Comments on: Ecotechnic Dictatorship is Our Last Hope of Averting Collapse

By: John Smith

John Smith — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:25:32 +0000

Sustainable retreat is not the only option. Incase anyone reading this is not educated in environmental studies, these projections are not accurate. The standard projection accepted by the environmental community is Jaccards 2005 assessment. If you want to read about another possible solution check out Mark Jaccard’s book Sustainable Fossil Fuels.

By: kurt

kurt — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:33:54 +0000

Photosynthesis of plants on land is among the cheapest but least efficient processes for winning energy from sunlight. Algae are by a magnitude more efficient and in the range of solar panels. They don’t need land, so they do hardly compete with food. Salt water covers 70% of the earth or waste processing can be used for fuel production (otherwise organic waste gets ideally fermented, dried and burned with some electricity being derived).
One problem with biofuel is the use of only very little of these plants biomass. The other problem is that it’s not converted into a component identical or very similar to gas or diesel. Mixing these components to traditional fuels can cause engine failure in unprepared cars. A big biofuel admixture initiative was retracted in Germany because this risk caused a public outcry recently.
My idea is growing plants as carbon storage devices and then processing them in an energy efficient process (solar powered) into more hydrated carbohydrates (using something like the coal liquefaction processes). That solves the big problem of storing energy where and when available and releasing energy where and when needed. Maybe it’s not the most efficient process, but it’s rather flexible and allows with slight adaption to keep running our current system.
The big advantage of biofuel is that you create an energy cycle that by economic growth increases its carbon storage. Even better are current experiments at turning plants into plastic and thus getting carbon out of the atmosphere.
At least I’m very sure that we have ample opportunities to run a greener economy, but so far economic pressure wasn’t hard and long enough for a change.
Fuel vs food is a debate because this world is constructed to keep small farmers in Africa dependent on food supply in a marginal economy where they have to grow cash crops. The last shock changed things little by little and in a few decades they’ll be rather independent.

By: CE

CE — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:16:50 +0000

Do we have enough good land to support growing all this extra fuel and building material? Especially as we are already having difficulties with our food supply (granted it’s supposedly more of a distribution problem right now.. but then we also have to fix that too). Exactly how much would we have to grow to replace what oil we use now (let alone satisfy demand increase)?

The more I read about this stuff, and the more solutions that people put forth, the more it seems that this is a really complicated global civilization, and the unwinding of it is going to also be very complicated. It’s in that complication that I find some hope actually. Ideas put forth about the reasons why things are collapsing might just be too simple to describe what’s really going to happen.

In any case, I think what you are referring to _is_ the collapse. If we get to the tipping point where fuel becomes that expensive, we are already in for some chaos. The last time oil did this we had a serious economic crisis that we have not recovered from. The housing bubble burst that’s true, but what was the needle that made it go pop? I do not think its a coincidence that it popped after a hockey stick ramp up in oil prices.

Interestingly we did see an increased focus on bio fuel before the bubble burst, but that actually had a negative effect on the global situation because it contributed to an increase in the price of food, due to farmers slashing their usual crops in order to grow the stuff.

But a real worrying thing for me is that the conversation that’s being had about this is only going on in corners of the Internet, and not in public. It’s easy to get caught up in the power of the Internet, but I have never known an important politician to discuss and take action on an issue that had not yet hit the mainstream media. It still has to hit TV news before it’s discussed. The spike in oil prices and the recession has never been discussed as being connected in the mainstream media to my knowledge, yet its discussed all over the place on the Internet. Likewise, Peak Oil has been mentioned only in passing in the mainstream media, and yet I see an increasing number of people referring to Peak Oil in the past tense – it’s already peaked.

That’s why I find the Ecotechnic Dictatorship concept so strange, because we are so far away from having that discussion, or any like it, in public. We are so far away from pulling out the ballot boxes, or staging a protest about it. We can’t even get our system to use the ballot boxes for simple things, like asking us if we mind having our personal freedoms removed, or if we should send our troops to inconspicuously-oil-related country X.

By: kurt

kurt — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:48:12 +0000

I agree on most points, but think that rising oil prices will lead to a tipping point where technology for consumption of plants as fuel gets much more significance, with additional energy produced by other means. If these are not only fuel, but also basic ingredients for plastic production, we have a viable option to combine economic growth and reduction of global warming. A very important choice would be replacing iron in construction with hydrocarbon or carbon fibers.

