No, you seem not to (or not want to) understand how the collapse of a civilization typically proceeds, which, as Greer asserts, isn’t in cataclysmic fashion, but is rather a slow, decades, even centuries-long process, ending with the eventual succession of the overextended empire (http://bit.ly/60ikFe or http://bit.ly/bwlNhV). I believe that industrialized civilization is such an overextended empire and the consequences of this will be my child’s future, and if nothing else I want her to have the wherewithal to understand and cope with the coming changes as is best possible.

I can see we aren’t moving in the same direction with this–c’est la vie!–but thanks for the discussion nonetheless…

After reading that I thank my lucky stars I am already a ball busting, hard working, highly adaptive individual who doesn’t look for the government to provide me with anything I am not willing to provide for myself. Then when the shit hits the fan in the form of the collapse of industrial civilization, instead of getting up and going to my shop to produce a product that I trade for the things I need to sustain my self, I’ll get my gun and go get breakfast.

Be it an asteroid, a plague, or the topic in discussion here I am going to react the same way. So, Dan, what are you going to do?

“Regardless of what we call them, history shows that societies and cultures experience cyclical lifespans and that each eventually experiences overshoot (of resources and/or money) and collapses, setting the stage for the next dominant cultural patterns to emerge.”

That’s true. But you’re still comparing apples and oranges. Particular civilized societies collapse for a variety of reasons, always specific to that particular society. The “collapse” you’re anticipating, however, would involve all civilized societies, since they are all presently dependent upon fossil fuels. You are not predicting the demise of a particular society, but of civilization *per se*, to be replaced by an archaic, pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural style of economy. That has never happened.

I use the term “civilization,” BTW, with its root meaning, i.e., to refer to a society characterized by cities (”civilization” derives from “civis,” the Latin word for “city”), with a “city” designating a settlement so large that most of its inhabitants do not know most of the others.

“Modern people’s unthinking adoption of the myth of progress has lead many to believe that human civilization is somehow outside of, or beyond the larger natural world that we are in fact but a small part of, and that ecological limits are mere hurdles to be crossed, rather than absolute barriers that may one day stop our way of life dead in its tracks.”

Actually, it is greenies who are disposed to look upon *homo sapiens* as being somehow “non-natural,” — as “viruses,” aberrations, trespassers upon the natural order, rather than as products of that natural order and integral with it. But we, and all of our products and activities, are as natural as coral, beavers, honeybees, and termites. Like them, we are a transformative species, able to alter our environment when we find it to be less than optimum. Our constructions are no less “natural” than beaver dams or beehives.

I confess to being one of those who rejects the notion of “ecological limits.” There are no such things — or at least, none with which we need be overly concerned at the moment. What counts as a limit, just as what counts as a resource, depends entirely upon the momentary configuration of the economy and the technologies which characterize it. But those are both dynamic processes evolving in a complex adaptive system whose future states are unpredictable in principle.

Greer and his ilk are making the same mistake made by Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, and numerous other economic doom criers — he is assuming the current state of the economy can predict its future, or that its current state is its terminal state, which must somehow be “sustained” into the future. He is looking at a single frame of a movie and imagining he can predict the denouement.

“And, once this bonanza is gone 30, 50 or 100 years from now, what are the likely possible consequences?”

The most likely consequence will be that be that as prices rise, we will develop alternatives, not only for the energy sources, but for the the technologies that require it — technologies far more efficient than those which make economic sense when energy is cheap. By the time oil becomes prohibitively expensive we will not be using it and will not miss it. We will have picked up those “ecological limits” like temporary fencing and moved them out of our way. That’s what Nature designed us to do.

As with any such reliance on technology, I believe it’s prudent to plan for the possible worst case scenario, or to at least consider that scenario before deciding to NOT plan for it!

