3 Cats Stalking

Free Kindle Book of "Was a Time When"

May 1, next Tuesday, check out my new e-book "Was a Time When" on Kindle. For one day you or a friend can download a copy for free, $0.00. I am participating in a marketing plan with Amazon where I occasionally offer my books for free, and this is my first try.

I ask that those of you who download a free copy read the book and send me an email (sam@wasatimewhen.com) telling me what you think of the book and the idea. If you want to post your comment on Amazon you can do that. I also ask that you tell others about the book, and if you think it is worthwhile, recommend that they go to Amazon and get a copy for themselves.

Learn more about the book at www.WasATimeWhen.com.

Sam Penny

Food for the new world

A few years ago (not sure just when) Alice and I read "Protein Power" by the Drs Eades and adopted a low-carb, high-protein diet as our way of life. They also had a good discussion of the kinds of supplements we should be taking. I remember daughter Deb concurred in what we were doing and offered some good advice.

Though we have had our health problems, and we still fight weight issues, I believe our quality of life is far better for what we have done by adopting the low-carb approach. Fat is not the problem; sugar and refined starch is. We have essentially eliminated sugars from our diet, and we are avoiding flour when given the opportunity.

Over the years I have become concerned about the diet of the whole human race and how there has been a strong push to highly refined grains as the staples for the human race in the coming years. The health of the USA population with its tendency to obeisity is a good example of how it does not work.

I have also given considerable thought to just what kind of food can support 7B people in the future as our fuel and soil and water resources are depleted. That is one of the issues I talked about in my book, Was a Time When. It is an ongoing discussion.

There is a recent post by Tom Murphy of the "Do the Math" blog where he looks at the relative EROIE for various food types. His post was reposted to TheOilDrum, and it, with the comments that follow, are a treasure-trove of ideas, comments, and generally good information about the world's food situation. Take a look at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9145#more to read up on this post. This is one of the best discussions of the whole issue I have seen in a long time.

My Conundrum About How Collapse Could Happen

When I built the scenario that formed the basis for my book Was a Time When, I found there were a number of trends that would force the human society to collapse much faster than most other researchers expected, with or without the physical events I included in my story.

The biggest driver seemed to be the loss of cheap fuel and the inability of our civilization to produce enough food to feed the 7 billion plus inhabitants of the globe. My analysis indicated this trend would accelerate as the feedback loop of failing systems of farming and transport further reduced the supplies.

I postulated that the structure of society would crumble under the load, further adding to the misery. I calculated that wars, pestulance, pandemics, and starvation would wipe out most of the people on earth within the lifetime of the main character of my book. This conclusion matched with those of some of the other doomers of this age.

But I still had a conundrum: why could I not find a way for our civilization to realize the dangers soon enough to do something about the dangers of the future? Surely, something could be done to minimize the effects and save more of our culture. In the end, I decided it would take a thousand years for civilization to recover enough to regain some of the culture and knowledge we take for granted.

The recent post at ClubOrlov, Trained for Success, Bred to be Eaten, is an excellent discussion of why the human race as it is now trained stands little chance to preserve its society and culture. Dimtri Orlov quotes other authors who indicate the futility of expecting humans to be anything but what they are. He has introduced another way the earth's population will be reduced, cannabilism, and he points out that humans will not plan well when they feel they are in the immediate danger of being eaten. Keep track of his blogs, he says some more ideas along these lines.

So my conundrum about how the collapse could happen is still on my mind, but it seems to me to be more definite than ever. There are more who are warning of the dangers, but I am coming to the mind that not only is it too late, but given human nature, it may not be possible to prevent it. Yes, there will be some who survive, but it will be hard to determine in advance who those might be.

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Murphy Interview

James Stafford at OilPrice.com has an extensive interview with Tom Murphys (of the Do the Math blog) about Tom's comparison of various energy options available to the human race at this time. You can find this at http://oilprice.com/Interviews/Tom-Murphy-Interview-Resource-Depletion-is-a-Bigger-Threat-than-Climate-Change.html.

I recommend reading the interview and resulting comments that follow. Tom Murphy was one of my resources in my research for my novel Was a Time When, and he has been consistent in all his research.

