I was banned, without warning, on 8 March 2005 from SFFWORLD.COM. SFF stands for "Science Fiction Fantasy." I read a lot of fantasy literature as recreation, especially during the winter when I must stay indoors. I'd been doing what most of the other posters do: conducting and voting in polls to decide which books or authors were the most popular, the best written, etc. I'd just begun a poll asking for people to post their reading speed in words per minute and pages per day. That kind of thing.

The most likely explanations for the ban were...

1. I'd put a link to a fantasy short story that I'd written.

2. I'd begun arguing about the significance of rape in fantasy literature with a feminist in a thread devoted to that very topic.

Prior to being banned, I'd incurred the displeasure of a forum moderator who took exception to my putting a non-racist version of two of my mathematical celestial mechanics treatises, Orbit Determination for Dummies and Transfer Orbits for Dummies, in the General Discussion area, which is the subforum intended for discussions that do not fit into any of the other subforums. I don't know whether any residual animosity contributed to sffworld's decision to ban me.

One person who commented on my short story said he found it "hilarious," and it was meant to be funny.

You can find sffworld.com's forum if you doubt that I'm being fair in my description of what happened. I have no way, at the moment, to check, but it is possible that they have deleted all posts by me because someone can find Jerry's Aryan Battle Page by doing a web search on my name.

Since none of my posts on that forum was intensively racial, I didn't record them locally. Again, the ban came without warning: I got nuked.

To follow is the next post that I would have made, if I'd not been IP-banned by the forum administrators. It's just to show you the kind of material that makes them uncomfortable.

Jerry Abbott

Quote, originally Posted by Valada
As for issues of political correctness–I don't want to go there in any depth, but the one point I would like to make is that, with something like murder, the person who is murdered is not there to feel the barbs afterwards.

You evidently have forgotten that the friends and families of murder victims remain to "feel the barb" afterwards, when someone spoofs killing in fiction. And in any case, whereas feelings are not unimportant, they are not as important as you seem to think they are.

Quote, originally Posted by Valada
Jenab, how are you to know that a victim of rape is not reading your posts and taking your flippancy to heart? For that individual, rape would have nothing to do with what is politically correct and everything to do with what is probably the most traumatic experience in their lives.

You may, at your leisure, go back up through this discussion and notice where I've distinguished rape in fantasy from rape in real life. [I'd said that an actual rape should be a capital crime and that rapists should be executed.] It's the same distinction which exists between murder in fantasy and murder in real life. Although I can understand that a real life rape victim might be made uncomfortable by a fictional account of rape, that victim's feelings have not the slightest hint of a rightful control over whether or how someone else might choose to treat rape in fiction.

We'd probably had best begin, then, with firming up our sense of what is real and what is imaginary.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
Although I don't spoof rape to rub salt in old wounds, I'm also not going to live my life in self-imposed restraint lest I unintentionally do same. Neither should anyone else be compelled to do so. The freedom of the many is more important than the possible offended feelings of the few.

Whereas there may be feminists who will tell you the same thing, there is a difference between feminist theory and its practice, between its doctrines as they appear on paper and the effect on human society that it really has.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I think someone mentioned "Victorian outrage" versus "feminist outrage" over rape. I think this is an important distinction. In feminist outrage, the anger comes from the fact that a free moral agent had her natural human dignity violated by an individual who desires her humiliation.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
That's not quite correct. The reason rape provokes outrage in feminists is that a man's will prevailed over that of a woman. It's not as general a display of disapproval of victimization as you make it seem. When a man is the victim of some violence, in which he suffers "humiliation" and his "natural dignity" is taken away, the feminists seldom make more than token responses...and more often they make none. If the perpetrator of the act was a woman, the response from the feminists is likely to be something like: "Well good: he got what was coming to him, the evil male bastard."

No, you'll never convince me that feminists experience outrage purely because "a free moral agent had [his] natural human dignity violated by an individual who desires [his] humiliation." It just isn't so. The truth is that feminists work to divide women from men; to partition the sexes into competing, mutually acrimonious classes, in order to weaken that of which they are both necessary parts, namely, a race.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
"Victorian" disapproval stems from the belief that women are men's property, whether their husband's or their father's, and to rape a woman would thus be a crime against the *man* not the woman. It has little to do with the squeemishness about sex. In fact, it is not even a Victorian concept, this dates back to the ancient Greek times and beyond. These are characteristics of patriarchal societies.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
Again, while you aren't completely wrong, your summary is not complete. Humans live only so long, less than a century usually, and then they die. Women are fertile for only 20-30 years of their lives; if they miss their chance to have children, then they never will. If a nation would propagate itself and its culture into the future, then women must have babies, and not merely any babies: they must bear babies of the national stock.

If women would have the sort of "choice" the feminists say they ought to have, then they would have to negotiate for their protection and support from mercenaries such as they might hire. It would never be given them for free, and they would have no right to claim it as their due. Any woman who could not afford to hire mercenary protectors and providers, and could not protect and provide for herself (and any children that she might have) would necessarily need to resort to prostitution, or die.

The old patriarchal system did not make a queen out of every woman, but neither did every woman deserve to be a queen. It gave each sex rights and obligations, and it cheated no one.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
The truth is that feminists work to divide women from men; to partition the sexes into competing, mutually acrimonious classes, in order to weaken that of which they are both necessary parts, namely, a race.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I am not sure where your definition of feminism comes from, but I would disagree with this blanket statement.

My statement was a general statement, and it is generally true.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
To be sure, there are some seperatist feminists who exist, but I believe they are few and far between. Feminists, at least the category of which I include myself, work to challenge the social contruction of gender that people worldwide give meaning to.

Your idea that gender is a "social construction" that I would challenge made me smile. Referring to human differences that are real – biological and innate – as "social constructs" is one of the ways liberals (including many Marxists and feminists) trivialize that over which they have no control. Harangue and confuse the multitudes as they may, liberals have never once seen their wishes overcome natural laws, and they never will.

Those "separatist feminists" aren't few and far between; they've been the voice of feminism, by and large, since Andra Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will), Kate Millet (Sexual Politics), Robin Morgan (Going Too Far), Marilyn French (The Women's Room), Kathleen Barry (Female Sexual Slavery), Gloria Steinem (in her later years), Mary Daly (Gyn-Ecology) and Adrienne Rich (Of Woman Born) first wrote. And they would probably like to regard gender as a "social construct" every bit as much as those other feminists do.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I believe essentially the same thing that you do, that we are all persons and that is all that matters, and that we should all be treated with the same inherent human dignity.

