A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on.
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A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on.
John Quiggin 
the artic 30 have bail but now have immigration visa problems.
I wonder if anyone plans to follow them in protesting in that way again
An appreciation of realpolitiks and real power would convince me not to protest wherever Russia has or claims sovereignty.
However, we should not take any shcadenfreude from the situation(s) of the Arctic 30. Russia is a Chekist state. “Chekism is the situation in the Soviet Union (USSR) and contemporary Russia where the secret political police de facto controls the society.” – Wikipedia. Russia, like two other unfree superpowers is asserting its right to wreck our climate.
There was some discussion about disclosing ABC remuneration in the latest thread.
Agree with what Ikon and others said.
Especially, I would expand that to ALL public expenditure. How on earth can “commercial in confidence” be justified when these people are spending my money, ostensibly for my good?
It doesn’t make any sense at all. If having the contract price and ultimate spending details available for public view puts off a supplier, I can’t see that as anything but a benefit.
Same goes for the ABC. Annabel Crabbe gets a couple of hundred thousand bucks? Fran Kelly, too? That’s just obscene. As one troll pointed out, Bolt did his ABC gigs for about $250 a go – how many people would jump at $250 for a nice cuppa and a Sunday morning spot on “Barry & Rupert & Friends”?
No, it’s BS. You spend our money, you account for every cent. And while you’re at it – break all commercial and formal or informal ties to News Ltd. If I wanted to hear what Rupert thought I’d pick up a News Ltd paper, I don’t need to hear it all over my ABC and SBS.
Politicians (handled by the establishment media revolving door to media advisors) do “appearances” to announce $X hundred million dollars will be spent on Y project.
If we had anything even vaguely looking like a functioning media, the first question would be: “And how exactly will that be spent? What is the precise break-down of that between actual work and consultants, PR, marketing, ‘community consultation’, advertising in the Murdoch press etc..”
Unfortunately the real journalists are starved of funding and genuine answers, whilst the enabling stenographers are richly remunerated and fed acceptable talking-point quotes for mass circulation regurgitation.
But I still persist!
What is the defining characteristic of late stage corporate industrial capitalism and its underpinning neoliberal ideology? Its defining characteristic is its maladaptiveness and inability to change in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the necessity to change.
Since at least 1972 we have been stuck in one ideology, one mode of production, one mode of excessive consumption and one general mode of political economy. The ideology is neoliberal, the production is corporate, hierarchical and fossil-fueled. We see excessive consumption of our resource endowment occuring without preparation for the transition to any sort of sustainable economy. We see endless growth attempted on a finite earth. The political economy of oligarchic capitalism continues without any attention to equity or sustainability.
This is a general and very personal rant of course. For forty years I have seen my civilization going the wrong way and known with 100% certainty that it was and still is going the wrong way. How have I known? With the publication of Limits to Growth it became axiomatically certain and obvious to any logical thinker that we were on an unsustainable path which if unchanged would lead to total disaster. I am not a deep or original thinker. I am simply a logical thinker who takes clear trends to their obvious and indeed inevitable conclusion.
What confounds me is how most people, even very intelligent people, cannot see what is so axiomatically clear and certain. Obviously, they are in the grip of a legitimising ideology which holds that endless growth capitalism is The One True Way. The grip and seductiveness of this ideology (we can have it good forever without any negative consequences) is so great that people cannot see what it is actually blindingly obvious and happening right in front of them.
The collapse has commenced. It is quite easy to predict that places like Greece, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and so on will never recover. They cannot ever recover. There are not enough resources left for recovery. All that can happen now is that the collapse will spread. Some regions might persist in a more or less liveable state for up to 50 years yet. That is probably the best we can hope for.
I will be signing off for a good while soon so people can have a rest from my doom and gloom. Actually it’s just hard-nosed, realistic perception and analysis but frankly most people just can’t handle the truth.
Ikon “I will be signing off for a good while soon so people can have a rest from my doom and gloom.”
No, please don’t go away, unless you really want or need to. I value your realism and doom and gloom as an important point of view.
I have also ‘known’ that we have been going the wrong way for the past 3-4 decades. I knew it from a woman’s point of view; that there was no way to be a good mother and raise good children and also be the competitive, selfish and individualistic person that the new ideology required.
With my genetic tendency to be depressed – father who took his own life – I need to deliberately adopt a Pollyanna outlook but your more negative viewpoint is and has been important to me, and I’d say others, for providing a different informed and intelligent perspective.
But perhaps the doom and gloom view is not good for your own state of mind?
@Julie Thomas
There is a form of intellectual depression that is the logical outcome of an objective analysis of the human condition. No doubt it is exacerbated by a lack of natural “happy chemicals” in the brain. It is best endured. Treatment is impossible for a thinking person because a cure would mean forsaking clarity, logic and objectivity.
Most happy people, happy in the absence of external tragedy, are so because they are lucky to be born with a brain that makes plenty of happy chemicals. It’s as simple as that. No great trick to it. To keep going when you are not so blessed is much more laudable IMO.
One of the symptoms of depression is that sufferers delude themselves that they are thinking clearly. As a sufferer I’m well aware of this. There’s plenty of research that shows, that, while depressed people may have a superficial ability to assess the likelihood of bad things happening more accurately than psychologically healthy people, when it comes to making significant decisions, depression hampers, rather than assists, the ability to think rationally.
The thing that periodically grates about Ikon’s rants for me is this pretence that they are based on some kind of objective certainty. I have no problem with Ikon pointing out the very significant global sustainability problems we face.
But there’s a difference between “possible”, or “likely”, and “certain”. Very few things in human affairs are actually certain. The claims that “doom” is certain are invariably based on ignoring or downplaying the evidence of positive developments while emphasising the negatives (hyper-optimists or “cornucopians” do the same thing in the opposite direction, of course).
The use of terms like “axiom” to refer to attempts to model uncertain empirical realities is also typical of this deluded faux certainty.
“It is quite easy to predict that places like Greece, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and so on will never recover. ”
These countries are going through some bad times, but we have a long historical record for all of them. Pick any 50 year period in the last 5000 years, and you can find the same or worse. So, I guess they probably will recover (or at least, if they don’t it will be due to a global catastrophe unrelated to their current difficulties).
On the subject of “easy prediction”, the noted celebrity psychic Sylvia Brown predicted effortlessly that she would live to the age of 88. She died several days ago, aged 77. đ
I remember a book that came out in the early 1970s, called The Last Generation which, as you might infer from the title, argued that the author’s generation would be the last to survive on earth due to environmental catastrophe etc. I went to Amazon to see if I could find it, but discovered the same title had been used so many times by everyone from ecopessimists to eschatologists that it was impossible to find the book I was looking for.
@John Quiggin
“I guess they probably will recover (or at least, if they donât it will be due to a global catastrophe unrelated to their current difficulties).” – JQ.
The point is that their current difficulties are directly related to a global catastophe. This is the catastrophe of continuing to attempt to grow exponentially (globally) at the time in history when resource limits have been reached.
@Tim Macknay
Nothing is more certain than the axiom: “Growth cannot continue indefinitely in a finite system.”
Nothing is more certain than the fact that exponential overshoot in biological systems will degrade carrying capacity.
Nothing is more certain than the fact the we are already in overshoot. Global footprint analysis indicates that very clearly.
@John Quiggin
Every day, for the last twenty years, I could have been predicting very pessimistically that “I am going to die today.” Could you infer from my large number of failed predictions that I was never going to die? Of course not. Equally, from a large number of failed predictions about ecological doom you cannot infer that ecological doom is not going to happen. That is a really basic logical fallacy. Each new scientific prediction (refined by new data and new modelling) has to be judged on its own merits.
Finally, doom is always guaranteed so far we can tell from the laws of this universe. Individual mortality, species extinction, solar collapse and the death of the universe (heat death or its collapse and a new big bang) are all practically certain events within the most miniscule, vanishingly small, range of uncertainty. Doom is assured. It’s just a matter of timing.
@Ikonoclast
The thing is, Ikon, your “axiom” and your first “fact” tell us precisely nothing useful about the probable trajectory of human affairs over the course of the next century. That’s the trouble with axioms.
And your third “fact” is simply wrong. The current state of footprint analysis simply does not warrant anything like the the level of certainty you ascribe to it. Footprint analysis is a relatively new method which deals with highly uncertain variables (which its practitioners readily acknowledge), and its value is debated among experts and in the literature. Even its value as a pedagological tool (which is its least controversial use) is disputed, because of the artificiality of converting things like atmospheric pollution into a land footprint.
What Footprint analysis undoubtedly does tell us is that we’re facing sustainability and environmental problems (which we already knew by other means).
But far from being a “fact”, the statement “we are already in overshoot” is pretty close to meaningless. Nobody really knows with any certainty what the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans actually is. The range of reasonable estimates goes well above the current human population, as well as below it.
And it’s not at all clear how the biological concept of overshoot is considered to map onto the modern human economy, the vast bulk of whose footprint is not concerned with food production. A large chunk of the global “footprint” measured by these analysis tools is the greenhouse emissions footprint, but the fact is, we don’t really know what the impact of global warming will be on human food production capacity (notwithstanding that we can surmise with some confidence (but not certainty) that it will have many negative environmental effects in general).
The only relevant “fact” about footprint analysis is that the analysts themselves do not ascribe anything like the level of certainty to their method that you do. Your insistence that this stuff is axiomatically “certain” is completely unsupported by evidence or argument. I really do wonder what motivates you to do it.
When you start saying this kind of thing, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s depression talking.
The laws of thermodynamics, the mortality of living beings, the finite nature of the sun and the probable heat death of the universe have absolutely nothing to do with the prospects for human civilisation over the next century or two. Those things are all as equally compatible with a cornucopian vision of space colonies as they are with a peak-oil type collapse.
That that you now want to segue to these vaster, more remote and abstract concepts of “doom” strongly suggests that you are not so much trying to grapple with real world issues as trying to preserve a particular mindset.
As Hoot said in the film Blackhawk Down; “You know what I think? It don’t matter what I think.” It don’t matter what you think. It don’t matter what they think. None of it based on what people think. (Where “think” means have an opinion.)
@Ikonoclast
Of course it is.
I thought the SBS 2 Cities of the Underworld show on the Mayan civilisation might have contained major insights. Until a few centuries ago the Mayans numbered 4.6m (if I recall) in the area that is now Belize. Now the somewhat Hispanic population is just 0.3m. The current people seem for the most part seem to be battlers but they look after their forests and coral reefs. They don’t seem to feel the need for human sacrifice like the Mayans presumably they just watch TV these days.
The Mayans turned to sacrifice to appease the gods when it all turned bad. In their heyday settlements and agriculture competed for space with little margin for error like drought. It seems the people just dispersed. The show claimed the Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012. Maybe not but the take home message could be that large human populations must implode before they can regenerate sustainably.
@Ikonoclast
So you think it is rational for you to have become more depressed over the past couple of years? Because you are noticeably more negative (and more certain) in your outlook on lots of things recently.
I agree with Julie.
Several years ago you were determinedly pessimistic. Then you got a bit more upbeat for a while – I recall you mentioning you’d read some material which caused you to abandon a peak-oil dogma about the non-viability of renewable energy. At the time I remember thinking that I liked the new, solutions-oriented Ikonoclast much better than the old, doomy one.
But now you’ve gotten determinedly pessimistic again, which seems to be linked to your interest in footprint analysis. But I can’t tell if the footprint stuff is a cause or a symptom.
And about brain chemistry, Ikon, it is not clear what comes first the behaviour or the good chemicals. We can change our brains; we just have to want to but it’s good to wallow sometimes and western culture does seems to appreciate art that comes from depressed people; from pain and suffering.
Eastern culture admired art that came from rising above the turmoil of ordinary life.
“The point is that their current difficulties are directly related to a global catastophe. ”
Say what? Current events in Syria, Egypt, Libya etc are far more closely linked to the history of European colonialism than to anything happening to global resources. And the disaster in Greece is the avoidable product of fiscal and monetary mismanagement by Greek governments and the ECB (take you pick which to blame, it doesn’t matter to your argument).
It’s far more reasonable to blame the wars, revoluations and barbarian invasions of 1500-3000 years ago (of which there are a long list) on the environmental mismanagement that turned much of North Africa (once the breadbasket of Europe) into a desert, and deforested large parts of Greece.
Having a clear-eyed appreciation of the quality and variety of the challenges one faces and the options for responding to them is an excellent thing. It helps to foreclose disappointment and predisposes rational conduct.
