Each U.S. military base is intended to survive disrupted supply lines for some amount of time. The massive “continuity of government” installations are intended for nuclear showdowns.

To be clear, the amount of time in question is on the order of months, not years, much less decades.

Well, all of the Roman Empire was interconnected. Perhaps the emperor sitting in Rome thought Byzantium would immediately fall if Rome fell. But as it turned out, the Byzantine subsystem had enough redundancy to persist. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was all-or-nothing, in the West. It didn’t get to Byzantium.

Very true … because the Roman Empire had more redundancy than we do now. Specifically, it had subgraphs that could be broken apart. Britannia didn’t really need Italy, the way that the modern United States needs the Nikkei to open trading tomorrow as scheduled. Less energy meant less trade, and that meant less inter-dependence. The world has become connected, as they say, and that’s a major liability.

I don’t think there’s any scientific proof one way or the other. I think everyone is speculating: my speculation is that it’s *possible* that a modern-day Byzantium could survive contraction and/or collapse; your speculation is that no modern-day analogue to Byzantium could possible survive collapse.

My speculation is the no modern-day analogue to Byzantium exists. Byzantium persisted because it had become very much a distinct system. It had taken a few centuries to disentangle itself, but culturally, sociologically and economically, by the time that Odoacer declared himself Rex Italiae, there were very much different (though allied) systems. More importantly, Rome never really “collapsed,” so much as it declined. That may seem like a fine line, but it makes all the difference: Byzantium had time to adjust gradually. There wasn’t all that much difference between Odoacer and Theodoric, versus the emperors that preceded them. Rome didn’t collapse, nearly so much as it faded away.

Right now, in Asia, I’m using less energy than I used in Europe, with a higher standard of living. If I went to live on a farm, sowing seedballs, I’d have an even higher standard of living with even lower energy throughput. I’d even have time to practice self-defense all day and contribute to neighborhood watch programs.

Yes, but your quality of life is increasing because you’re lowering your level of complexity. In short, you’re a little, walking collapse. On the personal scale, it means improved quality of life. On the global scale, it means massive die-off.

Quite a few military thinkers can’t shut up about the fall of the nation-state. I suppose you’re familiar with Martin Van Creveld and his American exponent, Lind. In the past, when armies were no longer employed by kings, they remained armies but practiced banditry openly. So military culture definitely can survive the loss of political legitimacy.

Quite right; but without a state, they cease to be militaries, and instead become mere thugs. As Augustine pointed out, legitimacy is what seperates emperors and pirates.

But I see your point. That said, raiders and bandits can only operate by preying on settled, agricultural populations. They can be attacked easily because they’re sedentary, and they have a form of wealth that can be taken. Foragers suffer from neither disadvantage. Where foragers have been slaughtered, it has always been to sieze their land for some economic purpose, like farming, or hunting them to extinction for ideological reasons. They’ve never been good prey to bandits.

So there is still a crucial difference in our guesstimates: I guesstimate that militaries will be inventive enough to improvise alternative energy for long enough to make a difference, and you guesstimate they won’t.

I think Jeff Vail agrees with me–and of the three of us, he’s the only one with military experience, having been an intelligence officer in the USAF and involved in planning several battles during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Note: the money “wasted” on the military often takes the form of redundancy. So when the military spends a huge sum on some incomprehensible boondoggle — a nuclear reactor, for example — responsible citizens might write it off to sheer waste. As I mentioned to Janene above, an economist might believe that the military could never buy an extra reactor, because there would be no rational economic justification for it. In the event of collapse, that “waste” purchase is useful.

The military, being generally protected from market competition and much more concerned with safety, takes a very different view of the balance of redundancy vs. efficiency than the society as a whole. You’re right, though, militaries have a good deal more redundancy than your average power company.

You are describing the argument as if it was unilinear. But in reality it is systemic, with an understanding that there are many many possible scenarios, but by looking at the fundamental property of underlying complexity we can compare widely varied issues.

Yes, I suspect my nitpicking would work better in a more narrow, specialized forum.

But the fact is that people DO support politicians that pursue these strategies. What happens if that stops?

If it stops as thoroughly as the collapse of Rome, then the politicians flee and taxation stops. That sort of civil disobedience is pretty rare, but entirely possible.

If you have a solar array of that magnitude, what incentive would you have to use it to mine coal? Wouldn’t it be much more feasible to sell the energy directly? Show me a business model that would prefer investing that energy to access some lesser amount of coal energy…

Well, (as far as I can tell) in American thinking, the military has a huge incentive to be disconnected from the outside world. Each U.S. military base is intended to survive disrupted supply lines for some amount of time. The massive “continuity of government” installations are intended for nuclear showdowns.

I think assuming economic “rationality” gives incorrect predictions about human behavior much of the time. The physical world really is interconnected. The mental and cultural worlds seem to be disconnected.

That is exactly what we do NOT have — considerable redundancy. We have SOME, but everyday that redundancy gets smaller. Each additional investment in complexity creates a correlative reduction in redundant systems.

It seems to be very hard to measure redundancy. It comes down to estimates and guesstimates. How much redundancy makes the difference between a survivable contraction with a command economy, versus an unsurvivable collapse with no economy?

Jason wrote:

We’re not talking about a sudden end to energy availability in some areas, while everything goes on hunky-dory in others. The problem of Peak Oil is the problem of what happens when we’re no longer able to grow. Even stability cannot be tolerated, because civilization must always grow. From a high level, we discussed this with “We All Fall Down” (see sidebar, under “Essentials”). Collapse is an all-or-nothing thing; it spreads, almost like water. Scaling this down to something like, say, the electrical grid, we’re not talking about blackouts throughout North America except for Los Angeles and New York. That’s completely unrealistic–the whole system is interconnected, meaning it’s all or nothing.

Well, all of the Roman Empire was interconnected. Perhaps the emperor sitting in Rome thought Byzantium would immediately fall if Rome fell. But as it turned out, the Byzantine subsystem had enough redundancy to persist. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was all-or-nothing, in the West. It didn’t get to Byzantium.

I don’t think there’s any scientific proof one way or the other. I think everyone is speculating: my speculation is that it’s *possible* that a modern-day Byzantium could survive contraction and/or collapse; your speculation is that no modern-day analogue to Byzantium could possible survive collapse.

No, what we’re talking about is first recession and depression (where growth slows down), then stagnancy where there’s no growth at all, and finally, actually having less energy than we used to. It’s at this point that things turn really nasty, as our entire culture has to switch gears.

Right now, in Asia, I’m using less energy than I used in Europe, with a higher standard of living. If I went to live on a farm, sowing seedballs, I’d have an even higher standard of living with even lower energy throughput. I’d even have time to practice self-defense all day and contribute to neighborhood watch programs.

Militaries, too, are facets of complexity, and thus, functions of energy. You can invest more or less of your energy into this or that facet of complexity, but as we’ve already discussed, all the various facets of complexity are ultimately interlinked. One facet cannot be terribly ahead of any of the others, because of the co-dependencies between them. Reduced complexity also must mean a reduced military. These are not seperate systems you’re talking about. You can’t have a military surviving without nation-states; neither can you have nation-states without agriculture.

Quite a few military thinkers can’t shut up about the fall of the nation-state. I suppose you’re familiar with Martin Van Creveld and his American exponent, Lind. In the past, when armies were no longer employed by kings, they remained armies but practiced banditry openly. So military culture definitely can survive the loss of political legitimacy.

So there is still a crucial difference in our guesstimates: I guesstimate that militaries will be inventive enough to improvise alternative energy for long enough to make a difference, and you guesstimate they won’t.

Note: the money “wasted” on the military often takes the form of redundancy. So when the military spends a huge sum on some incomprehensible boondoggle — a nuclear reactor, for example — responsible citizens might write it off to sheer waste. As I mentioned to Janene above, an economist might believe that the military could never buy an extra reactor, because there would be no rational economic justification for it. In the event of collapse, that “waste” purchase is useful.

Furthermore, to save civilization, it is not necessary to save it for everyone — if a small technological minority still has tools, they constitute civilization, even if most people are starving to death.

While that is, in itself, true, it’s also quite irrelevant. We’re not talking about a sudden end to energy availability in some areas, while everything goes on hunky-dory in others. The problem of Peak Oil is the problem of what happens when we’re no longer able to grow. Even stability cannot be tolerated, because civilization must always grow. From a high level, we discussed this with “We All Fall Down” (see sidebar, under “Essentials”). Collapse is an all-or-nothing thing; it spreads, almost like water. Scaling this down to something like, say, the electrical grid, we’re not talking about blackouts throughout North America except for Los Angeles and New York. That’s completely unrealistic–the whole system is interconnected, meaning it’s all or nothing. Just look at the 2003 blackout. No, what we’re talking about is first recession and depression (where growth slows down), then stagnancy where there’s no growth at all, and finally, actually having less energy than we used to. It’s at this point that things turn really nasty, as our entire culture has to switch gears. Who would invest in anything, when your expected value becomes negative? Without investment, where does the necessary infrastructure come from? In this way, collapse accelerates as it progresses. We’re not talking about a scenario where some citites go on just hunky-dory. Any shortfall is catastrophic, because we don’t just need to make up for everything we use now–we need to have more of it, and a continually increasing supply. The moment those conditions are no longer met, everything reverses itself, and we begin to collapse with accelerating velocity.

Solutions don’t have to be supported by “the people as a whole.” Solutions just have to work. Depleted uranium munitions aren’t supported by “the people as a whole” but they still kill, burn, and cause mutations.

But they’re not used as a primary energy supply–which is what we’re talking about here. Exceptions are sometimes important, but not when you’re talking about the energy basis of your society. Then, problems of scale are your biggest obstacles, and then, popular perceptions become important. Nuclear power plants may work, but if they’re not popularly accepted, you’ll never be able to build enough of them to make them economically significant.

Suppose the international peer polity of laws and trades collapses but the U.S. military continues to mobilize troops, steal oil, kill people, etc.

Militaries require resources to survive–resources like large populations to recruit from, oil to power their weapons, etc. Militaries, too, are facets of complexity, and thus, functions of energy. You can invest more or less of your energy into this or that facet of complexity, but as we’ve already discussed, all the various facets of complexity are ultimately interlinked. One facet cannot be terribly ahead of any of the others, because of the co-dependencies between them. Reduced complexity also must mean a reduced military. These are not seperate systems you’re talking about. You can’t have a military surviving without nation-states; neither can you have nation-states without agriculture. The distinctions you make are artificial and meaningless–it’s like worrying what will happen if the penthouse remains aloft after you knock out the foundations. It won’t–it depends on the foundations. That’s what we’re talking about here: a disruption to the most basic, fundamental foundation of any society. In such a state, the epiphenomenon of civilization can no more survive without the civilization, than you can exist without a food chain.

It doesn’t take *oil* specifically: if I had a gigantic solar plant supplying enough energy to operate a mine, the mine would still function. Even if non-synthetic liquid fuels are required, sustainable solar energy can be converted into ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel. (Global dimming and carbon dioxide emissions are still big issues, of course.)

OK, every method to mine coal that actually exists requires oil. You’re right, there are possibilities for oil-less coal mining. None exist at the moment. My statement was addressing the real, not the possible.

This is a very extreme claim. The modern state of affairs, grim as it may be, has various subsystems with considerable redundancy. If Americans can no longer afford to import Pocky from japan, the U.S. military will still be able to tap oil reserves and ferry troops about.

There’s actually very LITTLE redundancy–and that’s one of our key vulnerabilities. See thesis #19. But it’s not extreme at all; in fact, it’s common sense. See above.

So the U.S. military has its own plans to continue functioning regardless of whether the global economy has crashed.

I’m well aware, but such plans–if feasible at all–are only short-term, to whether a minor abberation. The military can no more survive without a civilization beneath it than your head can exist without its body.

Side note: I suspect the dominant role of oil in plastics production is challenged by bioplastics.

Then you don’t understand bioplastics. We’re typically talking about corn, which is very intensive with the fossil fuel fertilizers. Bioplastics as they’re currently made require more fossil fuels than just using petrochemicals.

Furthermore, to save civilization, it is not necessary to save it for everyone — if a small technological minority still has tools, they constitute civilization, even if most people are starving to death.

This is simply a question of emphasis. Jason has talked about small pockets of civilization surviving for short periods of time. But he is focusing on what happens to the majority.

Solutions don’t have to be supported by “the people as a whole.” Solutions just have to work. Depleted uranium munitions aren’t supported by “the people as a whole” but they still kill, burn, and cause mutations.

But the military expenditures of the US Government ARE tacitly supported by the people. If they were not, we would refuse to support politicians that wanted to spend money on weapon development. But the fact is that people DO support politicians that pursue these strategies. What happens if that stops?

More importantly, so long as the US Government is refusing to support AE R&D to any significant level, it will only be by the actions of individual persons that ANY gains will be made.

My objection is that the tribe of Anthropik seems to assume that there is only one possible “complexity break” and that single possibility will be dealt with by the new hunter-gatherer lifestyle for the elite few and mass starvation for the many. Certainly that’s possible. I would give it less than a 50% chance of happening. The tribe seems to be assigning it 99.9999% probability.

You are describing the argument as if it was unilinear. But in reality it is systemic, with an understanding that there are many many possible scenarios, but by looking at the fundamental property of underlying complexity we can compare widely varied issues.

You also may want to note that not everyone discussing here is a member of the tribe…

Suppose the international peer polity of laws and trades collapses but the U.S. military continues to mobilize troops, steal oil, kill people, etc.

And the US Military is deriving support from where? What happens to the US military if the government discontinues GI benefits? Or what if China calls our debt? Hell, what if China simply decides to STOP CARRYING our debt? All of these diverse issues play into the total functionality of the system.

It doesn’t take *oil* specifically: if I had a gigantic solar plant supplying enough energy to operate a mine, the mine would still function. Even if non-synthetic liquid fuels are required, sustainable solar energy can be converted into ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel. (Global dimming and carbon dioxide emissions are still big issues, of course.)

Well sure.

If you have a solar array of that magnitude, what incentive would you have to use it to mine coal? Wouldn’t it be much more feasible to sell the energy directly? Show me a business model that would prefer investing that energy to access some lesser amount of coal energy…

[Jason:]Yes, we’re “all or nothing,” because if there’s any shortfall, that will lead to catabolic collapse. Not only is there no one alternative that can make up for our petroleum usage; there is no combination of alternatives that can make up for it, either.[/i]

This is a very extreme claim. The modern state of affairs, grim as it may be, has various subsystems with considerable redundancy. If Americans can no longer afford to import Pocky from japan, the U.S. military will still be able to tap oil reserves and ferry troops about.

That is exactly what we do NOT have — considerable redundancy. We have SOME, but everyday that redundancy gets smaller. Each additional investment in complexity creates a correlative reduction in redundant systems. Again, it is basic economics. If you have resources (cash, equipment, energy) X, and the choice of investing those resources in duplicating past efforts (redundancy) OR the choice of investing those resources in revenue creating increased throughput, what are you going to do? When all that matters is the bottom line, there is a strong pull towards the later.

From the Article cited:

The economic effects of an oil shortage would be global. With less energy at their disposal, societies and governments everywhere will have more difficulty coping with problems likely to be of a more severe character—burgeoning populations, climate change, and shortages of such critical resources as water and arable land. Aside from expensive repair, costly methods like drip-irrigation will be needed to keep such lands arable, necessitating more, not less energy.

This sounds EXACTLY like what has been claimed here on Anthropik. Less Energy = Less ability to cope with critical issues.

If the prospect of 2050s America resembling a Mad Max movie is far-fetched 106/07 and extreme, it is not so for less fortunate regions where such regressions have already happened, as in Somalia.20 Lacking appropriate or adequate capital, institutions, and technical knowledge, their situations will much more readily degenerate to the point of collapse.21 And, as events in recent years have demonstrated, advanced nations will not easily insulate themselves from these problems, given the refuge for criminal activity and terrorism such areas will provide, as well as the waves of refugees they may generate. It may even be possible for practitioners of a radical ideology to seize power in a major state.

All of this is true… and yet a huge piece of the puzzle is missing. What happens to the US economy when the third world begins to collapse? We only maintain our standard of living by externalizing our costs onto third world nations. What would happen if we could no longer get cheap clothing from southeast asia, coffee and chocolate from child and slave labor in Africa, etc etc?

So collapse in the third world not only leaves us susceptible to terrorists and refugees, it ALSO drives us into the Greatest Depression we have ever seen. And that’s just the first stage…

Skimming through your link, I failed to find any actual proposed solution. Rather, it was merely a call to design a plan and implement it. But I did find this:

>blockquote>Whatever its precise size, this program ideally should be aimed not only at making the United States a world leader in the field of renewable energy sources, but at reducing America’s fossil fuel consumption below present levels in absolute terms before 2020 and eliminating fossil fuel dependence no later than 2040 and preferably earlier. To that end, the United States should pursue a broad range of approaches, not only hydrogen (the production of which should be delinked from fossil fuels and rare minerals to the extent possible), but also photovoltaics, wind, ethanol, biomass, and, while they are more dependent on geography, tidal and geothermal.

So without having any actual proposal about how to proceed, they are STILL talking about a twenty to forty year time frame. Problem is, if some of the recent revalations RE: over reporting of oil reserves, we may be looking at critical failure well within the next decade. That’s a problem.

Side note: I suspect the dominant role of oil in plastics production is challenged by bioplastics.

Plastics are the LEAST of our concerns. IF they find a way to deal with energy, AND find a way to maintain agriculture without petro-fertilizers and insecticides/herbicides, AND they address the issues of ‘peak water’ and global warming and so on and so forth… then I’ll concern myself with plastic.

Janene