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

New Good Things to Read

Not only did I recently publish my new novel, Was a Time When, but there have been several exceptional blog posts on the Internet you should all check out.

Crash_Watcher has a link to a really great YouTube video (34 minutes but it is worth it) in his blog entry titled Peak Fossil Fuels and Limits to Growth in 34 Minutes. As he warns, even the knowledgable set might need to watch it several times to get the whole idea.

Alice Friedemann writes in the CounterCurrents.org blog about Why Do Political And Economic Leaders Deny Peak Oil And Climate Change? This is one of the more complete reviews I have seen about why our society wants to keep denying there is a problem, and how this reflects back into our political system. Unfortunately, the wall that keeps us from taking rational action on the problems we face is pretty high.

Tom Murphy's article The Way is Shut in his Do The Math blog is a great summary of his search for some way to solve the energy problem of the future and talks about his plans for taking action in the future. You might also look at his past posts that study the various possibilities for alternate energy. On thing is for sure, liquid fuels are going to become a real problem since there is nothing that comes close to what we can get from petroleum.

In my novel I approach our situation as a given and build a scenario on what the world will be like if we essentially do nothing to solve our problems. Tom apologizes for using fear as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I conclude that unless people have some real idea about what life could become, they will simply say it cannot happen.

Read all these articles and my book. Then you decide where we are and where we can go. We really have few options, and they are fast disappearing.

And Tom's points about asymetric risk should be carefully considered. If you think we "doomers" are all wrong, and it turns out we are, you have not lost too much -- you will have spent less money and will be living a more conservative life. But if we are right and you are in danger, doing something about it now might make a big difference and you could lose a lot.

Think about the future and have a good day.

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

 

Five Year Status Report on 2-10-2012

Time flies as you get older. I checked and it was just over five years ago that I started this blog. My intent at the time was stated as:

Recently I became most concerned with the risks associated with resource depletion, climate change, and over-population. Scientific research is showing that unless we quickly respond to the challenges that each of these pose and begin to mitigate those risks, our life-style could suffer catastrophically.

To make matters worse, we live in a time when all three risk areas are converging in a complex fashion. Scenarios that I have done and studied support the conclusion that the combined effects of these risks could even threaten the existence of the world's civilizations.

Often the discussions of these problems are too single-minded, they do not address the interactions between them. That is where I will try to fill in the gaps.

I asked myself, has anything changed?

Resource depletion is still a big cat stalking our civilization, though there are still those who refuse to consider the problem. Not only is depletion showing up in fossil fuels, but also in rare earths, water, land, and a wealth of other resources that are fast disappearing. Here in the USA many think we are becoming more efficient and dropping demand, and the recent boom in natural gas drilling and production will solve the our energy problems. They ignore the fact that the boom is about to bust itself with the low prices and that the problem is the rising fuel consumption worldwide.

The "Export Land Model" proposed by TOD's westexas and detailed by Crash_Watcher is still alive and bringing the time of greatly limited exports closer in time than anyone wants to admit.

Nope, the only change I see in the trends for resource depletion are the acceleration of effects of depletion.

Climate change is the second cat that just keeps growing. I see no way the countries of the world can ever agree to limit their impact on the climate, so the PPM of the greenhouse gases will keep rising until the supply of fossil fuels gives out and we have no good way to produce the gases. Now we are beginning to see that methane escaping from the thawing tundra and sea-beds could take up the climate-forcing and it could be even worse.

One of the effects of climate change is to expand the range of extreme weather possibilities, and we are seeing more and more severe weather events around the world.

Nope, the trends in climate change appear to be on a straight line with temperatures rising around the world. Kiss the lowlands along our coasts goodbye and get out while you still can.

Population Overshoot is still the biggest cat, and it will fall the hardest. It is a personal problem for all of us, or at least for all our off-spring and future progeny. Wars may cut down some populations, but they are far too inefficient. Even nuclear wars are not very effective. Pandemics with new and unforeseen viruses will be effective at some population reduction, but again pandemics become harder to spread as people quite traveling around and meeting other people.

Nope, the trend to solving the over-population problem will be starvation. Resource depletion will take out industrial farming (no fuels, no fertilizers) and eliminate the means for getting the food to large populations in the cities. Water depletion will eliminate much of the land we now farm, like in the southern California desert. Climate change will change the places where crops can grow faster than the farmers can adjust. The infrastructure to grow a crop like wheat or corn is huge and complex -- it will not be replicated to adjust.

And there is this fourth cat I did not think about in January, 2007: the world's screwed-up economy and debt-based financing practices. When I started this blog the housing bubble had not burst, the 2008 depression looked to be avoidable, the banks looked solid. Now what I see is a bunch of banker-types running around trying to patch things up and hold the system together.They all base their plans on returning to economic growth like it was before 2007, ignoring the fact that resource depletion, climate change, and population pressures are about to change the entire world around them.

Nope, I do not see a significant group trying to develop a better alternative for our economy, so our society is faced with going further and further down a dead-end road to ruin.

Over the past five years I completed a scenario of how I thought all these catastrophes would interact and what the world would be like at the end of this century. I wrote a novel entitled Was a Time When to tell of that scenario, and that book is now available on the internet at Amazon.com.

My conclusion at this time is that the trends I began to discuss on this blog in 2007 continue, and in some cases are accelerating. So I say the status as of this date is ON SCHEDULE.

sam

"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.

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.

 

The Biggest Cat-Fight Yet

In my last post I bemoaned the fact that the Nature Cat was rearing her head with the awesome earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Now we are watching the Nuclear Cat come into the fray. It has become the biggest cat-fight yet.

I am not sure our society will survive this cat-fight very well. In fact, I expect this month to be remembered as the worst month in the history of the earth, until an even worse month comes along.

Folks, things are very rapidly going from bad to worse, even faster than our governments and other agencies can respond. It is time to start preparing, but I don't yet understand how to prepare myself.

We have a nuclear catastrophe in Japan, and it may spread radiation at some level around the globe. While that contamination will be a problem, I believe the impact of the catastrophe will be felt in the economic arena even worse. As a result of the economic fallout, people will starve or die of thirst or be caught up in riots and revolutions.

The earthquake and tsunami were terrible, and some are estimating that nearly half a million may have perished in the natural disaster. But that was a localized occurance. Pity the poor who live there now, for they are without power and food and water. But they are a small portion of the population of Japan, a miniscule fraction of the population of the earth.

But our society has been built on more and more complexity and now runs on the principal that all parts must work, and work right. When major supply lines go down, other operations stop. The Chevy truck plant in Louisiana shut down because they cannot get a component from Japan because the electrical power supply there is not sufficient to keep industry going. That is just a start. More will come, and at some point society will realize they are screwed, and then they will panic. I can only guess how bad the results may be. They will not be nice.

I will try to focus in future posts on what to do now, how to survive, how to build an attitude that you can live with. For now, I want to curl up in my hole and sleep, maybe for 20 years or more.

sam