In fact, I'm not certain what you mean by "human dignity." I am reasonably certain that it is not an organ, nor a hormone, and I'm pretty sure that it isn't inherited, as most human qualities are. Or, more exactly, I doubt that your conception of "human dignity" is genetically inherited, though I'd allow that you might possibly refer to the sort of theological inheritance by which a human acquires a soul.

In what does dignity inhere? I've long had the suspicion that one has this sort of dignity by the permission of liberals, who may remove it at will from those whom they would demonize for political reasons. Human dignity, then, or at least as you use the term, is an example of a social construct. Gender is not in that class.

The mundane meaning of dignity refers to an attitude, or a bearing–as with the solemn carriage of one's person at a formal social function.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I think that patriarchal socities works to divide woman from man the day humans are born, by attaching special, socially constructed meanings to their gender. And thus it is mainstream society, not feminists, who divide woman from man in these ways.

The division of roles by gender arise simply from the fact that women bear children, whereas men sire them. The largest task of men in human reproduction occurs in the provision of food and protection to children, not in causing the pregnancy. Whether we like it or not, nature has decreed that the female, not the male, will be the occasionally pregnant sex. If the female revolts from her task, the nation dies just as surely as if the male conspired to poison the wells and salt the land so that no food would grow anywhere. If women refuse their biological mission, they kill their people as certainly as if men had treasonously stood aside to allow enemies to infiltrate their country and create an army sufficient for slaughtering them.

That's the truth, whether we like it or not; it's how things really are, whether it pleases us or not. Women warriors and matriarchal societies may be popular in fantasy, but in real life they are signs that the race that permits them endangers its own existence.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
When a man is the victim of some violence, in which he suffers "humiliation" and his "natural dignity" is taken away, the feminists seldom make more than token responses...and more often they make none.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I would disagree. Feminists do speak out against violence against women, but I think that the sense of justice feminists adhere to also makes it necessary to speak out on violence against men, and many do. Violence against anyone is a violation of their human dignity, and many feminists do make it a point to address injustices like this. I believe the core issue feminists study is power and how power allows some people to treat others as if they were not deserving of dignity.

Are feminists fair? Very occasionally, they might try to seem so, and for that reason they will protest violence against a man once in a while. But this is not what they regard as their purpose, whatever their theory may be.

Their real conviction is that men are evil, that woman are good, that men harm women and are monsters for doing it, but women are justified when they harm men. The rare protest against abuse to a man being acknowledged, feminists generally see men as an oppressor class, women as the victim class, and in the main their actions reflect their desire to separate the victims from their oppressors. If they are permitted to continue to the logical conclusion of their desires, feminists will destroy any race they afflict. Feminists divide the sexes, whatever they might pretend otherwise. They do not seek harmony between them.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
If the perpetrator of the act was a woman, the response from the feminists is likely to be something like: "Well good: he got what was coming to him, the evil male bastard.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I, as a feminist, would not say anything like that.

Then you are an unusual feminist. Most feminists take the woman's side in everything, and they ignore anything which may be in feminist theory to the contrary.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
No, you'll never convince me that feminists experience outrage purely because "a free moral agent had [his] natural human dignity violated by an individual who desires [his] humiliation.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
That is too bad. Though if you ever change your mind, there is a great book you should read called "Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy."

You refer me to feminist theory, which you would like to imagine is the hand which guides feminist influence on society. It isn't. These are clever and pretty words by which some feminists endorse sentiments, principles and ideals that feminists, by and large, do not practice. Feminism is not unique in having departures between theory and practice; it happens also in Marxism (despite Karl Marx's theories), in capitalism (despite the theories of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand), and in the pursuit of racial equality. In all of these, as well as in feminism, there is a difference between what the theory and the practice, or between the theoretical predictions and the actual social consequences.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
If women would have the sort of "choice" the feminists say they ought to have, then they would have to negotiate for their protection and support from mercenaries such as they might hire.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I am not sure what you are referring to here. Reproductive choice? I don't see how that necessitates hiring a mercenary.

I hope that you will forgive me for using the word "choice" properly, without any reference to the cliche special meaning given it by feminists. No, I meant choice in how to live in the general sense. If women would live as the social equals of men, partaking in careers in competition with men, then the men would do themselves no good by behaving chivalrously, any more than a business company would subsidize its own competitors. A woman who would be a professional must pay for her provision and for her protection with cash. If she can get no cash, then she must barter for her protection somehow, and the most obvious means of bartering is prostitution.

Feminism depends utterly, if tacitly, on the continuation of male chivalry. Once that is gone, most of the women who can't adequately support (or defend) themselves will become whores, when they might have been, in a patriarchal society, wives instead.

Of course, sometimes the benefits of male chivalry do not come from the man who is feeling chivalrous. Subsidizing popular "virtues" is easier when the decisions are made by someone who doesn't have to do much of the paying. At the personal level, feminism has already partly divorced women from men, and in recent times has been able to influence some men (like legislators and judges) to squeeze money from other men for the benefit of women.

I don't think that this arrangement is stable. I think that it will eventually collapse, leaving women still estranged from men, while the men will have regained control over their own creative powers and the fruits thereof. In the end, feminism will have made whores of nearly all women–with a few exceptions like Red Sonja and Xena–and will have made men into the monsters that the feminists originally professed to loathe and fear, but which will have previously existed only as a small fraction of men.

When you fight natural law, you always lose. When you jump up from the ground, you return again. The harder you can jump, the longer you stay airborne, but also the harder you strike the ground afterward.

But as I said before, the purpose of feminism isn't, and never was, to unify the sexes as a harmonious society in which gender wasn't socially important. It was, and it always has been, aimed at dividing women from men and thus destroying the race of which they are both necessary parts.

Quote, originally Posted by Jenab
The old patriarchal system did not make a queen out of every woman, but neither did every woman deserve to be a queen.

Quote, originally Posted by Oreithyia
I don't believe that any sane feminist would say that every woman should be a queen. In fact, I believe many would say that the system of monarchy does not allow for the type of equality that many women and men hope for. The feminist ideals of justice are rooted in the Enlightenment, the men of which fought against such unfair systems of government.

Again, you refer me to what feminists say, regardless of which, I say, feminists do want every woman to be a queen and every man a subject. Feminist theory is one thing; the practical consequences of feminist activism are different things. I'm not unaware that feminists share the Marxist dislike of nobility/royalty; they share it because feminism is gender Marxism, with analogous flaws and fallacies. The communists will tell you that they want a classless society, but what they'll really give you is a society in which the state bureaucrats are the dominant class, the politically correct citizens are in the middle class, and the dissidents are in the bottom class. The feminists will do the same: women on top, men on bottom–despite any theory about gender equality that they might endorse.