With less fruity confusion than you seemingly imagine, I use the term “civilization” as it is used by Spengler (http://bit.ly/bYL2iU), Toynbee (http://bit.ly/1fofsr), Tainter (http://bit.ly/R17aG), Diamond (http://bit.ly/1uHlDI), Greer (http://bit.ly/bmLrzp) and others in their investigations into, and resulting theories about the larger dynamics of human societies/cultures/civilizations, including societal collapse. Regardless of what we call them, history shows that societies and cultures experience cyclical lifespans and that each eventually experiences overshoot (of resources and/or money) and collapses, setting the stage for the next dominant cultural patterns to emerge. There are increasing indications (http://bit.ly/drcK4N) that this overshoot has begun to occur within industrialized civilization, that we’ve wasted most of what little time we had to begin to prepare, that “the next twenty years will be nothing like the past twenty years” (http://bit.ly/25Yflc) because, as Greer soberly states to an I imagine flabbergasted poster in his latest column (http://bit.ly/acWDV2), “You can’t have the future you want; no matter what you do, at this point, your future is going to involve fewer choices, fewer comforts, fewer privileges, and a lot more deprivation and hard work than almost anyone in the industrial world is willing to imagine.”

Modern people’s unthinking adoption of the myth of progress has lead many to believe that human civilization is somehow outside of, or beyond the larger natural world that we are in fact but a small part of, and that ecological limits are mere hurdles to be crossed, rather than absolute barriers that may one day stop our way of life dead in its tracks. This unwarranted and hubristic viewpoint will likely ensure the misery of millions of people in the coming difficult decades, as too many continue to ignorantly cling to the platitude that there is a “someone” or “something” that is going to “save us” from the consequences of our own unwise decisions.

With regard to the ideas of unbroken progress and that today’s technic man is somehow the ne plus ultra of civilization, these are debatable points, and you are I think more optimistic than I about our long-term prospects in this rergard, but as clever as we think we are (and we are undoubtedly that), the fact remains that, as Greer bluntly states, “Fossil fuel energy–and only fossil fuel energy–made it possible to break with the old agrarian pattern and construct the industrial age.” We were, in essence, given a gift, a fortune of 500-million years of stored sunlight, which we…proceeded to burn through like a proverbial drunken sailor! And, once this bonanza is gone 30, 50 or 100 years from now, what are the likely possible consequences? As that earlier EROEI paper makes clear, no “alternative” energy source comes close to providing the advantages that fossil fuels do, and without this the changes ahead of us as we proceed down the uneven slope of Hubbert’s Curve will, IMO, be startling, unprecedented and difficult for us to cope with, and all the more so if we make no preparations whatsoever for the possibility.

“No civilizations have collapsed ‘all at once,’ and the idea that the end of industrial civilization will occur in some sort of overwhelming, dramatic event signaling the End of Mankind belies an ignorance of history and owes to one of the two predominant myths of the modern world; in this instance, the myth of the apocalypse.”

Civilization has never collapsed. You’re mixing apples and oranges. Societies and polities have collapsed, and they are sometimes called “civilizations,” e.g., the Minoan civilization, but they are merely particular instances of civilization. While they were collapsing, civilization continued, thrived, and advanced elsewhere. Civilization, i.e., cultures characterized by cities, has supplanted tribal cultures relentlessly and continuously since its appearance ~10K years ago. Similarly, “industrial civilization,” “agrarian civilization,” etc., are phases in the evolutionary history of civilization. They don’t collapse either; they evolve into new phases.

“Contrariwise, to assume technology will simply “move on” once the extraction of fossil fuels have peaked suggests a similar an ignorance of history and belief in the other dominant story within our culture, the myth of progress.”

“Progress” is a deceptive word, since it embodies an arrow, and the direction in which the arrow is alleged to point is vulnerable to prejudices. What we can say without too much hesitation is that civilized cultures evolve rapidly in comparison with tribal cultures, that it becomes ever more complex, that it is adaptive to changes in external parameters, including resource availability and utilization, and that standards of living consistently improve, by most common measures, as they evolve.

” . . . but rather because the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI, http://bit.ly/UfUeK), once it approaches 1:1, will dictate that efforts to extract these precious substances end.”

Yes. Oil will be abandoned (for particular purposes) when it is no longer economical to extract and refine it. And as its price rises, more efforts will be invested in developing alternatives and improving efficiency of processes which require it.

“BTW, what would constitute for you a “gradual” decline (relative to demand) of fossil fuels? 1% a year?”

We should expect the downslope of the peak to be symmetrical with the upslope.

