Sclass wrote:Who knows if peak oil will bring sudden chaos or gradually increasing stress (rising prices).
I knows.
Fundamentally, all transportation/information/flow systems exhibit high volatility in all dimensions when they are strained to their limit,... because science. How other systems are affected by this volatility depends on whether they're
fragile, robust, resilient, or anti-fragile and how strained these other systems are. And so on. Watch out for rare cascades.
A lot of what's going on in the energy universe now and over the past two decades was predicted well in advance, subsequently ignored, and afterwards explained to the public as "nobody could have known"---as are most other complex crises. This collectively induced ignorance is also what leads to the
Cassandra Complex in anyone with an analytical bent.
The peak in conventional oil (easy and cheap to get, think very profitable) was predicted to occur sometime in the early 2000s back in the late 1990s. (It actually occured in 2005) leading to oil wars as predicted in 2002. Subsequentially, Iraq was invaded because it had the second largest reserve in the world. Saudi Arabia, the primary ally in the ME, has the most. At the time Iraq was also planning to start trading oil in Euro having several ties with European companies. Naturally, then, the EU opposed the invasion. The US went ahead, to secure control of the oil and keep the trade in dollars. As predicted---because Iraq was and is highly sectarian and thus fragile, not robust like say Germany in WWII (pull up a map showing how the various factions of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, etc.)---invading Iraq immediately disintegrated instead of conquering it as expected.
Meanwhile the world economies were recovering from the tech bubble (and replacing it with a housing bubble ... also predicted a few years in advace ... predictions which were subsequently and concurrently dismissed in the usual manner: nobody knows, nobody could have known, etc.) thus increasing demand on the energy economy. As conventional oil turned out to actually peak in 2005, the price became high and volatile. Lobbyists managed to sell [to politicians] the seriously dumb idea of ethanol fuel because ... hey .. subsidies. This caused a worldwide shortage in corn (a spill-over; interesting systems theoretic construct). In robust countries like the US, food prices went up from 10% to 10-something percent. In fragile countries, like Mexico, they had street riots. People who can't afford food get really cranky. People who can well afford food might just slaughter some cattle (a highly inefficient source of protein) and use that as a buffer. Same idea as when US ranchers slaughtered cattle in 2012 because of droughts sending feed prices up too high. Did any first world iPhone users notice that? Probably not. Again, analysts looked at the fraction of the budgets going to food in various countries. In the Egypt, people spent 40% of their budget of food so it doesn't take much of a bump to start a riot or a revolution (10% -> 15% is inconvenient, 40% -> 60% is impossible)---this was pointed out in one of the GMO newsletters. Lo and behold! Several fragile countries subsequently disintegrate for various reasons: Egypt, Libya, Syria.
Meanwhile, overly cheap credit made available in the US for reasons that are equally well known/ignored also made its way into US tight oil. Unlike conventional oil which peaked in 2005, tight oil is not very profitable at all and only becomes so by massive leverage. Which was now available. From an energy perspective, tight oil uses up a lot of resources because its energy margin is so low. These resources come from the rest of the economy which therefore does poorly. This is why petroleum engineers are^H^H^Hwere making a killing while other graduates are still waiting tables. SA notices it can't compete with the credit subsidy in the long run (it needs oil money to pay off its population from rioting). It also knows how tight the margin is. So a price war is started. Again, this fragility created by the Tragedy of the Commons was predicted around 2012-13 but again ignored. The US economy as a whole is robust ... people initially welcome the drop in oil price but those engineers are of course fragile and get laid off. What is good for the country ain't necessarily good for the individual states where they used to work.
Another thing that was predicted in the 1990s was the steep decline in North Sea gas thus increasing the dependency of Europe on ... Russia! Most things going on in the Ukraine, Syria, IS, ... has to do with where to route the gas pipelines and who profits from it. Currently, gas goes from Russia to Europe via Ukraine. That is not profitable for the US! Nor does Europe like to have the shut-off valve be controlled by Russian politics. Now pull up a map of Eurasian gas pipelines (present and planned) and it becomes rather transparent what's going on. First Russia tried to secure a line by annexing Crimea but since Russia was blocked in the Ukraine by a change in power (now where did that come from?) they'd like to go through Greece. Conversely, the West would like Russia to be blocked as much as possible and instead to go from
Qatar to Turkey and then onto Europe, but to do that they'd have to go through Syria which Syria (an ally of Russia) opposed (go figure). So Syria must go. Easy. Simply supply arms to the rebels. The arms industry is highly antifragile and its politicians are as well because chaos equals opportunity. Hence this was an easy sell.
And so now we have the current situation. (And I didn't even cover Afghanistan). As more or less predicted anywhere between 1-2 and 10 years in advance depending on the complexity and flexibility of the systems and their interrelations.
A couple of years would be plenty of time for a nimble person or family to get out of the way of "history" before it gets written.
But despite this information being publicly available, nobody cares ... because shirt team-colors and easy explanations are so much more fun, so there's that. Or maybe sportsball on TV is just more exciting? Or maybe I just need to find a better hobby?
Getting back to the OP, the key is identify which systems (pf, food, region, land, vocation, ...) you're personally part of and whether those systems are robust, fragile, antifragile, or resilient. Step two is to identify what systems your systems connect to. E.g. if you're fragile and you're connected to a fragile system, you have a real problem. Whereas if you're robust and connected to a fragile system, it's not a big deal unless the fragile system is also connected to an anti-fragile system thus guaranteeing that you'll be taking slow damage.
In terms of a collapse: ... Yes, you're watching the civilizational collapse at the edge interfaces (think permacultue --- all the "interesting" stuff happens at the edge interfaces... stuff that's interesting enough to be lethal too) of the current empires proceeding more or less as predicted as a result of the predicted decline in conventional oil given the nondiscovery of adequate substitutes. IOW at this point in time: local destruction driving by a global shortage. But it doesn't look like that from here (in the middle of a robust core of the empire) because if you're reading this you can still buy the latest iPhone for only $499 and isn't that the very definition of progress
So with that perspective, should one have bought land?
Well, that certainly depends on where that land was bought and who bought it!
PS: I only described energy here. Similar things are going on in other systems for other reasons, but some are connected.
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I think it was something I needed to go through and am better for it, however.