Other posts of mine, originally appearing on SFFWORLD.

In order to recover my own writing from SFFWORLD, I went through a proxy server and reconnected to evade the IP ban. It was cheaper than buying an account with another ISP. While I was doing that, I became convinced that the reason that I was banned was that my ideas were frightening or antagonizing to feminist posters who enjoy favored status there: the only posts that the mods deleted were those on the subject of gender politics versus the realities of nature. I was unable to recover my posts which preceded the post, just above. Indeed, that post you just read never appeared on SFFWORLD because they banned me before I could post it. All of my posts unrelated to feminism were still visible when I made my salvage visit.

Since those posts are gone, and I did not have them saved in local files, you won't get to read them and appreciate how handily I demolished the feminist ideology with firmly grounded and flawlessly reasoned arguments. The feminists were fleeing my intellectual might while screeching like scalded cats! Or something of that approximate nature. Since they performed the censorship, you can surmise that there must have been reasons (like fear) for their not wanting to wrestle with me in debate; even if some doubt about their feminist theories wasn't openly admitted, it must have been there. A opponent who is confident that he or she is right does not resort to censorship.

But I also made other posts on SFFWORLD, including a long discussion of the end of the Industrial Age. Here's the thread.

As many of us have heard, the long predicted depletion in the supply of fossil fuels, crucial to the operation and maintenance of our industrial civilization, has begun to occur. So far, the effects have included a modest rise in the prices for gasoline, heating oil, propane, kerosene, deisel fuel - modest being on the order of 50% to 100% relative to those prices of several years ago. Also, if you've noticed, the prices of all goods requiring significant transport from the factory to the consumer have risen. The price of bread has risen by about 25% and the price of processed cold breakfast cereal has risen by about 60%.

This is only the beginning. As fossil fuels become scarcer, our fossil fuel powered farms and factories will necessarily operate on a steadily reducing scale, which means that the "bidding" on these scarcer goods in the marketplace will drive the prices up explosively.

And there's worse yet. Agribusiness is, after all, a business. It will be carried on only for as long as it can be done profitably, and not for one day more. Agribusiness has, through the use of petroleum fueled tractors and mechanical harvesters, and through the application of oil-derived pesticides and artificial fertilizers, in effect put the land on a sort of amphetemines: boosting its yield by a factor of ten while depleting its store of natural richness and killing off its native ecology.

On top of that, the elimination of the substrata of tree roots has caused the erosion of much of what used to be our topsoil, while concrete and asphalt pavement has made much more topsoil unavailable for farming.

Agribusiness will gradually reduce its scale of operations for a time, and then it will suddenly quit altogether. The land we live upon can no longer support our population by the old methods of hand-tool farming, and accordingly there will be famine. Famines will, in fact, sweep around the world, and perhaps nineteen people out of every twenty, on the average, will die from hunger or from violence related to hunger.

In fantasy, we often read that an author has availed himself of the natural tribal sentiments that come hardwired in all primates, ourselves included. Some races are the good races, usually elves, dwarves, and humans. Other races are the evil races, usually orcs, trolls (or trollocs), vampires, assorted demons, etc. There's no effort to assert "racial equality" or to make excuses for why, say, goblins seem to enjoy sneaking up on someone from behind and killing him with a slash to the throat. This is simply native, biologically programmed behavior, and we all accept it as such. It's fantasy; no problems with political correctness, right?

Well, prepare yourselves for living in a fantasy world then. What's about to happen on Earth is our getting clobbered on a Biblical level, or on the level of a cataclysm related in a modern fantasy epic. Our "human brotherhood" notions are not natural; they have prevailed in a time when fossil fuel energy has made possible an unnatural, and unsustainable, level of comfort and convenience, an ease of most basic forms of labor, and an abundance of food created with mechanized agriculture. Oh, plus a "liberal" use of police power by a socially intrusive government entity. When the energy goes, so do the theories about human equality and brotherhood. Your race will be your kin, again, as it was throughout most of history (and earlier), while other races will be monsters, a threat to yourself and to all you hold dear.

Governments have been busy lately in granting themselves legal justifications for the most extreme forms of authoritarian rule. The RICO laws; the Patriot Acts; the Executive Orders that say the government can take everything we have, divide our families, and enslave everybody; the precedents set at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and since; the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue...and much more, all indicate that the government is preparing for an all-out effort to control the populace at a time when the populace will be desperate enough to fight its authority.

If you aren't ready to handle that reality when it arrives, then your chances for surviving the post-industrial age are slim. Fantasy writers who would do a real service for their readers might wish to write realistic apocalypse fantasies while the means of having their books published still exists. (Though I'd advise them to keep their stories ostensibly otherworldly, as governments might be minded, eventually, to censor obvious criticism in literature.)

Didn't I say? No? I'm sorry. The end of the industrial age will also be the end of mass market publishing.

I guess it was too much to expect everyone to know what I've spent a while finding out. I really have looked into this, folks; I probably know more about the significance of fossil fuel depletion than most of you do.

For one thing, the idea that a technological solution to our situation exists is a fallacy. Technology does not create new energy sources. Energy exists in nature; technology is merely a means for tapping into sources.

A lot of you have faith in the inevitable ironing-out of the technical problems with hydrogen fusion. As it happens, I have worked as a physicist professionally, and it's my opinion that you will be disappointed in this expectation.

Even if fusion is mastered, it would solve our energy problem while creating a new one: disposing of thermal waste. Humans are smarter than we are wise: if we had access to unlimited energy, we'd merely cook ourselves with it, eventually, in a "tragedy of the commons" fashion.

That is, it's probably a good thing that mankind will run out of energy, with the result being that 95% of us will die, since the most likely alternative is that Earth would lose its ability to sustain life of any sort, resulting in the death of all life on it, including all humans. Harsh. But probably true.

Going again to your speculative panacea, suppose that fusion is mastered. That does not mean that we shall at once have the fusion-power generating infrastructure built, and you must build a powerplant before you can draw any power out of it. To do the building in the first place, you must have access to a sufficient supply of energy. Hence, nuclear power plants, both fission and fusion, must be made from fossil fuel energy, out of which we are shortly to run. So even if we do figure out how to keep an industrially advantageous fusion reaction going - which I doubt will happen - we still won't be able to build all the fusion powerplants we shall need to replace fossil fuels.

It is a measure of someone's denial that he (or she) will pin the hopes of their people and the future of their world on a speculative accomplishment. You'd be almost as well off hoping for divine intervention.

