Tuesday, 20 February 2018

The Bumpy Road Down, Part 5: More Trends in Collapse

Bitteersweet Berries
Still on the vine in February


The trends I covered last time were:

  • our continued reliance on fossil fuels

Oscillating overshoot with declining carrying capacity

I've once again included the stepped or "oscillating" decline diagram from previous posts here to make it easier to visualize what I'm talking about. This diagram isn't meant to be precise, certainly not when it comes to the magnitude and duration of the oscillations, which in any case will vary from one part of the world to the next.


More Political Trends



During the next crash and following recovery governments will continue to see growth as the best solution to whatever problems they face and will continue to be blind to the limits to growth. Farther down the bumpy road some governments may finally clue in about limits. Others won't, and this will fuel continued growth followed by crashes until we learn to live within those limits.

One thing that seems clear is that eventually we'll be living in smaller groups and the sort of political systems that work best will be very different from what we have now.

Many people who have thought about this assume that we'll return to feudalism. I think that's pretty unlikely. History may seem to repeat itself, but only in loose outline, not in the important details. New situations arise from different circumstances, and so are themselves different. Modern capitalists would never accept the obligations that the feudal aristocracy had to the peasantry. Indeed freeing themselves of those obligations had a lot to do with making capitalism work. And the "99%" (today's peasantry) simply don't accept that the upper classes have any right, divine or otherwise, to rule.



Economic Contraction


The remaining "good" industrial jobs in developed nations are less likely to be unionized, with longer hours, lower pay, decreased benefits, poorer working conditions and lower safety standards. The large number of people who can't even get one of those jobs have had to move to precarious, part time, low paying jobs in the service industries. Unemployment has increased (despite what official statistics say) and the ranks of the homeless have swelled.


Our globally interconnected economy is a complex thing and that complexity is expensive to maintain. During the crash and the depression that follows it, we'll see trends toward simplification in many different areas driven by a lack of resources to maintain the existing complex systems. I'll be discussing those trends in a moment, but it is important to note that a lot of economic activity is involved in maintaining our current level of complexity and abandoning that complexity will mean even more economic contraction.

At the same time, small, simple communities will prove to have some advantages that aren't currently obvious.


All this economic contraction means that almost all of us will be significantly poorer and we'll have to learn to get by with less. As John Michael Greer says, "LESS: less energy, less stuff, less stimulation." We'll be forced to conserve and will struggle to get by with "just enough". This will be a harshly unpleasant experience for most people.



On the other hand, as I was just saying, sending high paying jobs offshore is a pretty bad idea for consumer economies. And I suspect that in the long run we'll see that it wasn't really all that good for the countries where we sent the work, either.

During the crash we'll see the breakdown of the financial and organizational mechanisms that support globalization and international trade. There will also be considerable problems with shipping, both due to disorganization and to unreliable the supplies of diesel fuel for trucks and bunker fuel for ships. I'm not predicting an absolute shortage of oil quite this soon, but rather financial and organizational problems with getting it out of the ground, refined and moved to where it is needed.


In a contracting economy with collapsing globalization there would seem to be little future for multi-national corporations, and organizations like the World Bank and the IMF. While the crash may bring an end to the so called "development" of the "developing" nations, it will also bring an end to economic imperialism. At the same time, the general public in the developed world, many of whom are already questioning the wisdom of the "race to the bottom" that is globalization, will be even less likely to go along with it, especially when it comes to exporting jobs.



Impoverished organizations such a governments, multi-national corporations and international standards groups will struggle to maintain today's high degree of centralization and eventually will be forced to break up into smaller entities.




One of the biggest challenges at first will be to get people to believe that there really is a problem. Once that is clear, experience has shown that the effectiveness of response from the victims of disasters is remarkable and I think that will be true again in this case. There are a lot of widely accepted myths about how society breaks down during disaster, but that's just what they are: myths. Working together in groups for our mutual benefit is the heart of humanity's success, after all.