On the other hand, just as the usefulness of the broken analog clock that happens to be correct twice each day is zero, so too a person whose outlook is determinedly pessimistic without foundation has an outlook that is of no value, even to him/herself. Yes, s/he may periodically avoid disappointment but the things for which most of us live — a sense of purpose, belonging, and fulfilment will never be enjoyed.
Yes, being a pollyanna — or more commonly, cognitively dissonant may lead to ruin of of oneself and others — but being everyone’s curmudgeonly wet blanket denies one the petty pleasures of human community. Occasionally, as a rational optimist, one will achieve successes and one should prize these and use them as the foundation for as much rational optimism as one can muster.
Yes, there is uncertainty, but if this always weighs upon one’s back like the Old Man of the Sea on the back of Sinbad, one is contriving one’s own burdens, which makes no sense at all.
@Tim Macknay
I was being a little oblique. What I meant was that real world laws (the dependable laws discovered thus far by the hard sciences) operate independently of human opinions. What I meant was that it doesn’t matter what we think. What happens next will be entirely determined by real world forces.
@Julie Thomas
Happiness, unhappiness or any feelings in between are not rational or irrational. They are a-rational. However, we all spend a lot of time rationalising feelings, me included. I tend to think that “alienation from nature” (a very vague and debatable phrase I know) begins with language. To possess and use language is to be alienated. However, when you see the horror at the heart of nature you begin to understand the choice for alienation.
@John Quiggin
Your answer contains its own refutation.
“Itâs far more reasonable to blame the wars, revoluations and barbarian invasions of 1500-3000 years ago (of which there are a long list) on the environmental mismanagement that turned much of North Africa (once the breadbasket of Europe) into a desert, and deforested large parts of Greece.”
And indeed I do blame those processes for the outcomes you correctly note. So if man of that era with far less instrumental power to damage the environment still had such an enormous regional effect, I wonder why you doubt that modern man with far greater instrumental power will have a similar global effect.
@Ikonoclast
So it’s a choice you are making, to see “the horror at the heart of nature” rather than look for the other sights that one can see in nature.
I have heard all the arguments about how an intelligent person can do nothing else but despair. My father spent many years explaining this to me before he killed himself; that was in the late 60’s and early 70’s when I was 19 and pregnant with his first grandchild.
So I’m not arguing with your right to choose to be depressed; I do understand it. All will be well I guess, as long as you understand that you can choose to be something else, sometime soon anyway. đ
Ikon you say
“What I meant was that real world laws (the dependable laws discovered thus far by the hard sciences) operate independently of human opinions. ”
But humans are part of the real world and the way humans operate is entirely dependent on opinon.
I am not sure that free will is nearly as free as people (theists and humanists alike) assume. Whilst (macro) physics was viewed as deterministic it was difficult to see how free will could exist in a materially determined world. Once quantum indeterminacy was “discovered” or rather modelled and found to be useful and descriptive, the determinism problem appeared solved but only to be replaced by a new problem. It is difficult – in a different way – to model how free will arises out of indeterminancy. And at the macro level a probabilistic distribution begins to look exactly like determinancy which it is or at least it approaches.
Even without going to the extreme of questioning free will altogether, we can see that individuals’ actions and freedoms are highly circumscribed by human biology, social position, genetic inheritance and so on. So, if forgiveness is in my (likely) predetermined repertoire I should forgive humans for wrecking the world. They really can’t help it.
‘ Infinite growth cant go on for very long’ seems like a truism to me .’How can intelligent people go along with that model ?’ is a good question – I think they either hope for scientific breakthroughs that help ,or they only intend to go along with it until everyone is lifted out of poverty (assuming there is enough time left to do that ), or a terrible misinformed nihilistic selfish reason. What gives me hope for humanities future kis that I know people can be happy with far less than they think they need and far far less than too many currently have .
Iko – Language in general is something I know a bit about from a philosophy of language background .In this context it may not help much ,but it is possible (and I would argue very useful and ultimately unavoidable ) to define language much, much more broadly than you have .I think when you say ‘language’ you are referring only to spoken ,written, or thought words of ,in your case ,English . I hope more broadly conceived language would not seem to alienate you from nature but should bring you closer .Nature is horror and wonder. Words are just signs amongst so many other signs available to us sentient beings.
