One big debate within the peak oil community is if the world is facing an economic contraction due to scarce energy, will that be a “fast” or a “slow” collapse? In a fast collapse, failures cascade in a rapid, catastrophic way. In a slow collapse, there isn’t out-of-control acceleration, but past problems and a shrinking resource base undermine the ability to deal with future problems effectively, so the slide cannot be easily halted.
In 2005, I would have leaned towards “fast”, but I was wrong. All signs, including the Baltic caviar price curve for oil (instead of the sustained high prices I would have expected) point to slow.
A great case-study for this sort of collapse in modern times is the fall of the Soviet Union, which Dimitri Orlov analyzes in his book, Reinventing Collapse. So I was struck by a recent blog entry that discusses how Greece is now following a similar pattern:
What brought this thought about was reading the heartbreaking article: Suicides in Greece increase 40%
And I remembered a comment I head from Dmitry Orlov in an interview about how much of his high school class were now dead. Yet there were no headlines and there was never any official crisis or emergency. They did not die in gunfights over scraps of food like in The Road. Rather, more quotidian things like alcoholism, unemployment, suicide, homelessness, exposure, lack of medications and ordinary sicknesses like bronchitis and pneumonia took their lives. Russia’s life expectancy fell dramatically. It’s birth rate declined. Public health fell apart. Suicide rates went up. The population shrank. Entire towns became abandoned. In post-collapse Russia there was a slow die-off that occurred outside of the daily headlines that no one seemed to notice. They were ground down slowly by day-to-day reduction in the standard of living, a million little tragedies that, like pixels in an image, looked like nothing until the focus was pulled back.
And right now the entire continent of Europe is looking an awful lot like post-collapse Russia […]
An excerpt really doesn’t do it justice, go read the whole thing.
On a similar theme, consider this post on bus fuel efficiency improvements:
Orion buses, by stark contrast, are so far almost doubling the miles a coach can travel on a tank. Thanks to the fact that the diesel engine driving them is half the size of a conventional bus’s, they are also quiet enough for the driver to hold a conversation with a passenger on the freeway without either raising their voices. Oh, and don’t let that small engine fool; they move up hills faster than the conventionals. These buses are nice.
And they are going to be needed. As the financial crisis deepens, more and more are riding the bus. A financial analyst stumbled upon probably the best graph yet for visualizing the present perhaps post-peak world […]
The graph is question is this:
The post goes on to note:
Remember my excitement over the new Orion coaches? One of their chief investors in the hybrid technology, Daimler, has decided that increasing bus fuel mileage is simply not profitable:
Daimler Buses North America no longer will manufacture buses at its Orion facility in the Oneida County Industrial Park, officials announced Wednesday…
“Daimler Buses considered all possible options for reconfiguring our transit bus operations in North America,” said Harmut Schick, head of Daimler Buses. “But at the end of the day, Orion is facing a situation where the cost position is not competitive, the local market is in a continued slump and growth opportunities are not available from selling the product overseas.”
It’s not because these buses won’t prove cost effective in a future with ever-rising fuel costs. That’s not it at all. It’s because an era of ever-rising fuel costs will force everyone to reorganize their expenditures. Businesses that rely upon cheap fuel will cut back or go out of business, and closed and/or downsized businesses can’t pay as much in taxes.
Taxes pay for buses.
So just when they need to cut back on their own travel expenses, many workers will see a shortage of buses available to get them to and from work.
That’s slow collapse for you. Mundane problems with mundane solutions so close at hand. And yet…
ComplexMeme 