Title: Collapse Lingo Summary: A /r/collapse lexicon Date: 30 September 2021
Rounding up collapse lingo, terminology, jargon, terms of art, nomenclature, concepts, tropes, memes, arguments, and patterns.
[TOC]
Six Ways To Die framework
*[6WTD]: Six Ways To Die
when a civilization breaks down, the most efficient economies are most often those that use its remains as raw material.
– John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, p.71
See also:
The study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and -λογία, -logia. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.
A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty. Some causes of culturally induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.
Agnotology: Culturally induced ignorance : dredmorbius via 👤 Dr. Edward Morbius from Philip Mirowski - Life and Debt: Living through the Financialisation of the Biosphere from 👤 Erinaceous
The alpha strategy : the ultimate plan of financial self-defense (1981)
Book by 👤 John Pugsley
The notion that fiat money punishes savers therefore storing value can only be accomplished by acquiring a diversified portfolio of hard tangible goods that don't spoil. Examples include stuff that you'll use or industrial metals that have to be in demand.
anthropocene : proposed geological epoch following the Holocene, named in reference to the significant influence of human activity on planetary systems.
The proper start point of the Antropocene is debated. It could be considered the Industrial Revolution, the extinction of megafauna, or maybe as far back as the discovery of fire.
The end point however is clearer – it's in the near future. Thus is we consider it from way back it overlaps with the Holocene, and if we consider it as the lifespan of industrial civilisation it will only have been a few centuries – too short to be called an epoch.
👤 John Michael Greer argues a better name for this anomalous thin layer in the geological record would be the Pleistocene-Neocene transition:
We don’t call the first epoch after the comet impact 65 million years ago the "Cometocene", so there’s no valid reason to use a label like “Anthropocene” for the epoch that will dawn when the current transition winds down.
– The Myth of the Anthropocene - The Archdruid Report
See also P-N transition, or, toward the Neocene « immanence
This society which inverses the natural order of gift → barter → tribute → trade, and lack of commerce
Appropriate technology - Wikipedia
Related: Intermediate technology - "Build what used to be called "intermediate" technologies--simple but intelligently designed systems that use common materials to meet basic human needs." Richard Heinberg IAmA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2bm2k0/peak_oil_and_the_end_of_perpetual_economic_growth/cj6pptd
*[BAU]: Business As Usual
binding factors
: External bonds that can tempt, coerce, or entrap a person into doing something they would prefer not to do
(Milgram 1974, p. 148)
via Climate Catastrophe and Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock “Obedience” Experiments: An Uncanny Analogy
See also: Squeeze
*[BFs]: Binding Factors
Blue Ocean Event : an ice-free Arctic Ocean
(...) often defined as "having less than 1 million square kilometers of sea ice", because it is very difficult to melt the thick ice around the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The IPCC AR5 defines "nearly ice-free conditions" as sea ice extent less than 10^6 km² for at least five consecutive years.
– Arctic sea ice decline > Ice-free summer - Wikipedia
Significant because it may be a climate change tipping point. For example an ice-free Arctic lowers the albedo of the Earth, which amplified warming – a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Also appears as FIASY - First Ice-free Arctic Summer Year.
*[BOE]: Blue Ocean Event
See High-tech dip
When a child accidentally smashes a window, and then it has to be replaced, does this accident constitute a benefit to society, due to the economic activity of repairing and replacing the window?
Parable of the broken window - Wikipedia
via Patrick Brown on Radio Ecoshock - What If... (16 October 2019)
Speculative bubble
Like tulip frenzy in 1630s, dot-com Internet bubble 1997–2000, Real estate bubble 2008, shale bubble (2015)
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
– On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs
Wile E. Coyote moment of hang time
– The Archdruid Report - The Era of Impact
The fundamental energy problem facing cities, nations, and the world is, and will be in the future, the problem of falling EROI. As more energy must be used to acquire additional sources of energy, myriad economic problems will occur. Higher input costs lead to higher energy prices for the consumer, although the process is not a smooth one. Higher energy prices choke off demand, helping precipitate a recession. The recession reduces energy prices, helping to restore prosperity. The global peak of oil looks more like an “undulating plateau,” and the uncertainty adversely impacts the financing of future high cost energy sources.
– Klitgaard, Kent. (2019). Economy and Development in Modern Cities. 10.1007/978-3-030-11259-2_5.
A state of affairs that cannot continue without collapsing eventually.
Buy wholesale vs. retail, buy commercial-grade vs. consumer-grade.
For related heuristics see Dmitry Orlov - Shrinking the Technosphere (2017) Chapter 4: Harm/Benefit Analysis
Climate Sociology
Catastrophic Anthopogenic Global Warming : The cultural narrative that says climate science points to the inevitability of catastrophic consequences of man-made global warming.
via CAGW memeplex | Climate Etc.
See NTE
*[CAGW]: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming
Sailing
See The Archdruid Report - Captain Erikson's Equation
Other than its GHG effects there are also direct health effects from a high concentration of CO₂
See this compilation by /u/MrVisible on /r/doomsdaycult: The long-term effects of carbon dioxide on human health : doomsdaycult
Another thread: Great Stuffiness in the Air will be Felt Worldwide in the Coming Decades as we Inch Closer to 450ppm C02 : collapse
*[GHG]: greenhouse gas *[GHGs]: greenhouse gases
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
cargoism : delusion that technology will always save us from overshoot
See also techno-fix
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
carrying capacity : maximum permanently supportable load
From the cover of Overshoot - The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982)
Source: How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse
Said by Stephen Hawking heard from 👤 Geoffrey West from 👤 Erinaceous post
Also see Joseph Tainter - Human Resource Use - Timing and Implications for Sustainability
chit : a short official note, memorandum, or voucher, typically recording a sum owed
specie : money in the form of coins rather than notes
stock-in-trade : the equipment, merchandise, or materials necessary to or used in a trade or business.
Climate change adaptation - Wikipedia
climate change adaptation : adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climate change, including increases in the frequency or severity of weather-related disasters. The IPCC defines adaptation as "the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects" Examples: flood defences, planning laws, irrigation systems (Singh et al, 2016)
*[CCA]: climate change adaptation
[The Deep Adaptation Agenda] does not seek to build on existing scholarship on "climate adaptation" as it is premised on the view that social collapse is now inevitable
– 👤 Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy (2018)
Climate change mitigation - Wikipedia
climate change mitigation : actions to limit the magnitude or rate of long-term global warming and its related effects. Examples: reductions in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), increasing capacity of carbon sinks such as reforestation
Important steps on climate mitigation and adaptation have been taken over the past decade. However, these steps could now be regarded as equivalent to walking up a landslide. If the landslide had not already begun, then quicker and bigger steps would get us to the top of where we want to be. Sadly, the latest climate data, emissions data and data on the spread of carbon-intensive lifestyles show that the landslide has already begun.
– 👤 Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy (2018)
Climate Politics
climate leviathan : a world state or strongly bound alliance of states committed to preserving capitalism as a way to adapt to climate change; political theory of the emergence of a capitalist planetary sovereignty in response to climate change.
To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.
Figure 2.2. Four potential social formations
— Planetary sovereignty Anti-planetary sovereignty Capitalist Climate Leviathan Climate Behemoth Non-capitalist Climate Mao Climate X
Our thesis is that the future of the world will be defined by Leviathan, Behemoth, Mao and X and the conflicts between them.
– Wainwright, Joel; Mann, Geoff (2018). Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso
Related:
[William Ophuls'] main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming."
– 👤 Ophuls, William (1973). "Leviathan or Oblivion?". In Daly, Herman E (ed.). Toward a Steady-State Economy. W.H. Freeman. pp. 215–230.
Identify / Coin Preparation Coping Psychology
cloaked adaptation : building up or promoting collapse transferrable skills. Example: physical fitness
These are activities that work in pre-crisis contexts but also put one in a better position when SHTF. Identifying these makes you better able to relate with people of a wider spectrum of collapse awareness. People may be more receptive to proposals framed without involving collapse. Cloaking adaptation initiatives leaves the option of deferring or avoiding the psychological cost of coming to terms with collapse (ignore-ance), which may be desirable.
👤 John Michael Greer Preparation
A collapse preparedness strategy.
– So, what you're saying is that what we need to do, individually, is to go through collapse right away.
- Exactly. Collapse now, and avoid the rush.
The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now.
– The Archdruid Report: Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush
Also an anthology Collapse now and avoid the rush : The Best of the Archdruid Report (2015)
Related: earthshot, projects aiming for a level of complexity several steps lower than the one sustainable at that time
collapse on rails : Rather than collapse as an event (after which recovery is theoretically possible) what we have in the Ukraine is collapse on rails — an inexorable, systematic hollowing-out and pauperization.
Descent computing
Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology
Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a z80 kernel and a collection of programs, tools and documentation that aims to preserve our ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse. Collapse OS brought to completion can:
- Run on minimal and improvised machines.
- Interface through improvised means (serial, keyboard, display).
- Edit text files.
- Compile assembler source files for a wide range of MCUs and CPUs.
- Read and write from a wide range of storage devices.
- Replicate itself.
Additionally, the goal of this project is to be as self-contained as possible. With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools.
An example of an earthshot to the Age of Salvage.
vs dissensus
Risk
via 👤 Jared Diamond
Here in the United States if you slip and fall, generally you go to a hospital and get it fixed. In New Guinea if you make a mistake you may well end up dead or crippled for the rest of your life. And so in New Guinea I learned through incidents, through close calls I've learned to be very careful. I've taken that attitude with me. If drives my wife and my sons and my friends crazy because I'm always attentive to what could go wrong, but that contributed to the fact that I'm still healthy in my early 80s and hope to carry on. So, one of the prime lessons I learned from New Guinea is to anticipate the dangers, the 1-in-100 danger, but if you do it 100 times... In New Guinea if you sleep under a dead tree the chances are 1000 to 1 the dead tree will fall on you that night, but if you're a New Guinean who is going to sleep in the jungle and you sleep in the jungle for 3 years (1095 days) the dead tree will fall on you and you'll be dead.
Source: Books Of Your Life With Elizabeth - Jared Diamond's Books of His Life (01 May 2019) #t=00:08:10.000,00:09:18.680
See 👤 Nassim Taleb and the distinction between ensemble probability and time probability.
👤 Eric Michaels in The Fantasy of Electrification quoting 👤 Paul Mobbs
Consumer society cannot be ‘reformed’ from within because the types of physical change required dismantle its fundamental reason for existence – allowing people to be affluent consumers. This has been the case since Thorstein Veblen wrote one of the first books on the small minority of affluent consumers in the late Victorian era; and that situation hasn’t changed in the interim, it’s become habituated across most of the population.
Thus it will always be until it drives the world to ecological collapse. We cannot hope to reform consumer society from within. At best, we can only try to escape it. To do without the lithium-ion batteries, as well as the intensively grown potatoes, and instead ‘grow our own’ energy storage devices.
At its simplest, consumerism works by: Separating the mass of people from the land which could sustain them; then charging a premium to buy those goods made from the land via economic middle men. Basically, it’s a more modern, ‘civilized’ form of Indentured servitude. If you have no belief that this system can survive the realities of ecological collapse, then you need to find your route to the exits as quickly as possible. In reality, that means being able to have a space to grow your own potatoes!"
– Paul Mobbs, Lithium-ion batteries versus potatoes in the battle for energy storage
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
cornucopianism : crackpot optimism
cornucopian myth : euphoric belief in limitless resources (from the cover of Overshoot - The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982))
the enthusiastic and all but universal insistence, in the teeth of the evidence, that the end of business as usual will turn out to be the door to a wonderful new future.
from The Archdruid Report - The Era of Impact
Coopting Culture Wars
corporate climate response : Well, it can no longer be denied. Let's make ourselves, let's make capital an irremovable part of the solution. Let's have the changes that are going to be necessary be done by the private sector. Enshrine the necessity of the private sector!
– Robert Evans - Reddit /r/collapse AMA on 2021-07-22
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
crash : die-off
From the cover of Overshoot - The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982)
The redoubtable H.L. Mencken, writing at a time when such things were not quite as universal in the American mass mind than they have become since then, called them “credos.” It was an inspired borrowing from the Latin credo, “I believe,” but its relevance extends far beyond the religious sphere.
– The Archdruid Report - Mentats Wanted, Will Train
Creeping normalcy is a term used to describe how gradual changes can be accepted as the normal situation if these changes happen slowly, or incrementally. Jared Diamond made the term creeping normalcy popular in his Pulitzer prize winning book, Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond outlines how politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else deteriorate slowly, it's often difficult to recognize the change from previous years. The gradual and incremental changes are difficult to see, thus normalcy is difficult to recognise over short periods. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realise that conditions were much better previously. What is accepted as normal now is a result of gradual changes, or creeping downwards.
from 5 Errors In Thinking That Have Effectively Changed The World – WAKING SCIENCE
the crumbles : Catabolic collapse
See Welcome to the Crumbles S02E01 of the podcast It Could Happen Here by journalist 👤 Robert Evans
via 👤 William R. Catton Jr. - Overshoot
Gates, Soros, Google, Amazon
decadence : a perceived decay in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, honor, discipline, or skill at governing among the members of the elite of a very large social structure, such as an empire or nation state. By extension, it may refer to a decline in art, literature, science, technology, and work ethics, or (very loosely) to self-indulgent behavior.
It is the curse of living in a decadent period, just like when the last Roman poets, from Ausonius to Claudian, lost the skills of their predecessors and couldn't do anything better than aping them.
– 👤 Ugo Bardi - The Seneca Cliff of Rhetoric: Just say no to Powerpoint
[Ausonius] is considered derivative and unoriginal. Edward Gibbon pronounced in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that "the poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age."
Is it possible to enjoy both economic growth and environmental sustainability?
This question is a matter of fierce political debate between green growth and post-growth advocates. Considering what is at stake, a careful assessment to determine whether the scientific foundations behind this decoupling hypothesis are robust or not is needed.
This report reviews the empirical and theoretical literature to assess the validity of this hypothesis. The conclusion is both overwhelmingly clear and sobering: not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future.
‘Decoupling debunked’ highlights the need for the rethinking of green growth policies and to complement efficiency with sufficiency.
Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy (2018)
Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy - Insight
deep adaptation : a new meta-framing of the implications for research, organisational practice, personal development and public policy, called the Deep Adaptation Agenda. Its key aspects of resilience, relinquishment and restorations are explained. This agenda does not seek to build on existing scholarship on “climate adaptation” as it is premised on the view that social collapse is now inevitable.
The 4 R's:
- Resilience What do we most value that we want to keep and how?
- Relinquishment What do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse?
- Restoration What could we bring back to help us with these difficult times?
- Reconciliation With what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?
Demand destruction is a permanent downward shift on the demand curve in the direction of lower demand of a commodity, such as energy products, induced by a prolonged period of high prices or constrained supply.
It's one of the repeated lessons of economic history that money in the hands of the rich does much less good for the economy as a whole than money in the hands of the working classes and the poor. The reasoning here is as simple as it is inescapable. Industrial economies survive and thrive on consumer expenditures, but consumer expenditures are limited by the ability of consumers to buy the things they want and need. As money is diverted away from the lower end of the economic pyramid, you get demand destruction — the process by which those who can't afford to buy things stop buying them — and consumer expenditures fall off. The rich, by contrast, divert a large share of their income out of the consumer economy into investments; the richer they get, the more of the national wealth ends up in investments rather than consumer expenditures; and as consumer expenditures falter, and investments linked to the consumer economy falter in turn, more and more money ends up in illiquid speculative vehicles that are disconnected from the productive economy and do nothing to stimulate demand. That's what happened in the 1920s.
– The Archdruid Report - The Era of Impact
denial : (1) the largely unconscious habit of thought whereby we refuse to accept the reality of things that are bad or upsetting, or that challenge our worldview, our legacy, how we live, what is required of us, and/or our feelings of self-worth or superiority.
denial : (2) The instinctual impulse to reject or discount information that calls into question our hopes, assumptions or expectations about the future.
via 👤 Michael Dowd
via Mark Shepard - Slow Living Summit #2: Permaculture & Economic Sustainability (2017) #t=00:15:30
Also see Peak Oil Denial Bingo!
Inability to accept also takes more subtle forms, touched upon by 👤 Jem Bendell in a Deep Adaptation presentation:
- Too difficult: like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. I don't know how to integrate this in my life
- Keep busy: like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill. Environmental NGOs going buy this green thing
The response proposed by Jem is can be called Get ready
– Jem Bendell & Toni Spencer - Deep Adaptation talk
Identify / Coin
Repairing and reusing technology is becoming harder instead of easier. Descent-friendly design needs to become a thing. Reinventing essential tools so that they are accessible and scalable, sturdy, that reduce and contain use of perishable materials, modular (within its entire technological suite), easy to repair, well documented, don't have unnecessary dependencies.
Related: Dmitry Orlov - Shrinking the Technosphere (2017)
dilemma : a choice between two undesirable options.
A dilemma is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is unambiguously acceptable or preferable. The possibilities are termed the horns of the dilemma, a clichéd usage, but distinguishing the dilemma from other kinds of predicament as a matter of usage.
“(n)o population on the planet today is going to willingly trade economic power for lower carbon emissions, especially since economic power remains the key index of global status.”
– Roy Scranton - Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, p. 43
Related: Hobson's choice
discourse : the limits of acceptable speech
I would like to introduce you to the concept of a “discourse”. In everyday life this means something like a “conversation”, but in certain schools of philosophy it has a more specialized meaning, namely, the social boundary which defines what can be said about a particular topic, or, as expressed by the contemporary philosopher Judith Butler, “the limits of acceptable speech”. This is very similar to the concept of the “Overton Window” as explained in this essay by Neal Devers.
from Post Peak Medicine Book, p.24
disintermediation : to buy food, health care, and other goods and services directly from the producers.
via The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: Involuntary Simplicity
👤 John Michael Greer 👤 Ewa Ziarek
dissensus : the deliberate avoidance of consensus.
Dissensus, a concept coined by postmodern theorist Ewa Ziarek, is the deliberate avoidance of consensus. It has its place when consensus, for one reason or another, is either impossible or unwise: for instance, when irreducible differences make it impossible to find common ground for agreement on the points that matter, or when settling on any common decision would be premature. In situations of these kinds, encouraging people to pursue conflicting and even diametrically opposed options increases the chance that someone will happen on an answer that works.
– John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, p. 96
Evolution is dissensus in action, the outward pressure of genetic diversification running up against the limits of environment and, now and then, pushing through to some new adaptation: the wings of bats, the opposable thumbs of primates, the cultural evolution of human beings. As we enter a future of new limits and unpredictable opportunities, this is arguably the kind of organic process we need most.
– The Archdruid Report: Dissensus and Organic Process
doomstead : a homestead for weathering collapse. It can have features for off-grid self-sufficiency, security measures against intruders, concealment etc. Sometimes derogatory, to say the doomsteader's plan is leaky or unrealistic in practice.
doxa : the general opinion that gives a common meaning to the news of the world.
