history says you are humped 3 of 3

HISTORY SAYS YOU ARE HUMPED 3

I used to love the Druid Dude, but we did have a fundamental difference of opinion.  He was a stinking optimist, and thought we would have a long slow collapse.  I, on the other hand, being Baby Jesus’ favorite and hence blessed to always be right, knew that optimists are a cancer upon our land and should be shot, and postulated that the Waterfall Collapse ( very slow but steady downward slope followed by an unexpected sharp fall off the cliff ) was exponentially far superior in probability than his Stairstep Collapse.

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And the sad part was, he was the guy who introduced me to the book Overshoot.  We were reading the same bible and yet both founded a completely different religion.  I was just always confused as to how he came up with a long slow collapse when the source material described yeast in a vat or reindeer on an island both overpopulating and dying off.  But then, I guess I’ve always been easily confused.  He looked at the US and its so far at that point forty year decline and then at Rome, and concluded long decline was normal.

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But if you look at that yeast, the build up to the point where overpopulation crashed the population, it was rather slow.  I can’t remember if this example was given in “Overshoot” or by another writer, but take a football stadium.  Start with a small amount of rain, then keep doubling that amount.  It took all day for the stadium to be half full.  At 11:59pm, one minute to midnight, the stadium was now half full of water.  But since this was an exponential growth ( you have four kids, your eight grandkids have 16 kids, etc. ), from 11:59 to 12:00, the stadium is “suddenly” filled.

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This was the point Malthus was trying to make.  Food never increases as fast as population.  Why should he be blamed for studying models suddenly made TEMPORARILY obsolete when finite fossil fuels were starting to be turned into food?  I say to all Malthus haters out there, hump you.  Unless you are lucky enough to be old, you will experience first hand how wrong your dumb ass optimistic assumptions are.  Did I mention I’m not the world’s biggest fan of optimists?  It doesn’t matter how low our birth rates drop ( always excluding Africa, naturally ), that doesn’t validate hope.

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When you are at several dozen times the carrying capacity of the planet, even if suddenly we all stopped breeding ( yeah! ), if the energy being turned into food drops at the same time, we run out of energy before we run out of extra people.  Math B Hard, yo!  Before, all through history prior to the Carbon Fuel Age, collapse was slower because energy availability was steady.  You couldn’t overpopulate fast enough, as there wasn’t surplus food.  If you missed biology class, a fetus needs extra calories, as does a nursing infant.

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Yet, this obvious point isn’t so obvious.  In a land where a Movie Night snack can equal or exceed the normal amount of food a manual laborer used to receive all day, we are completely blind to our surplus of calories from petroleum input corn.  When a fish is surrounded by water, it cannot conceive of a desert.  At all.  It defies comprehension.  We are the same.  We are clueless about the normal state of affairs, which is food scarcity.  Since modern man became smarter than a feces flinging chimp, millenniums ago, food scarcity was the norm.

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And while it would be super deluxe peachy to NEVER go back to that, only in a land of Forever Fracking is that possible.  And, newsflash Supreme Dumbass Overlord Of The Universe, fracking ain’t going to feed seven billion people, and certainly not close to forever.  Am I the only one paying attention here?  Food First.  Certainly not FLIR First.  Oil Age Food meant that our population numbers literally exploded.  Because oil made food.  Okay, technically natural gas makes food, but there is a lot of oil infrastructure built in there.  It takes a LOT of steel and power to make artificial fertilizer.

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And, I’m sure we all forget, it doesn’t take the END of oil to starve those seven billion, it only takes enough of a decrease in the supply.  Decrease-you know, that state of affairs ongoing since 2005 as measured by net energy or BTU’s delivered.  And, even triaging Africa and a huge chunk of the middle east, we are STILL losing ground on energy supply.  AND, I hasten to add, there is absolutely ZERO reason to believe that Americans have a birthright to live.  No, I didn’t say “to live in luxury”.  I said, “live, period”. 

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ALL governments, societies and individuals seek low hanging fruit first.  The easiest target to triage was Africa, because quite frankly, Africa never mattered.  I don’t mean this as racially derogatory.  I mean that throughout history, the continent has usually been left to its own devices, in the large scheme of things.  The next area to be triaged, and no Spanky you incredibly large moron it had nothing to do with democracy, was the middle east.  For the simple fact that there is no reason to actually have any population in a desert if you have to completely support them.

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What area is next, to conserve the oil supply?  How about the juiciest target, using something like 25% of the global supply while only producing one eighth?  You think austerity measures in Greece were bad ( the German Muzzies needed to be supported before Zorbo ), just wait until they hit the US.  In resource contraction, resources are controlled by the strongest.  One million PC Brigade Princess Barbie troops using back door computer chips from China are NOT going to retain control of the globes oil supply.  It takes a mere financial calamity to stop one half of our domestic oil supply, overnight.

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After that, fuzzy foreigners can withhold imports which are a minimum of half our usage.  We only think we will always have oil because we used to.  Rut Ro, Scooby.  See how easy it was to starve out a superpower?  The only variable is avoiding nuclear retaliation.  We don’t need Yellowstone exploding to starve us out.  It just takes the spice to stop flowing.  Now, tell me why that should take 100 years to unfold.

( .Y. )

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