 | Carbon emissions: China no longer has any excuse to wait | The Oil Drum: Europe | IEA: without Iraqi oil, we'll be in deep trouble by 2015 |  |
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
I do not disagree with you, yet I still like to add some comments.
The jews might feel like it was.
The huge famines that Mao caused are called the "Great Leap Forward" and actually did cause a dent in population growth. Not for long though, and with small impact.
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/data/pop/pop_10.htm
Oddly enough that dieoff did not lead to a collaps of society.
Society was in a very low state of organization anyway during the plagues. Remember the feudal system? And even within the feudal system there were breakdowns of individual fiefdoms so you don't see any monolithic collapse because society was not monolithic, even though there was a nominal "king" of a region. In those fiefdoms was a high degree of independence of other fiefdoms. So the collapse of one did not affect the others around it too greatly other than to present an opportunity to expand their own fiefdoms.
The modern situation is far different with extreme specialization of labor, huge interdependences, etc. A massive fire in one memory chip factory in Asia back in the early 1990s caused global repercussions. At one point in time, a Wisconsin company made 80% of all hard disk read-write heads in the world. The global economy is far more fragile than you realize. There are not hundreds of memory chip manufacturers. There are not hundreds of aircraft builders. There are not hundreds of electrical transformer manufacturers. These manufacturing areas that I mention are so small yet so key to industrial civilization that they each represent near single points of failure and these areas are not alone.
One great danger to society is these very narrow areas of specialization coming up against economic collapse in the geographic region where these things are made. How do you restart the modern economy? Economists last year met and discussed this issue at a US government sponsored conference and concluded they had no idea how to restart it. This may be why Ben Bernanke, when faced with the choice between inflation and deflationary collapse has vowed to choose inflation?
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett