 Tuesday, June 25, 2002
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I found the following thread at the Energy Resources Yahoo Group. The authors assume that the readers are aware of the fossil fuel depletion crisis. Basically, we will soon be running out of petroleum--the easiest to extract and use of the fossil fuels, and since the current trend towards economic globalization is only possible with unlimited cheap energy, the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan.
Globalization and Fossil Fuel Depletion
Steven Zoraster: Instead of saying that "globalization is bad", those who oppose it should propose a mechanism for turning it off, and suggest what the results would be.
I will propose a strawman scenario for turning it off: The main industrialized countries [1] impose a 200% tariff on all imports from "non-industrialized" countries. This throws those non- industrialized countries out of the world economic system. Suddenly West African countries can not sell cash crops to the United States and Europe. Bangladesh can not sell textiles. Vietnam can not sell shoes or locally produced clothing. Argentina can not sell locally produced meat and wheat. The island states in the Caribbean can not sell bananas. The Philippines will not be able to sell sugar. Russia and India can not sell computer software. Malaysis can not sell computer chips. Mexico can not sell finished goods completed at those plants along the United States border. The demand for oil from Saudia Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria, Egypt and Indonesia will be reduced.
On the other hand, coffee from Central and South America and rubber from Malaysia and various metals from South America and Africa will probably remain in demand, because there are no substitutes. The ship building industries in Japan, Germany and Korea will immediately collapse. The price of wheat and rice in the United States will fall because there will be no export market. (No country which needs the food will be able to pay for the stuff.) On the other hand, the sugar cane industry in Florida, which is hardly ecologically friendly, will suddenly find the domestic demand for its product rise.
I claim this model will work for the turn off part. There certainly isn't any need to impose simultaneous controls on the flow of capital to undeveloped countries, since nobody is going to want to invest there anyway.
I will leave it to someone else to explain how this is good. Or describe another scenario for turning the system off that will make the results "good".
Brian Abernathy: Mr. Zoraster, With all due respect, I think that the mechanism for turning off globalization will be the depletion of fossil fuels and their subsequent impact on global economic systems. Whether or not globalization is bad or good is not really the question, for me at least, but rather it's the question of whether or not it (globalization) is sustainable. I suspect that it is not because it relies very heavily on fossil fuels. The effects of its demise will likely be the same from your scenario or mine, painful and deadly. However, the last thing we should be doing is trying to get more people more deeply involved in the global economy. Rather, we should be trying to teach them to live sustainably within their own bio- region with fewer and fewer cash crops and direct labor going into the global economy and more diversified, locally grown agricultural and locally made craft products for their own people.
Dick Lawrence: The entire centuries-old trend toward interdependence and globalization - including rapid and large-scale industrialization of countries like China and India - is at risk, and inevitably will start to grind away, in reverse, as fuel availability peaks and then declines. The entire enterprise relies on fossil fuel to keep it going.
This includes the urbanization of population into vast megacities, which are only sustained by a river of fuel, food, and water from the countryside and from agricultural regions in other countries. The people are there for jobs. The jobs are there for industry. The industries by and large rely on fossil fuel. Cut off any of these resources and the city will abruptly collapse, a catastrophe for millions. Remember too that their sources of food rely on a largely industrialized form of agriculture, totally dependent on fossil fuel in its present form for its "efficiency".
We could debate for days the "rightness", "wrongness" or morality of globalization and 3rd-world industrialization, but none of that will change what's on the way: within 10-15 years the unsustainability of these enterprises will hit home, the big decline will be on, and within 40 years gas and oil will be essentially gone and everything will be different. How different, we can only speculate, but we can reliably predict that per-capita available energy will be vastly lower than it is now, and extrapolate the consequences from there. By 50 years out, humanity will be largely subsisting on renewable forms of energy, plus nuclear. Neither one of these will run the tractors and factories of the future in anything like the quantity we have today. But, there will be even more of us to feed, more of us looking for jobs.
The tragedy is that we should be laying the infrastructure for that future now, with the truly cheap and available fossil fuels we have. But no one is doing that. Preparing to survive on renewables, on any kind of large scale, takes an energy and capital investment, and no one is making that investment today except on a very small scale. The economics of it are broken so it makes no sense from a business or personal financial perspective. Governments are in the best position to take the bully pulpit, make the case for preparing for change, and set up the economic environment to make the investment more genuinely reflect the value of energy. But, democratic governments may ironically be in the worst position to do that - the electorate won't stand for an investment in anything more futuristic than next year, unless it's Social Security.
The tragedy is, as Brian points out, we should be actively working to reverse the globalization trend, to make nations and regions and populations more independent, not less; we should be preparing everyone for a less energy-intensive future. Instead we are careening obliviously, full speed, in the wrong direction.
There are many arguments for globalization, and many other against it, all with legitimate appeals to equality, morality, and other high principles. We on this forum should realize that most of that is irrelevant; energy in the end will dictate the rise and fall of our civilation in its present form. How we go down should be our (collective) responsibility, but obfuscation and denial prevent all but a few from seeing the rocks ahead.
Ron Patterson: Dick, you wrote a fantastic post. I agree with almost everything you wrote as well as what Brian wrote in his post. But on I must take issue with your assertion that there will be more people fifty years hence.
As you state, 50 years out we will largely be subsisting on other forms of energy, forms that will not lend itself to running tractors, trucks or producing fertilizers or pesticides. This will mean a lot less food will be produced.
Just as population has always expanded to consume the available food, the population will likewise shrink to as the food supply needed to sustain it shrinks. All we have to do is connect the dots. If the fuel supply shrinks and the remaining fuel becomes much more expensive, then the food supply will shrink and what food is available will be much more expensive. The global population will shrink, almost in lock step with the availability of fuel to produce food.
Scott Meredith posted a good paper on the connection between food and population on the Alasbabylon list. An excerpt follows:
The prevailing lay and scientific attitudes beg the Malthusian question “how will the US continue to feed its population and still maintain its food and exports to needy nation?” In other words, “how are we going to feed all these people”? This indicates a denial of the certainty that increasing the availability of food will further increase the population, thereby increasing the number of starving and malnourished people. Thus, it does not address the Quinnian question “how are we going to stop producing all these people (Quinn, 1997)?” since it is through exports from food-rich to food-poor areas (Allaby, 1984; Pimentel et al., 1999) that the population growth in food-poor areas if further fueled.
And from the Alas Babylon Yahoo Group, we have another interesting suggestion.
Curbing Overpopulation
Newton Ellison: Unfortunately, men, starved or not, are hardwired to screw anything - dumb animals, another man (anywhere we can) or our well-oiled fists, if there's not a woman around. Often, if there's a woman handy, like it or not, we make babies.
And now that we have reached the carrying capacity of this great little planet, new ideas are needed.
The first thing we should do is take over the Roman Catholic Church and execute all known pedophiles. Then we put in a new Pope who approves any kind of birth control short of 3rd trimester infanticide.
Next, a new "Human Resources" plan: Any parent of a boy child of seven years must take the kid in to get a vasectomy, a new electric car or two or three and a paid up 4-year college scholarship.
If, by age 25, this boy child demonstrates capacity to support a family, and has an agreeable lifetime mate, his vasectomy can be reversed until the couple has two children, and then they may, under strict rules, not be re-vasectomized. (TKW->I would think only one child until we get the population down under two billion.)
But that's the rule, after two. Any woman knows, therefore, that her sex partners who are not married and making his wife's two babies is shooting blanks. That's easily confirmable. And a really frisky gal can always get her tubes tied.
This is not a perfect system. Some may abuse the rules. But it is a pretty good start, doncha think?
There are a lot of intelligent people writing on the Yahoo Group boards. If you are interested in the Fossil Fuel Depletion-Global Warming-Overpopulations crisis, take a look at the public archives of these two lists.
Energy Resources Yahoo Group, Alas Babylon Yahoo Group