The abiotic origin theory for oil is wrong. However, even if it were correct, it wouldn't matter. The timescale for replenishment of the oil fields, in the abiotic origin theory, is too long for there to be any hope that replenishment will save industrial civilization from collapse.

Nicba has referred to "a new hydrogen infrastructure," and said that "hydrogen will...take the place [of oil] as the primary 'energy carrier.'" Does he know what his own words mean? Yes, hydrogen (used as a chemical fuel) is an "energy carrier," which means that the hydrogen must be processed to elemental form before it can be later burned. The processing of the hydrogen uses MORE energy than is later recovered from the burning. That's why hydrogen combustion is not a solution to the energy crisis: it's a net energy loser. It's like charging a battery now so that you can discharge it later.

The same is true even for something like antimatter. Antimatter, in the form of positrons and anti-protons, is made - one elementary particle at a time - from collisions in particle accelerators. The antimatter can be removed with magnetic fields and, very dangerously, accumulated and stored in solid form with electric fields keeping the antimatter from any premature contact with matter. But it remains true that more energy is required to get the antimatter to begin with, than can be recovered later through matter-antimatter reactions.

There just is no getting around the fact that energy carriers - all of them - are net losers. The only way to continue with industrial civilization would be to harness a naturally existing source of energy by a means which is possible for us to erect in the time remaining to us.

Solar energy would have worked - had we pursued the developement of solar panel technology sixty years ago. It would have worked because more than sufficient power from sunlight falls on Earth to replace fossil fuels. But it's not a solution NOW because not enough time remains to build a solar panel array of the necessary size.

Exploiting extraterrestrial sources of energy is another thing we should have done years ago, but which is too late to begin trying to do now. Our remaining supply of fossil fuels simply will not permit us, now, to establish a fuel train from Titan to Earth.

In fact, you might say that the correct answer to the IQ test that Nature gave Man was to limit the use of fossil fuels to those who would apply them toward gaining access to extraterrestrial fuel supplies. We flunked the test. And all of Earth's evolutionary struggle to send the seed of its life to other planets became vain, fruitless, the moment mankind crossed the point at which it was no longer possible to reach out to those off-planet energy sources.

Really, it was a point of cosmic historical importance. To be sure, Nature will, in some other place, at some other time, begin the process of evolution again, perhaps with better luck. Eventually, there will be an intelligence that spans the stars. But it won't be us.

Of course, humans will "adapt" to the new energy situation. But in the process of adapting, most humans will die. The adaptees will be the exception, not the rule; they will be the few, not the masses.

What's happening with respect to our population and to the resources on which we depend is an impending event that is very familiar to biologists: overshoot and collapse. Because we are a globally resident species with a global system of trade, the overshoot of resources is also global. Because of the extreme slowness by which oil is made from geological processes, whatever you suppose them to be, this particular overshoot of resources will occur only once in the whole history of Earth. By the time there is again much oil under the soil, the increasing radiation from the sun will have made our planet unhabitable, and therefore lifeless.

I should explain. Our sun has five billion years (more or less) remaining on the main sequence. But its luminosity has been, and will continue, increasing steadily in the meantime. The increase is about ten percent per billion years, and about two billion years from now the higher thermal flux will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect by evaporating the oceans. That is assuming something else doesn't trigger a runaway greenhouse effect much sooner.

Every species known will exhibit the overshoot-and-collapse pattern given the proper circumstances: bacteria, caribou, rabbits, and us. The reason this is a common pattern is, to some extent, a lack of foresight (especially in the case of other animal species). But in our own case, there is less of lack of foresight and more of a "tragedy in the commons," which is based partly on a voluntary self-deception.

Humans have experienced overshoot-and-collapse events before. The inhabitants of Easter Island grew in numbers and fell prey to a tragedy in the commons in regard to the use of their natural resources, with the result that their civilization collapsed and most of the inhabitants died off. What happened on that island, several hundred years ago, will happen to the whole world soon.

But usually overshoot-and-collapse events are historically masked by wars. Most wars are induced by "population pressure," which is merely another way of saying that some people, somewhere, have overshot the supply of one or more resources available in their homeland and must, to survive, take away somebody else's resources. So they go to war, and they either win or they lose, with the losing side being largely, if not completely, exterminated. So in the history books the deaths are recorded as being casualties of war, conquest, and colonization, even though the ultimate cause is overshoot-and-collapse.

So we are not speaking of a special principle that applies only to the global depletion of fossil fuels. The coming overshoot-and-collapse event is merely the largest that will ever occur in human history. The number of deaths? About nine billion. As a percentage? 95% of mankind. The outcome? A new balance of population with food supply.

Those of you who doubt that the races will turn ferociously against each other after the collapse of civilization should reflect that there is no better way to judge the future than by the past. Review, then, the history of Haiti (San Dominique) and Zaire (Belgian Congo). Once you have studied your lessons, come back and tell me how confident you are that racial harmony will endure for eternity.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
I realize that you aren't readily going to be convinced by anything that the rest of us say, but you haven't convinced me of your basic premise. It appears to me that people have been saying that we will run out of fossil fuels in about 50 years for the last 80 years or so. The deadline is always getting pushed back.

That's not true. Every informed forecast regarding fossil fuel depletion has come true, within a reasonable allowance for uncertainty. When M. King Hubbert predicted in the 1960s that the worldwide per capita production of oil would peak in 1979, people laughed at him. But it turned out that he was right. The other peak that has been forecast - for about 40 years or so - is the absolute peak in worldwide oil production. And every one of those predictions, no matter when they were made, set the most probable time of the peak during the first quarter of the 21st century. Finally, now, here we are, with some of us pretending that all earlier predictions were wrong, so probably this one is too. The deadline does not "always get pushed back." It has remained more or less steady. We have at last come up to meet it, unprepared and asserting that everyone who had warned us in the past were just so many Chicken Littles.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
Extraction technologies continue to improve, making marginal deposits profitable, and new location technologies enable us to find new deposits. For instance, there is a giant tar sand field in Canada that will soon be operational for extraction, pushing the deadline of running out back further. You can say I'm "in denial" for looking at what technology is doing for us currently, so be it.

Up to a point, those extraction technologies can be implemented profitably. There are two constraints upon their being used: one is economic (the company using them must make a profit) and one is thermodynamic: the energy yield, after inefficiencies are accounted for, must exceed the energy cost of gathering it. Economic "forces" can shift the scales for the first constraint only. Technology shifts the second contraint, but there is a limit, and as that limit is approached, the cost of improving technology still further will weigh substantially and adversely on the economic constraint.

