Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Explore a hypothetical with me

20% or electricity from Wind in 2020. This, though subsidized, appears that it will happen.



Coal.



so, really, we can't.



agree



Panic in your tone. Move to Lakeview, Oregon. See how people do just fine living in the DEPRESSION THAT NEVER ENDED. Cash economy is weak. Trade, thrift, and skill is strong.



yes, it is. Predict the future always is. Read the last generation's version of peak oil. They were SURE, absolutely SURE, we would be in caves by now. Nuclear war having been waged. The Saudi's ruling over us. Yada, yada, yada.

DID.

NOT.

HAPPEN.

As for the future, consider this:

The Starfish Story
Original Story by: Loren Eisley



One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed
a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean.

Approaching the boy, he asked, "What are you doing?"

The youth replied, "Throwing starfish back into the ocean.

The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don' throw them back, they'll die.

Son, the man said, don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish?

You can't make a difference!

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf.

Then, smiling at the man, he said�

I made a difference for that one.

BMT

So,.....get your perceived "Leadership Hat" on,....quit talking down to people,....and tell us WTF you act stupid every Friday Night,...and than argue with whoever responds to your stupid [bleep]' questions.

Go for it,....."Sitting Pretty" (Yo,....that IS JO's NEW handle)

Lets hear it.

GTC

This sorry self appointed "Global Energy Engineer" can't (or won't) repair the gas tank on an old roto tiller properly (To "Cheap"),....the failure due to a shabby half assed lack of maintenance, one month.

.....THIS month he's DEFINING "Energy" solutions,.....

WTF,.....does this sound familiar ?

GTC

The end of the USA is ahead if some how Obama wins in 2012.

Check out the following book:

patriots a novel of survival in the coming collapse

The US will collapse much like ancient Western Rome collapsed back in on itself in a number of city/states on the Italian peninsula. The States of the US will gain sovereignty, i.e power as US collapses back in on itself.

If the national government can right itself back to limited constitutional government then the nation as a whole will survive. If not, then the national government and nation will be the handful of States around the DC proper.

In no case will the US just cease to exist. It took about 500 years for the ancient Western Roman Empire to shrink to a number of city/states and for the Eastern Roman Empire to morph into the Byzantine Empire. I expect it will take a number of decades or centuries for the US to do the same.

One more item, the national government created all the problems the nation faces today expecting the national government to solve those problems it created is shear madness.

If one is a surviour one will start developing solutions to solve problems to maintain one's standard of living what ever that standard is.

Kept Spain out of WWII

I am ready for the big bang and in fact hoping that it comes before the 2012 elections. I would nothing more than to see the whole shootinmatch go out in a blaze of glory.
I figure the states will be busted up about 5 ways and mexico will get a big chunk of it. Canada and Russia will also share in teh spoils.
It will take an iron fist to defend your little area. Those without a iron fist will be killed off or put in slavery. That includes your kids and your wifes someone else will be taking them.

Simple - We need a return to scholarship, and to move away from brief exchanges on the subject of politics and economics such as TV news, radio talk shows, and internet forums. People need to return to actual education insted of "whomever wins the arguement has the more sound philosophy". America is steadily dumbing down on everything.

Where politics are concerned both conservatives and liberals have become completely unreasonable. They figure if a little is good, then a lot, or complete is best. So if a little free market is good, then we should de-regulate EVERYTHING, and that will be better. Or if a little regulation is good, then we should COMPLETELY regulate everything.

The liberals take extreme views and label anything conservatives do as facism. Conservatives label anything a liberal does as socialist.

If someone has a solid education in politics and economics they would know that PURE anything doesn't work. Socialism shouldn't be a bad word, but it's THE label for anything that isn't extreme laissez-faire capitalism (which doesn't work any more than pure socialism does).

Our nation combines elements of capitalism and socialism. We don't go extreme either way and that's a good thing; because NO ONE want's to be a PURE capitalist any more than anyone want's to be a PURE socialist. They're not exactly lining up to move INTO Somalia (pure capitalism) or Cuba (pure socialism/communism).

American politics is about finding the RIGHT balance of the two. We need a return to that, rather than A-holes on both sides pushing extreme right or left views that don't work.

And where politics is concerned, we need to stop being so damn hostile, and return to gentlemanly debate.

Oh, and by answering this, does not mean I ascribe to or agree with your assessment of world conditions. But I disagree with your assessment in a gentlemanly way, and I see no need to demean you just because we disagree.