A gap has sometimes yawned between us and friends and colleagues who still clung to – and defended – an imaginary vision of continuity and linear progress. Over the years, we have clearly distanced ourselves from the doxa, that is to say the general opinion that gives a common meaning to the news of the world. Carry out the experiment for yourselves: listen to the news with this perspective in mind and you’ll see the huge gap between doxa and reality. It’s a strange feeling to be part of this world (more than ever), while being cut off from the dominant image that other people have of it.
– 👤 Pablo Servigne, 👤 Raphaël Stevens (2020) How Everything Can Collapse, Cambridge: Polity. p. 10. ISBN 9781509541393; Originally published 2015 Comment tout peut s'effondrer: petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (in French). Ed. du Seuil. ISBN 9782021223316. OCLC 908244398.
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
drawdown (William R Catton) : stealing resources from the future
From the cover of Overshoot - The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982)
drawdown (climate change) : the point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change
Sea squirrels are pale, sickly-looking, and, above all, sad. Dried ones doubly so. They are endowed with flabby bags for a body, some ineffectual spiny tendrils, and dangling dark bits of uncertain purpose. One might conjecture that they are mutant shellfish that survived having their shells dissolved by the carbonic acid in the seawater. Being vegans, the vegans would never think of eating one; nor anything else that washes up on the shores of that brownish, carbonated ocean, almost lifeless after that final, desperate binge of coal-burning that occurred just as oil and gas were running out. Picking dead sea squirrels off the beach with a pointed stick is an unpleasant chore, making it useful for teaching children the subtle difference between work and play. Sea squirrels have but two charms: they are at times plentiful, and, dried into flat chips, they burn with a clean, yellow flame – not bad for illumination, and convenient for cooking the food which the vegans both plant and harvest all along the shore.
from 👤 Dmitry Orlov – The new age of sail
Peak Oil Energy Alternatives
via 👤 Dmitry Orlov
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
Commonly used value: 150 people.
Political Collapse
in the best case scenario, can be better than life in a weak, semi-defunct state.
– Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013), p. 176/183
Identify / Coin
earthshot
: An ambitious project aimed at a society several steps lower in complexity than the one sustainable at that time. The startdown equivalent of a moonshot. Example: Collapse OS
> Startups do moonshots, startdowns point the rocket down to Earth.
In a decline regime short-term, incremental projects risk failure when society drops to a lower level of complexity. It's not possible to predict when problems will arise, but it is possible to judge the resilience of project dependencies. For instance, if success depends on a highly complex technological suite like supercomputer clusters, it's vulnerable to numerous kinds of disruptions and thus more likely to fail (see Liebig's law of the minimum).
Over time we may witness a Red Queen dynamic in which the rate of project failure increases due to complex systems collapse contagion. Projects cease to be viable, causing diminishing returns and leaving assets stranded. Take renewable energy – deploying wind and solar power could offset fossil fuel use for the lifetime of the installation, but at the end of service a fossil fueled industrial base is required for rebuilding. If that isn't available or economical at that time, the installation's energy output drops and the systems dependent on that energy may become stranded.
Therefore it is sensible to dedicate some of the projects to a level of complexity several steps lower than the one sustainable at that time. Expensive, hard or unlikely tasks of great potential impact (moonshots) are better protected from collapse contagion if their dependencies can be sustained at lower levels of complexity.
Picture a military retreat: exhaust the benefits of a position, abandon it before it becomes unsustainable, then fall back far enough to a position that you have ample resources to defend. Aiming further down the arc of decline allows for better fortification of that position as a backstop against runaway decline.
The idea for the term originates in Bret Victor's snarky tweets
If any "founders" out there want to "disrupt" our 401ppm atmospheric CO2, or "moonshot" ocean acidification, that would be cool
– Bret Victor @worrydream 10:05 AM • Aug 12, 2015
eco-anxiety : acknowledging the reality of climate change and its consequences, which can trigger chronic fear, fatalism, anger and exhaustion.
For more coping topics see /r/CollapseSupport
*[ECoE]: Energy Cost of Energy
The opposite of resilience.
efficiency is the straightest path to hell
There is little to no capacity to adapt in a maxed out system.
See Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013)
Another often overlooked fact is that a wholesale conversion to electric cars will destroy the market for gasoline. Nobody is even suggesting getting rid of diesel trucks or construction equipment, emergency diesel generators or locomotives, or ships which run on bunker fuel, or having jet aircraft burn anything other than jet fuel, so petroleum distillates will still be in high demand. But they will now be twice as expensive. You see, roughly half of what can be usefully produced from a barrel of crude oil is what ends up being blended and marketed as gasoline. If that half of each oil barrel can’t be sold, the prices of the remaining liquid fuels will double, as will freight rates. This will trigger a recession that will, among other things, destroy demand for electric cars. If gasoline prices drop through the floor and electricity rates shoot through the roof, what sane person would choose an electric car? And so it turns out that converting to electric cars is a good way to… not convert to electric cars.
– Dmitry Orlov - A Walk in the Garden of Unintended Consequences
elite panic : when people in positions of power fear the loss of their power and so overreact in violent ways.
But scientists and historians who study catastrophes for a living have long known that there is, in fact, very little antisocial behavior that takes place after disasters. Rebecca Solnit’s extraordinary book A Paradise Built in Hell describes in great detail the collective sense of “immersion in the moment and solidarity with others” that follows large-scale calamities. The common person rises to the situation to help other people, and there can be a profound experience of well-being, inventiveness, and flexibility. In fact, the worst effects in the aftermath of disasters come when institutions try to impose top-down organization, as the military might. The presumption of mass chaos, looting, murders, rapes—this comes from something disaster scientists call “elite panic,” when people in positions of power fear the loss of their power and so overreact in violent ways. Solnit quotes the sociologist Kathleen Tierney’s description of the phenomenon:
fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.
– [Letter from Saluda] Waiting for the End of the World, by Lauren Groff | Harper's Magazine
Ecology
Embodied Energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself.
Ecology
emergy : the amount of energy that was consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service.
See Embodied energy
energy cost of energy : the cost of accessing a unit of energy for use, stated as a percentage of the unit
(...) whenever we access energy for our use, some of that energy is always consumed in the access process. We can't drill an oil well, construct a refinery, build a gas pipeline, manufacture a wind turbine or a solar panel, or install a power distribution grid, without using energy, and neither can we operate or maintain them without it. The energy that is consumed in the supply of energy therefore comprises both a capital (investment) and an operating component.
This principle is central to the established concept of the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI), in which the consumed, cost or invested component is stated as a ratio. In Surplus Energy Economics (SEE), the cost element is known as the Energy Cost of Energy or ECoE, and is stated as a percentage.
Understood in this way, any given quantity of energy divides into parts. One of these is the cost element, known here as ECoE. The other – whatever remains – is surplus energy. This surplus drives all economic activity other than the supply of energy itself. This makes surplus energy coterminous with prosperity.
– #175. The Surplus Energy Economy | Surplus Energy Economics
See also EROI
*[SEE]: Surplus Energy Economics *[EROEI]: Energy Return on Energy Invested *[EROI]: Energy Return on Investment *[ECoE]: Energy Cost of Energy
vs Energy Conservation
See Jevons paradox
See Joseph Tainter - Energy Gain and Future Energy - Collapse of Sustainability talk
Suggested in Implications of net energy-return-on-investment for a low-carbon energy transition | Nature Energy • /r/collapsademic submission
EROI is sometimes called ERoEI
energy return on investment : the ratio of the amount of usable energy (the exergy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.
– Energy return on investment - Wikipedia
How much you get out over how much you put in to get it. If you put in 1 unit of energy and get 1 unit out you're just going through the motions. No surplus is created, extraction doesn't make sense. Accounting for the true energy costs is tricky so oftentimes poor deals seem acceptable, for example from a financial standpoint.
First defined in Hall et al. 1986. See also Hall et al. 2014
Prep Relocation Nomad
Regional economic symbiosis and spatial energy averaging are a method of countering productivity fluctuations.
Example: two tribes in the same bioregion experience fluctuations in productivity at the same time, and fight when drought/flood/locusts hits. They are engaged in competition for the same resources, and in cooperation with tribes from different regions - higher up the mountains, lower down the plains, etc.
This is why it stands to reason that the best places for resilience are regions with plenty of bioregional diversity – ocean to mountain, tropical to temperate. Countries that are big and diverse, where you can change bioregion while still avoiding risky interactions such as crossing a border.
Energy cannibalism : refers to an effect where rapid growth of an entire energy producing or energy efficiency industry creates a need for energy that uses (or cannibalizes) the energy of existing power plants or production plants.
From 👤 Nassim Taleb:
The difference between 100 people going to a casino and one person going to a casino 100 times, i.e. between (path dependent) and conventionally understood probability. The mistake has persisted in economics and psychology since age immemorial.
– The Logic of Risk Taking – INCERTO – Medium
👤 John Michael Greer Coopting Culture Wars
entryism : the strategy of joining a group that exists for some purpose unrelated to yours, getting established there, inviting in your friends, and then using every sleazy trick in the book to take over the group so you can use it to promote your own agenda.
– Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness - Ecosophia
"The Environment" is a social construct that exists only in the human mind
👤 William E. Rees - Ecological Footprint Analysis & The Vulnerability of Modern Cities (2012) #t=00:21:08
The Governance of Eco-city Innovation at the University of Westminster in London, England
The moral to this story? In an era of impact, the advice you hear from everyone around you may not be in your best interest.
from The Archdruid Report - The Era of Impact
EROC : Energy Return On Carbon
*[EROC]: Energy Return On Carbon
EROI : Energy Return On Investment
*[EROI]: Energy Return on Investment
Energy Return on Energy Invested
*[EROEI]: Energy Return on Energy Invested
*[EV]: electric vehicle *[EVs]: electric vehicles
Finance Money
extend government-backed loan guarantees and pretend that economic growth will resume shortly
from Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) p. 18/25
Tangential
First Ice-free Arctic Summer Year. See Blue Ocean Event
*[FIASY]: First Ice-free Arctic Summer Year
Peak Oil Economics
fungibility : (economics) property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable. Example: Crude oil is a fungible commodity.
via 👤 Derrick Jensen
It’s also the same tone you’ll get from a flurry of recent Hollywood movies that were supposed to be blockbusters and turned into world-class flops. All of them have the same basic structure as Airship Heroes, or for that matter of any improving Victorian tale of virtue rewarded and vice rebuked. You’ve got the good people being good because they’re good people, you’ve got the bad people being bad because they’re bad people, the bad people try to do something bad to the good people, and the good people win because they’re the good people, that’s why.
Throw in lavish cinematography and way too many special effects, get the paid reviewers to cough up the usual fulsome praise, and (ahem) you’re good – well, except that you may just find out that you had everyone on board but the audience, who yawned and stayed home. This is why the phrase “get woke, go broke” has become so well known among moviegoers and the less politically correct critics. It’s also why I expect any day now to hear that a group of young, brash, politically conservative venture capitalists have funded a new moviemaking studio which will be located just outside Branson, Missouri, which will produce films that won’t be subject to the rigid social-justice dogmatism that rules Hollywood these days, and which in ten years or so will be where all the hot young talent is headed because the Hollywood studios just keep doubling down on a series of failed formulae.
This is basically what happened, after all, to the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton.
– Adrift In An Airship - Ecosophia
Get Woke, Go Broke - Urban Dictionary
(paraphrasing) I'm suggesting a third way of response, which could be broadly defined as "Get ready". And it's to have conversations premised on an acceptance of imminent collapse, but with a faith that through talking with each other, with an open heart and open mind, we can work out what to do. It doesn't mean that we're going (...) to stave off some form of catastrophe (...) but we can at least look at ways of reducing harm.
And I would even go as far as saying unless we have those conversations now we face losing crucial time to actually help get some form of society into and through this moment. We don't know whether we can, but we lose that chance. Because we're too afraid and we want to stay in denial and not have these conversations.
– 👤 Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation - Jem Bendell & Toni Spencer (2019)
👤 William R. Catton Jr. - Overshoot
Q: Could you elaborate on what “ghost acreage” is and why it is important to Britain’s Industrial Revolution?
A: Ghost acreage is a term coined by Kenneth Pomeranz to help explain how Britain and other western European nations industrialized. The basic idea of “ghost acreage” is that imperial powers, like Britain, France, the Netherlands, and others, could draw upon resources from lands outside their borders, enabling those nations to support much larger economies than they otherwise could. For example, because of the economic connection between Britain and the United States, the cotton mills of Britain added “ghost acreage” from the U.S. South. This freed up good land in Britain for farmers to grow more food to feed the rapidly growing industrial population of Britain. If the British were to try to produce cotton within their own national borders, they would not only struggle to grow it in the wrong climate, but alternatives such as flax or sheep would chew up valuable acres of land British farmers could otherwise be using to grow food. Ghost acreage also comes into play when discussing new types of energy, such as coal. British industrialists could have burned wood to fuel their new machines, but they would have had to purchase and burn wood from throughout Europe and North America at great expense. By burning millions of tons of coal, it was as if the British had suddenly acquired billions of acres of underground forests. As with plantations, the use of coal freed up land for other purposes, such as agriculture, or it allowed for wood to be used in shipbuilding and construction instead of as fuel. Ghost acreage is an important concept because it reminds us of the ecological aspects of the industrial revolution; by drawing on natural resources from overseas and underground, the small island nation of Britain was able to escape its ecological constraints and start the Industrial Revolution.
Gifts should be the primary transactions, with barter, tribute and trade in order of decreasing importance.
See Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) p. 100/107
Also see Antipodes
Ginkgo model of societal crisis [gingko is a common spelling of Ginkgo biloba]
The major question on my mind now, instead, is how we could sail through the crisis without a major amount of bloodshed. This is where the “Ginkgo Model” may serve as a useful conceptual device. As I said earlier in this post, the trajectories of entry into structural-demographic crises are fairly narrowly channelized. But once the crisis breaks out, suddenly a much broader fan of possibilities opens up. It’s just like a Ginkgo leaf:
Some post-crisis trajectories go to a really dire territory: a bloody civil war, a revolution bringing an oppressive regime, or disintegration of the state into a number of territorial sections. Other post-crisis trajectories are less dire. In the best scenario, the elites manage to pull together and implement the reforms needed to defuse the pressures for crisis—reversing trends of immiseration and elite overproduction and restoring the fiscal health of the state.
– 👤 Peter Turchin - The Ginkgo Model of Societal Crisis - Cliodynamica
Tangential
Gothic High Tech : Consciously weaponized bullshit
👤 Bruce Sterling via 👤 Venkatesh Rao
graceful degradation : (technology in collapse) when a system is confronted with faults specific to collapse, such as unavailability of fuel, electric power, consumables, replacement parts etc. yet it doesn't instantly become a paperweight. Instead it allows repairing, degraded operation, upcycling or recycling. Examples: hand tool with electric power as progressive enhancement, electric bicycle that degrades into pedal-powered bicycle then into Chinese wheelbarrow
See Descent-friendly Design and Fault tolerance - Wikipedia
Identify / Coin Cornucopianism Contrarian
Information processing with computers underpins present societal complexity and enables desireable adaptation and conservation measures. But it relies on a vastly complex high-tech supply chain that is vulnerable to disruptions.
The Great Refactoring would be the effort to reinvent computing so it's sustainable in the deindustrial future.
Probably re-imagining it to work on a substrate other than the current one, electronics. Silicon chips, electricity, radio communications are all difficult to support without a fossil-fuel subsidized industrial base operating in a stable environment. At least at current levels of performance and cost.
Even though information processing capabilities are not inherently tied to this physical incarnation of electronic computers, The Great Refactoring is likely a doomed earthshot, a pipe dream. Although several proofs-of-concept for computing on novel substrates exist in the lab, time, money, planning and physical constraints hamper their timely roll-out.
Collapse OS takes a more pragmatic approach by focusing on electronic computing, but on a level of complexity easier to sustain by fixing with scavenged parts and tools in a collapsing world.
See decoupling
Collection of sustainable-living skills
Green wizards are defined as "individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate technology movement – and share them with their neighbours when the day comes that neighbours are willing to learn"
Hairshirt environmentalism (or hairshirt-green) refers to the idea that the environmental problems we face can be addressed by limiting our consumption of resources.
via 👤 Venkatesh Rao
See High-tech dip
Identify / Coin Conservation Cultural Evolution
high-tech dip : making use of advanced technology while available to vet designs and best practices that can be passed on and implemented by low-tech means.
A technological triage effort to brace a technology with chances of survival through the collapse of industrial civilization. The type of technology can be somewhat dependent and has been re-engineered to survive (2), independent (3), or defunct (4) and brought back from the dead.
It can be a re-engineering effort, for example producing slide rules to help replace a vulnerable but critical electronic technology. Or it can be a refinement effort, aimed at increasing the accessibility and ubiquity of a technology already presumed saved. For example doing computer simulations to determine an optimal design for a hand tool.
By actively planning for capability loss high-tech dips can be understood as an effort to contain the blow-back from unravelling intellectual dark matter. Entombing the fruits of complexity before that level is relinquished. Whether or not a fruit is suitable to be entombed is determined by the complexity cost of the low-tech phase (the lower the better) and the cost/benefit ratio of the effort (don't waste time optimizing trivialities), among other factors. A particularly strong signal will call for a big effort, a scramble that can be called an earthshot.
Examples:
- arriving at simpler proxies for high-tech tests. Listened to Dan Kittridge speaking about which lab he works with to get his soil tested, rarer minerals were tested as a bonus. If the tests rely on a burdensome technological suite, maybe we can leverage AI pattern matching to displace those tests, relying only on simpler DIY tests but getting sufficient information from them.
- (mechanical engineering) genetic algorithm generating millions of designs for a part, stress testing all of them in computer simulation and selecting the most optimal solution. That design can then be copied by craftsmen with hand tools. Ideally it is distributed with documentation (mentioning what it's optimized for, how and why). Or only the form was passed on, to be reproduced in the dark.
- using advances in cognitive science to develop teaching and learning methodologies, maximizing the chance that more people will learn new skills required by changing circumstances, faster.
A related example from the field of cultural evolution: the evolution of the soundholes in violins, which settled on the f-hole as the most optimum, best-sounding option, after painstakingly improving over many centuries. It appears this evolution of violin soundhole design moved towards acoustic power efficiency1.
Failures of cultural transmission. Imitation leading to idolatry of the Old World and decadent aping, losing sight of important properties of the technology.
In the low-tech phase we're dealing with a dead man walking technological suite. Evolving circumstances may require adapting the solution, but since only the transparent aspects of the technology are likely to have been transmitted through imitation, improvising an adaptation may not be obvious and the whole evolutionary path is dropped. The significance of the fruits of complexity should be preserved. Since the experiments can't be replicated so you must trust the design by checking its quality by other means.
Systemic collapse contagion. The context for the technology may undergo spontaneous existence failure, for any number of reasons.
Related:
- Technological triage
- Decadence
- Intellectual dark matter
- Appropriate Technology
- Intermediate technology
- Bridge technology
- Descent-friendly Design
- Graceful degradation
*[AI]: Artificial Intelligence
Peak Oil Energy Alternatives Fossil Fuels
Hobson's choice : a free choice in which only one thing is offered. Because a person may refuse to accept what is offered, the two options are taking it or taking nothing. In other words, one may "take it or leave it".
