My Doom Meter has Been off the charts . . .

Cashmere · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Mar 27, 2008 Posts: 1067

I'm glad to have the time I do with my wife and kids, in the greatest 100 years of excess of human existence.

But man, a dark cloud has formed over me in the last 3 months, and I'm having trouble shaking it.

Credit crisis growing.
Oil price growing.
Energy costs growing.

But you know what did it?

It was the food.

It's all too right and too real when I start hearing about food riots.

It's the food.

Starvation in my lifetime has been African kids on TV. Send in your 10 bucks and forget about it.

A famine in Ethiopia, one in some other place.

But now it seems like we're one bad harvest away from seeing images of riots from all over the world.

Panic will set in.

I've always taken an immodestly great pleasure in being right.

This time, I am stricken with it.

Colorado-Valley · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 16, 2004 Posts: 724

Buy a little farm and start growing food. You can make A LOT of bread with just an acre of wheat.

pstarr

relax man. It's just the margins. In part a Cosco rice shortage due to hoarding by the small restaurants locking in their costs. In part of the ethanol boondoggle and a commodities rush. In part an Australian drought. In part limited arable land.

Agriculture uses only small percent of the world's petroleum. If you live in the first world you will not starve. You'll have your mush in the morning, your porridge at lunch, and your gruel at night. Confused

_________________
director

ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap wav

zoidberg

What was the rice limit in the US? 4 twenty kilo bags per visit? Sounds rough. Razz

If it makes you feel better a large rise in food prices puts the people on the proverbial $1-$2 per day range into famine territory. To be callous you can send in you can up your monthly feel good ticket to $12 instead of 10. Its like how energy price increases dont result in everyone reducing consumption equally. The pain of demand destruction is borne disproportionately by the people already on the margins - ie their consumption goes to zero instead of you reducing yours by 1%. If you want to feel better eat less meat. Meat production consumes a good deal of grain production.

Trust me, you have NO idea what doom is. Not yet anyways.

Hagakure_Leofman

wisconsin_cur

kjmclark · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 09, 2005 Posts: 303

pup55 · Expert Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 3450

For awhile now, we have been doing some calculations on this.

In the US, each square km of arable land supports about 180 people, with 0.6% of the population being employed as farmers.

In Pakistan, each square km of arable land supports about 900 people, with 50% or more of the populating being involved in agriculture.

In Mexico, about 440 per square km, in Germany maybe about 700.

In basket case nations such as Haiti, Tanzania and a couple of others we checked, it is always up around 1000. Nigeria was around 900 as I recall.

A lot of these crazy little places have an exploding population: in a lot of them, maybe 40% of the population is under 14.

The point is: with a land area the size of the US, we should be able to feed our own population, even with a diminishing amount of energy. It is possible that you, personally, will eventually have to get involved in agriculture, and the overall quality of your diet will be lower, but it is doable under some system of production. Also, that is not to say that the transition would not be painful.

Even Mexico, as much as we complain about them, is relatively well off as far as their food production capability is concerned.

Be thankful you are not in one of those other places where they are marginally functioning right now, and cannot or will not get control of their population.

jlw61

Then there are articles like this that start spelling out the preps being made by TPTB. Simply put, government is getting its ducks in a row in anticipation of these events.

My meter isn't pegged, but it's been floating at the low end of the red zone for some time now.
_________________
When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. -- Otto Harkaman, Space Viking

vision-master

ohanian · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Oct 17, 2004 Posts: 1060

The future famine is already here - it is just not evenly distributed.

William Gibson

William Gibson once famously said that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Guess what: The present isn't evenly distributed, either. The human race today has a tremendous degree of wealth and productivity, with an extraordinarily unequal distribution. There are still more than a billion people whose lives look very similar to those of half a millennium ago. Bringing the future to the world's leading-edge cities is a piece of cake. The challenge is bringing more than a few bread crumbs' worth of the present to the rest of the globe.

On a happier note:

"The future will be better tomorrow." --Dan Quayle

Ferretlover

hippiema1 · Coal Joined: Jul 27, 2007 Posts: 15

I've been reading for about eighteen months now--and often a post seems to summarize what I'm feeling. Like you, I'm feeling a kind of doom that I've been able to be rational about (more of less) until now. Now the emotions have really grabbed me in an immediate kind of way.

My husband and I have been talking a lot about PO and the economy over dinners with his parents recently. We've been thinking of moving to an intentional community/farm and potentially having them join us. We're a little nervous about the financial ramifications of the move if we cannot sell our current house.

Last night my 9yo, who has heard a lot in the background from us and from other folks in the neighborhood, broke into tears about how scared he was for the future (because of climate change, peak oil, hunger, wars and violence, injustice and oppression, and--as he says--"economic collapse") and about how awful humans are to have done this to the world.

While I want him to know about what is going on to a certain degree, I feel awful that he has picked up enough that he is this frightened. Trying to put on a happier, more confident face in front of him seems like what we need to do for a while. But this makes it even harder to manage my own emotions.

Thanks to everybody--both those of you who are feeling more confident and rational as well as all of you who are expressing the intensity of your feelings.

Heineken

Cashmere, perhaps unwittingly, you're hijacking my thread . . .

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic37601.html

Moderator, please merge?
_________________
"Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog

"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother

Cashmere · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Mar 27, 2008 Posts: 1067

Heiniken - I might have unconsciously lifted your title!

Anyway, in terms of Internet etiquette, a thread hijacking only can occur within a thread.

It's like you're accusing me of hijacking your car - because I'm driving the same make and model and yelling the same thing out of the window.

Maybe I hijacked your look or your mojo, but not your thread.

In any case, merge, don't merge, I don't really care either way. I'm way too doomerish right now to consider it.

On a separate note, why are people so concerned with duplicative threads?

What harm could there possibly be in leaving a second thread of this nature that overlaps the content of another thread?

It's not like this is a rip off of Best of Montequest's sticky.