In other words, our national government needs to return to limited constitutional government.

This is because you fail to see that there will be no SINGLE solution to the energy needs of the fuure. The solution is energy sources from a number of technologies, some fossil some renewable. But to think there's going to be a one to one swap for oil is foolish. We will never not use oil, but we will use oil much less for transportation in the future. Oil will be reserved for what ONLY OIL can do, and electricity, from a wide variety of generation sources, will do most other transportation jobs.

The technologies are mostly out there now, we just need to make more use of them and allow them to evolve. Most of the world is changing already, but the big change will be when we hit peak oil; that's the shock that will hasten the change. The world will never run out of oil, we'll just outstrip our ability to get it out of the ground fast enough for it to be a cheap energy source.

It wil be a painful change, but we'll make the change and we'll be better off for doing it. The nation that will rise to the top is the one best positioned to make the change when the time comes. At this point, the US is a near dead last.

Uhm... I DO see that. That was the point of this thread.

In your first post, you said you didn't agree with my hypothesis. In your second, you laid out pretty much just what I've been saying. You've done confused me. Are you just not agreeing that there will be a long, painful transition period?

We'll come out the other side, likely into a hydrogen/nuclear economy. But there will be several DECADES in between. Guess what, that's "it" for most of us.

It's repaired, properly, and running great.

You got a screw loose, Mister.

The starfish thing is a platitude. Platitudes don't fuel container ships. If they did, you & TRH would have this sorted out two pages ago my friend!

Total nuclear war was a legit concern, and in fact nearly happened at least once. Belittling it as a concern is amusing but not relevant. It wasn't a resource running out; it was a decision that wasn't made. Completely different...

If indeed they are that screwed in Lakebiew, then they are that much closer to REALLY being screwed by $12/gal gas and a massive jump in fundamentals like foodstuffs.

Coal is isn't portable, and electricity (via coal) is only inefficiently stored energy- similar to hydrogen only worse. Cost cost cost. Can't seem to say that enough.

You know why Rome fell? It wasn't because of butt-sex in the bathhouses. It was because they were a wood-fueled economy. They hit "peak wood". Even though their empire had expanded through Europe, which had plenty of wood, the COST of getting back to Rome became prohibitive. They couldn't even smelt coins properly towards the end due to lack of wood.

We will find energy sources to power an infrastructure post-petroleum. But it will be a much more localized infrastructure. And in between it's gonna get brutal.

Hang on!

Platitudes? I've merely summarized received wisdom as passed down to us from some of the greatest minds in history. I guess you can lead a horse to water ...

Here's reality, lie-beral hypocrite:

Socialism has a 100% failure rate, and the closer to socialism we've gotten, the worse the situation has become. Socialist programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) have eld to this situation.

The best idea is to scrap the .gov largess, do away with the feel-good socialism embodied by the (D)s, schit-can the .gov mandated BS embodied by the (R)s, and get back to the Constitution.

Hell, if that means balkanize so the left (like you, Jeff) and their parasitic tendencies can have their own areas, fine, do it.

The rest of us - MOST of the area of the U.S. - will get back to living in this nation as it was meant to be, free of the likes of you and the "free schit army".

When you socialist regimes collapse, as they all have, we'll simply bury the bodies (hopefully all of them), and take back the land.

The left's idea, Jeff... The one's you can't even truthfully admit to yourself that you believe in... have failed. Every time, and are failing again.

Only a fool fails to learn from history, Jeff. You don't even bother to try.

Ask yourself, Jeff...

Are you and yours better off now, nearing life lived by another's leave, or were you better off when you were more free to make and control your own destiny working as much, making as much, as you saw fit?

That'd require an honest answer, and you've yet to give even yourself one of those...

Well I can't tell if you're talking about energy or just social issues. Energy wise, you and I may share some parallels in our beliefs, but socially I'm not so sure. We'd have to discuss more. I see you as a liberal and you would tend toward the more far left side of the spectrum. I'm a moderate, and I'm really tired of far right and far left ideology. As the two sides become more polarized, America becomes more screwed.

Actually, the only thing I can say on this topic is that the premise is fundamentally flawed. It was flawed when the Club of Rome started this intellectual masturbation in 1968 and it's been no more than that ever since.

You can explore this hypothetical all you want, but as the software engineers say, GIGO. Garbage is what you'll get and what you've got.

