Pick your post-peak future corner

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7Wannabe5
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Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Which corner would you choose?


https://www.openpermaculture.com/permac ... duction-37


I'm maybe 80% Transition, 10% Collapse, 10% Green Technology.

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jennypenny
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by jennypenny »

I'm a slow doomer. I guess that means I'm in the planetary collapse camp.

leeholsen
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by leeholsen »

My post-peak is all financial assets.

I know that Jacob is much smarter than I but I don't buy into the peak oil when new discoveries are still being made, nor climate change; even all the dramatic changes in somethin like lake mead could still just be a period of a few 100 years where that area just didn't get the rain and dried up over my suv doing it by contbuting a small percent of CO2 to .004% of the atmosphere and it's throwing the whole planet off; but I realize that we are ticks on a dog in relation to this planet; so i'm not going round and round with anyone on it; i have better things to do.

HOWEVER, i do think if you are under 60; you have a good chance at being affected by the debts countries, companies and people carry. At some point, countries will not be able to print money out of thin air anymore and will most likely start taxing and seizing more of their people's money to stay afloat. That's my only post-peak concern and I would think it would be here to, but so many people are relying on pensions here; i'm thinking there's a lot of people not being realistic; before seizing individual monies; they'll cut pensions.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by Laura Ingalls »

I think I would come in pretty close to 7wanna5, but a bit heavier on tech. Not because I am a big fan of tech but because I think wind and solar will become bigger deals even without massive subsides. Iowa will generate more electricity from wind than it uses very soon.

On a less serious note, we are at peak craft beer in America. The bubble is going to burst very soon. To have a craft brewery is the dream of too many folks to be sustainable.

leeholsen
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by leeholsen »

Laura Ingalls wrote:I On a less serious note, we are at peak craft beer in America. The bubble is going to burst very soon. To have a craft brewery is the dream of too many folks to be sustainable.
NOT TRUE !

I just found about the new hamsphire beer fest on loon mountain in june full of craft beers and i'm looking to go.

vexed87
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by vexed87 »

luckily for you leeholsen, people will still be doing it for the love it for millennia to come, ale jugs are known to date back to 10,000 BC and I'm pretty sure they didn't contain budweiser ;)

Infact, with peak oil and contracting energy supplies, we are pretty much guaranteed more craft beer than industrially produced beer, this is because it will be too expensive to produce/distribute on a large scale centrally so craft beers will be priced more competitively (at least here in the UK, craft beer costs way more than commercial stuff)/.

Every cloud... ;)

jacob
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by jacob »

Advice from a tombstone...

"Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier,
Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer,
Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall
And when ye're hot drink Strong or none at all."

BRUTE
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by BRUTE »

brute is long entropy.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by Laura Ingalls »

jacob wrote:Advice from a tombstone...

"Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier,
Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer,
Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall
And when ye're hot drink Strong or none at all."
So short beer and long on craft whiskey ;)

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Ego
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by Ego »

Laura Ingalls wrote:To have a craft brewery is the dream of too many folks to be sustainable.
Recently I sold some stuff to a guy who has owned a British pub here for decades. He was saying that many of his new micro-brew competitors are funded by wealthy parents trying to settle their kids with "do what you love" gigs. When I asked if he thought they would be in business in a few years he laughed and said he doubted they would last more than a few weeks. Since then I've seen three go out of business in my neighborhood alone. Within a few weeks each of the three had liquor license paperwork posted in the windows for the new microbrewery that was about to open.

A friend of a friend has made a very good living for twenty years now as the "expert" partner in these absentee-deep-pocket ventures. From what I can piece together, he enters the agreement with no upfront investment. He is the man with the expertise and the connections who (supposedly) will help the inexperienced kids and will not profit unless the business succeeds. Judging from his rather lavish lifestyle and the fact that the ventures never seem to last very long, I suspect that his expertise involves negotiating large kickbacks from his connections. There seems to be no shortage of ways to separate money from the people who didn't earn it but have it to spend.

