So? Grain is nutritional vapor compared to meat. I get so sick of the fallacy that a pound of biomass is the same whether starch, roughage, fat, or protein.
What the hell does that even mean? It was a LOT LESS fun for the poor, wasn’t it?
If your point is that money will be useless in the brave new world of no imports, no airplanes, and no Internet, wouldn’t that money at least give you a big leg-up in preparing for that world?
OTOH, I believe I asked you once why you weren’t hunkered down in New Zealand with a cache of weapons and a subsistence farm, given your belief in Kunstler. I forget what you replied, but maybe that answer would also answer why you don’t believe in getting more money to prepare for Kunstler’s upcoming global crisis.
BTW, BrainGlutton, I apologize if I’m completely misrepresenting your beliefs, or level of belief in Kunstler. It was never my intent to exaggerate your beliefs in order to make them easier to knock down or anything like that.
It just strikes me that if I totally bought into what Kunstler says, I’d have completely given up searching for a job, learned how to shoot and farm, and been doing my damnedest to get my family to move somewhere with more subsistence farming. Or failing all that, at least gone home to spend as much time as I could with my one year old nephew, since I’d know he’d likely never grow up. I wonder sometimes if you think I should be doing all that.
IOW, Kunstler’s message sure seems to be one of complete hopelessness for human civilization, and I just don’t see how one can continue living the way one does now with that hanging over your head.
As another poster pointed out, the Depression was an even less fun time to be poor.
Anyway, I have a family member who lived through the Depression (as a boy) and I’ve discussed it with him. His family was moderately wealthy. His family always had enough food to eat; clothes to wear; and a place to stay. The Depression didn’t really have a big impact on the basic aspects of his life.
Right now, the price of crude oil for delivery in 2015 is under $110/bbl. Free money, if you believe that we are hitting a peak oil crisis.
This is both true, and not the whole story. For example, grain is not being sold to hungry people in the developing world because it is being sold in more reliable ways at a better price to make bio-fuel for the first world. The problem indeed is not that there is not enough grain. But, this doesn’t much help the guy who can’t buy his sack of corn.
Politics plays a big part in things, but we must remember that the wealthy nations play a pretty big role, too. It’s not just a bunch of tin-pot dictators. It’s a bunch of tin-pot dictators cutting deals with wealthy nations.
Non-densely populated areas tend to lack the economic and political power to build up food reserves, import food, etc. Food is flowing out of these areas and not flowing back in. So population can still play a role even when it’s not the population of the community in question.
My point was simply that looking on public crisis as personal opportunity, as brazil84 recommends, is not only a monstrous attitude but a foolish one.
Love, we can manufacture it right now out of a million little things at a reasonably, if unpleasant, price.
That would be my point. There may never be a Peak Oil, at least, not within any timeframe we can foresee. Or if there is, it may well be due to demand falling rather than supply tightening.
I’m not alloing for it because it’s not a possibility at all. It’s a light engineering and heavy infrastructure challenge, but there’s nothing that special about fossil fuels in the grand scheme of things. They are very handy, but hardly the only way to skin a cat. Hydrogen, electric, and ethanol fuels are potentially available right now, just not quite where we want them.
So? It’s your money. If you want to make a fortune, why don’t you? If you then want to do good works for all mankind with your wealth, we won’t complain.
I don’t see how it’s foolish. It seems more foolish to turn down free money.
I don’t see how it’s monstrous either. You’re just hedging yourself against the possibility of a downturn. Not only that, you’re encouraging the development of other sources of oil and other sources of energy. You’re encouraging people and governments to take action with respect to the upcoming crisis.
Seems to me that any time you invest in a commodity (long or short), you stand to profit handsomely from events that will cause a lot of pain to other people. Is that monstrous?
Anyway, as another poster said, nobody will complain if you use your fortune to do good works.
And by the way, even if you feel it’s “monstrous” to invest in commodities, there is still signifigance to the current backwardation of the oil markets.
Essentially, what it means is that there are a lot of investors, backed by analysts who study these things as a full time job, who are willing to bet serious money that there will not be a peak oil crisis in the next 8 years.
To my mind, there is nothing unethical about taking these peoples’ money if you think you know better than them.
Personally, I would avoid the investment because I’m not confident that I know better than experienced commodities traders and the analysts they employ.
Not exactly. He simply foresees a different form of civilization. He’s recently published a novel, World Made by Hand, set in a post-oil future; I haven’t yet read it but I understand what it depicts is a hard and spare kind of life but not a bad one.
Still and all, I do not want to live in that world, not even a little. I continue to live in this one, getting such fun out of it as I can, because I can, for now. As for later . . .
