PowerSwitch

Hi All

You guys have known me for a while on these boards and those on PO.com.

I am PO believer, but I must admit I am beginning to find the energy debate tiresome.

Maybe I am just having a bad day but, whatever way I debate or whatever my preparations are , the "doomers" (ok maybe not so much on powerswitch) just shoot me down and argue that we are all dead anyway!

Is there any point debating this topic anymore? Poster after poster on PO.com (of all nationalities) has decided that the population density of the UK vs land available (amongst a million other factors) means that PO is going to kill everyone in the UK!

Somebody cheer me up please, I feel like giving up...

Baffled

BTW, I would actually like to meet up with you guys at some point. Maybe a chat with likeminded souls would do me some good?

Perhaps a Bristol meet would be convenient? , I know CLV you are in monmouth and Damien B you are in Dorset (for example) and we could meet in a pub and have a good rant!! (and a few pints!)

All the best!

I know what you mean - I'm starting to find the hard core doomers every bit annoying as the cornucopians! Neither contribute very much to the debate... Bristol meet ? yes! A few hours in a pub one Saturday afternoon or something more serious with presentations and the public invited?

Hi TB - I know what you mean but I find it always helps to <delete>whistle this little tune : "Always look on the bri.."</delete> to remember that things are never as simple as either the doom merchants or the BAU ostriches would have us believe.

In one sense as I think we in UK will be amoung the last to be hit by PO because we can buy our way out of it for a long while (pity the third world though, and beware of resource wars with the emerging world). And in another way even when TSHTF not everyone will get splattered and there has been plenty of good discussion and advice on here about how it will be feasible to maintain and even enhance your own quality of life (if not standard of living which is a different thing altogether) whilst trouble rages around.

More "Cloud Atlas" and less "Masque of the Red Death" I think perhaps.

T Baffled -

I share your feelings about the self-declared doomer club at po.com -
As an applied ecologist I'm getting bored of being shot at from nearly all sides.
Tedious is the word.

It seems to need quite a change of course if its going to avoid degenerating into steadily duller and more futile debate.

In terms of a meet, which I'm all for, might a country pub near a rail station be possible ? - I have dogs . . . .


regards,

Bill

Yes, look on the bright side. Remember that a week is a long time in politics, a decade even longer. Things can move pretty fast when push comes to shove. Most of the greatest achievements were done without the aid of electricity (Shakespear, Michaelangelo, Bach etc.) Population density can be very high. Plenty of upland Britain had a higher and self sufficient population hundreds of years ago than it does now. Urban areas could be pretty close to self sufficient in energy and food if needed. Think what it would be like if every south facing roof was PV, every chimney sported a micro-turbine, every conservatory was a hydroponicum with aquaria for carp, every basement had a borehole for groundsource geothermal and every lawn and shrubbery a vegetable plot. Oh the surplus of it all.
We can do it - it's just a matter of doing it without getting cross with each other.

It's definitely worth meeting up, you come away feeling a lot more positive afterwards. If some of you choose a meeting place, advertise it on the forums if you want to, and there might be a whole bunch of people in travelling distance.

Totally_Baffled wrote:
Maybe I am just having a bad day but, whatever way I debate or whatever my preparations are , the "doomers" (ok maybe not so much on powerswitch) just shoot me down and argue that we are all dead anyway!

How can they know? That's just more crystal BALLS imho.

Just a failure of the imagination. Humans are remarkably adaptive and inventive, and never so much as when their backs are against the wall. Neccessity being th mother of invention and all that... If people in the third world can exist on twenty times less energy than we consume then so can we - not that I particularly want to regress to a lifestyle that primitive! In an emergency societies and technologies do change remarkably quickly. You only have to examine the histories of the two world wars to realise that. The period where society as a whole wakes up to the emergency will be the most unpleasant. There will be a lot of shouting, anger and blame game.

I see no reason why we should not as a country be able to feed ourselves. We are very fortunate to have a mild generally wet climate - even though the South East has bee experiencing a drought for the last few years. Compared with farmers in say Spain or North Africa, ours are very lucky in how little irrigation is required in the UK.

We would unfortunately have to go vegetarian to be able to feed ourselves.- a thought which as a carnivore I find extremely unpleasant. My own personal preference is for meat, fish and alcohol as the basis of an an enjoyable diet, rather than rabbit food.

My view is that right now certain aspects of daily life are wonderful and blissful and worthwhile, and some are tedious and soulless and depressing. After the end of cheap oil, certain aspects of daily life will be wonderful and blissful and worthwhile, and some will be tedious and soulless and depressing.

Just not necessarily the same ones.

Waiting, like everything else, is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

Many thanks for your responses guys, you have cheered me up no end. I thought it was only me getting frustrated by all the "doom".

Like you guys on here , I realise there will be difficult adjustments and a substantial drop in lifestyles (well material lifestyles anyway).

But for the mega "doomers", this doesnt seem to be "enough" of a price for us "evil" humans to pay for our over exploitation of FF's!

The debate for the hardcore doomers seems to be a 5 billion die off via nuclear war /starvation. If you dont agree you are a cornucopian! Nothing inbetween.

I guess what frustrates me the most is, going to all the effort to do what I can. Recycling everything, buying second hand, buying from local farm shops, using less energy , reducing my car mileag, car sharing, walking , choosing a green electric supplier, learning to grow veg etc etc , only to be ridiculed by the doomers as Jevons paradox (for example) will mean that I will be eaten alive by hoardes of starving Zombies anyway!

know what you mean - I'm starting to find the hard core doomers every bit annoying as the cornucopians! Neither contribute very much to the debate... Bristol meet ? yes! A few hours in a pub one Saturday afternoon or something more serious with presentations and the public invited?

I was thinking an afternoon in the pub (nothing too heavy gotta get home in one piece) and perhaps some food early evening.

Maybe wait until further into the summer , so we can get outside and enjoy some fresh air and exchange views/info on aspects of this energy elephant!

I will re raise a thread in May/June to organise something? The more people the better!

I'm up for attending an energy event as alternative - as long as I am not presenting! Im not as clued up as you Chris!

Totally_Baffled wrote:Maybe I am just having a bad day but, whatever way I debate or whatever my preparations are , the "doomers" (ok maybe not so much on powerswitch) just shoot me down and argue that we are all dead anyway!

I agree that the forums on po.com are rather messy and discussions rarely result in some kind of productive outcome, but the UK situation is extremely worrying. In fact, I worry more over the UK than over Sweden where I live since systemic failures in the UK would have profound influences here too.

The very basics are kind of frightening. From Eurostat:

60 million people
Utilized agricultural area: 16 375 000 hectares
Arable land: 6 380 000 hectares

That gives a total of 0,11 hectares of arable land per person. A lousy 1100 square meters. With the best permaculture methods and mainly vegetarian diet, it is indeed possible to make a living from 1100 square meters, but it will require tremendeous social changes. Beyond my imagination actually.

Totally_Baffled wrote:Poster after poster on PO.com (of all nationalities) has decided that the population density of the UK vs land available (amongst a million other factors) means that PO is going to kill everyone in the UK!

The lack of interest in facts and a tendancy to fall back on dogma is not the exclusive domain of the BAU crowd.

Gustave LeBon wrote: The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation.

It strikes me the main reason PO is such a big deal is NOT the decline in hydrocarbon supplies but the fact no one has any understanding of why this matters or how the world works.

You have to do your own research and make your own mind up - who cares if people don't believe you?

I presume most people get into PO research because they want to know rather than because they want other people to believe them....

MacG wrote:

Totally_Baffled wrote:Maybe I am just having a bad day but, whatever way I debate or whatever my preparations are , the "doomers" (ok maybe not so much on powerswitch) just shoot me down and argue that we are all dead anyway!

