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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   26119 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.

If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/

I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.

Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.

Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.

This was JMG back in '08

Drawing on the theory of catabolic collapse touched on earlier, Greer next outlines in detail how our predicament is likely to play out during the decades and centuries ahead. Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse—well-known within peak oil circles—shows how civilizations headed for collapse tend to decline in a gradual, downward stairstep of repeated crises and recoveries. They don’t undergo the sudden, catastrophic free fall envisioned by diehard peak oil doomers. This theory makes for truly fascinating reading, and is included in its entirety as an appendix.

How will our own society’s catabolic collapse proceed? Greer sees us on the verge of a couple of decades of economic contraction, chronic energy shortages, declining public health, political turmoil and vanishing knowledge and cultural heritage. This crisis period, he predicts, will be followed by a respite of perhaps 25 years or so, during which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification, climate-controlled buildings, modern medicine and other present-day amenities will buy it a little breathing room. But this respite will, in turn, be followed by another round of crises that will rid our civilization of further layers of social complexity, and so on.

Eventually, the developed world will assume an agrarian lifestyle built around local communities and sustainable resources. But this change will happen so slowly that no one alive today will be around to witness the end result. Thus, Greer maintains, our energies should be focused not on surviving the end of industrial civilization, but on making it through the imminent crisis period that will be but one brief interval within that larger context.

It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.

which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification

Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.

Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.

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