I am not sure which post-peak corner I would go to but I am sure it will not involve a bar stool.

enigmaT120
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by enigmaT120 »

leeholsen wrote: I know that Jacob is much smarter than I but I don't buy into the peak oil when new discoveries are still being made, nor climate change; even all the dramatic changes in somethin like lake mead could still just be a period of a few 100 years where that area just didn't get the rain and dried up over my suv doing it by contbuting a small percent of CO2 to .004% of the atmosphere and it's throwing the whole planet off; but I realize that we are ticks on a dog in relation to this planet; so i'm not going round and round with anyone on it; i have better things to do.
More like ticks on a moose:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015 ... vironment/

leeholsen
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by leeholsen »

well, I'm not sure how this developed into a beer thread, but no matter if you have a post peak concern or not; I'd advise drinking weihenstephaner.

it's supposedly the worlds oldest brewery and the beer is awesome, much better than that guiness stuff. I suggest the original premium.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

leeholsen said: My post-peak is all financial assets.
Well, even those of us who are currently confused in our gardening practice due to 10 day run of mid-80s temperatures in Michigan (and it's not even June!) would likely agree that social contracts, including financial assets, are likely to be stressed in the near-ish future.
Laura Ingalls said: I think I would come in pretty close to 7wanna5, but a bit heavier on tech. Not because I am a big fan of tech but because I think wind and solar will become bigger deals even without massive subsides. Iowa will generate more electricity from wind than it uses very soon.
Don't forget geo-thermal. My 10% margin is based on the fact that my more intelligent friends who have expertise in various engineering fields seem to be in agreement that there are many, better, already engineered "solutions" that could be put in place, but have not for short-term business cycle reasons, but ultimately they will prove to be too little and/or too late at this juncture. So, I guess my 40 year out prediction would be something like 10% decline in human population due to tragic events related to peak, decline in "standard of living" to ERE level of remaining population, and 10% improvement due to technology.
On a less serious note, we are at peak craft beer in America. The bubble is going to burst very soon. To have a craft brewery is the dream of too many folks to be sustainable.
One of the urban farmers I visited on local greenhouse tour was getting compost from friend who operated craft brewery. A young couple is soon going to be opening a coffee roastery right around the corner from my garden space. It is directly on the route to one of the expressway entrance/exits, and the neighborhood is not exactly (understatement) gentrified yet, so I think they have a fighting chance.
brute is long entropy.
7W5 does not inhabit an isolated system.
enigmaT120 said: More like ticks on a moose:
Very apt analogy if you consider soil to be the skin of the earth. We're like sarcoptic mange.

sky
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by sky »

Collapse, recovery through transition

jacob
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by jacob »

Technology is coming up fast. For example, the energy density of modern batteries is about 50% of that of oil. Since electric motors are about twice as efficiency as combustion energies, this is what makes cars like Tesla's possible.

However, any technological transition is still extremely far behind in terms of where it should have been compared to if humanity had decided to pull their collective finger out of their collective asses (or is that ass) 50 years ago. In particular, ingrained interests are still working against it even technologically speaking!

Sociologically speaking we're even further behind. People happily have babies. People go to war and fight over petty issues.

A couple of issues.

Humankind have broken out of the nitrogen cycle long ago. Breaking this cycle was and will be the only way to support 7+ billion people. The only known way to sustain a civilization of 7 billion ppl rests on oil and gas. Because we haven't managed to find new resources as fast as we've been using them since the 1960s, we've been living on past discoveries/capital rather than income. This particular civilization can not and will not exist after 2050. Ponder that until it sinks in.

Humankind has also broken the carbon cycle. So we have global warming. This is going to be increasingly expensive. We are rapidly destroying the freebies we get from nature. If nature is the dog and we are the ticks, the ticks are currently sucking up 60% of the blood of the dog. The dog is dying. Species are going extinct at 1000-10000 times the background rate because our activity is destroying habitat (say a forest that contains 1500 species inside 100x100 meters) and replacing it with "landscaping" that might contain 15 species or so.

Solar and wind are not nearly as energy intensive and oil. This means less energy. Less energy means less globalization. This means more localization which means each area now needs to have its own tech capacity instead of relying on a factory on the other side of the world. On a personal level, it also means that a group of 1000 where 10 of them works in food production will probably no longer be able to afford that 1 of them becomes a neurosurgeon and another becomes physicist. If those people aren't around to support the culture (physics department, top tier hospital), books in libraries aren't going to substitute. Effectively, this means that the local accessibility to technology (such as internet access or maybe even internet existence --- maybe it will be universities/military only again, like it used to be) will decrease.