Sam Penny

"Was a Time When" Available as Printed Book

My new book is now available as a printed book at CreateSpace.com or Amazon.com. It also got a great review by Crash_Watcher.

Now it is on to the book launch business.

sam

"Was a Time When" Published on Kindle, Dec 27, 2011

It's done, or at least the Kindle part is done. I published my new book last night as a Kindle book. It is available at Amazon for $3.98 and ready for immediate download.

The paper copy book will be available around mid-January.

I am very interested in getting some professional reviews of the book. If you have a blog where you discuss books or the fate of the world in the next 75 years, let me know your background and how to reach you and I will send you a review copy, either a .pdf or a paper copy (when available), free of charge.

For your information, here is my product description.

This tale began in 2006 as the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam, yet-to-be-born in 2015.

Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.

Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.

There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.

This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:

“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”

I will be discussing the book and offering ideas on other options and how to cope with the future at www.WasATimeWhen.com. Come by for a visit.

"Was A Time When" starting final edits. The

I have begun the final editing of my new book. It should go to the printer by next month. I have taken the advice of a couple of early reviews and put the story into a normal time sense, so the Sam Hardy tells his tale from his birth to the end of the century.

As soon as the book becomes available, I will let everyone know. If you want a review copy, send an email to sam@prudentrver.com and tell me of how your review will be published. BTW, it will first be available as an ebook/Kindle and I expect to have hardcopy sometime later.

sam

What Are Your Rights to Survival?

I was very surprised, and pleased, to receive an email asking me to do a radio interview with Kellene Bishop on the Preparedness Radio Network to discuss preparedness and self-reliance as it relates to my earthquake novels "Memphis 7.9 (revised)" and "Broken River." This interview is currently scheduled for Saturday 10/1 around 10am MDT.

As I thought of the problem of preparedness, I realized there are really two levels to consider. One is to be ready for the sudden onslaught of disaster, like an earthquake or hurricane, and I think this is some of where Bishop is going to come from.

The other level is preparing for survival in the world I see developing across the earth, a world where there are the pressures of over-population, reduced resources and limited supplies, and changing climate.It occurred to me in such a world, the resources required for one person to survive will necessarily be taken away from someone else. The result will be that you may survive, but someone else will not.

I do not have a good comment on this dilemma at this point, but it gets to the question of just what are your rights in the upcoming fight to survive. Think about it.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

 

 

 

Some Conclusions About Implications of Peak Oil on Population Growth

One of my favorite bloggers, Crash-Watcher has continued his analysis of regional petroleum production and consumption trends, and, the implications this has for population growth. These are published in the last five installments of his large study. He concludes the population growth will continue for quite some time, though some regions could suffer die-off soon.

In Part 6 Predicting regional and global peak oil and total recoverable oil he engages in a fantasy by which the North American region continues and even increases its consumption of oil, until there simply is not any left, as soon as 2028 or as late as 2047. He concludes "The USA’s consumption rate must go down—it is time to grow up and deal with it." Rots of Ruck!

Part 7 The relationship between global population and global petroleum production examined the correlation between global population and petroleum consumption and considered the merits of two possible scenarios for population change in light of declining petroleum production. He considered both Jay Hanson's die-off scenario where 90% of the earth's population dies an untimely death, and Julian Cribb's conclusion that we need a new Green Revolution to feed the growing throngs. Cribbs sees the huge challenge facing farms is how to double the food supply with less water, less land, less petroleum, less petrochemical based fertilizers and pesticides, and less money being invested in new technologies.

CW searched for the relationship between population decline and declining petroleum consumption in Part 8: Searching for evidence of population decline during periods of declining petroleum consumption for various regions in the world and concluded that our ability to "grow" our way out of the dilemma was limited at best. Dropping consumption did not limit population growth. He proposed the hypothesis that The population will continue to grow in these seven different regions of the world, at least until the per capita petroleum production/consumption drops below a certain critical level that is needed to support a petroleum-driven Green Revolution.  Once production per capita declines below that critical level, I expect to see a decline in the region’s population, in proportion to the per capita petroleum consumption rate decline. The question was, how much petroleum consumption is needed to sustain food production.