When nothing more whatever can be done to raise oil profitably from the ground, and when nothing more whatever can be done to make the energy yield exceed the costs of production, there will still be oil in the ground. But unless God takes a hand in things, and with suitable miracles violates the laws of thermodynamics in order to hand you that oil, there simply won't be any purpose in trying to get it.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
However, nuclear fission can also extend the period before a massive energy collapse by a long, long time. Yes, the power plants must be built with trucks that need gas. However, unless you truly believe that this apocalypse will occur in the next 10 or so years, that won't be the limiting issue. Politics will have much more influence on that situation, and admittedly, that's not the best thing to rest our future on.

As I see it, with political considerations weighed as best as I can weigh them, there will be trigger events that will suddenly alter the fortunes of the industrialized countries. For one thing, the oil fields in Saudi Arabia are no longer gushers - they are way past their peak. In order to keep production high, one of those technologies that you propose for the Canadian oil sands is being applied in Saudi Arabia, namely, pumping water under the oil field to raise the pressure on the oil, making it possible to extract it out faster. This is not a good sign for the longevity of those oil fields, which are the world's largest, and the forcing pressure on the oil also means that when the end comes, it will come quickly.

Similarly, the market responds primarily to short-term forecasts, not to any theories about what might happen eventually. That's why there's a lot of misinformation going around about oil reserves and the dependability of oil as a supply of energy during the lifetimes of today's investors. When events have unfolded to the point at which the lies are exposed, there will be an economic trigger event: a panic in the global markets, every oil investor trying to sell all his shares (but finding no buyers), hyperdeflation in the value of the US dollar (and corresponding hyperinflation of prices in dollars), people losing jobs, banks foreclosing mercilessly on mortgages, and all the other socio-economic and political accoutrements of a Great Depression.

So, rather than a gradual decline, civilization will experience a decline with a roughly exponential envelope, however disrupted by episodes that will trigger stairstep falls of various magnitudes.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
I see that you do not predict that collapse within the next 10 years, as you are predicting 9 billion deaths of 95% of humanity. That implies a total human population of 9.47 billion people. Our current world population is about 6 billion, so it will take us a little while to breed up to the point to where there are enough of us to be killed off.

The collapse of what? Despite several severe plunges (stock market crash, the sudden failure of major oil fields), the government will have two priorities relating to its own survival: (1) keeping its military assets and (2) the continuation of mechanized agriculture. It will keep those things going for a long as it can, and it will drop agriculture only when it must choose between that and its military power. (It would make much sense for our government to repudiate its public debt, but for political reasons I don't expect it will.)

Agriculture, then, will have the benefits of fossil fuels for a while, even after the Depression begins. The population of the world won't begin to crash until maybe 20-30 years after the early economic crashes begin. Rather, it will keep on growing like bacteria during the last generation before the nutrients in the petri dish have been entirely consumed. I expect the global famines to begin in the 2040s.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
I just have to ask, where are your figures coming from? 9 billion, 95% are fairly specific numbers. Why not 10 billion and 80%? From my calculations from your figures, you feel that after an energy collapse the Earth's total sustainable population is about 470 million. How did you arrive at that number? And given your specificity regarding the deaths, why do you only say that we'll run out of fossil fuel "soon?" Are you willing to say that it will happen in the next 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years? "Soon" can have a lot of meanings, based on what time scale you're looking at.

Quite right. When I said "running out," I mean that there will be a reduction in the absolute worldwide production of fossil fuel energy. I don't mean that the world's supplies of oil and natural gas will be gone when Major Bad Things begin to occur. The diminution of the supply will be quite sufficient to cause those Major Bad Things.

For my world population peak, I refer to the United Nations World3 reference run. I specified 9 billion as a guess. The peak of the world's population could be higher, though the highest estimate I've heard from others is 12 billion, and I don't think the population will ever become that large.

The 95% death percentage is another guess, based on my having been told that mechanized, chemically assisted agriculture yields about ten times as much food per acre of land than the old hand-tool methods of farming did. So why didn't I say 90%? Two reasons, and the first reason has two parts: 1a) the machines have stripped away the root substrata of farmland and have thus caused the erosion of much topsoil (i.e., there was farmland that now has not enough top soil to be called farmland anymore), 1b) the chemical fertilizers have killed the ecology of much farmland that has retained a soil cover, though that soil is now sterile (i.e., there was farmland that once could grow food without chemical stimulants, but which can do so no more), and 2) together with the collapse of mechanized agriculture will be a collapse in the transport required for food distribution. Altogether, I "guessed" that about half of the people who might have been fed, if the farmland had remained in the health and quantity it originally had, and if the yield had been transportable to hungry people, will nonetheless die because there will be less total food grown than might have been possible to grow upon the same land in, say, 1900, and because what is grown will spoil before it can reach those who need it.

As I said, it is a guess. But is it a bad guess?

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
BTW, I fully agree with you about hydrogen. There are also some similar problems related to solar panels, particularly with production costs and the pollution associated with it.

What do you think of politicians and businessmen who, knowing better, hail hydrogen fuel cell technology as the answer to the "energy crisis"?

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
And you're probably right about racial equality. If we completely descend back into barbarism, racial violence (along with every other form of violence) will go back to being the norm. Of course, I never felt that we would achieve complete racial tolerance until we meet aliens, and realize that human differences are pretty miniscule compared to the difference between us and beings from a completely different evolutionary path. (I still don't think that multiracial families will immediately turn on each other, however.)

Right. Robin Hobb (the fantasy fiction author) recently asked me which of her children she'd "savage" first. I answered that I didn't know, but would she consider the history of the Belgian Congo? There, a Black revolution against Portuguese colonists targeted for some of the most extremely obscene murders those Whites who had "gone native" by marrying or having relationships with Blacks, as well as the mulattoes who were born to them. There are photographs, somewhere, that record some of those abuses: very nasty scenes. And when judging what the future will be, there is no better guide than a study of the past.

Quote, originally Posted by Michael B:
I believe that you missed the point I was making. It is possible that in an energy shortage that the West will barely suffer at all. If the oil crises of the seventies are anything to go by, it is the non-West that will be reamed. After all they are and were less able to afford the increases in costs. They ended up borrowing money to pay for oil and that contributed to the Third World debt problem (as well as poorly considered industrial projects and theft by dictators).

On the contrary, the (industrialized) West has the furthest to fall, and will suffer the most greatly upon the collapse of industrial civilization. This is not a mere temporary energy "shortage" - this is the final end of the power needed to keep industrial civilization going. Those countries whose inhabitants remain closer to the old hand-tool farming methods, who have the least technical specialization, will have a smaller adjustment to make and will have an easier time adapting.

