Coping with famine: WWII scenario

Barbara · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 7:38 am Post subject: Coping with famine: WWII scenario

Since I've learned of peak oil, I thought that all our family stories about WWII would help to imagine an hypotetical scenario.

Italy, 1943. The nazis were occupying all the country. There was no food for people in the cities: everybody had a card to get an amount of food, but it wasn't enough to feed people without starving to death. No gasoline for vehicles, and anyway there were only few wealthy people left with cars.
Bycycles were best friends of people. They used those to go anywhere... if they were strong enough to pedal! No risk of bandits, of course, but big risk of getting catched by nazis: if they found you with hidden food you were dead.
Electric lights were on and off. No available soap, no clothes, no shoes. People learned how to adapt old parents clothes to kids. Many learned to make shoes with wood and cloth. Many, as my grandparents did, found a chicken and put it to live on the balcony trying to get an egg a day.
In those times, there were many little farms not far from the cities, and people went bycycling to farms to find food. My granddad was a mechanic, and he traded his typewriters with some food. It was very risky, and could take a whole day just to go and come back. Olive oil and butter were like gold: there was a strong black market in the cities where you can trade, say, a little bottle of olive oil with a lot of flour or sugar for the needs of a big family. The poorest people were the "white collars": office employers who weren't skilled to use hands to do anything. They literally starved, coudn't exchange any skills for food. Mechanics, tailors, doctors, people with relatives in farmlands were a bit wealthy.
The black market saved many people from starvation, but "white collars" didn't have anything to exchange, and began giving away all their family properties, from sheets to shoes, from silver to forniture. Many of them died anyway.
About heating, it was a big problem. My grandma had to burn forniture to get heating. People put paper in water, then pressed it to get "heating balls", but those balls could go on only for ten minutes of heating.
Most people spent the whole day just to find some food for the family. Some of them (like an uncle of mine did) went to steal food from nazis deposit, but it was the riskiest of all the risky businesses. Sometimes a voice spreaded: "That shop has soap!" or "Coffee!" and people made lines of hours only to find that soap finished soon. My mother was a little child, and once she fainted for hunger while waiting in one of those lines with her mom.

As you can see, we already had an apocalypse here in Europe. I'm pretty sure that Danish, Czechs, French here can add their own family stories.

TheSupplyGuy · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 8:39 am Post subject: yeah

Aaron · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 10:08 am Post subject: Great Post

Excellent post.

This makes a serious point about how large groups of people can survive drastic situations through devices of their own making, as it were.

Since the black market is alive & well across the world today, I think it's pretty safe to assume that any serious economic downturns would only fuel these markets.

But the point about how these markets have all but rescued the survivors of a horrible war, is at once reassuring & disturbing. Nice to think that some alternative could exist beyond simple desperation, but not so nice to contemplate our collective future, in the hands of violent criminals.
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Barbara · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 11:21 am Post subject:

TheSupplyGuy (OT Wink

),
italians didn't "love" Mussolini: they accepted him at first because things were slightly better. Money for retirement, for example, sports for children, good schools and so on. But we were in a World War only few years before, so we didn't like at all to go in another war. And about Roman Empire etc, nobody believed that, it was just propaganda.
When Mussolini made that alliance with Hitler, people here became scared as hell. Nobody liked Germans: they were our worst enemy just 20 years before, in WWI! And nobody trusted them. Old people here still remember Nazis as the worst nightmare of their lives. The transition from Mussolini to democracy (and end of war) was something we'll never forget, we had a civil war while allies were bombing and nazis were slaughtering people all around. A mess.

Aaron,
About black market, it could go on because there were no bandits. Simply killing of people to steal their food was not an option: remember there was a nazi police all around. In case of peak oil, if worst happens, there will be no police to stop robberies.

Licho · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 2:03 pm Post subject:

I'm convinced that transition is not going to be as severe as Barbara described.. Having care about bandits - that's anarchy, this will be avoided, im sure state will try to conserve oil for most important security and infrastructure during transition.

rowante · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 9:22 pm Post subject:

Perhaps the situation in the USA will be similar to an occupied country. My theory is that the reality of peak oil may be somewhere between Licho's optimism and Matt Savinar's pessimism. That said, where you live will be crucial as to what reality eventuates.

