subject of "Collapse Dynamics" at London School of Economics, given last year by Noah Raford.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/noah-raford-collapse-dynamics-26-may-2009-london-school-of-economics-1539
Collapses seem to follow a general pattern, depending on initial conditions. My guess is that England will follow usual "Imperial" trajectory, typical of multi-cultural country with low social cohesion. First comes financial collapse and break down of long distance logistics systems, such as food. Then civil war. Malnutrition and end of water supply / sewage systems lead to epidemics. And so on. Roman London went from multicultural city of 60,000 in AD 410 to perhaps 50 to 60 by end of century. And no ethnic minorities or members of elite appear to have survived. Selection for strong social cohesion must have been intense.
Will USA follow similar path. We might soon see.
Gavinthornbury
Posted by: Gavin | June 06, 2010 at 03:33 PM
You have summed it all up, then with no reservations toward accuracy. Hmmm!
As Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics 1965, told us, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
How can anyone in this century be so dismissive of the capacity of man (based upon developments since the start of recorded history, not to mention the Indusrial Revolution) to overcome obstacles to population growth with science and technology?
You have succombed to the current blindness of political speak that proclaims Climate Change a sudden malady. Examine the record of climate changes and human existence for hundreds of thousands years, author.
See any survival? Is there hope after all? The better question is how will those authorities frightening you profit from your blind fear?
Wake up, man!
- More than your Weak Sapience "Majority". A professional in the realm of human nature and frauds.
p.s. Is the sky ble? It may be falling soon.
Posted by: Vigilis | June 06, 2010 at 05:59 PM
Wow. A thoughtful and organized dirge.
Regrettably, "their beliefs in something that could not ever happen — that happy days would come again" is all too prevalent in the eloquence economics, financial and business crowd (and in society in general), the expectation of return to BAU.
The evolution towards greater sapience is something that may proceed at a brisk pace, but whether it will be swift enough to stay apace of the changing milieu. It was perhaps two million years ago that
Homo erectus showed up on the scene. Homo neanderthalis had been around for 400,000 years before going extinct 30,000 years ago. Homo sapiens has been around only 200,000 years: a spring chicken when compared to any and every species we see around us. Yet on a scale of 200,000 years evolutionary change may not stay apace of the alterations in our lot that may play out over a millennium or so.
Posted by: Robin Datta | June 06, 2010 at 06:58 PM
Ecogas have a wide range of LPG kits and can fit most of today's vehicles. Our workshop located in Laverton North.
Posted by: Gas conversions | June 06, 2010 at 10:01 PM
Dear George,
I still can't see how increasing competition will select for a species that 'wisely' believes in decreasing competition...
"Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would soon sink into indolence, and the more highly-gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means." Charles Darwin
...or how being fruitful and multiplying can ever be anything other than the most sensible evolutionary strategy on a dynamic planet...
"It is impossible not bitterly to regret, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase." Charles Darwin
...or indeed, how anything can ever be considered a work in progress given that evolution has no specific direction:
"...for natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life." Charles Darwin
...but apart from our differences about the future and the fuel (unsustainable population growth) and direction (whatever works) of evolution, this summary of the present is, as usual, engaging and thought-provoking.
Kind regards,
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Watkinson BVetMed MRCVS FLS | June 07, 2010 at 12:12 AM
I sincerely hope this is not a sign that Georges isle of sanity is in danger of being swamped by a floodtide of unsoliticed promotions, denialists and the formulaic refugees!
Posted by: GaryA | June 07, 2010 at 03:34 AM
Your post brings up a question I've never seen addressed, to wit, "How much of our petroleum is used by our food production and distribution system?"
Perhaps my view is influenced by the previous oil crises of the 70's and 80's, but if I were making preditions, I would predict government intervention in how much petroleum was available to the general public. Remember how the number on your license plate determined which days you could purchase gasoline?
I'd bet on more intense government regulation as Peak Oil begins to really bite. If the government has any sense at all, food production and distribution and electrical generation will be high priority consumers of what oil is available. While this sort of "clever" response won't ultimately solve the problems you have ably summarized, it will allow for a more gradual weaning away from our petro-milk.
Posted by: blueridge | June 07, 2010 at 05:45 AM
Thanks for the recap... personally I think the 'villages' idea, like any solution, needs to grow bottom up and by being muddled into being as Transition Towns are doing. I'm not sure there are any historical precedents for such things, and intentional communities often don't have great records when deliberately started. You know better than I that the conversion rate from theoretical possibilities to on-the-ground results, when it comes to actions requiring sapience, is low.
I can't necessarily step with you from "humanity is in dire straits and headed for a major decline" (obviously true) to "humanity is no longer fit for survival as it is currently genetically constituted" (more tenuous and don't see relevance)... in fact it seems a little like throwing the board away because you don't like the game!