(However, famines will occur in Third World countries that have become dependent on food imports, such as food relief from the US, just as would have occurred had they themselves owned the technics by which the food was grown.)

Quote, originally Posted by Michael B:
As for the non-West demonstrating their outrage, they will have to do more than blow up a couple of skyscapers. Considering what the Americans have done in return to the Islamic fundamentalist movement in return for that act, it may not have a particulary smart move to further its aims.

You show yourself to be badly misinformed. We have done nothing (much) to punish the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center towers. Rather, we have given them a nice reward. The Al Quaeda gang is fundamentalist Muslim, but the Baathist regime of Sadaam Hussein was secular, and the Muslim fundies hated it about as much as they hate Israel and the United States. When we destroyed Iraq's government, we pleased Mr. Osama bin Laden and those whose politics are similar to his. He might not like the Americans being in Iraq, but he probably figures we'll go away after we lose a Vietnam or two's worth of soldiers, leaving Iraq in the possession of fundamentalist Muslims, maybe, though the Jews or the Chinese might grab the region instead.

Quote, originally Posted by Michael B:
The fact is, all things being equal, rich civilisations have a pretty good track record of buying what they need to survive and giving barbarian types a good kick up the backside. Things may get messy and they may become a lot poorer in the process but these are seperate issues.

Are the Iraqis barbarians? Did we "buy" Iraq from them?

Quote, originally Posted by Michael B:
Also, it is worth noting that the West has allies in the non-West, elites who can be relied on to crack down on their own people, a sort of divide and rule policy.

For now, maybe. But whereas the US government might have some control over ruling families, it has no control over large dissident factions that might kill those families during a coup or a revolution. Such things have happened before - often enough that one ought not to use the phrase "relied on."

Quote, originally Posted by Michael B:
Furthermore, thanks to improved technology and approaches, we are now producing/doing more with less, the Americans excepted. Malthusian doomsters have been predicting doom and collapse since 1798. Whilst I would not say catagorically it will not happen, it is funny how the less advanced parts of human civilisation seem to come off the worse whilst the more advanced survive albeit in a changed form.

Rich people in the slaughterhouse chute do have a way of tossing poor people ahead of them until the end of the business day. That's how they survive. When the ship sinks, the ship's officers and the first-class passengers kill the crew and the steerage passengers, make a big pile of their corpses, and climb atop it so that their noses will be the last to be submerged, hoping that rescue will come from somewhere in the meantime.

The rescue won't come this time.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
From my calculations from your figures, you feel that after an energy collapse the Earth's total sustainable population is about 470 million. How did you arrive at that number?

I just noticed something. That 470 million figure can be reached two ways.

The way you reached it was from my estimate that 95% of about 9.5 billion people will die from starvation. I got the 9.5 billion from a UN computer model, and I reasoned the 95% death fraction from a 90% reduction in food yield resulting from the transition from fossil-fuel-enabled agriculture back to hand-tool farming, going together with difficulties in transportation.

But another way to arrive at that estimate is to study the history of the world's growth in population. For several centuries during the Middle Ages, the estimated number of humans hovered right close to 500 million. That may represent a pre-industrial balance between population and food supply.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
It is important to realize that the cultures that Rich calls expansionary or "Suicides" are the ones that have produced thinkers like him. Also, as countries become more technologically & economically advanced, they also start to limit their population growth, which is one of the goals advanced there, such that Scandanavia is now approaching Zero Population Growth. The thing is, we want to be able to live sustainably without giving up the wonderful benefits of those "Suicide" cultures such as: lower infant mortality, higher life expectancy, high literacy rates, etc. I am also an optimist in this way, and I believe it can be done.

Not so much that it can be done, but that it can be done once again. Let us think about whether there has been any culture that became preeminent in technology for its time, economically advanced in relation to the rest of the world for its time, universally literate, and found a way to control its population size in a manner that does not lead to "Suicide." Has this occurred somewhere?

Quote, originally Posted by Leo:
not to say much but i dont think its going to be like this. yes its true that rich people do act like what you people say. but i dont think the industrulized nations will fall. if those are the countries that are making the most progress

All progress depends on energy. A country that makes much progress uses much energy. Imagine countries to be like cars. No matter how fast your car is when every car has gasoline in their fuel tanks, your car is no faster than any other car when all the gasoline is gone.

Some people suggest that birth control as a means of limiting the growth of Earth's population is a remedy for the threat of global famine. It is not.

For one thing, such a practice will select against itself in the normal course of things. When the choice of whether to limit births in the name of social responsibility is left up to the populace, some will heed the civic call and use birth control. But others will not. The result will be a shift in births in favor of the less responsible portion of the population that did not use birth control, or otherwise limit their numbers.

As time passes, an ever-larger fraction of the population will be descended from those who did not use birth control and have inherited some measure of their parents' reluctance to do so. Social appeals or other propaganda in favor of general birth control use will do nothing more than cull civic responsibility out of the herd.

Further, the widespread belief that birth control is some sort of answer to the threat of overpopulation, and the shallowness of thought which that belief implies, indicates that we have either a general incapacity for thinking, or - as I believe is more likely - a general aversion to considering which other alternative will certainly work because it has worked for billions of years.

Births per se aren't the problem. It's the lack of natural rigor to life that leads to an early death for the biologically unfit, the poorly adapted, the defective. Fossil fuels enabled mankind to remove this rigor from his existence for a time, but at the price of accumulating a load of bad genes that increasingly require mechanical aid to compensate.

The depletion of fossil fuels will bring the bill for these accumulated genetic costs due for payment. No longer will mankind be able to evade natural rigor, which is essentially as rigorous as it ever was, but we are much less adapted than we once were for meeting its challenges.

In fact, the demographic groups that maintain a high birthrate, despite the disaster that will sweep the world, will have an advantage over those that attempt to redress the food shortage by reducing their family size. Conflict over resources is inevitable, and in the usual course of things people will tend to sort themselves by biological similiarity first and foremost. Other things being equal, the side with the biggest army wins.

It is time for us to consider how we will maintain our existence, and that of those who are important to us, in the tempestuous struggles that lie ahead.

(I will retire for a few hours to consider my reply to Archren.)

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
May I lay out a timeline so that you can see how I'm interpreting your remarks?

-2010-2015: Sudden depletions of several major oil fileds, particularly in the Middle East, exacerbated by political considerations there (coups, riots, etc.) will plunge the world quickly into a global Great Depression.

And blackouts, rolling or flickering for a year or so (maybe 2010), then becoming permanent as the electric power grids fail for the last time (maybe 2015).

