How bad a crash are people expecting?

MonteQuest · Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 8:29 pm Post subject:

Jack quote:

Jack · Moderator Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 4929

MonteQuest · Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 10:42 pm Post subject:

gg3 · Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 2:20 am Post subject:

No one knows with certainty what's going to happen. But even in the event of a slow wind-down in the economy, guess what? Twenty to forty years from now, a lot of us here are going to be old enough to be really vulnerable. If you're 30 or older, think about that for a moment.

The best-case scenario looks something like "old people in poverty," choosing between eating, heating, rent, and medicine. The worst-case scenario looks more like the early stages of Naziism, where the very old and disabled were subject to "euthanasia."

Slow decline = watching from the sidelines while other people go homeless and hungry. Crash = you've just been evicted or foreclosed and you don't know where your next meal is coming from.

Re. gloom about the suburbs: Depends on the suburb. Those where the houses have any appreciable land around them, would lend themselves nicely to a revival of the old "victory gardens," which will soften the impact considerably. Those where houses are jammed together, things could get ugly, moreso than in the cities due to dependence on automobiles and centralized shopping complexes.

The figure I have for uranium is 40 years if it's not recycled, and 250 years if it is. Nuclear power is a good solution if we start building soon, and doesn't produce greenhouse gases. BTW, plastics (in the plants) are hardly as significant an issue as *concrete,* i.e. think "portland cement shortage." There is already enough of a cement shortage to have contributed to a steep rise in costs for the SF Bay Bridge retrofit project; expect it to get worse over the years.

Guest, no one really knows, see my first paragraph. Personally I would strongly prefer that none of this were real, that we could keep on going as if we had another century or two to make the transition to sustainability. But wishing doesn't make it so; and I'd rather spend the rest of my life living without a few luxuries, if that's the tradeoff for community self-sufficiency & security.

Tdrive, silicon wafers used in PVs are also energy-intensive to produce. However there is a new generation of thin-film flexible polymer PVs which are already technically feasible and the projected costs drop significantly in the near-term. But I don't think the new PVs, or the new 5-MW wind turbines, or next-generation (PBMR, CANDU, etc.) nuclear plants, are enough to solve our problems completely.

As far as your neo-feudal scenario is concerned, it's only a short few steps away from today's rental real-estate market.

Smé@gol · Guest

TylerJC · Guest

(gg3) You're right about nuclear plants, they require more concrete than plastic. I know very little about building them because, I've never tried building one :D .

The timeline I created is incorrect. All of the dates should be doubled. 10 years after peak should be 20 years after peak and so on. After I posted this, I realized my mistake.

I think that "modern" feudalism is a possibility. It won't be like the Middle Ages. There won't be a dominant religious dogma that burns people at the stake (hopefully). Also, we won't bleed people to make them better. Modern Medicine won't disappear completely. The average person will make it to around 50.

Oh, one more thing, the average middle class family is already under this type of feudalism to some extent. They have, at most, one month's wages in a savings account. And if either parent loses a job, they are without a house in a matter of months.

Dustin · Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2004 1:37 pm Post subject:

True: Oil will peak within a few years.
True: Wind power is becoming more powerful and cheaper.
True: Solar power is becoming more powerful and cheaper.
True: We can build nuclear plants to make up for shotfalls in petro.
True: Plastics can and proboly be made though nanotech and heavy oils.
True: Energy efficency will improve so we need less energy to do the same work.
Might: Fusion come on line (professor i use to work for gave it a minimum of 50 years to come online, he worked at livermore where they are working on it.)

Everything is based around these arguements, which are all true. When peak oil hits, we will quickly start to improve the efficency of our cars. We will learn to do less with energy. Solar and wind will pick up to make up for the short fall in oil. Nanotech will start performing miricles to keep up our standard of living.

So how long can that keep up? Everyone agrees that solar and wind have much room to grow, but they will one day reach a limit due to technical limitations and maximum suitable area to build them. We will run out of uranium. Oil production can be kept up due to better drilling technologies and discoveries, but will one day run drop off. World population keeps increasing, meaning we have to feed more and more people with less and less land since much will be taken up by wind and solar fields. Plus much of the world in increasing their standard of living, so more and more people will want more energy.

So even if renewables are able to make up for shortfalls in oil production, or even increase in output than oil, will they be able to keep up with the increasing world hunger for energy? All views of the future depend on how someone answers this question. An optimist would say that it can. A pessimist says it cant. While both have diffrent view points, all the facts can support both of them.

Presonally, i think that renewables will not be able to make up for the shortfall of oil over a significant amount of time and im expecting anything from a soft landing to a hard crash.

