Thread by @Ghostwoods

I've been thinking -- as you may have suffered through -- about carrying capacities and overshoot and population corrections.

I think our common error lies in thinking of the planet as our environment. It's not. Not if you're reading this.

We live in an insanely complex technological civilisation. That is our true environment, as modern humans.

That civilisation, in turn, exists in a financial and logistical environment (let's call it FALE!) that is entirely artificial.

This FALE is not tangible, like the Earth is. It's entirely virtual. It has developed over about six hundred years, increasing in complexity constantly.

Much like our population has.

Over those 600 years, unimaginably vast amounts of resources have been poured into creating it.

This was never a systematic process. No-one had a plan at any point. It's like Castle Gormenghast -- an insane labyrinth that somehow holds together.

On this very, very strange substrate, our civilisation has fed and grown.

The two are impossibly intertwined. There's no way to disentangle them without killing both.

But FALE is impossible greedy. It needs constant inputs of incredible amounts of raw _stuff_. And that's just to keep it going.

We're used to things continuing normally. It's how we're wired. It's very hard to imagine otherwise.

And we look around us, at bricks and trees and planks and wires, and think "Oh, this is robust. It isn't going anywhere, and even if it does, we can rebuild easily enough."

But that's not the actual environment. The actual environment is Just-In-Time, and Interlocking Dependency, and Infrastructure Maintenance, and whole heap of other crap to make your eyes glaze over.

The actual environment is FALE.

And FALE isn't _real_.

FALE is also extremely fragile. The more complicated it gets, the more efficient it gets, the more delicate it gets. One swift kick, and it crumbles.

There are a lot of very big kicks coming. We can see them. We all know they're there.

The boots are hobnailed, and they're already swinging towards the groin at impressive speed.

Global recession.
Weather disasters.
EROEI degradation.
Water poverty.
Species loss.
Pollination loss.
Food production crisis.

Each one alone is enough to disrupt FALE.

The thing about FALE is that if it breaks, we just can't rebuild it. It's not real, and the complexity is unmanageable.

It's not a machine. It's more like a person. If a person breaks, we bury them and mourn their loss.

If FALE breaks, advanced civilisation breaks with it.

Yes, sometimes with a person, we can help them work around the damage and live on in some way.

Yes, certain types of problem can be cured if they're not too systemic.

But in the end, all living things die.

Old age, for FALE, is a shortage of available energy.

EROEI -- Energy return on energy invested -- is the new name for Natural Causes here.

A hundred years ago, EROEI on oil was 100 -- each barrel of oil you spent on drilling oil gave you 100 back.

We used all that oil.

The last dregs of efficient oil (EROEI 30+) ran out in the 70s, and triggered the crisis.

We're down to EROEI under 20.

Below about 12, business becomes unprofitable, and FALE starts to die.

Renewables and nuclear are all under 10, and likely to stay there. Fission, so far, promises to be under 2.

Hydro is towards 100, but we've already dammed almost all the dams, and besides, water is a growing crisis.

Coal is around 50, which is great, but OH MY GOD THE CO2. It's the FALE equivalent of smoking 80 a day. It might stave off EROEI crisis, but it'll replace it with temperatures we can't live in.

None of this is speculation. Economists and banks and energy companies live by EROEI.

When everyone and their mother forecast economic downturn within 18 months now, what they're saying is "How the hell are we going to keep juggling these plates?"

There is no current-tech solution dreamed of that offers an EROEI over ten.

We were very dumb.

We used the incredible boost of oil to create an amazingly delicate sandcastle on a sandy beach with amazing views and an afternoon of lovely warm sunshine, forgetting that suns set.

We don't have enough energy budget left to build FALE again, or to rebuild it when it dies -- at least, not without pushing the climate very rapidly outside human-survivable limits.

It is going to crash. It doesn't have long.

It takes advanced society with it, and advanced society fails from the top downwards.

The most precarious, JIT-riddled systems die first.

That's cities, in case you were wondering.

I know I've been going on about this stuff a fair bit recently.

It's not that I'm depressed, or anxious, or have turned into a wingnut.

It's just that maybe, with some advanced warning of what to look for, some of you can fight your ways through this.

One day, the power is going to go off, and the food trucks will stop rolling in.

Shortly after, the water will go off too.

They won't come back on.

Fifteen years, maybe. Energy source projections suggest a sharp downturn sooner, but folks are always looking for more oil.

And for all their evil, our lords and masters don't want to lose their toys. They'll fight to keep FALE alive for a bit longer.

So fifteen years.

Within that time, you want to be in a town of less than 10k, with plenty of local wood or coal, in green, arable land.

You need to be at least 75 miles from the nearest city 100k+, more if you can manage it. Basically impossible in Western Europe and SE Asia, of course.

Somewhere that the average summer temperature is under 30 degrees, if you want to survive a heatwave without power.

And above all, you want to befriend your neighbourhood, and bed into your community. No matter how much you might privately dislike them.

Smaller, rural-area communities are going to be the only survivors when this flushes down the pan.

If survival matters to you... get there.

I don't survive long-term electricity lack. I need complex medications and electronic sleep aids and other stupid stuff.

I'm a first or second wave casualty. That's fine. I'm getting old, anyway.

Maybe you don't have to be.

And don't take my word for any of this, please.

Go look into EROEI, and Limits To Growth, and the RPC8.5 Pathway that feeding FALE *demands* we stay on.

This is coming.

I'm so sorry. It's unavoidable. We built ourselves a wondrous house of cards, and the wind is rising.

None of this means a species extinction event for us. Not necessarily.

But it's a vast die-off, over the next thirty years. @GreatDismal's "Jackpot".

We 'delved too greedily and too deep', if you prefer Tolkien, and the Balrog is loosed.

Some of us will survive.

But it's not going to be the city-dwellers.

/end