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
-Between then and 2030-2040 the world will gradually become a more miserable place, as the powers-that-be scramble to survive particularly through ensuring their continuing military dominance, eventually sacrificing all other considerations (with agriculture being the last to go).

The quality of living for most people will trend generally (and probably rapidly) downward from 2010 on, with minor upswings here and there as some relief effort or other has a temporary success. But, yes, that is basically correct.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
-Between 2030-2040 this strategy will ulitmately fail, causing a gradually accelerating world-wide famine, leading to a 95% reduction of the global population over the next (I'm guessing here) 10 years or so, by 2050 at the latest?

The profile of the global human population versus time during the die-off phase (from famine, war and disease) will probably resemble die-offs observed among bacteria in the laboratory or among animals in the wild. The crash is rapid at first, followed by a tail of decline at a more modest rate.

It is possible for the sharp slope of the crash to continue right to the point of extinction; the requirement for this sorry outcome being the lack of any niches where favorably situated members can ride out the deaths of their fellows.

I expect that the world's population in 2100 will be about a half billion, though I couldn't say more exactly how the approach to that figure will look.

Growth of yeast in a 10% sugar solution (After Dieter, 1962:45). The fall of the curve is slowed by cytolysis, which recycles nutrients from dead cells.

Growth of reindeer herd introduced to St. Matthew Island, Alaska (After Klein, 1968:352).

Illustrations and captions from "Energy and Human Evolution," by David Price, online at http://dieoff.org/page137.htm

Quote, originally Posted by bond:
Nuclear power anybody? Or is the extinction of 95% of the human population preferable to touching such a ghastly technology?

Besides the obvious hazards attending the use of nuclear energy on a scale much larger than present usage - the danger of reactor accidents, the danger of improperly disposed wastes - there are other difficulties.

First, the reactor infrastructure necessary for making up the energy lapse created by fossil fuel depletion isn't there. It isn't even close to being there. Nuclear reactors usually take more than a decade from decision to operational status, and we're going to be in trouble before any decisions to build, made now, can result in any new nuclear megawatts.

Also, while there's enough nuclear fuel to last maybe 60 years at present energy demands, those demands will rise as nations not presently fully industrialized continue to develop. Global energy use would double, and double again, provided that the means to do so were available. After 25 years, perhaps, we'd run into "peak uranium" - and what would we do then?

Further, at some point waste heat would become a problem, and in waste heat there is the danger of triggering a rapid (not gradual) global climatic shift. Under the oceans is a great deal of methane hydrates, which, if the ocean temperature rises enough, will sublimate and bubble to the surface, thence into the atmosphere. I've been told that there's enough of it to change the composition of the atmosphere. The last time it happened was several hundred million years ago, and it led to widespread extinctions of animal life. An exception was a burrowing reptile with a very efficient pair of lungs: it survived because its lung capacity could compensate for the reduced atmospheric concentration of free oxygen.

And, of course, there's the matter of terrorism and nuclear security.

Quote, originally Posted by MrBF1V3:
As for civilization collapsing, see the civilization thread. Are you sure we have a civilization?

Not in Texas. Not anymore.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
However, I remain skeptical about a permanent energy shortage and a massive human die-off. Could you further elaborate on your thinking?

You might lose your skepticism if you find out how much energy global civilization uses annually, and then determine what percent of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Then remind yourself that just because something can be done on a small scale does not mean it can be done on a much larger scale.

For example, just because it is possible to make motor fuels, generator fuels, lubricants, etc., from farm produce does not mean that such goods can be produced at a rate high enough to replace fossil fuels. All the farmland in Minnesota can keep the lights on in just one medium-sized city. Everywhere else would be dark. And, remember, that farmland will be needed for growing food, rather than motor fuel.

Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, and other esoteric sources of energy are barely a drop in the bucket, relative to the energy that our civilization has been deriving from fossil fuels. They do not approach fossil fuels as an energy resource. So while solar panels might keep the lights on in a few people's houses, they will not keep civilization going. Neither can the use of these "alternative" energy sources be enlarged to the point where they could fill in the oil-depletion energy gap.

So get a horse. Get a plow. Get a few acres of land, somewhere out of the way. Plant some fruit trees. Plant some nut trees. Build some fences. Buy some guns and a lot of bullets. Secure your water supply: a rain-fed cistern is good, though if it's below your faucets you'll need hand pumps. Sock away lots of metal hand-tools, especially ones with blades like axes and knives. Buy some whole grain wheat - half a ton per family member - and don't tell anybody you have it. And wait for the apocalypse bear to eat everybody else.

Quote, originally Posted by JainFarstrider:
the tarsands in alberta have potential to have more oil in them then the entire middle east combined.

That may be true. But industry uses first those energy resources that are easiest (and hence cheapest) to get to. Conventional oil doesn't have to be removed from sand; the oil in Alberta's tarsands does. The extraction of oil from tarsands requires an investment of energy in the extraction and purification process that substantially diminishes the energy profit (as well as the economic profit) of the oil from that source. And some of the tarsands oil is harder to reach than this, with no profit in energy at all. The oil is down there, but to get it you must burn more than a barrel of oil per barrel of oil recovered.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
May I clear something up though? When you started this thread you mentioned increasing gas prices and resulting inflation as current harbingers of the collapse of the oil supply. There are so many other factors that influence both oil prices and inflation that you can see why that argument was less than conclusive?

One of those "other factors," which has been up to now the primary cause of inflation, is the design of our money system. Whereas we once had a currency based on monetized wealth: gold brought to the Treasury Department was minted into coins at no charge to the gold-bringer (i.e., it was a public service), was at one time typical of how money entered circulation. Generally speaking, wealth had to created first, before there was money to spend against it; work had to be done first, before it was paid for; if you wanted something expensive, you saved your income and made the purchase when you had enough money - you did not take out a loan.

For some purposes, monetized wealth is inhibiting. How do you become capitalized to create wealth, if you need the wealth before you can get the capital? Actually, this isn't a paradox. It merely means that all the stages of labor, on incrementally increasing economies of scale, must be tediously worked through, with none of them skipped (as a rule), and eventually you'd gain the capital you require to operate at the economy of scale that your ambition aimed for. Provided you had the talent to get to that point.

After all: think a bit. Who "smoothed the way" for the guy who did it first? Nobody.

Our money system was hijacked, literally, by a banking scam that seems to have been invented in Medieval times by certain goldsmiths who loaned gold-backed promissory notes and endorsed loans on the false presumption that they had enough gold to pay off on all their promises. On each of their loans, they claimed and collected interest due them. Essentially, this is counterfeiting aggravated by fraud, but the goldsmiths not only succeeded, they were able to use their successes to perpetrate this money fraud on larger scales as time passed.