After generations of industrial agriculture, much of the world’s arable land is so depleted that it can no longer produce crops without significant inputs of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and other minerals. Unless the deindustrializing world can find a readily available, abundant and concentrated source of plant nutrients to replace chemical fertilizers before fossil fuels begin to run short, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that future humanity may face a Hobson’s choice, in which dwindling supplies of fossil fuels can be used to produce fertilizer to keep people from starving to death, or electricity and heat to keep them from freezing in the dark — but not both.
– John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, p. 112
Related: dilemma
Ecology
Cause & effect vs. Forcing & feedback (via 👤 Ugo Bardi)
hubris : the overweening pride of the doomed
via John Michael Greer, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (2015) > Chapter 5. The God with the Monkeywrench, p. 110, EPUB file
ignore-ance : returning from a state of consciousness to a willed state of not knowing
Coined by Chris Foster, via Under the Weather - Believer Magazine
A possible response to eco-anxiety. For more coping topics see /r/CollapseSupport
The Golden Rule of Technological Innovation:
Innovation does not solve problems, it creates them
The second rule of technological innovation:
Sucessful innovations are always highly disruptive
The fighting tanks with horses methaphor.
– 👤 Ugo Bardi Cassandra's Legacy: The Coming Seneca Cliff of the Automotive Industry: the Converging Effect of Disruptive Technologies and Social Factors
Coined by 👤 Samo Burja
Maybe there's something invisible holding our society together in the exact same way. (...) Intellectual dark matter. I think we are standing on a large tower of intellectual dark matter. And some of the dark matter has been lost for good. And some of it is still with us. And sometimes, unfortunately, I think we're living on the fumes of institutions that remain on autopilot, but the knowledge has been lost.
[Intellectual dark matter is] the observation that even if we cannot investigate the knowledge directly we can ascertain the knowledge exists. Just as the invisible mass can be detected through its gravitational effects.
– Samo Burja - Civilization - Institutions, Knowledge and the Future (2018)
Standard delusional response to historical arguments supporting the imminence of collapse
the iron triangle : entrapping interdependence relationships between a house (because you need a place to live), a job (because you need to pay for the house) and a car (because you need to be able to commute to the job) Example: The sailboat, as a lifehack, has allowed my family to break out of the “iron triangle” of house — car — job by which much of the population is enslaved.
The iron triangle is a well-designed trap, and escaping from it is very difficult. It is difficult even for a young, resourceful individual who can sustain some amount of hardship and doesn’t have much to lose. It is even more difficult for families with children. This is because it is not possible to get rid of any one vertex of the iron triangle without jeopardizing the others:
- Lose the job — and how will you continue paying for the house and the car?
- Lose the car — and how will you get yourself to the job? And if you can’t earn money, then how will you keep paying for the house?
- Lose the house — and where will you recuperate between your work shifts so that you can continue working the job and paying for the car?
– Dmitry Orlov - Shrinking the Technosphere (2017) Chapter 8: Wresting control > The iron triangle
See also: Squeeze, Binding factors
Jevons paradox : the observation that increasing energy efficiency ultimately leads not to conservation, but to increased demand due to affordability.
In economics, the Jevons paradox is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
In 1865, 👤 William Stanley Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal increased considerably after James Watt introduced his improvements to the steam engine. Jevons argued that increased efficiency in the use of coal would tend to increase the demand for coal, and would not reduce the rate at which England's deposits of coal were running out.
Also known as the rebound effect. See also Khazzoom-Brookes postulate
"Warehouse on wheels" model
Khazzoom-Brookes postulate : energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel, lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macrolevel.
A more modern analysis of a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox.
The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief, is a series of emotional stages experienced when faced with impending death or death of someone. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
See Leapfrog
leapfrog : to jump over some obstacle, to overtake, to progress. In the context of collapse leapfrogging is skipping a technological stage in societal problem-solving. The classic example is leapfrogging wired phone infrastructure and going straight for a mobile phone one instead.
While big emitting nations and international aviation and shipping are pivotal to delivering early and global-scale mitigation, overlooking how emissions may rise as other nations necessarily improve their standards of well-being would be a mistake. It is clear that rapidly industrializing nations need to leapfrog the high-carbon infrastructures of their industrialized counterparts, and establish low-carbon alternatives from the outset.
– Alice Larkin, Jaise Kuriakose, Maria Sharmina & Kevin Anderson (2018) What if negative emission technologies fail at scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations, Climate Policy, 18:6, 690-714, DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2017.1346498
LESS : acronym for Less Energy, Stuff and Stimulation
*[LESS]: Less Energy, Stuff and Stimulation
Coined by 👤 John Michael Greer
See The Archdruid Report - Hair Shirts, Hypocrisy, and Wilkins Micawber
legacy tech : machines that can be kept running for years or decades after they can no longer be made > The struggle to control various items of legacy tech may become a fruitful source of conflict as the deindustrial age proceeds down the curve of catabolic collapse
– John Michael Greer, The Long Descent (2009) > Chapter 5: Tools for Transition, p. 175
One way or another, the flow of new products will eventually sputter to a halt, though at least some of today’s technologies will stay in use for as long as they can be kept functioning in the harsh conditions of an age of resource scarcity and ecological payback. A surprisingly broad range of technologies can be built and maintained by people who have little or no grasp of the underlying science, and thus it has happened more than once — as with the Roman aqueducts that brought water to medieval cities — that a relatively advanced technology can be kept running for centuries by people who have no clue how it was built. Over the short and middle term, in a world after progress, we can probably expect many current technologies to remain in place for a while, though it’s an open question how many people in the industrial world will still be able to afford to use them for how much longer.
– John Michael Greer, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (2015) > Chapter 5. The God with the Monkeywrench, pp. 132–133, EPUB file
See Technological triage and High-tech dip
Tangential
Striving for political unification is an effort to increase legibility, meaning better exploitation.
Ecology
Liebig's law of the minimum - Wikipedia
Liebig's barrel illustrating the limiting factor of energy for the economy. From the video course Nexus One > Energy primacy - Part 2 | Energy & Economy 7/16 by 👤 Nate Hagens
growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor).
or
the amount of anything that a given species or ecosystem can produce in a given place and time is limited by whichever resource is in shortest supply. (...) concentrated energy is the limiting resource.
from The Archdruid Report - The End of Employment
Systems Thinking
*[LTG]: Limits to Growth
The Limits to Growth - Wikipedia
There goes that Limits to Growth argument again. And indeed this [fisheries collapse model] is a LTG archetype system: a rapid growth rate, a limit, and a feedback signal to slow down that accumulation of boats that's coming too late to keep the system from going over an important threshold beyond which the system begins to erode. Those things together make not only an unsustainable system but a system that's almost certainly going to crash.
– paraphrasing from 👤 Donella Meadows - Sustainable Systems (1999) #t=00:39:44,00:40:19
Presented at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business as part of the Sustainability Lecture Series on March 18, 1999.
its main message was unbelievable and unacceptable, since it could be paraphrased as follows: global politics in the first third of the 21st century will be dominated by global resource and pollution constraints.
“Data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario,” Turner concluded in the 2014 paper.
“It is notable that there does not appear to be other economy-environment models that have demonstrated such comprehensive and long-term data agreement.”
– 👤 Graham Turner
Alternate forms: lo tek, folk tek
via 👤 Nicole Foss
Identify / Coin
Tongue-in-cheek way to assert the fallacy of economic wealth decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions.
Tim Garrett - Measure the size of the global economy from the top of Mauna Loa
the mariner's rule : One hand for yourself, one hand for the ship
The rule that sailors learned and followed in those days was simple: “One hand for yourself, one hand for the ship.” Every chore that had to be done up there in the rigging could be done by a gang of sailors who each lent one hand to the effort, so the other could cling for dear life to the nearest rope or ratline.
from The Archdruid Report: The Mariner's Rule
Modern techno-industrial society is a product of the ‘enlightenment project’ and is deeply rooted in what philosophers refer to as ‘Cartesian dualism.’ This perspective sees humans as somehow separate from the biophysical world, assumes we are masters of nature and enables us to act as if society is not subject to serious ecological constraints. Dualism, and its companion expansionary-materialist worldview, are arguably the major source of many of the so-called ‘environmental problems’ confronting humankind today.
– William Rees about page | SCARP | UBC School of Community and Regional Planning
via 👤 Rob Hopkins
The monkey trap is, as the name suggests, a device for trapping monkeys. It is ingenuous in its simplicity, and also in the fact that it does not actually trap the monkey at all: it is the monkey that does the trapping. The trap consists of a hollowed-out gourd tied to a tree using a vine. The gourd has an opening just big enough to admit a monkey's paw when it isn't clenched into a fist. Inside is a banana. The monkey reaches inside, grabs the banana, but cannot withdraw it. Even as the hunter approaches to collect it, it cannot bring itself to unclench its fist, let go of the banana and escape. What traps the monkey is the monkey's own internal cost/benefit analysis, which is slanted toward the short term, coupled with its inability to consider the long-term effect of its short-term decisions. It is a perfect metaphor for what has caused the US to go off the rails.
from 👤 Dmitry Orlov - Monkey Trap Nation
"When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail"
"When you realize that you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging"
from 👤 John Michael Greer The Long Descent: A user's guide to the end of the industrial age (2008) Chapter 2: The Stories We Tell Ourselves > Faustus and the Monkey Trap; Distracting Ourselves
The monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, also known as the monopoly on violence
States exercise a monopoly of force
via 👤 Joseph Tainter The Collapse of Complex Societies
Look if we're gonna catch up and not be behind forever we have to do something big. We have to commit a lot of money, a lot of resources... We're gonna go to the Moon.