Mullah Nasrudin once told a joke or preached a sermon or something that annoyed the king, who sentenced him to death. Nasrudin pleaded: “If you spare me, within one year I can teach your favorite horse to fly!” The king was interested in the proposition, but made it clear Nasrudin would die if he failed. One day Narudin’s friends came to visit him in the palace stables, where he was chanting magic spells over the horse. They asked, “Why did you make such a rash proposition, when we know and you know you cannot do it?” Nasrudin replied, “Well, maybe I can, and maybe I can’t. But I have a year to try. A lot can happen in a year. I might die a natural death, just when I would have had I not offended the king. The king might die, and a new king traditionally pardons all convicts. There might be war, and I might escape in the confusion. And if worse comes to worst . . . maybe I can teach that damned horse to fly!”
And maybe, just maybe, somebody will come up with some miraculous new non-petroleum technology that will make it aw better.
I don’t consider Kunstler a hero, BTW, but a prophet. The heroes of this aspect of modern life are those who are trying to do something about it – such as activists for mass-transit systems and commuter rail; or “New Urbanist” architects and planners like Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe, making some effort, however smalll, to remake our built environment into something more walkable, liveable and sustainable.
Actually, we base our confidence not so much on the recprd of technological solutions, but on the record of Kunstleresque doom-crying elicited by seemingly intractable problems that are now one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Specifically, the claim that various alternatives to the gasoline internal combustion engine won’t work is reminiscent of similar predictions about most of the major technologies at the center of modern civilization.
That doesn’t exactly dispel my suspicion that his conclusions are one part fact to Avogadro’s Number parts wishful thinking.
I have to agree, BG. Right now, I don’t see how your attitude is any different from that poster (was it VO3?) who refused to invest money or earn interest on it because it was usury.
Yes, but if your approving quotes here are any indication, to get there, billions of people will die. How do you know you won’t be one of them, especially if it’s going to happen in the next five years, as he claims? That doesn’t give anyone much time to get prepared.
Also, would it be at all fair to say that he’s an anarcho-primitivist? I didn’t know that term existed, but I came across it on Wiki last night.
You don’t get it. Kunstler is no Luddite and he no more wants his predictions to come to pass than you do. Yes, he decries a lot of things about contemporary industrial civilization, partly for their ugliness and social effects, partly for their perceived unsustainability; but I have read all his books except for A World Made by Hand, and not a line in them can be taken as romanticizing or glorifying the simple life, or arguing that it is on balance preferable to the status quo. The most he says for it is that it won’t necessarily be all that bad. Kunstler loves civilization. The City in Mind is all about cities, the good and the bad of them; he reserves his greatest admiration for Paris – no place for a nature-lover – and is rather scornful of those aspects of London which were formed or inspired by a misplaced love of rural Arcadia.
I have no objection to investing in profitable opportunities so long as they are ethical in and of themselves (and I have no objection to letting money earn interest, either). If I had any money to invest, I might well put it in oil futures as brazil84 advises. My point was simply that investment opportunity should not be the first thing you think of when faced with the possibility of an impending society-wide disaster, especially one of such an existential-threat scale that it might well render your money worthless or unspendable. The first thing you should think of is, “What can we do to prevent this disaster, or at least mitigate its effects?”
Personally, my first thought would be “How can I protect my family?”
But anyway, my general sense is that there are a lot of people in the world who are willing to bet other peoples’ money and property on their views – but not willing to bet their own resources on those same views. You can make all the excuses you like, but that’s what it comes down to.
If you really believe in Peak Oil, you should be willing to risk your own money on the belief.
And like I said, investing in oil futures will help to mitigate the hypthetical disaster, since it will encourage people to develop alternate sources of oil / energy.
Well, all I know about him and his writing is what you’ve quoted on this message board. Since you’ve read more of him than I have, of course I give your interpretation the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps your enthusiasm to advance his point of view here colored my impression. 
But given that, am I wrong in my impression that he thinks that, no matter whether he wants his predictions to pass, that he thinks it’s an inevitability? Because that’s why I asked the question earlier on why you’re “wasting your time” online and in cities when others who wholeheartedly believe in catastrophic peak oil have already converted their life savings to gold, learned how to butcher their own hogs, and moved to New Zealand or to offshore lifeboats. (IE that particular question didn’t have anything to do, necessarily, with desirability either on Kunstler’s part or on yours.)
Brazil84, I think BrainGlutton’s idea would help you to do just that: protect your family. In the process, you might help protect mine and his. And vice versa, of course.
No one is going to be able to ride out a total terrestrial disaster alone.
:dubious: What exactly is his idea? Kvetch on an internet message board?