Licho has made good points about efficiency. Consumers in the USA (ditto Australia) waste enormous amounts of energy (the reason for this was discussed in another thread, see Javon's Paradox http://www.peakoil.com/postt50.html). As the supply of oil decreases in countries like USA and Australia, I think that war-time like efficiency drives will be started by governments. Ad campaigns piling guilt on fuel and energy wasters etc. The rate of saving will have to keep track will the rate of decline to maintain order. Is this possible, for how long? Fuel will be rationed to keep primary industry and agriculture running.

Conservative governments will lean even further into Fascism, having to blame some imaginary external threat (Islam). We are already seeing this now. Poor, hungry, ill-educated people are easily pushed into hatred and led into genocide. This has been the history of human beings since man first left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago (read Jared Diamonds, The Third Chimpanzee). I will state here that IMO Islamic fundamentalism is equally a manifestation of this as the "War on Terror".

So will the USA go to war burning through the energy needed for an easier transfer? Or will periodic riots and calamity require the military to be used for nationwide martial law (We have already seen people posting barbaric notions on this website proclaiming their intention to loot and murder...), perhaps the answer is both.

The collapse of USA hegemony and corporate globalization seems to be inevitable. What happens to Australia with it's pitifully weak armed forces and defences when the US is too busy with internal strife? What about Israel? Taiwan?

The enormous population growth of the last 40 years has happened in the poorest countries, I don't doubt for a second that is where the die off is going to happen first. That is going to be the most horrifying 'efficiency drive' in human history.
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Licho · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 2:29 am Post subject:

You are forgetting that many countries went through peak oil, or something much worse - they went through almost complete oil embargo. I'm speaking about Cuba and North Korea, both were denied oil and handled the crisis. Society still exists there, even if it's so despotic like in NK. There was no fall through anarchy, and society did not dissolve. Cubans are actually doing fine right now, considering embargo..

Barbara · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 3:43 am Post subject:

Licho,
you forget something I mentioned while talking of WWII: those countries under embargoes are dictatures. And in dictatures police works very well. I was in Cuba, and while people is almost starving nobody will ever try to steal food from other people or shops or farms: police will put them in jails in 2 seconds!
Will we have the same full working police after peak oil? Will we want it? Or there will be restless bands stealing around and nobody to stop them?

Licho · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 4:14 am Post subject:

If things will be getting hard, and stealing happens we will have to use bigger security forces, army to defend whatever needed.. Even democracy can have very good security. Cuba, while certainly not a democracy is not a total police state either.

War was more severe than peak oil is gonna be, with massive food shortages, such things will be avoided with minimal effort from goverment. Peak oil does not automatically mean food shortage.

Leanan · News Editor Joined: May 20, 2004 Posts: 4345

JLK · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 9:27 am Post subject:

Just a couple of thoughts.

During the WWII occupation the Italians knew that the food shortages, etc. were temporary; things would be back to normal after the war. The motivation was to survive and persevere through the bad times, but not to change one's lifestyle too radically because the good times would be back.

The psychology of post Peak Oil will be entirely different, though. When the public begins to understand that cheap oil (and perhaps cheap energy overall) will never return, individuals and especially governments will be forced to make painful long term structural changes in how things are done. I think that Prof. Deffeyes is right that we will eventually be OK but there will be a decade or so where things get pretty nasty.
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Keis · Coal Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 12

Licho · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 12:19 pm Post subject:

Peak oil really does not mean immediate starvation (perhaps some supply problems in isolated parts, but sure not shortage). Here are some facts:

- there is excess free arable land in many European countries, up to 30% in some countries

- for fertilizer production, oil is not used, but just natural gas (still plenty world-wide, fertilizers can be shipped through world)

- agricultural machinery and transportation of products is only fraction of oil consumption. Oil for farmers is likely to be cheaper than for others.

- there is excess food production in almost every industrialized country.

- American energy intake from food is far bigger than needed for normal healthy life.

- large parts of production go to feed animals, who decrease efficiency to 1/5! (For every 1 J of animal energy you can get 5 J of plant energy). So simply eating less meat will free constraints even more.

Problems with food could later arise in parts of Asia and Africa I fear .. But still, situation is gonna be different from Korea with total embargo. Yet even theirs society survived.

Licho · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 12:21 pm Post subject:

Keis, people won't think it's endless abyss! Alternatives and technological solutions that we must reach will be presented. People will be convinced that it's just painfull transition to different energy sources and life-style - and it is..

MrPC · Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 6:56 pm Post subject: