[Ibon]

Every once in awhile my doom meter swings far to the left where everything seems to be resilient and stable and nothing on either the short term or mid term horizon represents any real game changing shift to our current trajectory. At the moment I am taking this position. I perceive nothing out there that represents a viable threat to Kudzu Apes un relentless advance.

The forces we perceive as game changers of course are real; climate change, fossil fuel depletion, global debt crisis, geo political threats, etc. But at the moment they all seem snail pace gradual processes whose potential to cause major disruptions seem greatly exaggerated.

IF the marginalized suffer somewhat does this really threaten the whole?

[SeaGypsy]

Obviously you have been in paradise too long & need a holiday to a great northern megalopolis.

[onlooker]

Well other then financial meltdown or a nuclear blitzkrieg, I sort of see your point Ibon. haha

[Ibon]

Take a look at the past 200 years of modern industrial civilization and choose the most challenging events like the pandemic flu virus of 1916, WWI or WWII or the depression. Go in your mind to some of the most war torn corner of the planet or to the worst genocide events, drought stricken emaciated hunger moments. None of these events put more than the slightest dent in our trajectory.

We are all fretting over loss of lifestyle and privilege and we then project on to this a crumbing house of cards.

It isn't true, None of it. None of the threats we discuss here will threaten our species. It is all about having to struggle a bit more, losing this opulence. That is something very different from civilization crumbling.

[Ibon]

Think about something else. The demographic of posters on this site are North Americans, Europeans, Australians, a few russians. . What a coincidence that is considering that the shifting world order puts these areas in a great adjustment and decline.

Where are the Chinese voices here. Where are the voices from developing countries who thrive and persevere on 1/20th of the wealth all of us are so afraid of losing.

Many of us here have the hubris to believe that we are the few and wise who understand the ecological dilemma of human overshoot and the rest of the planet is simply lost in a delusion.

Is this not hubris? Are we free of delusions ourselves, this small party of peak oilers who all share the same demographic and all share the same unease as our little corners of the world will have to enter a period of struggle.

And we then project this into a grandiose end game for our species.

I think we are not free of delusion. I think we are delussuonists par excellence!

[onlooker]

Yes, I do have to concede that it would take a truly perfect storm of Consequences to render our species extinct. My final determination (barring new swaying info) is that our forthcoming extinction is unlikely but not impossible

[Ibon]

My final determination (barring new swaying info) is that our forthcoming extinction is unlikely but not impossible

I go way beyond this asessment. There is little on the horizon to even change the trajectory of our species rapacious and dominant position on the planet. Just a shift of major players.

Remember the comments that the Chinese have come late to the party?

Pure hubris.

[Tanada]

My final determination (barring new swaying info) is that our forthcoming extinction is unlikely but not impossible

I go way beyond this asessment. There is little on the horizon to even change the trajectory of our species rapacious and dominant position on the planet. Just a shift of major players.

Remember the comments that the Chinese have come late to the party?

Pure hubris.

A few years back I quoted a Chinese leader. When asked what he thought of Western Civilization compared to Chinese civilization that has endured well over three millennia his response was "It is too soon to tell." Pause and consider that, our civilization, by courtesy so called, is but a flash in the pan compared to the Chinese culture that has endured countless invasions and conquests, feasts and famines. An educated Chinese citizen can easily understand what was taking place 1,000 or 3,000 years ago in China. The grand Canal in China has sections that date back 2,550 ybp! It is still in heavy regular use for commerce today. In comparison Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607 and has lain abandoned for over 2 centuries now being an archeological site and museum rather than a functional settlement. Sure there are suburbs up against the edge of the preserve, but they have nothing in common with the settlement that was founded there in 1607. If not for the Virginia Historical Society and later the Federal Government intervention the entire historical site would have been worked over into subdivisions with fancy mansion row along the James river where the archeological digs are located now.

Chinese people know where they have come from and are comfortable in the knowledge that for good or ill they have endured both as a population and a culture for thousands of years. Modern western culture is consumed with newness to the point that a home that is 25 years old and perfectly sound in all its particulars is considered unsuitable. IOW we, as a culture, are crazy.

[asg70]

Ibon is correct and no new threads need to be started to debate it.

What Ibon said about past shitty times in history when the entire globe was fighting off pandemics or world wars is on-point.

Since doomers start from the vantage point of the first world, then passing hardships like the recession are misinterpreted as TEOTWAWKI. Basically it's a "first world problem" style response to things that past generations expected to have to cope with. It only seems abnormal to us because we've been so coddled since the end of the Vietnam war.

I'm sure at some point we will indeed globally enter the true downward spiral, but when that time comes, there will be no ambiguity about it whatsoever. The only way, for instance, the global population can flatline let alone turn downward would be for there to be a truly apocalyptic grade spike in death-rates. That would require one of the fundamental pillars of civilization collapsing, like some huge weather anomaly like a steadily degrading climate that results in regular dustbowl conditions and dwindling agricultural productivity. I can see something like that happening by mid-century.

It's also possible that the rate of oil depletion will be such that classic peak oil doom scenarios do in-fact play out, or at least combine with the above. I don't see it as likely, nor for it to bite that soon, but still a possibility.

But right now, this moment, it is the calm before the storm. If this forum is still around when things really start to fall apart, the signs and portents that some here will have cited to "prove" that collapse is now will look like nothing but a king complaining about a hangnail.

[onlooker]

Well I guess then we should all just concede that "doom" is something that is very abstract and in the eyes of the beholder like beauty. I think the principal purpose of some of the posts of us more pessimistic posters is to sound a general alert to those who might hear. I think it is rather glib and short sighted to simply point out that doom happened before and is the normal state of affairs for humanity. That may be right but I happen to think that this particular suite of threats is unlike any our species has ever faced. What makes it interesting is that we are more technological and "modern" than we have ever been. I think this is imbuing many with a false sense of security.
One of the things that initially attracted me to this site was precisely that it was about Energy. Our entire technological edifice rests on availability of energy. It powers our industrial world economy.
But even beyond this is what someone like Montequest a previous poster on this site alluded to in the basic ecological condition of Overshoot of our species. Ibon, is quite familiar with all this given his education and professional background. I am just a student. We are in severe overshoot of our entire planetary environment. Ibon I think has confirmed this. This is a situation that we have never encountered as a species. So, we have no exits available like in past times with the colonization of the New World ie. Western Hemisphere. We stand perched at the height of our powers but ironically we stand at our most vulnerable point because of that. Imagine it as we have now the farthest to fall.
Our principal vulnerability is the same one many past civilizations have encountered. The Environment. The difference is everyone on the planet is to a greater and lesser degree now vulnerable as our overshoot condition is planetary across almost all areas. By overshoot it is not just in numbers but in our lifestyle and how we have come to rely so much on it for our basic survival in the rich countries. Imagine if you will the Electrical grid going down all over the US. Food delivery and other essential deliveries like medicine would stop. Water provisions in many cases would soon stop. Without lights social order could quickly cease. Hospitals would become useless. Can we really grasp what a toll this would take in terms of fatalities. And the longer this situation were to persist the greater the toll presumably. What if it suddenly became permanent. So, in summary, we stand to obliterate each other upon initiation of a Nuclear War, we stand ready to succumb in large numbers to a lethal Pandemic and we stand teetering on a crash of our Financial system that could literally bring to many people around the world this very scenario , I just described with the Electrical grid.

[Newfie]

Depressives tend to have a more accurate outlook.
Optimist tend to do better than depressives because of their rosy outlook, it keeps them slugging against odds.

[asg70]

in summary, we stand to obliterate each other upon initiation of a Nuclear War, we stand ready to succumb in large numbers to a lethal Pandemic and we stand teetering on a crash of our Financial system that could literally bring to many people around the world this very scenario , I just described with the Electrical grid.

But onlooker, you can only lay out these generalities once.

After that, what shall we talk about (other than the usual worthless petty politics threads)?

This is why I think doomers tend to scan around for news stories and to attempt to fit them into the puzzle whether they belong or not. That's why it encourages them to have a time-compressed or fast-crash narrative.

It's the mode of communication of the forum that leads to this, of needing to keep the forward momentum of the discussion going.

There are people whose handles I don't even recognize who never post here. They just hang out and sling drive-by comments on the headline stories. They are probably the worst super-doomers. StarvingLion is probably the closest to them in sensibility.

But I think that, as I guessed before, this sort of thing provides a form of entertainment. It's "theater". You wait for the next news item and then you snicker and schadenfreude. Oh, look. They're rounding up people in Saudi Arabia. SHADENFREUDE. Oh, look. Tesla is on the brink of insolvency. SHADENFREUDE. The opiate for those who have reached a point of supreme anti-establishment sentiment is to passively sit back and shadenfreude and naysay. The doom blogosophere like Kunstler and Orlov and the rest, that is the drug they are selling.

So I really do NOT buy the idea that doomers represent some sort of valuable early-warning device. Doomers are only sitting on the sidelines and heckling anybody and everything. They have nothing to fight for, at least nothing with a snowball's chance in hell's chance of coming to pass, and so they will heckle and snicker.

In summary, doom doesn't move fast enough to be able to fuel an ongoing daily discussion. Perhaps if people posted at a rate of once a year then it would be possible to look at average statistics that might be more relevant. Scientific bodies studying things like AGW do that, like with their annual average temperature reports.

I think the reason there are so few posters is they realized that behaving like this represents a huge timesink that is better spent making the most of the time we're given. That is why remaining posters like PStarr seem to camp out here and his replies appear within seconds. There's no way someone can find something useful to add to the discussion when they reply to literally every post. So it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of his posts are worthless ad homs or unfounded FUD/naysaying. And it only takes one of these toxic posters to create a whack-a-mole effect of more rational posters smacking him down with rebuttals, and so we get the dysfunction of what's left of this site.

It doesn't really matter how important the topics are underneath it all. People are using the site like any other discussion group...to generate drama. The current pissing contest with Short already preparing to welch out on paying his bet is a great example.

[onlooker]

To your long colliquey Asg, I can only say what did you expect when you joined this site? An epiphany, earth shaking solutions. If you did you are sadly naive. In the final analysis nobody is forcing you to stay here, if you are fed up, you can leave.

[Ibon]

Ibon is correct and no new threads need to be started to debate it.

What Ibon said about past shitty times in history when the entire globe was fighting off pandemics or world wars is on-point.

Since doomers start from the vantage point of the first world, then passing hardships like the recession are misinterpreted as TEOTWAWKI. Basically it's a "first world problem" style response to things that past generations expected to have to cope with. It only seems abnormal to us because we've been so coddled since the end of the Vietnam war.

I'm sure at some point we will indeed globally enter the true downward spiral, but when that time comes, there will be no ambiguity about it whatsoever. The only way, for instance, the global population can flatline let alone turn downward would be for there to be a truly apocalyptic grade spike in death-rates. That would require one of the fundamental pillars of civilization collapsing, like some huge weather anomaly like a steadily degrading climate that results in regular dustbowl conditions and dwindling agricultural productivity. I can see something like that happening by mid-century.

It's also possible that the rate of oil depletion will be such that classic peak oil doom scenarios do in-fact play out, or at least combine with the above. I don't see it as likely, nor for it to bite that soon, but still a possibility.

But right now, this moment, it is the calm before the storm. If this forum is still around when things really start to fall apart, the signs and portents that some here will have cited to "prove" that collapse is now will look like nothing but a king complaining about a hangnail.

This is pretty much what I was getting at. And if the depletion rate of fossil fuels would start to accelerate as Pstarr believes will one day soon occur then what would actually happen? Think about the immense and absolute superfluous consumption, all those non discretionary usages. This would quickly dry up and remaining depleted reserves being used for more essentials. In this scenario we don't collapse, we don't go extinct, we simply suffer the hardships which have been part of past generations normal reality. Something we have been removed from for a couple of anomalous generations.

We see this coming up and from our pansied reality we declare doom.

What fools we are. How weak. What else would one expect from members of this site being all representatives of North America, Europe, Australia.

We know the power structures are shifting toward China, toward other places, our day in the sun is over and we cry doom doom doom.

Between Cog railing against leftist communists and Pstarr predicting peak oil doom there is very little difference.

The same voices actually. Just not able to handle that the world order is shifting under our feet.

That is all it is.

It's still all good.

