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My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

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Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#141

Post by YouCanDoBetter »

justbored123 wrote: post #85
thewarrior wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy. Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008. It seem…

Shale is not economically viable, regular oil is profitable at 10 dollars a barrel, shale needs 60 dollars or more. That is an extreme difference that we are not feeling because of massive amounts of credit pumped into the shale boom. Once the fake money dries up and the market prices that shale oil at its correct value you are in for a world of pain. Imagine the gas a the pump station going x6 and that affecting the…

Shale is profitable because oil prices per barrel hit over 100$ in the 2000s. It's our answer to the OPEC oil cartel, and the reason they dumped all their oil for pennies on the dollar at the start of Covid - "This time we'll REALLY drive shale out of business and we can raise prices again in 5 years!!!"

Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$.

Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#142

Post by XorNot »

marcosdumay wrote: post #135
XorNot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay". Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.

And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine. And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse. Anyway, the conclusion is that we should…

It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do?

Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do?

Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do?

"Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it.

In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#143

Post by s5300 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #129
Isamu wrote: post #102

Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases? It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever. [edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by…

> It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever. My belief in disaster preparedness from the powers that be was severely shaken by the early to mid term response to covid in the US. I genuinely thought we’d handle a large scale disaster that had been prepared for forever much, much better than we did.

I think it was heavily dependent on the administration.

To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#145

Post by hogFeast »

chestertn wrote: post #60

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting…

One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil price. Sometimes that supply effect of higher prices is limited (we are, potentially, seeing this with copper) but if you are projecting linear trends, you don't understand economics (and btw, this was the issue with the original Limits to Growth and almost all of these studies...for some reason, people who are attracted to this problem spend more time fooling around with their toy models rather than just talking to someone in mining or O&G).

That being said, it is equally true that very few people who study economics actually ask basic questions about how and why economic growth occurs. Economic growth is just energy consumption. That is it (whether humans burning food or oil or gas or whatever, the industrial revolution was about unlocking energy for production...note, this plays no role in Solow growth). And if you build a system which is unable to improve efficiency than that process is logically finite (but, as in paragraph one, no-one knows how finite...you can do all the computer simulations you want, no-one knows...a good example of this is shale oil, Russia has unfathomably large resources of shale oil...everyone knew it was there but it didn't matter until fracking, peak oil was a mania).

So I don't think anyone is really asking the right questions. It is really simple: do we want free energy? Do we want to improve the efficiency of our energy use? Even if climate change wasn't happening, we would need to look at solar/wind/whatever (and, hopefully, this will lead to a new industrial revolution). Imo, population control is also important. We can improve energy use but population will just grow to fill the space (and part of the problem is here actually poor quality elder care and weak pension systems caused by low savings rates). Obv, population control isn't popular anymore but...it makes sense once you understand economic growth.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#146

Post by mythrwy »

foxylad wrote: post #132
notjes wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once said: If you are a teen and you aren't a lefty, you have no heart. And if you are in your 30'S and you are still a lefty, you have no brain. Many travel along those lines. And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite. There is no peak oil. There is no peak food. There is no peak climate. There is no water…

> resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them. I'll give you peak oil: our i…

I never accepted the premise of that book as being universally true.

Societies have collapsed for reasons other then resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other then resource scarcity.

I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything.

My guess? The professional political/priestly/mid-level manager class gaining self serving control and cannibalizing productive (and competitive) capacity is a very common cause of collapse.

We see it on a smaller scale in companies real time.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#147

Post by XorNot »

schimmy_changa wrote: post #51
dane-pgp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-…

Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!) The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, n…

> The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives

This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand.

That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#148

Post by premium-gecko »

briefcomment wrote: post #109
premium-gecko wrote: post #6

The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth : "In searching for…

If you thought the world could only survive with a much smaller population, and you had enough money to buy out all decision makers and media, what would you do? Sit around and wait for the world to end, or take matters into your own hands?

I can't say what I'd do if I were a rich misanthrope. But if I were to have a conversation with a rich misanthrope, I might urge them to take up some kind of spiritual cultivation practice like loving-kindness meditation. And I would try to impress upon them the idea that no human or group of humans is smarter than all humans together, i.e., the best ideas seem to come from emergence, the clash of all our activities, rather than some committee of them and their friends. I would try to instill doubt and humility in them about whether the world needs saving and whether they're so sure that their ideas are correct that it's justified to force them onto millions of people by trickery and deceit.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#149

Post by premium-gecko »

iaw wrote: post #53
yongjik wrote: post #45

> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ... This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020…

Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely. Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.

> we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region

What was supposed to have done that? Adding 100 ppm of CO2?

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#150

Post by another_story »

wussboy wrote: post #93
titzer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political…

But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding…

But in the case of systems collapsing due to climate change, it's the scientific community with mountains of evidence saying our topsoil is disappearing, coastal cities will start to flood, typhoons and droughts will become more frequent, and food supplies are at risk.
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