– JFK on the moonshot, according to Jonathan Blow #t=00:01:23,00:01:33
MTI : Modern techno-industrial society
*[MTI]: Modern Techno-Industrial
*[NTE]: Near-term Extinction *[NTHE]: Near-term Human Extinction
Ecology
🆚 transparent.
This may seem backwards, but it isn’t. In many situations transparency invites exploitation by outsiders, while ambiguity and opaqueness require local knowledge and subjective judgment.
– Dmitry Orlov - Shrinking the Technosphere (2017) Chapter 4: Harm/Benefit Analysis
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
overshoot : growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, leading to crash
From the cover of Overshoot - The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982)
See 👤 Donella Meadows - Twelve leverage points
/r/Paupericide. The Extermination of the Poor.
This sub is dedicated to monitoring the extermination of the poor. From Latin pauper (“poor”) and the suffix -cide (a Latin combining form meaning "killer," "the act of killing").
Paupericide is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control — in everyday language, to make money — by destroying or taking the lives of those below. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below
Anything about criminalizing or hampering Survival by either state or non-state actors is permitted in this sub. Examples of Survival Crime include things like basic behaviors, such as sitting, lying down, sleeping, building shelter, making fire to stay warm, sharing or recieving food.
Beware of
- Biofuels policy that raise the prices of food such that people begin to become malnourished or starve in poorer countries.
- Enactment and enforcement of legislation that makes it illegal to sleep, sit, or store personal belongings in public spaces in cities where people are forced to live in public spaces.
- Selective enforcement of more neutral laws, such as loitering, jaywalking, or open container laws, against poor people.
- Sweeps of city areas in which poor persons are living to drive them out of those areas, frequently resulting in the destruction of individuals’ personal property such as important personal documents and medication.
- Enactment and enforcement of laws that punish people for begging or engaging in unsanctioned/unpermitted work, in order to move poor or homeless persons out of a city or area of higher socioeconomic class.
- Enactment and enforcement of laws that restrict groups sharing food with poor/homeless persons in public spaces.
- Enforcement of a wide range of so-called “quality of life” ordinances related to public activities and hygiene (i.e. public urination) when no public facilities are available to people without housing
A game to play while arguing with peak oil deniers.
I’ve thought more than once of providing my readers with Bingo cards marked with the credos most commonly used to silence discussions of our future—“they’ll think of something,” “technology can solve any problem,” “the world’s going to end soon anyway,” “it’s different this time,” and so on—with some kind of prize for whoever fills theirs up first.
– The Archdruid Report - Mentats Wanted, Will Train
| Solar satellites will save us. | You just don't understand capitalism. | The aliens will land before we run out of oil. | There's nothing we can do about it. | I can't deal with that. |
| The market will take care of it. | The technology's getting cheaper. | I don't want to live through that. | Scarcity is just a state of mind. | Biodiesel will save us. |
| I need it, so it has to stay available. | There are no limits to what we can achieve. | PEAK OIL DENIAL BINGO (free square) |
(Sudden change of subject.) | Fracking will save us. |
| They'll think of something. | Jesus will show up before we run out of oil. | They've just found a big new oil field. | It's different this time. | Technology will always be with us. |
| The stone age wasn't ended by a stone shortage. | We'll all be extinct soon anyway. | Fusion power will save us. | It's the government's fault. | I'll be dead before it happens |
whole systems thinking applied to design.
Permaculture : an ecological design methodology whereby we create relationships between materials, plants, animals and humans, so that their function and yield are optimized.
The aim is to create systems that are ecologically sound and economically profitable which provide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute and are therefore sustainable in the long term. Much of the design is taken from nature. It can be as simple or as sophisticated as you like.
it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. Watch Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil | TED Talk 👤 Rob Hopkins
See Joseph Tainter - The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)
The great physicist Max Planck, in a statement that Nicholas Rescher calls 'Planck's Principle of Increasing Effort, observed that "...with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased" (Rescher 1980)
via 👤 Joseph Tainter Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996)
Ecology 👤 William R. Catton Jr.
See crash
A reasonable approach by 👤 Dmitry Orlov, from his Post-Collapse Planning presentation at the ASPO conference 2011
*[ASPO]: Association for the Study of Peak Oil
Maybe that child will grow up to be the genius that fixes climate change! You don't know!
As it happens, Rickmansworth appears on the first page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; it’s the town where “a girl sitting on her own in a small café” suddenly discovers the secret to making the world “a good and happy place.” But fate intervenes. “Before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.”
See ClubOrlov: Book Excerpt: The Problem of Excessive Scale
Read Leopold Kohr - The Breakdown of Nations (2001)
Watch Geoffrey West on Complexity (2011) - YouTube
See Civil religion of progress
progress trap : > the unintended consequences of brilliant innovations that permit clever folks to survive by shifting to a new and improved way of life. Unfortunately, they also tend to burn the bridges behind them as they advance. Returning to the good old days is no longer possible.
– Ronald Wright, via 👤 Richard Adrian Reese – What Is Sustainable: Wild Free and Happy Sample 21
What social scientists label a “progressivist” view supposes that cultural complexity is intentional and that it emerged through the inventiveness of our ancestors. Progressivism is the dominant ideology of free-market societies. A sort of ancestor myth. The concepts of civilization and progress have a status in the cosmology of industrial societies that amounts to what anthropologists call “ancestor myths.” Ancestor myths validate a contemporary social order by presenting it as a natural and sometimes heroic progression from earlier times.
(Joseph Tainter - Human Resource Use - Timing and Implications for Sustainability)
The Utterly Dismal Theorem - directly challenges the progressivist view: Any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for as long as misery is the only check on population, the improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population, which is to increase the sum total of human misery (Boulding, 1959: vii [emphases in original]).
via On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs
See Jevons paradox
rebuildables : The more fitting name 👤 Nate Hagens uses for renewables
See Renewables
reconciliation : within 👤 Jem Bendell's framework of Deep Adaptation, considering “what could I make peace with to lessen suffering?”
As we contemplate endings our thoughts turn towards that kind of reconciliation: with our mistakes, with death, and some would add, with God. We can also seek to be part of reconciliations between peoples with different political persuasions, religions, nations, genders, classes and generations. Without this inner deep adaptation to climate collapse I fear we risk tearing societies apart. Unless we have found a way to accept the impermanence of our own lives and those we love (to be reconciled with mortality) and a way to accept that we must act without knowing if we will succeed (to be reconciled with impotence), our future actions risk being a form of manic distraction that could lead to violence.
– Bendell, Jem (2019) Because it’s not a drill: technologies for deep adaptation to climate chaos. In: Connect University Conference on Climate Change, 13 May 2019, DG Connect, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium.
Cassandra's Legacy: Some reflections on the Twilight of the Oil Age - part I
Many readers are no doubt familiar with the so-called “Red Queen” effect illustrated in Figure 2 – to have to run fast to stay put, and even faster to be able to move forward. The OI is fully caught in it.
‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’ - Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-glass
Due to the rapid decline of net energy per barrel, the Oil Industry is under the sway of the Red Queen Effect. It must run faster and faster, pumping more and more oil per year, to meet end-users' demands -- ditto for all other fossil and nuclear resources that are subject to the same Red Queen Effect. But the net energy/barrel all need to keep running will have run out by about 2026.
‘Now, here, you see, if you run too fast you die!’ (paraphrasing Lewis Carroll)
All alternatives, PVs, wind turbines, biomass, shale oil, tar sands, new nuclear etc. are under the sway of the Inverse Red Queen Effect:
- if they grow at above 7%/year, the energy needed for their build out drains net energy out of the industrial world, just when much more of it is required
- while they actually need to grow at 35%/year to address the Perfect Storm over the next 10 years – at that rate the net energy drain would kill the industrial world
Currently, globally, about 88% of all energy resources are used wastefully -- a waste worth over €5 trillion/year globally. However, by retrieving waste heat and making productive use of it, it is feasible to sustainably circumvent the RQ & 1/RQ Effects & tap into those lost funds
relinquishment : within 👤 Jem Bendell's framework of Deep Adaptation, it involves people and communities letting go of certain assets, behaviours and beliefs where retaining them could make matters worse.
Examples include withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facilities, or giving up expectations for certain types of consumption
Preparation
What are the best places to be, leading up to or during collapse, that I can get to, and establish myself in such a way that I can maintain the best standard of living possible for as long as I can or simply increase my probability of surviving the incoming population bottleneck.
Where’s the best place to live in light of collapse? : collapse
Your personal relocation strategy is a question of what you can achieve and what you desire. Your list will however match other people's list to a great extent, so you must find trade-offs – creative ecological niches.
Example:
Do you like not living in unbearable heat, maybe moving to greenland is NOT a better option than just buying 400W of solar panels and attaching it to a small efficient AC that keeps one room of your house cool even during summer electricity blackouts. Most problems have multiple solutions, it is worth it to take time and think about things from an economic perspective and different time horizon perspectives.
Another scenario to illustrate the importance of finding a niche:
Imagine you are a goat herder in Somalia during a multi year drought and there is no grass for feeding your animals. You have to sell them for dirt cheap because everyone else is also trying to sell off everything they can to get money thus depressing the goat prices further. Now the price of food is skyrocketing because there is no grass and the farmers crops failed, everyone is trying to buy up a hoard of food because everyone knows it is going to be a hard year. You manage to get the equivalent of $120USD in cash after selling practically everything you own but held onto one breeding pair of your healthiest goats you plan to use to regain a livelihood after the drought is over.
To aim for the optimal resilience think: if I find myself in dire straits will I be alone (too fragile), in the same boat with millions others (too competitive) or alongside a small community, collaborating to mutually overcome the difficulty (ideal)?
