The Logic Of Collapse  

Having quoted Jeff Vail in the previous post I figure I may as well link to some of his peak oil related posts. Jeff is obviously a variety of anarchist - but I haven't read his work closely enough to determine what sort. He has written several oil related posts this year as he has moved from being something of a peak oil agnostic to someone who is fairly convinced about peak oil's imminence (his recent post "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns gets high points for apt post titles when talking about the impact of peak oil on the economic system, too).

FTD long ago linked up "The Logic of Collapse" which is at the scarier end of the peak oil tales spectrum - not so much because of the frequently analysed collapse scenario but because he suggests perhaps it should be deliberately engineered.

Personally I think we're better off struggling along and seeing how things go (which I only note just in case anyone thinks I'm suggesting otherwise) - but the idea did remind me of Jeff Wells' (purveyor of fine, but frequently distressing, conspiracy theories) sinister "Global Year Zero" warning. I tend to fervently hope that Rigorous Intuition is just a work of talented paranoid fiction, but I do wonder sometimes.

But I digress - the quote below is from "Logic of Collapse" which starts off with Jeff V looking at Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies" (his paper on Roman roads is pretty interesting too, for those who are into Roman history).

Despite the growing logic of collapse, in today’s peer-polity world that option does not exist except on a global scale. Today we have 3 options:

1. Continue business as usual, accepting declining marginal returns on investments in complexity (and very soon declining overall returns) until an eventual, inevitable collapse occurs globally. Continuation of present patterns will continue the escalating environmental damage, and will continue to grow the human population, with population levels in increasing excess of the support capacity of a post-collapse Earth (i.e. more people will die in the collapse).

2. Locate a new, more efficient energy source to subsidize marginal returns on our investments in complexity. This does not mean discover more oil or invent better clean coal technology—these, along with solar or wind power still provide lower marginal returns than oil in the heyday of cheap Saudi oil. Only the development of super-efficient fusion power seems to provide the ability to delay the decline of marginal returns any appreciable amount, and this will still serve to only delay and exacerbate the eventual return to option #1.

3. Precipitate a global collapse now in order to reap the economic benefits of this action while minimizing the costs of the collapse that will continue to increase with the complexity and population of our global civilization. When combined with a strategy to replace hierarchy with rhizome, as outlined in A Theory of Power, Chapter 9, this may even represent a long-term sustainable strategy.

Whoa. Am I seriously suggesting the triggering of a global collapse?