[onlooker]

Okay if I am understanding, we should not cry doom because as history shows this is just standard stuff for humanity and the past 2 or 3 generations have been a true anomaly for us.
Okay fine. So climate change, peak oil, general environmental degradation together with an unsustainable population level are realities but should not be termed doom. I am okay with that as long as we concede that these are realities and that, they are getting worse
Or perhaps we can phrase it as the Overshoot Predator is getting closer and hungrier

[SeaGypsy]

(mods please merge with onlooker's unnecessary split 'Is Ibon Right?'- )

The overshoot predator is completely natural, perpetual. S/he is having a good munch right now in north Africa & parts of the middle east. Part of Ibon's OP refers to local transience, that what is perceived as global over population is in fact still a local phenomenon, affecting local populations & environments. This particular topic has been hashed over thoroughly without resolution previously in these forums. There being nothing new under the sun, it appears we are going to do it again.

[asg70]

So climate change, peak oil, general environmental degradation together with an unsustainable population level are realities but should not be termed doom.

Again with the straw-manning! Doomers have trouble living truly in the present...tense....

These things are realities but are still only minor irritants at best. The extreme weather events are costly but still only pose a small and manageable dent to BAU.

Now, if Cid's Methane burp insta-doom scenario takes place, then it's game over in no time. But even then, let's say it is, what the heck value is there biting your nails over it? Just eat, drink, be merry (and fly to Greece shamelessly the way Plant does).

Note the delusions of grandeur of doomerism as a movement. The fact people name their blogs Cassandra this and Cassandra that. There is this sense that if you only bang away at your keyboard enough you're somehow causing a sea-change in public attitudes which will result in meaningful mitigation. People will have less children, grow food forests, yada yada. Didn't the ship sail on that with Nopenhagen in 2008?

Where does that leave doomers? Just sort of huddling in their corner shaking their fists at TPTB? Well, they would, if some of them, being right-wingers by nature, haven't decided to use this board as a forum to bash democrats and coddle Trump, even though he's doing everything possible to make us more vulnerable to the dooms we supposedly care about. But hey, ideology, like blood, is thicker than water.

Again, if you go back in the archive, there used to be prep threads. Nobody talks about preps anymore. Why? Because there's NO NEED for those preps right now. How many of you are leaching acorns for your starch needs or any of those other survivalist tactics? The Dervaes are still just eccentrics because their lifestyle has not caught on. Sharon Astyk is either in the process of or has already sold her little boutique farm. Kunstler, Greer, and now even Bill McKibben are trying to make money more from being fiction authors. The Oil Drum is gone. Matt Savinar is an astrologer. Mike Ruppert killed himself. Matt Simmons is dead.

What I've described above is what happens when the party's over (pun intended) and people start putting down their drinks and heading home.

The party is over because a) we're in a lull and b) activism of any kind has been proven to be a non-starter. So make your peace and get on with life.

If that's the case, what's left to talk about?

Well, in my case I'm interested in the EV rollout, because it's symbolic of the invisible hand of the market that everyone had sworn was incapable and unwilling to ameliorate the situation. Do I expect it to 'save' us? No. But it could change how this stuff plays out as far as making it less likely for us to enter into a Mad Max future purely on the basis of oil depletion.

I'm also interested in things other than peak-oil that are coming about due to BAU lasting longer than we anticipated, namely A.I. and automation. When your whole world view is wrapped up in a single topic you become blind to other trendlines. People here are largely suffering from this tunnel-vision. There's probably other sites out there that are more general purpose futurism discussions, but I don't know where they are so I'm here hoping that I'm not the only one who can see more stuff going on besides PO and AGW.

[onlooker]

That is actually a well thought out, coherent post Asg, I guess it begs the question what exactly is the use of this site. You yourself answered that you are interested in learning about you could say mitigation strategies being adopted now. I do concede that this exercise in calling out doom especially that it is nigh is tiresome. I myself was not ascribing to it in terms of dating any truly global negative events until I discovered the Etp. I still am an adherent to it and so I do think that our rich world societies are approximating a true inflection point in terms of economic disruption. I do not necessarily see this as total doom but it will pose serious challenges and hardships to the coddled entitled feeling rich world citizens. Ibon, would say it is NOT doom at all but a needed change in lifestyles and attitudes which I actually agree with.

So, in summary I suggest we do not take each other so seriously. My main reason for being here is because I am entertained by the intellectual stimulus. So it is all good especialy given that some of us are not so young and our personal doom will probably arrive before any global catastrophic one.