Message-ID: <00c001bd7779$8e77b580$65745ecc@jay95> Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 06:27:38 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:j@QMAIL.COM> Subject: REQUIEM To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
[ In a private message someone asked why I didn't mention Hydrogen energy. Hydrogen is not an energy "source" -- it's a "sink". In other words, it consumes more energy than it produces. ]From: tom abeles <mailto:tabeles@tmn.com>
>be gored". And as long as the coin of the relm is decoupled from hard
>goods, then the "ones and zeros in the banker's microchips" will
>prevail.
Basically, I agree with you Tom: "business as usual" will prevail until the system disintegrates.
In principle, it is not possible for our economic system to avoid the "crash" because its premise, the conversion of nature into commodities, is the heart and soul of our system problems. Moreover, the doctrine of continuous and unlimited economic growth serves as a substitute for redistribution of wealth and true politics. It's a way for the plutocrats to maintain political superiority over the lesser classes while avoiding unpleasant political questions
With no true political system -- and no prospect of obtaining one -- "business as usual" devolves to anarchy:
---------------------------------------------------------------- [snip] What kind of future will our children have? Shortly after the year 2000, industrial activity will rise high enough for it to seriously degrade land fertility. This will occur because of contamination by heavy metals and persistent chemicals, climate change, salinization, topsoil loss, falling water tables, and increased levels of ultraviolet radiation from a diminished ozone layer.
Around the year 2005, global oil production will "peak", and the spike in oil prices will quickly exacerbate other major problems facing industrial agriculture.[51] Food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. It has been estimated that about four percent of the nation's energy budget is used to grow food, while about 10 to 13 percent is needed to put it on our plates. In other words, a staggering total of 17 percent of America's energy budget is consumed by agriculture![52]
By 2040, we would need to triple the global food supply in order to meet the basic food needs of the eleven billion people who are expected to be alive. But doing so would require a 1000 percent increase in the total energy expended in food production.[53] Guess what? Eleven billion people won't be alive by 2040.
The dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, the declining fertility of the land, and the positive feedbacks imposed by declining resource quality will force the economy to divert much more investment into the agriculture and energy sectors as part of a desperate attempt to maintain agricultural output. Government budgets also decline in real terms as greater and greater fractions of the economy are diverted into the resource sectors.
As resource quality and land fertility continue to fall, society will be forced to allocate more and more capital to the agriculture and resource sectors, otherwise the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would restrict production still more -- it's circular, there is no way to avoid the positive feedback. Ultimately, industrial capacity will decline rapidly taking with it the service and agricultural sectors, which depend upon industrial inputs.
Constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, the availability of life-supporting resources will go into a permanent, steep decline.
In many ways, the next hundred years will be the inverse of the last hundred. As fossil fuels dwindle, supply lines collapse, and societies disintegrate, muscle will gradually replace machinery. "Home grown" will replace "imported". Obviously, large cities will be mostly abandoned.
Well-intended activists from both the Left and Right -- armed with facts and ideologies -- will form political movements, select the best liars for leaders, and take to the streets demanding that government take us back to "the good old days". The worse our problems become, the more they will act instead of think. The less they think, the worse our problems will become. Social order will disintegrate, and Roadside Warriors will go mad, killing, raping, torturing, and burning...
It really will be back to the good old days! Shouts of "BRING ME HIS HEAD" will ring through the land, slaves, scalps, souvenirs and trophies of all sorts, ... exciting possibilities limited only by our ingenuity.
The good news is that recycling will finally become fashionable! We will see feral children mining the dumps for plastic to burn (Pampers) so they can heat the hovels they are forced to live in. The strongest kids will set traps for fresh meat -- rats -- while the weaker kids will eat anything they can cram into their mouths (old shoes, styrofoam peanuts, newspaper soup). Pandemics will sweep the world, punctuated every so often by explosions as abandoned nuke plants go critical. Leaking dumps and tanks will spew PCBs and radioactive hazwaste into the feral food chain spawning surprising new shapes for young mothers to enjoy nursing. [54] Toxic chemical fires, blowing garbage and trash, genetic mutations, filthy water, cannibalism ...
As the Easter Islanders say:
The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.[55]
The situation will be especially serious for a short time because the population will keep rising due to the lags inherent in the age structure and social adjustment. Then mercifully, the population will drop sharply as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.[56] Trapped in obsolete belief systems, Americans won't even know why their society disintegrated.
A hundred thousand years from now -- once the background radiation levels drop below lethality -- a new Homo mutilus will crawl out of the caves to elect a leader. Although we have no idea what mutilus might look like, evolutionary theory can still tell us who will win the election. He will be the best liar running on a platform to end hunger by controlling nature.
How could it be otherwise?
refs at www.dieoff.org
Jay