Whoever manages to survive, if anyone, they may learn more about sapience. But their genome doesn't seem to matter hugely to me. If we as a species go bust, so what? We've had a good innings! And since we can't know much about the process or usefully predict it, having "no more homo sapiens sapiens" as a major conclusion seems a little over-dramatic. Who knows what will happen on that score? And does it actually affect what needs to be done? I think not.
The ancestry from Catton is where you and Greer intersect so strongly (Catton has a quote on the back of Greer's "Long Descent" I think). I think like JMG that history is a better guide than one might believe. All the issues you're dealing with about sapience, moderation, and so forth, were mooted in China and Greece 2,500 years ago, and their conclusions in terms of what constituted sapience weren't so far from yours. These cycles come around, varying in intensity, and ours (because of oil) is at the intense end of the scale, but although our situation is different in degree from earlier ones, I don't think it differs as massively in kind as you do. Human settlements will certainly go through massive upheavals but that doesn't mean the only survivors will be in small villages "off to the side" somewhere! There are all sorts of interesting dynamics to play out...
So "a completely new experience for humanity" doesn't seem quite right to me, nor does "there can be no recovery from this decline" -- whilst certainly "There is no other lands to which one might migrate", the civilization we currently have in Europe was seeded from the earlier classical one via a dark age, not a migration. And a dark age, a sword and axe age and an age of bitter difficulty, is indeed what we are in for, with a lot of weirdness and unpredictability.
I should stop carping, since I agree with all your factual points...
Posted by: Jason | June 07, 2010 at 06:36 AM
Phil (shoulda...),
RE: timidity of environmentalists. I believe James Speth addresses that very issue in The Bridge at the Edge of the World. I highly recommend this book to all.
RE: our over-domestication. I like the words to PinkFloyd's Another Brick in the Wall; "We don't need no education." For me at least that means none of the kind of education that is offered today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwTpZpwjtIE
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:25 PM
Gavin,
Thanks for the link.
-----------------------
Vigilis,
Interesting remarks. Funny you should mention climate change and survivors. In fact it was the major climate changes that initiated a reduction in species of the genus Homo during the last several ice ages! In fact Homo sapiens was likely a product of glaciation some 150 to 200k years ago. Thanks for bringing that up.
I'll try to wake up.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:26 PM
Robin,
The issue of the rate of biological adaptation and subsequent speciation is a crucial one for the reasons you intimate: rapid and radical climate change.
I know that there is some reasonably good evidence that rates of genetic drift can be high under the right pressures. I am also thinking that adaptation can be accelerated under conditions of breeding programs. The third possibility for us appears to be gaining traction, i.e., genetic engineering. I'm not thrilled about that approach but I suppose it will be tried somewhere by someone.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:27 PM
Gas,
I don't allow ads on my blog but as a public service to readers who might be thinking about the gas option, I'll leave this up since you didn't also post a link.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:27 PM
Matthew,
We're still not connecting!
Now maybe you are one of those evolutionists who are adverse to group selection theory, but I think that is an example of exactly the kind of thing that I am referring to. Group selection is put forward by Sober & Wilson (Unto Others) and endorsed by E.O. Wilson, as the most explanatory way to view increasing cooperation among individuals within groups by competition among groups! There is no dichotomy here. The group emerges as a new entity with greater cohesion as a result of inter-group competition in the traditional view. What sapience represents is the emergence of this property mediated by the sections of the prefrontal cortex I have outlined (as a hypothesis). Eusapience is simply expanding the scope of this emergent property, in exactly the same way that intelligence expanded in early humans giving us fire and tools. Eusapience provides a way for more humans to act cooperatively and plan over longer time scales. This latter, I suspect, will be an advantage for a population that will be facing the hardships of climate change without the abilities for adaptation provided by industrial-grade technology.
It isn't ever the case that there will never be competition at some level of organization. Currently, for example, the cells of our bodies generally cooperate to produce us as individuals, but we individuals, on a higher level of organization, still compete with one another quite often, in spite of our sapience.
Competition and cooperation seem to alternate in dominance in emergent processes. At any given level of organization competition among components gives rise to much more highly adapted components. But in turn these components are coevolving in such a way that they cooperate more than compete (think symbiosis). That gives rise to the emergence of a yet higher level of order where aggregates of cooperating components become, themselves, systems (not unlike climax communities in ecology). Then, at that higher level, those new systems can enter competition and the process goes on and on.
I appreciate your quotes from Darwin, but we must remember that Darwin was just the first (or one of the first) recognized authorities on selection. Much has been learned since then so his are not the final words on the matters. BTW: he did recognize the potential for group selection as similar to sexual selection, so he had some notion that not all selection is at the individual level within a population.