A meta-heuristic is to look to increase your optionality.
Survival and thriving always has and always will involve dynamic adaptation.
Related: dissensus
“Renewable” energy technologies are misnamed — “rebuildable” is a more fitting name for them
Renewable energy is, therefore, misnamed. It’s a phrase, a meme, a story because it implies that its energy may be renewed and used again. This is not the case. An oak tree is renewable. A chicken is renewable. They can reproduce themselves based on solar and hydrological flows, and finding another chicken. A Prius or a wind tower aren’t renewable – they’re rebuildable.
Some problems with trasitioning to wind and solar power infrastructure:
Completely gratuitous use of the term "renewable". For wind and solar, the energy source for power generation may be renewable, but the technology is not. Every 15-20 years it has to be "renewed" using industrial production that is based on nonrenewable resources, many of them already scarce. Solar panels and wind turbine blades are not only nonrenewable but largely nonrecyclable and, in the case of solar panels, constitute toxic waste. The push for "renewables" has in each case paved the path toward rapid deindustrialization and offshoring of industrial production; in the future, these "advanced" (read, "deindustrlalized") economies will be unable to import expensive "renewable" technology and will lose access to electricity.
– Comment by 👤 Dmitry Orlov on 16 January 2020 on the post New Decade, New Rules
👤 Saul Griffith Conservation Energy Efficiency Contrarian Descent computing
replacing atoms with bits : the high-tech adaptation strategy of substituting control for material, when it's lighter and cheaper to do so.
The really big themes I’d like to emphasize, because we need more people to join the club, so to speak, is the importance of being able to substitute a control system — sensors and computers — for actual materials... We are actually now replacing atoms with bits.
– Saul Griffith - SOFT, not SOLID: Beyond Traditional Hardware Engineering (2014) via What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view. > Producing Energy > Computation
The catch that many cornucopians tend to play down is that the wealth generated by replacing atoms with bits is now dependent on a high-tech suite, which comes with a long, vast and energy intensive supply chain that's vulnerable to disruptions. As I'm writing this the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging Asia is causing just these kinds of disruptions.
This problem could be mitigated by:
- high-tech dips, where a design relies on high-tech for invention, but can be supported with a low-tech suite after it's introduced
- The Great Refactoring, reinventing computing so it's sustainable in the deindustrial future
The opposite of efficiency.
resilience : a system's capacity to absorb shocks and reorganize as it is undergoing change, so that it continues to have, essentially, the same function, structure and reactions and, therefore, the same identity.
Complexicon - Resilience from Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer YouTube channel
As 👤 James Howard Kunstler puts it, "efficiency is the straightest path to hell", because there is little or no capacity to adapt in a maxed out system.
In pursuit of a conceptual map of “deep adaptation,” we can conceive of resilience of human societies as the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviours.
– 👤 Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating our Climate Tragedy (2018)
The best example of this phenomenon is, I think, with today's planes. They have noticeably slowed down from the time of the supersonic Concorde, to emphasize efficiency and comfort. The Concorde was simply too expensive to be a practical technology: it was a plane in overshoot. It is likely that something like that will happen to today's smartphones - right now, they are wonderful devices, but they are in a condition of resource overshoot. In the future, we will not be able to maintain their extreme performance facing the increasing costs of rare mineral resources. That doesn't mean that smartphones will disappear (although that's not impossible) but it means that some kind of compromise between performance and cost will have to be reached.
restoration : within 👤 Jem Bendell's framework of Deep Adaptation, it involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and organisation that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded
Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support.
Related: retrovation, LESS
Technology Innovation
the strategy of using the past as a resource for problem-solving in the present.
from The Archdruid Report - A Time for Retrovation
Identify / Coin 👤 John Michael Greer
reverse wealth pump for the Age of Salvage : Designing assets to be bought by the rich in the present that will ultimately end up stranded, to be used as raw material by salvage societies. Example: batteries from electric mining equipment
(...) What if we could somehow design products FOR dismantling? Whip up some gadget frenzy among the rich of today, get them to buy up said gadget in droves until it's fairly ubiquitous, then have them dispose of it (fad is over / planned obsolescence / etc.) then when it gets to the Global South that gadget is full of useful modules for off-grid homesteading, that poor people can make use of with a bit of tinkering (think Cuba). Like washing machine motors can be useful for wind power generation.
from akaleeroy comments on Collapseniks conveniently squeezed into boxes (prettified chart)
SCIM : simple critical infrastructure map. A way to understand vital services and how they keep you safe.
Succinctly:
If you cut your finger with scissors, it's pointless to wonder which blade hurts you more.
Context:
It’s been a long time since anyone raised again a race between declining availability of liquid fossil fuels (“peak oil”) and climate change. Since America increased its production, and other countries may also find frackable oil and gas deposits, the presumption is we will have enough energy to power our way directly into catastrophic climate change. In other words, we have been presuming that climate change “wins” the race to crash our civilization, and likely the world population. What does Jean-Marc think? He gives the example of scissors on your finger: one blade is energy supply, the other climate change, both pinch.
Jean-Marc Jancovici: Whistling Past the Graveyard – Radio Ecoshock
The scissors model of Malthusian collapse, where the population grows without limit and resources do not, is the idea of great opposing environmental forces cutting into each other.
Ecology
Conservation
Slow steaming refers to the practice of operating transoceanic cargo ships, especially container ships, at significantly less than their maximum speed to save money on fuel.
Identify / Coin Denial Coping Psychology Society
The highest have the farthest to fall
A hypothesis that accounts for why some people are better positioned to entertain the possibility of collapse. Because they are less invested in the system, whereas those with senior roles in our society lean more conservatively (see Strategic ignorance)
Since the [Deep Adaptation] paper came out, I have come to consider a new reason why societal collapse is inevitable. It came to me when I spoke at the European Commission. During my talk I did a quick poll to discover that about 90 percent of the officials in the room believed that collapse is coming within their lifetimes. Yet their ability to conceive of what was appropriate to discuss as policy responses and activism was, in general, woeful. The ideas being shared were more of the same tinkering with capitalism and redirecting private investment into mitigation efforts. Why? One hypothesis is that the highest have the farthest to fall. If one is well-respected, well-paid, and living well in the current system, perhaps with a sense of responsibility for lots of employees and stakeholders, then one has the most to let go of in order to allow the full impact of our current situation to sink in. At a sub-conscious level it eats away at assumptions you didn’t know you had. For instance, assuming that one would be respected by your children and younger generations as you enter old age, and, ultimately as you lie on your death bed. To be successful in society means one is having affirmed, daily, the illusion of the socially-respected agentic separate Self. Instead, our climate chaos invites us to see that we aren’t separate, we aren’t in control and our stories of self-respect and meaning were always made up. We must let our deepest assumptions and stories melt away to find what else can emerge. That may be why I have a better time talking to children about collapse than I do talking to people with senior jobs.
– 👤 Jem Bendell - A Year of Deep Adaptation – Professor Jem Bendell
societal collapse 👤 Jem Bendell Deep Adaptation : the uneven ending of our current means of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning. Others may prefer the term societal breakdown when referring to the same process.
Soft Development Paths - The Gupta Option
The soft development path is an alternative approach to spreading results like those of the Kerala Miracle, in which an Indian region with an average income of $300 per year has attained quality of life as measured by lifespans, literacy and infant mortality very close to those of rich nations. Although not every area may enjoy Kerala's unique social advantages, Kerala proves that it is possible to live well on very little money or ecological impact. Kerala proves it can be done, and appropriate technology will lower the barriers to this kind of success in other regions.
People are often locked into unsustainable lifestyles.
squeeze
: (collapse) a situation in which you are pressured into taking an unsustainable path.
That city really puts the squeeze on you.
See also: Binding factors, Iron Triangle
Identify / Coin
startdown : a decline-aware startup. A new organization focused on solutions for prosperous descent. > Enshrine the values of tomorrow into the code of today.
Related: earthshot
stordalen
: carbon footprint unit equivalent to a single bacon cheeseburger 🍔 4.15 lbs (1.88 kg) CO₂e.
Example: Ms. Stordalen's wedding celebration flight came in a little under 10.5 kilostordalens (ks)
(...) about Ms. Stordalen and her 10,491-bacon-cheeseburger flight. (It suddenly occurs to me that a stordalen, equivalent to 4.15 lbs of CO2 — the carbon dioxide footprint of a single a bacon cheeseburger — would make a good measure of carbon footprint more generally. The flight just mentioned thus came in a little under 10.5 kilostordalens (ks); how many megastordalens (Ms) or even terastordalens (Ts) get churned out by the lifestyles of today’s privileged is a question I think few of them would want to answer.)
– A Wilderness of Mirrors - Ecosophia
strategic ignorance : Sudden, total inability to comprehend a datum one finds inconvenient.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
– Upton Sinclair
Related: Denial
via 👤 Joseph Tainter
A subsidy dumpster, if I may venture on a definition, is an energy technology that looks like a viable option so long as nobody pays attention to the economic realities.
See The Archdruid Report - The Crocodiles of Reality 👤 John Michael Greer
Economics
Ecology
Design Pattern
Watch Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil | TED Talk 👤 Rob Hopkins
via 👤 Toby Hemenway
[...] humans have rarely had surplus energy. Surpluses are quickly dissipated by growth in consumption. Since humans have rarely had surpluses, the availability of energy cannot be the primary driver of cultural evolution.
surplus energy economics : > the principle that the economy should be understood as an energy system, not a financial one.
– #175. The Surplus Energy Economy | Surplus Energy Economics
Sustainable = the mid-point between degenerative actions and regenerative actions.
We can bring a degree of rigor to our discourse by a simple step. Each time one hears the word sustainability insist that the speaker answer four questions:
- Sustain what?