CW next looked into the issue of how much petroleum is required to produce the food required by the current population in his article Part 9: Estimating the critical levels of petroleum consumption necessary to sustain the modern food production system and concludes that he estimates that the critical, or limiting, petroleum inputs of the food system are in the form of diesel fuel used in food production on farms (about 1.1 b/yp) and diesel fuel for food transportation to markets (presently about 0.6 b/py).  Together, these critical needs can be met by a total of about 1.7 barrels of petroleum per person per year.  All of the other petroleum products involved in the food system (pesticides, fertilizers, packaging gasoline for the public to drive to the grocery store) can be made from the other petroleum products produced from this same 1.7 barrels.

Finally, in Part 10: Peak oil exports, peak oil and implications for population change he summarizes his analysis that he has written in 70 single-spaced pages, +50 figures and scores of tables produced over the course of two months. He reaches the conclusion that the world's population will necessarily drop because of a scarcity of food resulting from a scarcity of petroleum to produce that food. He projects that whether regions share their food or not, by 2050 the world's population will have dropped to between 3 and 5 billion, down from a potential maximum of 8.5B in the 2035 time zone.

CW is to be congratulated for completing a long and concise analysis of the future of both population and petroleum products available to the people of the earth. His results offer the basis for more study into this problem, and make it clear that there is a problem to study.

 

Club Orlov Discusses Stages of Collapse, And How It Relates to Me

Among the interesting excerpts of a radio interview done by one of the members of the Club Orlov is a summary of the five stages of collapse approaching our world with some suggestion of when.

The stages are Financial Collapse (unsustainable/unachievable increases in debt), followed by Commercial Collapse (shortages in both oil and credit mean insufficient fuel to keep goods moving). Political Collapse will follow because governements are every level start to fail. There is insufficient money to pay for expected services of fire and police protection.

The last two stages of Social Collapse and Cultural Collapse will be a local issue and depend upon the people of a particular area to keep control or not. The interviewee states:

"Unfortunately to my thinking these two stages have largely run their course in many places in the United States where people really don't know their neighbors and also they don't really do very much for themselves. They expect to be fed at fast food establishments, they don't know how to cook from scratch, and things like that."

Luckily, I live in a community that does not fit the above description. I am part of a group of people who mostly live in 400 square feet or less and who know how to prepare and even grow their own food. The people are largely self-sufficient, but we still depend upon the world around us, more than most of us are willing to admit. We should be the most likely to survive these collapses.

The speaker believes the country will be unrecognizable within 10 years, and it will be dismembered by its creditors. Some stages will happen suddenly, like shortages of fuel, and that can lead to chaos in hotspots all over the country.

Finally, he says,

"Unfortunately a lot of people simply cannot be reached because they refuse to hear what we have to say. It's not that they can't understand it, it's that they refuse to listen. The media, in general, in the United States makes it very easy because there is this fictional reality that they perpetuate and foist on people that contradicts what we're saying. We're saying that 'this will not continue for very much longer, people'. And then the media says that 'everything is fine, everything is normal' ... Some of these just fictional feel-good messages are saturating the media and the reality-based people really don't stand a chance."

This is a pretty dire prediction, and it is near-term. What is distressing for me is that IMHO my community is going through some signs of these stages of collapse already.

As I said, my community should be one of the most likely to survive. I live in a cooperative of RVers located in a beautiful oasis across from Mount Palomar in southern California. With power from Southern Cal Edison (to pump our water) and groceries and fuel from Temecula (17 miles away) we are "totally self-sufficient."

The people here are good friends and great neighbors, but I worry because they are strangely (to me) reluctant to look ahead and decide we must plan what we will become in the future. They want to be independent and unencumbered by any plans that might somehow restrict their lives. Most don't want to look at the possible downsides of tomorrow.

I see the time (within the next five years) when RVers will be mostly a thing of the past because those who would like to move about cannot afford or find the fuel to do so. Then the mix of our residents must necessarily change. I see the time when we cannot individually afford to drive 34 miles to town and back to pick up a loaf of bread. Then our means of feeding the people here must necessarily change. I see the time when we cannot depend upon SCE to provide the power needed to pump our water out of our aquifer. If by then we do not have some alternative means to pump water, our oasis will become the scrubby desert it was before our founders leveled the hills and built this paradise. I see the time when our social and cultural structure collapses completely for lack of sufficient foresight and planning to sustain our infrastructure and life-style, and all who live here must leave.