So we're treading a fine line between NEEDING high technology to live and not being able to afford it energetically speaking. It's hard to tell how these will balance out.

However, whenever there are supply constraints of a fundamental feedback in a system, you're going to see VOLATILITY!

So I expect bigger and more frequent financial crisis. I definitely expect food to start getting volatile in the same way that oil prices have. That is, it swings between being too expensive for consumers to afford and too cheap for producers to produce. Ditto water.

All this volatility (in its many different forms) will shake the weaker ticks off of the dog until the situation stabilises in either a permanent decline or a stable solution. The stability of such a solution depends on whether humanity can manage to exceed their genetic tendencies to procreate and declare war on each other. We avoided mutually assured destruction by nuclear weapons. Maybe we can avoid it by resource extinction too?

7Wannabe5
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob said: Humankind have broken out of the nitrogen cycle long ago. Breaking this cycle was and will be the only way to support 7+ billion people.
Does your calculation include this:
BIOLOGICAL NITROGEN FIXATION

Approximately 80% of the atmosphere is nitrogen gas (N2). Unfortunately N2 is unusable by most living organisms. Plants, animals, and micro-organisms can die of nitrogen deficiency, surrounded by N2 they cannot use. All organisms use the ammonia (NH3) form of nitrogen to manufacture amino acids, proteins, nucleic acids, and other nitrogen-containing components necessary for life.

Biological nitrogen fixation is the process that changes inert N2 to biologically useful NH3. This process is mediated in nature only by bacteria. Other plants benefit from nitrogen fixing bacteria when the bacteria die and release nitrogen to the environment, or when the bacteria live in close association with the plant. In legumes and a few other plants, the bacteria live in small growths on the roots called nodules. Within these nodules, nitrogen fixation is done by the bacteria, and the NH3 produced is absorbed by the plant. Nitrogen fixation by legumes is a partnership between a bacterium and a plant.

Biological nitrogen fixation can take many forms in nature including bluegreen algae (a bacterium), lichens, and free-living soil bacteria. These types of nitrogen fixation contribute significant quantities of NH3 to natural ecosystems, but not to most cropping systems, with the exception of paddy rice. Their contributions are less than 5 lbs of nitrogen per acre per year. However, nitrogen fixation by legumes can be in the range of 25-75 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year in a natural ecosystem, and several hundred pounds in a cropping system.
This year I am underplanting all my fruit trees with beans. Slash/drop/mullch proportion of plants before production of mature beans will provide nitrogen to fruit trees, and mature beans will provide protein/nitrogen food source for me. I don't understand why 7 billion people can't be supported on the planet, if I can be supported on .2 acres? Diverting urine directly to edible crops will also help.

vexed87
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by vexed87 »

It's not that the planet couldn't theoretically support 7 billion people, rather without fossil fuel derived fertilisers we can't continue to support 7 billion people in the way we are accustomed to. Food will have to be grown locally, in accordance with organic and regenerative practices which pretty much rules out monocrops, tractors/harvesting machinery and the dumping of artificial fertilisers and pesticides.

Food is cheap now, not so much when manual labour replaces the industrial food system, this will fundamentally change the way society is structured, I assume this is what jacob means when he says this civilisation won't work beyond 2050.

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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by jacob »

You're likely not being supported by just 0.2 acres. I would suspect that you are bringing things in (mulch, starch, clothes, building materials, ... ) and things out (whenever the toilet is flushed) thus resulting in a somewhat larger amount of ghost acres. If not, you should get in contact with NASA to consult on the Mars mission.

Anyhoo, yes, that is the natural nitrogen cycle, called crop rotation when being done deliberately by farmers. It has worked over many centuries (but not many millennia). However, all farming civilizations have failed in the long run (w/o access to "virgin" areas) except the few areas annual inflow of nutrients via a big river (Nile or Yellow river). Maybe permaculture is capable of completely closing this cycle for all nutrients, but what currently feeds our civilization is far removed from both traditional crop rotation and permaculture.