“I think we’ve actually reached this point and that your 2060 peak oil figure is way off base? Can you provide a citation, if you will, to support this estimate?”

Sure. “Squeezing More Oil from the Ground,” Leonardo Maugeri, *Scientific American*, October, 2009. (May be available online, but probably behind a paywall).

The extension results from new recovery techniques, just coming into use, which allow more oil to be recovered from wells long thought exhausted. Though they still contain billions of barrels of oil, it was not recoverable economically.

My point is not that any sort of “Armageddon” is going to happen as the era of cheap, abundant energy recedes and industrialized civilization itself begins to decline. No civilizations have collapsed “all at once,” and the idea that the end of industrial civilization will occur in some sort of overwhelming, dramatic event signaling the End of Mankind belies an ignorance of history and owes to one of the two predominant myths of the modern world; in this instance, the myth of the apocalypse. Contrariwise, to assume technology will simply “move on” once the extraction of fossil fuels have peaked suggests a similar an ignorance of history and belief in the other dominant story within our culture, the myth of progress. Both of these myths have deep roots in the collective imagination of the modern world, and very few people nowadays seem to be able to think about the future at all without following one narrative or the other. Unfortunately, both of these myths are very poorly suited for the likely challenges the era of scarcity industrialism has in store of us.
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You are correct that “self-impoverishment” is unlikely to catch on with enough people to make any difference. Renunciation, even in the face of possible catastrophe, is a strategy few can summon the inner strength to attempt, let alone master.

You are also correct that the last drop of oil will never be pumped from a well, but not because some other, as yet undiscovered energy source will come along or be developed to “save” our wasteful way of life, but rather because the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI, http://bit.ly/UfUeK), once it approaches 1:1, will dictate that efforts to extract these precious substances end. I think we’ve actually reached this point and that your 2060 peak oil figure is way off base? Can you provide a citation, if you will, to support this estimate?

BTW, what would constitute for you a “gradual” decline (relative to demand) of fossil fuels? 1% a year? 3%? 5%? And what would you suggest as prudent individual and societal preparations for such a small, yet potentially dramatic change? An what technologies do you imagine will replace the consumption of fossil fuels? Again, see http://bit.ly/UfUeK for details of why I believe there is none, nor will there be any energy forms that can truly “replace” the cheap, abundant fossil-fuels we’ve partied on for the past 300-years.

I think many will be surprised to see where automobiles end up in the priorities of Americans once gasoline passes, say, more than $5 a gallon. Bikes (and sleighs?) may yet swarm over Spokane streets in larger numbers than automobiles.
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BTW, thanks for your thoughtful posts…

“The assumptions made by governments, citizens and even some contemporary bloggers is that the growth of the American economy based on the consumption of fossil fuels would continue unabated for…well, forever.”

No one I know of has made such an assumption.

“The fact is that as fossil fuel use diminishes in the wake of peak oil . . .”

We worry about “peak oil” when the peak has actually been reached, because until then will not know when it occurs. Guesses about when it will occur have been pushed forward every few years for the last 50 years or more. At present it is ~2060. We don’t impoverish ourselves now out of an irrational fear of something that may or may not happen 50 years from now.

“Unfortunately, Americans, including those here trying to “free” Spokane, will not be motivated to accept, let alone embrace these changes until the first shocks of energy depletion have occurred.”

Well, no. There won’t be any “shocks.” Depletion of resources does not work that way. The resource becomes gradually harder to find or recover, and as a result prices gradually rise. As they do, people invest more money and effort in development of alternative technologies. No premature hand-wringing and no government subsidies are required. The “last drop of oil” will never be pumped from a well, because by the time that last drop is reached, technology will have moved on and it won’t be needed.

“The desire to “maintain the status quo” by denigrating those that seek to find new ways amongst the ruins of a soon-to-be-failed way of life.”

No one I know of is trying to maintain the status quo. Libertarians propose leaving people maximally free to increase their welfare in the present and adapt to future conditions and exigencies as they appear. Greenies, like all previous prognosticators of Armageddon, propose that humans repent their sins, regress to some fantasized past Eden, and freeze the dynamic of history into a stasis. That advice is as silly (and unworkable) now as it was when it was proposed by Christian doom criers 2000 years ago.