The piece is generally good, although I’d take issue with the statement that there’s no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the “Bronze Age Collapse” and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.
Also the “life expectancy not exceeding thirty” claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I’m not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called “Dark Ages” lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.
In America I see complacency continuing, because I’ve learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don’t know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.
The piece is generally good, although I’d take issue with the statement that there’s no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the “Bronze Age Collapse” and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.
Also the “life expectancy not exceeding thirty” claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I’m not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called “Dark Ages” lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.
In America I see complacency continuing, because I’ve learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don’t know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.