DIE OFF

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."
-- Thomas Hardy

Petroleum geologists have known for 50 years that global oil production would "peak" and begin its inevitable decline within a decade of the year 2000. Moreover, no renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels.

In short, the transition to declining energy availability signals a transition in civilization as we know it.

Read the entire synopsis now!

Approaching die off!

 

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Closely associated with this DieOff.Com web site, the EnergyResources Group deals with the systemic aspects of energy, ecology and human culture.

This web site was created and maintained from 1999 to February 2003 by Jay Hanson

In February 2003, Tom Robertson took over content development, maintenance and operational costs.

THE END OF FOSSIL FUELS

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F O S S I L G A T E

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet's energy balance. David Price

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. Joseph A. Tainter

Energy use per capityproduction solution
Petroconsultant's scenarionet energy loss
resource qualityprofit ratio

global oil production

If one considers the last one hundred years of the U.S. experience, fuel use and economic output are highly correlated... Energy quality is by far the dominant factor. -- Cleveland, Costanza, Hall, and Kaufmann (Science 225: 890-897)
Industry deregulation of electric utilities in the U.S. has cut utility investment in energy saving programmes by 45 percent." [Reuters, 10/02/98]

ECONOMIC THEORY

The members of the American economics profession, as Arnold contended, performed a vital practical role in maintaining this unique system of corporate socialism American style. It was their role to prevent the American public from achieving a correct understanding of the actual workings of the American economic system. Economists instead were assigned the task to dispense priestly blessings that would allow business to operate independent of damaging political manipulation. They accomplished this task by means of their message of 'laissez faire religion, based on a conception of a society composed of competing individuals.' However false as a description of the actual U.S. economy, this vision in the mind of the American public was in practice 'transferred automatically to industrial organizations with nation-wide power and dictatorial forms of government.' Even though the arguments of economists were misleading and largely fictional, the practical -- and beneficial -- result of their deception was to throw a 'mantle of protection ... over corporate government' from various forms of outside interference. Admittedly, as the economic 'symbolism got farther and farther from reality, it required more and more ceremony to keep it up.' But as long as this arrangement worked and there could be maintained 'the little pictures in the back of the head of the ordinary man,' the effect was salutary -- 'the great [corporate] organization was secure in its freedom and independence.' It was this very freedom and independence of business professionals to pursue the correct scientific answer -- the efficient answer -- on which the economic progress of the United States depended. -- Robert H. Nelson in http://dieoff.com/page235.htm
Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers. -- Borowski, pp. 121-122

SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS

FOOD, LAND, WATER AND POPULATION

Humans have destroyed more than 30 per cent of the natural world since 1970 with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater and marine systems on which life depends. -- [Guardian, 10/2/98]
Age-adjusted mortality in Russia rose by almost 33% between 1990 and 1994.... Russia is not alone in experiencing drops in life expectancy; all the nations created from the break-up of the Soviet Union have reported a decline in life expectancy since 1990, although none has been as large as in Russia. -- [JAMA. 1998;279:793-800]

Africa is beginning of a full-on Malthusian dieoff. See "Worldwatch Briefing: Sixteen Dimensions of the Population Problem" at http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/pr98924.html and "Life on Earth is Killing Us" press release at  http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/1998/10/100298/killingus.asp and study itself is here.

To put this in context, you must remember that estimates of the long-term carrying capacity of Earth with relatively optimistic assumptions about consumption, technologies, and equity (A x T), are in the vicinity of two billion people. Today's population cannot be sustained on the 'interest' generated by natural ecosystems, but is consuming its vast supply of natural capital -- especially deep, rich agricultural soils, 'fossil' groundwater, and biodiversity -- accumulated over centuries to eons. In some places soils, which are generated on a time scale of centimeters per century are disappearing at rates of centimeters per year. Some aquifers are being depleted at dozens of times their recharge rates, and we have embarked on the greatest extinction episode in 65 million years. -- Paul Ehrlich (Sept. 25, 1998)

As capitalism fails in more-and-more countries, these countries will disintegrate too. Ultimately of course, this will lead to world wars over natural resources. See Homer-Dixon's work at http://utl2.library.utoronto.ca/www/pcs/tad.htm

CLIMATE CHANGE

James White, co-author of a study published in the journal Science, said that the Antarctica ice cores show a temperature increase of about 20 degrees F within a very short time about 12,500 years ago. .. Ice cores from Greenland, near the Arctic, show that at the same time there was a temperature increase of almost 59 degrees in the north polar region within a 50-year period, White said. [AP, 10/1/98]
The National Climatic Data Center has just announced that last month was the warmest September on record - almost a degree F above the previous record and nearly 4 degrees F above the average. It is the 9th consecutive month to break the previous all-time record.   ... there are areas of the Earth, such as the Arctic, where the temperature increase is 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit. This is enough to melt permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that characterizes northern tundra bogs. And melting bogs release methane, a greenhouse gas. -- [UPI, 10/8/98]
U.S. government scientists said this year's "ozone hole" over Antarctica was the largest ever observed, leaving an atmospheric depletion area greater than the size of North America over the southern land mass. [Nando, 10/7/98]

DISEASE

MORAL THEORY

CARRYING CAPACITY

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. ... -- Robert D. Kaplan

SUSTAINABILITY

OTHER ECOLOGY

OTHER SYSTEMS

ODDS AND ENDS

"a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling"  -- by Jay Hanson, 04/01/97

ABSTRACT:
In this essay, I examine the economic model of "rational man" and how the model legitimizes prevailing public policy. "Rational man" supposedly weighs the important, known variables and then makes that decision which is most likely to achieve the desired end (the greatest "utility"). Thus, we can say that public policy is founded on the notion that people calculate the utility of each decision, somewhat like a computer.

But modern cognitive science has shown that people do not make decisions by calculating the utility of each decision. Thus, economic "rational man" is a fraud that leaves the public exposed to ongoing economic and political exploitation by corporate media experts. Moreover, this fraud provides economists and political leaders with effective "moral cover", or in the words of Adolph Eichmann, "a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling" that leaves them free of all guilt for their dirty deeds.

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