Government response will take days or more likely weeks to organize, and in the meantime there is much we can do to help ourselves. Of course it helps to be prepared... (check out these posts from the early days of this blog: 1, 2) and I'll have more to say on that in upcoming posts.




So I think we're likely to do fairly well until the government gets around to getting in touch with us again, probably sometime after the recovery begins.



The move toward automation that we've seen in the developed world since the start of the industrial revolution has been driven by high labour costs and the savings to be had by eliminating labour from industrial processes as much as possible. That revolution started and proceeded at greatest speed in Britain where labour rates where the highest, and still hasn't happened in many developing nations where labour is very cheap.


The Food Supply and Overpopulation

In the initial days of the coming crash there will be problems with the distribution systems for food, medical supplies and water treatment chemicals, all of which are being supplied by "just in time" systems with very little inventory at the consumer end of the supply chain. To simplify this discussion, I'll talk primarily about food.

It is often said that there is only a 3 day supply of food on the grocery store shelves. I am sure this is approximately correct. In collapse circles, the assumption is that, if the trucks stop coming, sometime not very far beyond that 3 day horizon we'd be facing starvation. There may be a few, incredibly unlucky, areas where that will be more or less true.

But, depending on the time of year, much more food than that (often more than a year's worth) is stored elsewhere in the food production and distribution system. The problem will be in moving this food around to where it is needed, and in making sure another year's crops get planted and harvested. I think this can be done, much of it through improvisation and co-operation by people in the agricultural and food industries. With some support from various levels of government.



With my apologies to my "crunchy" friends, modern agriculture and the systems downstream from it supply us with the cheapest and safest food that mankind has known since we were hunters and gatherers and allows us (so far) to support an ever growing human population.

The problem is that this agriculture is not sustainable. It requires high levels of inputs--primarily energy from fossil fuels, but also pesticides, fertilizers and water for irrigation--mostly from non-renewable sources. And rather than enriching the soil on which it depends, it gradually consumes it, causing erosion from over cultivation and over grazing, salinating the soil where irrigation is used and poisoning the water courses downstream with runoff from fertilizers. We need to develop a suite of sustainable agricultural practices that takes advantage of the best agricultural science can do for us, while the infrastructure that supports that science is still functioning.




This will come to an end around mid century with the second bump on the road ahead (starting at point "g" on the graph), when a combination of increasing population, worsening climate, and decreasing availability and increasing prices of energy, irrigation water, fertilizer, pesticides and so forth combine to drastically reduce the output of modern agriculture.


Turning to Violence as a Solution

It is a sad fact that many people, communities and nations, when faced with the sort of challenges I've been talking about here, will respond with violence.




Migration and Refugees



In Conclusion

I've been talking here about some of the changes that will be forced upon us by the circumstances of collapse. I've said very little about what I think we might do if we could face up to the reality of those circumstances and take positive action. That's because I don't think there is much chance that we'll take any such action on a global or even national scale.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Political Realities / Collapse Step by Step / The Bumpy Road Down


Don Hayward said...

Irv, I think I touched on most of these issues in After the Last Day. Of course, my timescales are compressed for story reasons, but it is hard to predict the timing anyway, as you point out. You have more faith in the goodwill and effectiveness of governments than I have. In any event, the bumpiness will not be evenly distributed in both time and space so it is impossible to predict precisely for any region, country or locality. Availability of energy will be a big determining factor. I made sure I put the disclaimer at the front of my story that it is neither a prediction or a how-to book. I eliminate about 80% of the local population and perhaps your 90% is closer to what will eventually happen. My purpose in writing the story was hoping to reach those who will not read non-fiction discussion such as this blog. In the follow-up story, The Seventh Path, I introduce a locality that is industrial and expansionist, 150 years after my collapse. The sequel to that will discuss the details and what will be the inevitable failure of the effort. The bumpiness will continue for some time.