Take the issue of progress in evolution. Is there a direction? Most non-systems biologists will argue (vehemently) that there is not. Yet we have the obvious fact that evolution has produced greater levels of complexity and increasingly complex brains to deal with that increasing complexity. Not in every creature, of course, but in terms of niches and emergent species able to exploit the increased complexity.
Those biologists (naturalists like Darwin) argue against teleology, rightfully. But they make the mistake of confusing teleological arguments with teleonomic ones. The latter have to do with systems dynamics and emergence phenomena. The universe is tending toward greater complexity - not all over because that would be in defiance of the Second Law of Thermo - but in pockets like the surface of the Earth.
So, to summarize, members of our species that demonstrate greater cooperativeness will form symbiotic relations that emerge as much more organized (and controlled) systems. Perhaps several such species will emerge (it has happened before!) and then they might compete with one another. This is taking group selection to a much higher level. I think it works.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:28 PM
GaryA, GaryA,
Actual ads will not be tolerated. As for other sorts of comments, they all keep me thinking. At my age that is a good thing! But thanks for the sentiment of concern.
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blueridge,
According to Pimentel & Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, page 6, the proportion of fossil energy devoted to food production as a fraction of total fossil fuel use, is about 19% in the US. In some developing countries it can run as high as 60-80%. The US uses so much more fossil fuel in toto that the 19% number represents substantially more total energy than the 60% in a developing nation; about four times as much per capita per year as in Africa, for example.
Therein lies the operative phrase!
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:29 PM
Jason,
Indeed Catton does provide a jacket cover quote for Greer's book. But that was after he wrote Overshoot but before he wrote Bottleneck. Have you read the latter? I suspect Greer and Catton are on divergent paths on the issue of how bad and how soon. And I find myself siding with Catton.
The reason I say this will be a whole new experience for mankind is that throughout all of history humans have been able to discover new sources of ever higher power energy, and then find ways to exploit them. Once the fossil fuels are no longer recoverable at a high enough EROI that may likely be the end of that whole history. Our current efforts to extract real-time solar energy are puny at best, and nuclear may represent the epitome of our capacity to develop technology to exploit such exotic sources of energy as fission or fusion. Personally I think we have reach the apex of technological competence; diminishing returns on complexity now rules the day. Thus, no more growing sources of energy will ever emerge again. The folks going through the dark ages did so not because they lacked energy, but because they lacked the knowledge of how to exploit what sources they had and how to improve the efficiencies with tools. Once that knowledge started to emerge the energies were there to supply.
In the future, no amount of tool magic will compensate for the loss of the high power sources from fossil fuels.
Having said that, I do suspect in the far future when, if my thinking proves right on this, there will be a predominance of eusapients who will find wiser, not necessarily cleverer, ways
to exploit whatever energy sources (i.e. real-time solar) in a way to bootstrap a higher technological capacity without all the wastage that marks our current foolish ways. I do not claim it is over for humanity, only that Homo sapiens' time is coming to an end. The way that can happen is for our species to give rise to a new, wiser species.
Carping is OK!
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 07, 2010 at 02:30 PM
I suspect bottleneck selection will favor a decrease in sapience. What selection pressure do you think will increase sapience?
Posted by: comox | June 07, 2010 at 05:00 PM
It is worth asking what would happen if a major world leader comes out and explains the situation as it is, with no sugarcoating, including the most inconvenient fact of them all, the necessity to bring the population times per capita consumption quantity safely within the carrying capacity of the planet (and safely may mean significantly less than a billion).
The two opposites in the range of possible outcomes are:
1. Everyone realizes in how deep trouble we are so we collectively decide to lower birth rates to something like 0.1 kids per woman, to cut back our consumption, to forget about benefits like retirement, to abandon religion and begin actually educating the kids that will be born so that they grow up to build a truly sustainable and sapient society.
2. The economy immediately collapses like absolutely never before because the empty promises on which it is built are exposed, mass rioting begins, everyone tries to hoard as much food and fuel as possible by any means possible, including violence, social structures fall apart, chaos reigns everywhere; the collapse comes much sooner as a result.
Which one do you think is more likely? It may very well be that people like Obama are perfectly aware of the situation, (although the evidence does not suggest that at all, I am just stating the possibility), they would still not be able to do anything because of the above considerations.
Posted by: Georgi Marinov | June 07, 2010 at 06:55 PM
The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.
Posted by: Climate change and energy efficiency | June 07, 2010 at 10:44 PM
Eusapience. Be careful what you wish for. Because for some reason this reminds me of naked mole rats.
The naked mole rat is one of the two species of mammals that exhibit eusociality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole_rat
Maybe highly intelligent naked mole rat type hominids that look on current homo sapiens as dangerous vermin to be severely culled. Not a pleasant thought.
Gavin
Posted by: Gavin | June 07, 2010 at 11:19 PM