(This is the sandpit, right? Yes? Good.) You know, depressed old people can have some strange effects on those around them. When I was young my parents never talked to me, which I can understand. I was an appalling conversationist back then. Still am really. But I did had an elderly babysitter who was so convinced that everything that was wrong with the world at the time was the result of how terrible young people were today that I just assumed things such as murder and other crimes were only recently invented by the young and didn’t occur in the past. Sure I’d heard of Jack the Ripper, but I just assumed that he (or possibly she now that I think about it) must have been the first murderer, and possibly suffering from premature youth. I was aware that there were wars in the past, but I didn’t think of them as large scale murder but more a form of very dangerous contact sport.
The funny thing is, this elderly babysitter maintained her belief that young people were much more horrible than those in the past, despite having first hand knowledge of what many young people in Nazi Germany were up to in the 30s and 40s. It seems to me that if she had just used her cognitive powers to compare what she knew young people to be like in the past to young people at that point in time, she would have seen that despite their weed, and their free love, and their pokemon, they weren’t all that bad and would have saved herself a lot of concern and would have prevented a great deal of confusion in the lives of people around her. (Or at least one person anyway.)
The “youth of today” meme is tenacious, and I’ll bet it originated some time back in the day of the first species of humanity that could speak.
As for free will, I am inclined to view it as an illusion, but a beneficial one. It is entangled with our conscious processes, although it isn’t necessarily the case that consciousness should eventuate free will; perhaps the advent of a spoken language, combined with consciousness, admits an easy avenue for the illusion of free will to grip us; perhaps all that is necessary is the conscious ability to reflect upon possible futures and/or pasts, and to construct an internal narrative as to how we arrived at a particular action.
There is plenty of fun to be had in starting with the premise “There is no free will in the usual sense intended,” and then to see how that might be so, without hurling out concepts like responsibility, culpability, choice, morality and ethics in general, etc. I liken it to the atheist position that “there is no god or supernatural world” and then seeing if a morality can be preserved in spite of that premise: the answer is that yes, a morality can be preserved, although it is no more or less secure/absolute/relative etc than a god-based morality. Being nice to others is entirely within a human’s grasp, with or without a god to watch over them.
Back to work…
Forgetting the OT or even OTT side issues which I was guilty of starting in on…
I would be interested in what evidence it would take to convince Tim McN and Prof J.Q. that;
Exogenous factors of resource shortage were, beyond all reasonable doubt, dragging on or throttling global or regional economies independent of or at least in conjunction with the usual endogenous suspects?
Above, I use “exogenous to the economy” to mean physical factor limits (raw materials and energy) completely outside the economy (until and at the point of drawing part of them into the economy).
It is interesting to question how one would identify and diagnose that general locus. Clearly at the transition zone (assuming there is one or is to be one) there will be an area of uncertainty where it is difficult to discern whether problems internal to global capitalism itself are causing long recessions or whether it is the price and scarcity of key resources which is also contributing to on-going recessionary “drag”. If it is the latter, it is likely to be a new feature to orthodox economic analysis which is not geared to look outside the box. The “box” in this case is the self-contained, perpetual motion machine independent of environment which orthodox economics, at least in its bowdlerized and popularized form, considers the economy to be.
This is an informative short paper on energy issues from the point of view of human macroecology.
Click to access 2011-1%20Energetic%20Limits%20to%20Economic%20Growth.pdf
@Ikonoclast
You’re going to need to be more specific than that. The comment is so vague, it’s not clear what you’re talking about. Convince us what, specifically?
I particularly endorse the scientist’s summary view;
“Mainstream economists historically have dismissed warnings that resource shortages might permanently limit economic growth. Many believe that the capacity for technological innovation to meet the demand for resources is as much a law of human nature as the Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic that creates the demand (Barro and Sala-i-Martin 2003, Durlauf et al. 2005, Mankiw 2006). However, there is no scientific support for this proposition; it is either an article of faith or based on statistically flawed extrapolations of historical trends.”
Prof. J.Q. will forgive I am sure if I accept the views of the scientists and not the mainstream economists on this issue. This is particularly so when mainstream economics itself stands indited of failing (and failing quite palpably and obviously when the Great Moderation failed) by none other than J.Q. himself on this very site. I am sure we all remember that blog post. That was a piece of laudable intellectual honesty, in case I sound too judgemental and triumphalist. Frankly, following that and all the scientific evidence available, I don’t see how my position is anything other than very well buttressed. It would stand (extremely likely) if I retreated from my absolute certainty claim to an extremely likely claim.