Anonymous said...


And the reason for that is that it works. It's how humans evolved to live. We are simply not adapted to live the way we do and the evidence is all around us, if only the majority of us could see it.

Thanks for another great post. I look forward to the next series.

Eric said...

Would be curious as to what the stabilization might look like.

Irv Mills said...

@Don Hayward
I am reading After the Last Day and enjoying it. And I'm not about to quibble about the details of how you have things proceeding. Seeing it laid out like that, I find it quite helpful to thinking about what might happen and how to respond.
I think I do have more faith than some in the government and in individuals in big companies taking action to keep things going. But you've been quite generous to Hydro One and without saying it, to Ontario Power Generation as well, who are quietly keeping the generating stations going in the background of your story.
I especially like the way you have the people in Weyburne getting together co-operatively and taking care of themselves. Most people these days don't give that sort of thing enough credit.

Irv Mills said...

Thanks, Bev, you've got it right how humans evolved to live. I may be too optimistic about modern people being able to learn to live that way again, but I think we can.

Irv Mills said...

I didn't bring that together in one place, though I think I dropped a lot of hints, both in this post and in some of the earlier ones. And remember that "the balance of nature" is a myth, so the idea of there being such a thing as a long term stable state is not really realistic.
Having said that, I am for some strange reason tempted to take a preliminary run at answering your question, with a long range plan of writing a post on this subject sometime this year.

For us to get to a stable state, the one time energy bonanza of fossil fuels has to be over. This is not to say that there will be no fossil fuels left in the ground, but rather that it will take as much or more energy to get them out of the ground than they provide once we get them out. EROEI<=1. Our energy sources will be the sun and indirect solar sources like biomass, falling water and the wind. Maybe waves and tides (and yes, I know tides aren't solar energy). The EROEI of these energy sources will average out to around 10, ranging from around 5 to not much more than 15.

The next element in a stable state would be that climate change is essentially over. The CO2 we added to the air burning fossil fuels will have been taken back out by biological processes, and damaged ecosystems, on land, but more importantly in the oceans, will have recovered to the extent they are going to recover. I suspect that the deserts will have grown and there will be fewer ideal human habitat than there are now.

This will be the age of salvage. The remnants of modern civilization, especially refined metals, will around for a long time and even hunter gatherers (who there will be more of) will have iron tools.
The majority of us will still be engaged in some sort of agriculture. Here rain is a major determining factor.

If rain comes to us indirectly via a river and has to be applied to the filed via some sort of irrigation infrastructure, then the infrastructure has to be built, operated and maintained. This requires a central authority and lots of people who operate under the close control of that authority. Not the most pleasant sort of society, in my opinion. The kind of place where that control can become too oppressive and heading for the hills becomes an option that people are eager to take.

If rain falls where it is needed (on our fields) you get a much less centralized society where farmers are more independent.

There are a few exceptions like the pacific northwest and a variety of fertile river valleys/deltas where the forests, rivers, and the ocean provide abundantly for people with relatively little agriculture, technology or organization.

In those exceptional cases where an abundance of falling water makes a higher level of energy available, even the possibility of generating electricity, this will support a a higher level of technology.

I hesitate to make statements like having a society at level similar to some point in our past because then people will jump to all kinds of conclusion about details, which I don't think are supported. But if we can restrict that to just the amount of energy that is available per capita, then I think most people will be living at a 17th century level at best. Pre-fossil fuels and pre-electricity.

If there is a supply of falling water in the area, and large forests, then it might even get up to early 20th century, but of course without fossil fuels.

We'll at this point I think there is probably much more to say, but I have run out of steam for the night.

Joe said...

Looking forward to your future posts on individual and community methods of preparing for collapse. Whether collapse to 17th century energy levels is direct and rapid or undulating and takes decades, preparation will be generally the same. Prudence would also suggest preparing for the worst-case scenario, which would be rapid collapse.