Looking at the Bottleneck---Missionary's Position

 On rainy days, I drift through my collected pictures and graphs looking for things I might have learned by reading and perusing. One of those things is that liquid fuels are one day going to decline, if they are not already. As a result, life here, that would be the world, will change like it has not changed before, or as someone said, maybe Richard Dawkins, when asked what the twenty first century would look like. "Just like the 20th century---but in reverse."

I would appear we have to change, that is go through a massive change that was labelled a bottleneck by William Canton. This would be a squeezing point where major adjustments must be encountered. Interestingly, anthropologist note we went through a bottleneck before some 70,000 years ago. Humans dropped to 1500 breeding pairs. That ain't no pretty picture. 

It is hard to get a grasp on the changes, but, like always there WILL BE changes and one would suspect they will not all be to the material betterment. The thing that is uncomfortable to me is the fact there are so many of us that it would seem difficult to make everyone happy with the changes---if anyone, really. I suspect things will get uncomfortable . The graph above and many others like it, lay the ground work for those shifts but do show a gradual down slope.

 While many thinkers believe the changes will be gradual (Greer) others (Foss) think that as the energy declines, or call it liquid fuels, the economy will falter and the drop off will be aggressive. It would seem,  if it goes quickly, say back to the energy levels of the 30s the pictures below will personify that change.

Others rant about finding sustainability but at the same time mention that the only time we will live sustainability is when a man walks to the the potato field where he has a job weeding potatoes----by hand. Nothing else seems to them to be sustainable in the long run---none of it. I suspect that some of the industrial world can be dragged along for a while, salvaged if you will. Some even refer to it as the Era of Salvage as it will impossible to keep producing our highly energy-intensive products----particularly when we realize the worlds is gaining 225,000 more people every DAY---people that simply have to be fed. .

 However, there are innovators out there, some who think we might, if cleaver, if not enlightened, slip quietly into a new way of living, one that is truly sustainable. I listen, and I listen and I do see efforts, some not too differently than how I live now, that might make the change gradual and comfortably. But how the hell 7 billion can make that movement through the bottleneck is beyond my imagination. Here and their pockets,yes, but the idea of convincing folks now living in total poverty there is no future for them, a future they see on their silly smart phones, will be hard medicine. Hunger breeds revolution. I see hunger.

 It is a rainy day and I can not get in the garden, but I did play the fiddle and read. I don't like bottlenecks.