That fraud eventually led to the rise of the great banking houses in Europe, all operating on the principles by which the original goldsmith's scam worked. These banking houses actually held the leaders of political empires in thrall. Since the bankers had the means of inducing war against any state by all its neighbors, and then some, no head of government dared do other than what the head bankers wished. You've heard the saying "If treason doth prosper, none dare call it treason." It seems to apply, as well, to fraud. Easily squashed while small - as one might douse a smouldering campfire - it can be impossible to resist when it has become enormous: like a forest fire.

The American Civil War's fundamental cause was not to "end slavery." Rather, the cause was to ensnare the United States into debt in favor of those banking houses. The Secretary of the Confederacy (Judah P. Benjamin) was working for the Rothschilds, who had another agent of high rank on the Union side, though I've forgotten his name. Also, Lincoln's assassin was a contractor for Mr. Benjamin, who in turn was ordered to have Lincoln killed for introducing "greenbacks" as the major US currency.

(John F. Kennedy was killed a century later for a very similar reason: he'd stripped the Federal Reserve of its power to regulate the value of money and gave it back to Congress - as the Constitution requires. Lyndon Johnson's first act, as president, was to rescind Kennedy's executive order, giving control back to the Federal Reserve.)

After Lincoln was out of the way, the bankers contrived a play in the US Congress. After objecting, quarrelsome Members of the House of Representatives were physically assaulted and forcibly removed from their seats, the remainder of the House convened to act upon a Bill that was later to be called "the Fourteenth Amendment."

Read the Fourteenth Amendment. Although all of the bill's provisions served to advance the interests of the ethnic group to which most of the bankers belonged, the section about the unquestionability of the public debt of the United States serves the bankers interests insofar as they are bankers. Just as a pimp might get a whore hooked on drugs, and for the same reasons, so did the bankers get the United States government hooked into a monetized debt money system. To monitor the security of their gains, the bankers saddled America with the Federal Reserve Board and usurped from Congress the means of regulating the supply and value of money.

The bankers' aim is to rule the world; it's an old theme that recurs in both real history and in Saturday morning cartoons. This isn't a cartoon. Regarding that aim, James Paul Warburg - one of the bankers - stood before Congress and said, "We shall have a World Government whether or not we like it." Arrogant, huh? This is the most famous line of speech we have from the banking elite, except for one by Rothschild: "Give me the power to make a nation's money, and I care not who makes its laws."

Anyway, this long aside has been an agreement with you that there are other causes for most of the inflation in prices that has occurred for the past 100 years. However, the most recent rises in fuel prices are in response to anticipated shortages soon to occur. They're the result of "futures" speculators starting to wise up to why the oil companies have been merging corporately, while none of them has been building any new oil tankers.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
Two counterpoints:
1) The oil companies (not previously known to do things that do not yield a profit) believe that they can extract oil from those places profitably. Just because we go after the easiest resources to exploit first doesn't mean that we can't go after the harder stuff later.
2) You assume that no technological advances will ever allow things to operate at lower energy costs. That is fallacious. For instance, in the 1950s, it cost the energy equivalent of running a small town to build a computer that could multiply. We now have equivalent computing power in small quartz watches, and infinitely more computing power running on all our desktops. Likewise, improvements in efficiency will allow more energy resources to be extracted for less energy costs. These processes aren't speculative, hopeful matters for the future, they are being implemented right now.

To what you wrote, I guess the best way for me to respond is by saying: "Let us wait and see. Time will show us what the truth is."

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
You still haven't mentioned why all these development projects currently underway, plus the places that are easy to develop but haven't been because of environmental concerns (such as ANWR) won't push back your predicted collapse timeline significantly.

Yes, I've done this. Find my earlier post where I said that just because something can be done in principle does not mean that it can be done on an enormous scale. ANWR's oil, exploited right to the thermodynamic recovery limit, can keep America going for several months, perhaps. OK, what shall we do then? Canada's oilsand reserves might be enormous, but do you think that we shall recover oil from them at the rate of 20 million barrels each day? That's the current US rate of oil consumption. What do you suppose will happen when, regardless of the size of the oilsand reserves, the output can't be made more than one percent of the rate that is required?

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
Basically, it isn't just the tarsands in Canada (which some sources say could produce more than you're estimating, but that's beside the point). Certainly no single field could produce enough to keep the US going at the current rate. But it isn't just one field. It's hundreds, scattered all over the world. We've been talking only about North America and the Middle East, but there is also Russia, South America, Africa, and many off-shore oceanic developments. For your scenario to play out, the shortage would have to be so sudden and so severe that there is no time for us to do any belt-tightening or development of new sources. I find that unreasonable. It seems to me that you are saying that it is impossible for all of humanity to do anything to save ourselves from extinction, even given 20 years to do it in. And that even with all the oil fields in the world we will run into drastic shortages over the course of (at most) five years.

I understand your point better now. Most of the world's oil does not come from scattered fields, but from a few big ones. When the big ones are gone, not all of the scattered small ones will make up the difference. Both discovery and exploitation follow bell curves, or, since you are a scientist, normal distributions. What I've been speaking of is what others have called Peak Oil, which is the all-time global maximum for the production of oil. It follows the discovery peak by about 40 years. Peak Oil (production) is where we are now, except that forcing the big fields has turned the peak into a plateau, keeping the production higher, for the moment, than it would otherwise be, at the price of enduring a much steeper decline when the decline eventually comes.

There is essentially no more discovery of new oil deposits. Or, rather, I should say that as of five years ago the oil companies were discovering oil at only one-fifth of the rate at which the world was using oil. I predict that we will not have time to invent our way out of the collapse of industrial civilization, and I predict that the collapse will be permanent.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
Basically the fundamental issue is that I see a gradual decline of the available oil in such a way that we can ramp up other technologies, whereas you see a sudden catastrophic shortage leading to total collapse.

Well, then that is your prediction, and it is in conflict with mine. You see a gradual decline, whereas I see a fast one.

Quote, originally Posted by Archren:
Are you sure that there's no other proof for your predictions that you'd like to mention? Because it is difficult to accept arguments that run counter to everything I've ever read based solely on the authority of one person, no matter how reasonable. Otherwise, you're right. Time will be the only judge of accuracy, and there's nothing more to say.

Scientifically, this is a valid passive-data collection experiment. We will probably both live to see which of us is right.

Jerry Abbott

That was as far as I got with the energy debate before the SFFWORLD administrators deleted my account and banned my IP address.