I agree that the forums on po.com are rather messy and discussions rarely result in some kind of productive outcome, but the UK situation is extremely worrying. In fact, I worry more over the UK than over Sweden where I live since systemic failures in the UK would have profound influences here too.

The very basics are kind of frightening. From Eurostat:

60 million people
Utilized agricultural area: 16 375 000 hectares
Arable land: 6 380 000 hectares

That gives a total of 0,11 hectares of arable land per person. A lousy 1100 square meters. With the best permaculture methods and mainly vegetarian diet, it is indeed possible to make a living from 1100 square meters, but it will require tremendeous social changes. Beyond my imagination actually.

Yes on the face of it, those are worrying stats.

But on the other hand, 73% of the vegetables the UK consumed in 1996 came from 160,000 hectares.

http://www.ukagriculture.com/statistics ... stics.html

81% of UK potato consumption comes from a paltry 14800 hectares in 2004!

http://www.ukagriculture.com/statistics ... stics.html

Ok it requires FF fertilizers and diesal machinery - but a tiny amount compared to overall consumption. But it puts things in perspective!

This is one of my biggest bugbears when it comes to the debate. PO = reducing oil availability , not not oil at all. Hell will squeeze oil out of the NS for another 20-30 years (although the quantities will be a lot smaller!)

MacG wrote:
60 million people
Utilized agricultural area: 16 375 000 hectares
Arable land: 6 380 000 hectares

Beyond my imagination actually.

Hmm.. Imagination. Get on over to Google maps and have a good look at the UK, especially the suburbs of the major cities.

An enormous ammount of the UK looks like this or this

those are two locations in the outer suburbs of North London and South London chosen at random from 'orbit' above planet Google and zoomed into. One is Peckham and I can remember where the other is...

All other cities in the UK are the same. I had a quick look ( but did not grab) at Sheffield in the North of ENgland and its suburban gardens look even bigger!

Now try your imagination again bearing in mind that an awful lot (the majority maybe?) of people in the UK live in places like that - detached or semi-detached housing with gardens. Quite different to Europe where most people live in city appartments and the suburbs are quite small. London is a vast suburban sprawl compared to other European cities. Londons outer edge is fragmented and incorporates a lot of green space. Its orbital motorway is 195 Km long. Compare that with the orbital motorways around Paris, Berlin or the closest big city to where you are. -

The other factor is set-aside - at the moment we produce too much food in the UK so we pay farmers not to farm ie. set productive arable land to one side and do nothing with it., There is also the potential for converting a lot of pasturage and waste land to arable if required.

Basically, given a little imagination, there is a huge untapped potential for food production in the uk, mainly from suburbia, but also from underutilised and poorly utilised farmland. A section of my parents (admittedly quite large) suburban garden was enough to supply us with potatoes and green beans all year round. Local access to as much horse manure as we could handle was very useful for this. We also composted all organic waste from the garden and kitchen. Beans would be picked every week during summer/early autumn, topped, tailed blanched and then consigned to the vegetables freezer in the garage. Potatoes stored in wooden barrels filled with dry peat also in the garage - fortunately a large double garage - once side used for the one and only car and the other for storage.

Don't bother listening to PO doomers. If you did, if you gave up all hope, then there's not much point in living and you may as well go out and make one last purchase of paracetamol tablets.

PO does not mean no oil. It is a challenge but why let that put you off? Try and rise to it. All we humans know is civilisation, I don't see why we can't keep some form of civilisation going for many years.

As for the food situation... we do grow a lot of food in this country; we could prioritise our oil production for the growth of food. Picky supermarket produce specifications mean that an awful lot of edible fruit and veg is discarded every year; and the same pickiness encourages farmers to use more pesticides and fertilisers than is necessary. So we do have plenty of room to cut FF use even in food production.

On the subject of UK food production and carrying capacity:

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.af.tab2e.hmt2a.xls