OK, I do so. I hold that it is extremely likely (> 95% probability) that the global economy will suffer an enduring collapse this century due to resource shortages and/or other factors. “Enduring Collapse” I define as permanent or semi-permanent global recession/depression of a duration in the order of decades. This will be accompanied (extremely likely again) by a plateau and then drop in global population with the peak at about 2050 plus or minus a decade and the 2100 population at about 60% of the peak (this last percentage perhaps being a little optimistic).
Footnote: I will be extremely surprised if we have not entered what appears to be already a permanent global recession/depression by 2020 or 2025 at the very latest. Given standard longevity, and no untoward accidents or illnesses, Prof. J.Q. and I will each be around to claim victory or defeat in the debate as the case may be.
It won’t be long now, as the monkey said when he got his tail caught in the chaff cutter.
@Ikonoclast
I read the paper you linked to.
It has some irritating aspects (such as the authors’ enthusiasm for a foolish analogy between the economy and a living organism), but I broadly agree with its general conclusions i.e. that continuous economic and population growth cannot occur indefinitely in a finite world, and that raising the living standards of most of the world’s population and catering for a larger population will require substantial increases in global energy consumption. Obviously, such a task is challenging, and may not be achieved. Of course, one doesn’t require a “human macroecology” analysis to tell us that. As sunshine said, it’s a truism.
It’s also worth noting that (although they might well believe it, judging by the tone), the authors have enough sense not to state that collapse is inevitable, or that the world simply cannot find the energy supplies necessary to support the growth envisaged. They clearly recognise that their research doesn’t support such a conclusion.
This is a little pretentious. Using the words “science” and “scientist” doesn’t magically confer infallibility on people or methods of analysis. Notwithstanding that I agree with the broad conclusions of the paper you linked to, it clearly has some significant flaws.
For example, the authors make a bit of a fuss about the importance they attach to a foolish analogy between the economy and a biological organism – they say it is one of the main reasons for their conclusions. However, it doesn’t take much analysis to work out that such an analogy is far from compelling – economies have just as many qualities that radically differentiate them from biological entities as which make them similar. At best, the analogy is a way of illustrating a point, yet the authors treat it as a plank of their argument.
For me, this insistence that economies are like organisms is a dogmatic belief that regularly appears in the literature of “ecologic economics” and similar disciplines (with which I’d include “human macrecology”) and which mark them out as something that falls well short of a mature science.
The authors also rely on a great many sources who are clearly not scientists, such as Joseph Tainter, Thomas Malthus and Richard Heinberg (!). Most of the scientific references are concerned with animal biology, not the natural resources sciences or physics. In addition to the economy-organism analogy, the authors also use other concepts of dubious scientific validity, such as something they call the “Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic”.
In short, notwithstanding the references to thermodynamics and biology, to the extent that this stuff is science, it’s social science. It sure ain’t Newtonian mechanics (and neither is footprint analysis). Its level of reliability should be judged accordingly.
My hunch is that Ikonoclast is on the money. There have been predictions (eg Aleklett) that world oil exports will decline 40% between 2010 and 2020. Others (eg International Energy Agency) say there will be a slight increase in volume but we know the net energy (after ‘toil for oil’) must be declining. That decline affects everything from food production to the daily commute. I wouldn’t draw comfort from Australia’s recent energy ‘efficiency’ w.r.t. electricity since we’re talking cuts of under 10% not getting up to 40%.
Late next year we should see a lot of angst over gas prices. Petrol should nudge $2/L even if it doesn’t we will be driving less. Then there is the cost of unhelpful weather. Each year we have about 200,000 new mouths to feed but the same amount of water in the rivers. Per capita demand reduction for transport and electricity will be swamped by population growth. Underemployment appears to be another increasing trend. By 2020 I think we’ll have more cures for cancer but the all fun stuff like driving and restaurant dining will be cut back. When this penny drops the political landscape will change dramatically.
@Ikonoclast you must be investing your super in commodity futures?
So where did the >95% probability come from? “Science”? Did it appear to you in a dream?