By: CE

CE — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:00:36 +0000

It’s one thing to toy with these ideas on the Internet (where the people reading your article are already in the same mindset as you), but put these ideas the the general public and you will simply get laughed off stage. I mean seriously imagine trying to peddle these theories to the general population – what do you imagine the response would be?

If you want to know what will happen as the world plunges towards the abyss, you have to look at power structures in place now, and try to see the direction they will go over the next years. The evidence does indeed point to increasing state control (because it’s already happening), but that’s coming from very well established institutions, not new kids on the block.

Popular leadership in the collapse period won’t be offering ecological solutions. They will be the leaders offering protection and security in an increasingly violent and malfunctioning world. For the foreseeable future that’s the current elites. Watch for western society becoming increasingly conservative and fearful. Watch for the rest of the world becoming increasingly hungry and angry. That’s not a recipe for average people in western society wanting to try out new ideas of leadership.

We will go into lock-down alright, but it won’t be with a happy green aura. It will be our governments strengthening the fence, and doing increasingly nasty things to people outside the fence, all with our tax dollars and our implicit consent. Precisely what we have been seeing more and more of lately.

By: Kurt

Kurt — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:36:14 +0000

You’re overdoing it. The 14th century Malthusian catastrophy in Europe was important for starting the renaissance, but it didn’t do away with the states nor with the social order. And it made lots of happy heirs, plus low yield technologies were abandoned.
Currently, at least two strong economic powers are steering directly for what looks like a crash. Well, I think they can wheather the storm because we have the technology to expand and use nuclear breeders, sunlight collectors (not solar cells), solar heaters and, last but not least, we have not yet really started to turn the oceans into agricultural fields for growing genetically engineered plants for food and fuel. However, there sure will be a catastrophy concerning the living conditions of many people leading to a cooperate-or-die situation in which the mightyand affluent can help to survive, but at exorbitant costs for the dependant. Steering right into this storm is the best a superpower bent on world domination can do. Sure, a lot of nations will look like Nauru, but there will also be big winners and because they have the power they’re not interested in steering a different course, so your whole plan is an utopia.

By: Isaac J

Isaac J — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:07:07 +0000

Please keep up your excellent and well formed posts. I look forward to many more. You have an excellent informed and academic manner of writing.

By: NB

NB — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:30:11 +0000

Re Calvinism, check this. Though as it looks now much of the West will collapse demographically before the Evangelical/Calvinist demographic revolution arrives to the rescue. Some Western countries seem to be teetering on the brink.

By: AK

AK — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:54:20 +0000

1. According to you, Clark argues that downward genetic drift of traits that made people “less violent, more literate, and more productive”, resulting from differentiated mortality rates across social classes, raised the level of general intelligence in Britain sufficiently so as to kick off the Industrial Revolution.

OK, a basic objection. Why did this happen in Britain, which had a continuous class-based society for about 1000 years, instead of in much older civilizations which had class-based systems for thousands of years?

I think I’d prefer to continue believing in more conventional explanations for the origins of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

2. My main emphasis is not on the “dictatorship” but on its socialist and “ecotechnic” aspects. Preferably it would be democratic socialist, but in practice is will likely have to resort to coercion to maintain itself in power as it carries out the managed decline in material throughput.

3. Awkward wording. “or restrict access to food to PRIVILEGED groups” = “or grant good access to food only to members of privileged social groups”. I was not arguing with you there.

Actually when I wrote that I had in mind the tinpot African dictators who use control of the food supply as a tool of political power, granting access to it for privileged groups and denying it to their political enemies. Mao’s and Stalin’s famines were more disasters of planning and conception than intentionally democidal.

And I repeat the question – was it really democracy that saved India from famine, or the Green Revolution?

By: georgesdelatour

georgesdelatour — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:08:58 +0000

1. I’m intrigued to know why you “don’t buy Clark’s explanation for its spread throughout society”. I’ve just finished reading the book, and the mountain of evidence he brings to bear on that point actually makes it quite a tedious, boring read. I don’t feel qualified to say if he’s right or wrong there, so I’d love you to expand on your criticism.

2. Kerala is DEMOCRATIC socialist – there has been no Great Leap Forward there, thankfully. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese famines could have happened if the starving had possessed the power to kick out Stalin or Mao through the ballot box. Those leaders’ invulnerability to electoral removal was the necessary (and maybe sufficient?) explanation for both famines.

3. “I do not dispute that when society begins to tinker with traditional market mechanisms or restrict access to food to PRIVILEGED groups, the risk of famine increases.” Could you expand on this? Are you suggesting the Great Leap Forward was all about starving PRIVILEGED people, like senior Politburo members?