I don't foresee a voluntary transition away from our current practices. The progress/development narrative is overwhelming. As a consequence, fossil fuels will continue to be consumed, renewables and nuclear will be added to the mix. China is said to have developed modular molten salt reactors that can run on thorium or other fertile material. This appears to be part of their Belt & Road Initiative.
Research into iron powder as a fuel source for industrial processes is ongoing. Ammonia is being looked at as an energy carrier for hydrogen and fertilizer production.
Even if successful, these technologies would only delay the inevitable.
The only aspect I would question is the rate of decline, and people's perception of it. John Michael Greer has written about the concept of catabolic decline as applied to societies and civilization. The situation can get worse, but not in a way that large numbers of people would find alarming.
I don't think you are wrong on any part of this article, it is exactly spot on. It is truly a bizarre time to be alive. None of us asked to be born at this time, and yet here we are. Thankyou for the hard work you have done to research this article, the infographic is particulary good.
Another great post laying out some facts and popping some fallacies.
You wrote: "Please comment on this post if you can imagine such a scenario, and be sure to include your thoughts on whether the world will voluntarily come together..."
It's hard to imagine a scenario in which the major nations of the world come together to do what we need to do, which is reduce consumption and energy use, because as you point out, current economic systems depend on increasing consumption and the energy use that goes with it. I wish the Socialist/Communists in charge were better about this, but they're really not.
What I *can* imagine is some global environmental shock to the system that forces change regardless of what elites want. If we look at localized disasters (like the recent hurricane in NC), we can see that people are willing to get together and take care of each other when business-as-usual is disrupted, and when gov't and other big institutions don't respond adequately. What that shock would be, I don't know.
Regardless, I'm going to continue to advocate for a voluntary soft landing instead of crash, because nothing is impossible.
Given the loss of species and forest land every year, the sooner this civilization collapses, the better. If it happens soon, there will be at least some of the natural world left to begin recovery, while if civilization lasts too much longer nothing will be left in it's wake.
So my first suggestion is to obtain some of the now commercially available geneticly modified micro-organisms to biodegrade oil and are used to clean up oil spills, and travel through oil country infecting oil wells with them to convert the oil in the ground into useless sludge.
I have seen oil wells pumpting away on automatic, unattended and unguarded, with no fence around them. A few turns of a wrench and it would be possible to reverse the pump and infect the whole underground oil deposit which feeds hundreds of overground oil wells.
Start on the North Slope of Alaska, work down through Alberta, zig zag from California to New Orleans, and by the time you get to Veracruz, Mexico, the first wells in Alaska will be pumping useless sludge and by then it will be too late for the enemy to start guarding oil wells because they will all be infected. I estimate it would take only about 6 weeks to do the whole job.
A few weeks later the whole oil-driven American machine age civilization will literally screech to a literally grinding halt. And since America is so important to the rest of the world, other countries will collapse too. And the sooner that happens, the more species and wuilderness will bbe left to replenish the earth after most of the humans have recycled each other fighting over what is left on the supermarket shelves when the deliveries stop.
I don't foresee a voluntary transition away from our current practices. The progress/development narrative is overwhelming. As a consequence, fossil fuels will continue to be consumed, renewables and nuclear will be added to the mix. China is said to have developed modular molten salt reactors that can run on thorium or other fertile material. This appears to be part of their Belt & Road Initiative.
Research into iron powder as a fuel source for industrial processes is ongoing. Ammonia is being looked at as an energy carrier for hydrogen and fertilizer production.
Even if successful, these technologies would only delay the inevitable.
The only aspect I would question is the rate of decline, and people's perception of it. John Michael Greer has written about the concept of catabolic decline as applied to societies and civilization. The situation can get worse, but not in a way that large numbers of people would find alarming.
I don't think you are wrong on any part of this article, it is exactly spot on. It is truly a bizarre time to be alive. None of us asked to be born at this time, and yet here we are. Thankyou for the hard work you have done to research this article, the infographic is particulary good.
Another great post laying out some facts and popping some fallacies.
You wrote: "Please comment on this post if you can imagine such a scenario, and be sure to include your thoughts on whether the world will voluntarily come together..."
It's hard to imagine a scenario in which the major nations of the world come together to do what we need to do, which is reduce consumption and energy use, because as you point out, current economic systems depend on increasing consumption and the energy use that goes with it. I wish the Socialist/Communists in charge were better about this, but they're really not.
What I *can* imagine is some global environmental shock to the system that forces change regardless of what elites want. If we look at localized disasters (like the recent hurricane in NC), we can see that people are willing to get together and take care of each other when business-as-usual is disrupted, and when gov't and other big institutions don't respond adequately. What that shock would be, I don't know.
Regardless, I'm going to continue to advocate for a voluntary soft landing instead of crash, because nothing is impossible.
Given the loss of species and forest land every year, the sooner this civilization collapses, the better. If it happens soon, there will be at least some of the natural world left to begin recovery, while if civilization lasts too much longer nothing will be left in it's wake.
So my first suggestion is to obtain some of the now commercially available geneticly modified micro-organisms to biodegrade oil and are used to clean up oil spills, and travel through oil country infecting oil wells with them to convert the oil in the ground into useless sludge.
I have seen oil wells pumpting away on automatic, unattended and unguarded, with no fence around them. A few turns of a wrench and it would be possible to reverse the pump and infect the whole underground oil deposit which feeds hundreds of overground oil wells.
Start on the North Slope of Alaska, work down through Alberta, zig zag from California to New Orleans, and by the time you get to Veracruz, Mexico, the first wells in Alaska will be pumping useless sludge and by then it will be too late for the enemy to start guarding oil wells because they will all be infected. I estimate it would take only about 6 weeks to do the whole job.
A few weeks later the whole oil-driven American machine age civilization will literally screech to a literally grinding halt. And since America is so important to the rest of the world, other countries will collapse too. And the sooner that happens, the more species and wuilderness will bbe left to replenish the earth after most of the humans have recycled each other fighting over what is left on the supermarket shelves when the deliveries stop.