Yes, there will probably be considerable pressure to introduce an amendment to the Australian Design Rules to make small, cheap electric cars street-legal. But it gets worse – I also suspect that some people (not you of course!) may even resort to riding bicycles or scooters (gasp!).
@Tim Macknay
It’s my assessment given the robustness of LTG modelling, LTG Revisited, the LTG 30 year update and the complete inflexibility of all the basic physical and thermodynamic laws involved. Endless growth is absolutely impossible of course. And other scenarios of soft landings on sustainable plateaus involve a lot of wishful thinking, prevarication and deception of self and others. But go ahead and kid yourself silly. Don’t worry, be happy.
@Tim Macknay
For several years I rode my Apollo IV from outer Belconnen to the parliamentary triangle, even in heavy 7.30 am frosts. Now I live in the bush I make biodiesel out of used chip frying oil. We need separate roads for light vehicles and behemoths. Perhaps that’s what Abbott meant when he talked about roads fit for the 21st century.
@Donald Oats
You are right, I remember reading that some of the first writing found in Sumeria, included complaints against the younger generation and how disruptive and badly behaved they were.
I was just reading a Piece by Chris Hedges which reminded me of the discussion taking place in this thread:
I’m fortunate not to suffer depresion. I love and enjoy nature and, compared to so many people in the world, am very safe and comfortable. But I see some very big problems in our very near future (and beyond) which I can’t see real solutions to.
Seriously destructive climate change would appear to be not only 95% ‘locked in’ but is already making impact and nothing is happening which will prevent it.
The world economy is more or less run on fraud.
Absent a new ‘Super Giant’ oilfield, peak oil is around about now (as others have noted).
Democracy as practised today isn’t working the way it is supposed to.
Far too much military gear exists for my liking, especially the stuff that makes very big noises and makes an awful mess.
I’m all for optimism and hope but magical thinking I can’t get my head around.
@Ikonoclast
Since the Meadows Report and subsequent follow-ups didn’t assign probabilities to any of the modelled scenarios, I take this to mean you just made it up.
Does this include scenarios 8 and 9 in the LTG 30 year update? If so, what makes you regard those scenarios as “wishful thinking” and “deception” and the others as robust? What about the 30 Year Update’s general conclusions from its final four scenarios? Do you think those are wishful thinking as well?
Also, what makes you so convinced of the robustness of scenario planning, and the robustness of LTG’s specific scenarios in particular? Do you think there are other possible scenarios? If not, why not? If yes, what probabilities would you assign to them and why?
I agree that the laws of thermodynamics and other basic physical laws are inflexible, but why do you think this is this relevant? Surely the relevant considerations are the reliability of the various figures used to estimate growth rates, available resources, production, pollution and so forth. “Basic physical laws”, while obviously applying at all times, don’t really figure in the analysis at all.
I’m not sure what this remark is in aid of. It’s neither evidence or an argument, and it doesn’t support your viewpoint.
Are you going to clarify what you were asking at #36?
“Also, what makes you so convinced of the robustness of scenario planning, and the robustness of LTGâs specific scenarios in particular?”
Tim – have you compared LtG standard run with actual results?
I doubt it, because if you did, you would not be so chirpy?
Click to access Turner%202008.pdf
@iain
Yes, I have read that. It’s interesting.
But where have I been “chirpy”?
I confess to being a little frustrated that, from my perspective, all I have done is criticise Ikon’s level of certainty (i.e. his absolute certainty, now conveniently revised to “95%”) about future events, and his claim that scenario planning, footprint analysis and other methods of estimating environmental impacts and sustainability on the macro scale are as reliable as basic physical laws (which is just silly, IMHO – these methods are valuable, but they’re just not that precise).
In return, Ikon has gish-galloped all over the place, going from a “scientific certainty” of global catastrophic collapse, to linking the current European economic malaise with an incipient global catastrophe, to annual predictions of his own death and the heat death of the universe (!) and back to a more specific scenario (i.e. 95% certainty of a ‘permanent or semi-permanent global recession/depression of a duration in the order of decades’).
Yet you, Ikon and Megan are all responding as if by querying this level of certainty, I’m insisting on some Julian Simonesque glorious future of space colonies and personal jetpacks (I assume Megan’s jibe about magical thinking was directed at me).
To quote Megan from an earlier thread: “Can’t we do ‘cautiously concerned’ anymore?