Dustin

born2respawn · Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 4:26 am Post subject:

Guest Reader · Guest

I'm fairly new to the topic- Or at least up until recent I hadn't even thought about the long term ramifications of the oil crash. I'd just assumed something would be in place by the time the proverbial crap really hit the fan. I've spoken to my father, who has fairly extensive experience in economy and agriculture- That is to say, he ran the corporate and international banking divisions of a very large American bank(that will go unnamed for privacy purposes) for the better part of two decades, got tired of an office, and moved on to run an agricultural based credit union where he can work from his home. I also noticed my dad's bought a lot of land the last few years about two and a half hours west of St. Paul, claiming it's "hunting land". My dad hunts maybe twice a year now that he's into his 60s. It amounts to 250 acres of unused farm land that he hires a neighboring farmer to condition each year, a cabin on site and another lake cabin a few miles away. He won't flat out admit that it's any sort of precautionary step, but given his concern on the situation that he voiced a solid decade ago to me, I'd assume that has something to do with it. I'd hazard to guess he's a believer, albeit minus the grandeous deterioration scenes many of you are depicting.

When I recently discussed it with him, he's all but stated the U.S. would be fine in the aspect of no mass starvation. He's a believer in the soft crash idea here. He believes there were going to be two major factors in America's ability to maintain itself:

1) The policy on subsidies for the US agricultural community. He has no guess what the government will do in regards to that, and if it will be able to afford to make companies like Lucerne in Phoenix still a viable operation when mass cattle hearding and milk production really doesn't belong in Arizona. These companies that rely much of their profability on subsidies due to their location in regards to Milwaukee are going to be hit hard, and their continued production will be hard to determine if the goverment runs into dire monetary straits.

2) Tied into it is how much priority the shipping industry will get. He anticipates a day when mass transit becomes almost the only means of transportation outside of manual power for the average joe. That's fairly obvious. The ability to adequately feed our population will depend a lot on how much priority the shipping of food and other necessary items to maintain a relatively comparable standard of living will get. In his mind at least, when crunch time arrives, the only motorized vehicles contributing the loss of petroleum based product should be limited to those of the military and police forces, shipping and those areas where public transportation cannot be made almost entirely electric.

Another factor many of you are missing is that manufacturing jobs could very likely return to the United States to replace many of the service jobs that will be lost. Why is the US losing those now? It's cheaper to do elsewhere. That very well may not be the case as we begin our descent. There will undoubtably a large increase in unemployment, that's unavoidable, but it's also entirely plausible that new sectors will open up in our own economy to take over where other interests abroad are no longer feasible. The United States as an entity will make a rapid movement towards being a self-sustaining nation, albeit perhaps late to avoid a good number of years of hard times.

The rest of the world might be screwed though. Darwinism strikes again.

Guest · Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 5:15 am Post subject:

As an side to the paragraph:

What we're likely looking at is that large scale, long termed economic correction that people have been prediction for years. It'll just suck a bit more than previously anticipated.

jrob8503 · Guest

I have decided what conditions would make me happy post-peak.

-12 hours of daily hard labor (sundays and holidays off)
-bare min. of food and water
-bathroom/outhouse/whatever privacy
-medical care is at least good enough to handle people w/ terminal illnesses (i.e., diabetics get their insulin)
-uncomfortable, but livable shelter

IN EXCHANGE FOR:
-free concerts
-reading material
-a fine p.o.a. to come home to every night

Am I asking for too much?

Dustin · Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 11:29 am Post subject:

Guest, problem with manufacturing jobs returning to the states is two fold. First, PO is going to be a world wide event. It assumes that energy will rise to the point where manufacturing on a large scale breaks down, regardless if its in Ohio or Brazil. Moving back to the states wont solve the lack of energy problem.

Second, the manufacturing infrastructure here is beyond declining. The reason that so many energy intensive industries have moved to Brazil and China is that their factories are new and more technologically advanced than the factories here. Our factories are mostly over 50 years old, and cant compete with china'a and brazil's factories. If the companies where to pack up and move back here, they would have to put out a massive amount of capital to build new factories and machines, which in that respect, would still be cheaper to do overseas.

DevilHouse · Coal Joined: Sep 15, 2004 Posts: 12

I think it's plausible in the long run. There wouldn't be a sudden, massive influx manufacturing return, but as OP hits and transport becomes more and more expensive, the enormous cost of shipping goods to and fro abroad and the enormous costs of building new facilities in America could very possibly meet an equilibrium making it possible. That's probably a long term occurance though, happening more on whatever rebound there is.