- Sustain it for whom?
- Sustain it for how long? and
- Sustain it at what cost?
These questions appear simple on the surface but the ease with which they may be offered obscures their power. Asking these questions carries one deeply into a rigorous assessment of what sustainability means and how it may be achieved in specific situations.
– 👤 Joseph Tainter, taken from Joseph Tainter - What is Transformation?
Sustainability prioritizes outcomes, resilience prioritizes process2
Also see Joseph Tainter - Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability
System D : a name for the informal economy or the shadow economy
System D or Système D is a person's ability to adapt quickly and improvise to solve problems.
The protest conundrum debated in Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013), p. 180/187
techno-fix : Technological band-aids applied on top of other technology which has failed us.
Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what's happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.
“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries."
Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you: "circumlatrantium" . which refers to barbarians who are, literally, "barking around" the empire's borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking - they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of "Of matters of war" is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.
Related: Cornucopianism, Unserious
via 👤 James Howard Kunstler How Do You Like the Long Emergency So Far? Jim Kunstler at TEDxAlbany 2010 #t=00:13:53
Foundation of ignorance
technological triage
: sorting critical technologies by their dependence on a functioning industrial system:
1) wholly dependent – can't be saved no matter what
2) somewhat dependent – will be saved if we act and lost if we don't
3) independent – will be saved even if we do nothing
4) defunct – technologies that have gone out of existence but could be brought back and put into use if action is taken now.
Like triage done by battlefield medics, resources should go to 2) and 4), reengineering the somewhat dependent technologies to survive deindustrialization and bringing back defunct appropriate technologies.
– John Michael Greer, The Long Descent (2009) > Chapter 5: Tools for Transition, p. 173
tragedy of the commons : The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.
– Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia
from 👤 William R., Jr. - Overshoot via The Archdruid Report - As Night Closes In
“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
– Garrett Hardin, via Doom For Dummies
Related: Fractal planting patterns yield optimal harvests, without central control a situation observed with Balinese rice farmers where they plant in synchrony without central planning, but maximizing their individual gain creates optimum yields instead of the tragedy of the commons. Codifying this practice into a scientific theory to be prescribed has caveats though: 👤 Nassim Taleb makes this case talking about traders arriving at price.
Their prices were sophisticated and more efficient than those produced by the formula, and it was obvious what came first. For instance, the prices accounted for Extremistan and “fat tails,” which the standard formulas ignored. (...) Traders trade → traders figure out techniques and products → academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them → new traders believe academics → blowups (from theory-induced fragility)
via 👤 Catherine Austin Fitts
trading up : going against your residual middle-class financial programming and overcoming irrational aversion to spending money where it matters.
from 👤 Venkatesh Rao RibbonFarm Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class
See Lost Generation, Downshifting
See Joseph Tainter - What is Transformation?
a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.
– The age of turboparalysis » The Spectator 👤 Dmitry Orlov
See Bumpy plateau
Most of us grew up using QWERTY keyboards, but they were actually designed to slow typists down so they wouldn't jam typewriters. There are far more efficient keyboard layouts (DVORAK, for instance). Changing society over would make the world generally more efficient. But we won't, because everyone already knows QWERTY and all the keyboards already have QWERTY layouts and learning new things is hard and having two systems during the switch over is twice as hard. An individual could choose to move over, but then they have to go to the extra effort, creating hardship for themselves, while really making not much of a difference at all.
So, who do you blame for this? The original keyboard designers, who never envisioned modern computers? Companies who meet demand for QWERTY keyboards? Regulators and schools? Individuals who take the path of least resistance?
And that's just one insignificant habit that could be fixed in a decade with the slightest bit of effort. Stopping carbon emissions, on the other hand, will outright kill billions of us.
No person or company is ultimately responsible for climate change; it is a natural, unintended consequence of our society. The use of fossil fuels was originally well-intended by people who never imagined that they could break the planet and nothing less than utterly breaking civilization as we know it can fix it.
– [/u/sylbug commenting on Corporations are wrecking this planet
See Jevons paradox
Identify / Coin
The opposite of specialized. A very specialized tool is harder to repair and may become obsolete, losing all value. Universally usable goods are good news for resilience and barter.
- general purpose 🆚 specialized
- interoperability 🆚 vendor lock-in
- standard 🆚 bespoke
- ubiquitous 🆚 rare
- global 🆚 local
- fungible 🆚 unexchangeable
- transparent 🆚 ambiguous/opaque
Way to describe delusional responses to the challenges of collapse, hinging on an incomplete picture of the problem and/or fallacies: wishful thinking, infinite substitutability, cornucopianism, infinite growth on a finite planet.
via 👤 James Howard Kunstler How unserious #t=00:07:57,00:07:58
One of the central myths of modern society is that the process of urbanization (and slumification—favelas are currently the fastest-growing form of human habitation) is due to city life being “more attractive” and farming becoming “more efficient.” Fewer people want to or need to inhabit the wider landscape, the story goes, and so they are moving to the cities. And this, some say, is simply a good thing. But the real cause of this rapid urbanization is that economic activity is moving to the city—because localized, artisanal production cannot compete with centralized manufacturing. This is a temporary dislocation made possible by burning fossil fuels.
a form of systemic, institutionalized violence
– Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) pp. 18–20/25–27
Design Pattern
Cornucopianism Peak Oil Energy Alternatives
Saying the market will replace petrochemicals because it replaced whale oil (used for lamps, not 100,001 industrial processes and consumer products) is like saying we'll find abundant rare earth minerals forever because we didn't run out of rocks.
– /u/Blisk_McQueen comments on The World's Resources Aren't Running Out
See also: Peak Oil Denial Bingo!
White's law, named after Leslie White and published in 1943, states that, other factors remaining constant, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased".
from The Archdruid Report - The Era of Pretense
wicked problems : highly complex problems which cannot be solved in a straightforward way, and may not be soluble at all.
We need to be aware of their existence because the problems we are now facing are wicked. If we cannot see a solution, that does not necessarily mean that we have not understood the problem; it may mean that there isn't one.
The main features of a wicked problem are:
- Vagueness: they lack clear definition because they spill over into many different issues and systems.
- Hard to grasp: they can be recognised from one or two perspectives, but are too complex to understand in the round.
- Populated: they affect many people: solutions are likely to be social rather than technical.
- No right answer: the best that can be done is to pick the least bad response.
- Changeable: the problem, and attitudes bother to it and to solutions, are constantly changing.
- No definition: the problem may be hard even to identify in a form that allows it to be shared.
- No solution?: there is no objective clear definition of the problem, so no definitive solution.
- No clean ending: the problem-solving ends when money and time run out.
But do not believe that a problem is wicked because someone tells you so. Look again.
– 👤 David Fleming. Lean Logic: A dictionary for the future and how to survive it. 2016, p.499
Solar via 👤 John Michael Greer
Solar steam-engine pioneer.
La Chaleur solaire et ses Applications industrielles (1869)
See The Archdruid Report - The Steampunk Future Revisited and The Archdruid Report - Captain Erikson's Equation
Permaculture
What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
Tangential
David Fleming (writer) - Wikipedia
Author of Lean Logic: A Dictionary of the future and how to survive it (2016)
The dictionary is now available online: List of entries - LEAN LOGIC
Tangential
Deep Green Resistance
Podcast: Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio archives
Donella H. "Dana" Meadows
Reddit: /r/dredmorbius /u/dredmorbius
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Problems, Predicaments, and Technology
Reddit: /u/Erinaceous
Coined dissensus
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy, Stanford University Press, 2001.
James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By Hand novels, and more than a dozen other books.
Ecosophia blog
Formerly blogged at The Archdruid Report, now taken offline. The Archdruid Report Archive
Co-author of The Limits to Growth
Michael B. Dowd
Risk Tangential
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Wikipedia
Twitter: @nntaleb
The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future - Energy For The Future
Nexus One video series - University of Minnesota Honors Freshmen Experience
Nicole Foss Archives - The Automatic Earth
Author: John Pugsley - Worldcat
Known for coining and publicizing collapsology, co-author of Comment tout peut s'effondrer: petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (2015) / How Everything Can Collapse (2020)
aka Ramblinactivist
‘The Metablog’ Index – Ramblinactivist’s Blogs
Cliodynamica – Peter Turchin's blog
Peter Turchin is a Professor at the University of Connecticut, External Professor at the Complexity Science Hub-Vienna, and Research Associate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He conducts research on the cultural evolution and historical dynamics of past and present societies. He is the author of seven books, including War and Peace and War (2005), Secular Cycles (2009), and more recently Ultrasociety(2016) and Ages of Discord (2016).
Known for coining and publicizing collapsology, co-author of Comment tout peut s'effondrer: petit manuel de collapsologie à l'usage des générations présentes (2015) / How Everything Can Collapse (2020)
aka Rick Reese. What Is Sustainable
Transition Movement
Robert Evans (journalist) - Wikipedia
Roy Scranton (Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) | Goodreads
Behind Instructables.com, Makani Power, Otherlab.com etc.
Proponent of the un:solid movement
Economics
Permaculture
Cassandra's Legacy blog
Tangential
Blogs at RibbonFarm
Twitter: @vgr
Initiator of the Hexayurt project and the 6WTD framework and SCIM
Ecology Post Carbon Institute
Originator of the "ecological footprint" concept
Ecology
William R. Catton Jr. - Wikipedia
Economics
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"For a constant void area, the f-hole has the maximum power radiation among other historic soundhole geometries in the violin family." – Tavakoli Nia, H. (2010). Acoustic function of sound hole design in musical instruments (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). ↩
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Charles Redman, "Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits?", Ecology and Society 19(2): 37 ↩