Which was only to be expected as Constitutional federalism has been gradually replaced by centrally consolidated governance at the national level. The Founders understood, even then with our much smaller populations and geographic size, that a nation this large cannot be governed (regarding internal matters) from the national level. How much more is that the case today?

Internal governance, they understood, needed to be diverse, i.e., "thirteen experiments in republicanism," as they put it. Today, had we heeded their wisdom, that would translate into fifty experiments in republicanism, united nationally on only a very few factors, mainly as looking outward toward other nations as a union of sovereign states. Under that system, polarization isn't an issue, as just about everybody can live under a republican system, and a set of laws, that they can at least tolerate, as populations would shift to the states which more closely approximated their ideal.

Additionally, this ability to "vote with one's feet" would have had a moderating effect on state governance, as there would be a competition among the states for the most desirable laws. When so many laws personally affecting us come from Washington DC, however, that competitive aspect is eliminated, so our representatives in the central government feel no particular impulse to provide only those laws which please Americans. They instead develop the sense that "Folks have to take what we give them, and we can manipulate the system such that even a large majority opposing certain trends in law will be unable to affect change to their liking, so we legislators can focus our energies instead on pleasing the powerful lobbies of the large corporations and the international banking establishment (both of which will assist us in getting reelected), while we continue to lead the people by the nose." That's essentially what we have today.

Kevin,

Ok, agreed on energy more or less. I understand it's getting a little noisy here with Crossfire hollering but there MAY be a discussion to had.

My interest in the social impact of peak oil is that it will define the coming decades; it'll be the water we are swimming in so to speak. Similar, I suppose, to a major war in that regard.

We seem to be prone towards lurching to the right or left in this country. So, I'm trying to wrap my brain around the ramification of a far-right mindset dealing with this, v. a far-left mindset. As I said earlier, I do feel that the modern mind is particularly unsuited to this problem. Oil, and a consumptive, cheap-energy based economy, is built into our DNA at this point.

Our economy, our infrastructure, and our agriculture are entirely dependent on being able to move people and goods around. In the case of agriculture, our modern factory farming, while highly productive, relies entirely on massive "inputs" from fossil fuels- both as fuel, but also hugely on nitrogen fertilizers that are derived from natural gas.

Again, COST. Food will still be grown, goods will still be transported, but the cost will obsolete our current way of life.

So, it's very easy to say as TRH does that individual freedom solves this, or as BMT says that hope and change will (sorry pal but that's what you were saying). Those things might solve problems that we have in our current economic paradigm. I suppose they can't hurt, and are preferable to the alternatives, in the coming crumbling of this economy, but they aren't solutions... and they fail to acknowledge the issue, really, which is that on the most fundamental level possible, the rug is about to be yanked out.

Say we lurch to the right. Environmental regulations are gutted, allowing for things like strip-mining the Rockies for the low-quality oil beneath them.. Industry is deregulated. We continue massive military expenditures and global interventionism. Taxes are lowered. Entitlements such as Medicare and SS are drastically cut. Government shrinks; by TRH's estimation, which may be true, individual liberty thus increases. Concurrently, as the cost of oil skyrockets and the economy goes into deeper recession, unemployment goes ballistic, capital is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich, and the effects of entitlement cuts are... brutal. Unregulated industry takes what it can, uses high unemployment as leverage to put the final nails in the coffin of the American worker, and the finance sector runs away with what's left.

Say we lurch to the left. Environmental regulations tighten. Government attempts to regulate industry in ways that help but might not. The military is cut and the Empire (hegemony) pulled back. Taxes are raised to support massive entitlements. Debt soars. Concurrently, as the cost of oil skyrockets, and the economy goes into deeper recession, unemployment goes ballistic (but benefits (essentially welfare) are increased and lengthened; capital is taken from the ultra rich and redistributed to the less- productive poor, resulting in less available seed money for entrepreneurs, and we end up with a bankrupt entitlement-based nation.

Am I missing something in that analysis?

So, Kevin, I do agree that the answer, such as it is, lies somewhere in the middle. This flies against the sentiment here to lurch to the right. Heck, I've even been feeling that as my disgust with Washington grows. I guess my intent her with this thread is to a) raise awareness that actually debt/deficit/entitlements are not the biggest looming issue, and b) to pick the brain trust here as to how they see this hypothetical (sic) scenario playing out as seen through different polical lenses so to speak.

Very much appreciate those who are participating.