The break out I'm talking about is the green revolution that used fossil fuel based technology to adding nitrogen from outside the cycle and then developing plants that were capable of accepting all this nitrogen to increase yields by a factor 4-5 over natural cycle genetics. This fossil fuel based technology will not be around after 2050; alternatively if it is still around, it means that remaining few fossil sources are all being directed towards food which means that food is going to be a lot more expensive and that billions of people will be priced out and into starvation. Climate change ain't helping here.

Insofar of civilization sustainability, the question is whether one permaculture farmer can feed 50 other people using 10 acres and distribute that food over long distances, and recover/recycle all nutrients to sustain it. Because this is what one farmer is capable of supporting in the current system. If you need more people ... and I imagine it would take more effort to recycle all nutrients instead of just pissing them into the waterways per current practice ... these have to be taken away from other functions, e.g. university professors, software engineers, dentists, ...

Quite likely there will be a transition towards permaculture where more people spend time on food production. I'd expect the path towards that state to be highly volatile.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob said: You're likely not being supported by just 0.2 acres. I would suspect that you are bringing things in (mulch, starch, clothes, building materials, ... ) and things out (whenever the toilet is flushed) thus resulting in a somewhat larger amount of ghost acres. If not, you should get in contact with NASA to consult on the Mars expedition.
lol- I definitely am not currently being supported on just .2 acres, but that is roughly the goal of my permaculture project which is scheduled to "pop" into completion by harvest time 2022. At this juncture, I am in build-mode and the loop is wide open. for instance, I had over a truckload of compost dumped in the last couple months, and I am charging the lithium batteries for my little whacker on Big Coal. However, my intention is closed-loop sustainability, inclusive of all fertilization needs, at the survival level with maximized free trade at the boundaries towards quality of life. For instance, success of my project will definitely include getting on my bike and pedaling 4 miles to the plot of my beekeeper friend to trade him apricots for honey.

I don't plan on creating such a simplistic system, but a model along the lines of 1 human, X1 alfalfa, X2 potatoes, X3 sour cherries, X4 bush beans, X5 meat rabbits, X6 asparagus, X7 raspberries, X8 hazelnuts, X9 ducks and X10 acorn squash could be used to do calculations to determine the viability at the .2 acre level and then tweaked to satisfaction. Of course, not including the soil dwellers such as bacteria, fungus, termites and earthworms and the need-be transient vector elements such as songbirds, moths and opossums will lead to huge error, but...? If .35 acres prove to be necessary, so be it. It's not a matter of straight-forwardly converting current agricultural land into permaculture mode because almost all the land currently wasted on lawns, parking lots and under-occupied housing could be included.

OTOH, there is a level on which it is sort of ridiculous to create such a model of sustainability when I am currently surrounded by dumpsters full of rotting foodstuffs, and affluent men willing to buy me dinner and/or a plane ticket out of Dodge City, but the puzzle intrigues me and I can't think of anything better to do, or anyplace better to do it.
vexed87 said: Food will have to be grown locally, in accordance with organic and regenerative practices which pretty much rules out monocrops, tractors/harvesting machinery and the dumping of artificial fertilisers and pesticides.
Yay!!! I would note that I will consider my experiment/project to be a failure if it takes more than approximately 10 hours/week of human labor to maintain it (more in May, less in January.) Processing and medium-term storage of self or locally produced foodstuffs will likely prove to be more of a challenge than growing. Of course, getting my greenhouse up and going will help in shortening the hunger gap.

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Re: Pick your post-peak future corner

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote: OTOH, there is a level on which it is sort of ridiculous to create such a model of sustainability when I am currently surrounded by dumpsters full of rotting foodstuffs, and affluent men willing to buy me dinner and/or a plane ticket out of Dodge City, but the puzzle intrigues me and I can't think of anything better to do, or anyplace better to do it.
This is likely the reasoning why societal transition has yet to be prioritized. Why start now when it seems easier to start next decade? Why start locally when it seems easier to relocate globally? Why be the first mover when it seems easier to copy the leader?

Such a strategy makes sense if the belief is that we're on a continuous slope. If we're approaching a discontinuous cliff situation, ...

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