In car navigation systems while the most widespread use of GPS technology are trivial. Far more important will be the impact on marine and aviation navigation. It was actually developed for military use (to guide cruise missiles accurately). I guess if the GPS system has failed there will be other limitations on the ability of agressor nations to fire cruise missiles anyway. Not many people can navigate using astro-nav, DR etc. I sailed from UK to Oz and although I could theoretically navigate with a sextant, in fact without constant practice is actually very difficult. I remember the frustration of trying to fix the north star one night; and could clearly see it with the naked eye, but just could not find in my sextant view finder. I always suspected that the GPS system would be an early casualty of PO or Peak Capital. I suppose aircraft can use ground beacons, but will have to revert to astro for long flights over oceans. Those that are still flying that is.

Excellent discussion material, thanks Ugo and Gail.

This points to a broader analysis of interdependence of the critical infrastructure, composed of several sectors;

- Energy
- Chemicals
- Nuclear Reactors
- Materials and Waste
- Defense Industrial Base
- Dams
- Banking and Finance
- Transportation
- Postal and Shipping
- Information Technology
- Communications
- Commercial Facilities
- Agriculture and Food, Water
- Public Health and Healthcare
- Government Facilities
- Emergency Services
- National Monuments and Icons

Just the communication between sectors alone is fraught with considerable complexity and fragility.

The way our civilization has self-organized has morphed over time. We've become highly dependent on highly interdependent critical infrastructure, though we can continue to morph our organizational model to include re-localization of some goods and services, to reduce (or eliminate) long distant JIT dependencies that will become more difficult to sustain.

Thanks, Ugo.

Dennis Meadows (one of the authors of "Limits to Growth") also emphasized the importance of capital in a talk of his that I transcribed. He felt this was the factor that would likely cause a permanent shift down (or even collapse).

As the price (and amount of energy) of required to extract oil goes up, and the excess energy (and real profit) from extracting oil goes down, it becomes more and more difficult to keep the system operating. We have more and more infrastructure that needs to be maintained, this takes a lot of energy (and capital) too. Remember Charlie Hall's cheese slicer model:

With Charlie's model, after a certain point, each year the output gets to be less and the input required gets to be more to maintain a constant level of production.

Building renewables add to the capital requirements as well.

The late Donella Meadows on reaction to The Limits to Growth.

http://wholeearth.com/issue/2096/article/72/chicken.little.cassandra.and...

Another canary in the mine. Unfortunately this "mine" is all there is. We can't flee the mine. Thanks Ugo for the article. If we only had this one problem we could deal with it, but all the infrastructure is aging and much is not being replaced or updated. The people who trashed Limits to Growth, instead of letting it be the realistic warning that it was, are idiots or criminals - take your pick.

So many things we think are critical. GPS has spawned a whole generation of GPS dependent drivers imho. Maps anyone? So we have to go back to maps, is this going to hurt GDP? Other than GPS device makers?

They are replacing bridges and culverts all over Oregon. So yes we are fixing as needed for the auto-dependent culture we live in. Can we fix infrastructure? Obviously yes we can. To me the bigger question is should we fix it?

We navigated on land and water before GPS. Why would the loss of this technology so mourned, except by military and aviation? And even then which country will be the last one dependent on this technology for long term military purposes or airplanes for travel.

We have beat the dead horse of things must change because of PO or PFF that this mourning the loss of technology such as GPS makes me bored. And there is nothing exciting about buggy whips either.

I'm well on my way to becoming a grumpy old man.

We need to seriously integrate into "The Oil Drum" a section on advanced alternative energy such as Subquantim Kinetics, Dr. LaViolette, PhD-physics. One of the limitations on "The Oil Drum appears that the site is closed to any consideration of the consequences of considering sub-quantum kinetics (SQK). All institutionalized public science (as opposed to militarized-black-Ops science) does not recognize "genic energy. The laws of thermodynamics and genic energy are divorced from each other by a paradigm of reasoning differences. Genic Energy assumes an open universe constantly fed energy from the (currently not measurable) sub-quantum realm, while our laws of thermodynamics assumes a closed universal system with all energy simply changing form within this universe. These cosmological differences are well explained by the serious works of Dr. LaViolette. To disregard SQK and shut out consideration does not serve "The Oil Drum’s stated mission statement. It would be wise, in my opinion, for "The Oil Drum" to allow responsible and out-of-the-box alternative energy ideas which institutional science simply ignores. The otherwise high-minded mission statement of "The Oil Drum" fails us by ignoring serious, emerging science and new ideas for energy production on earth.

"The Oil Drum" thus appears to otherwise lock itself into "the establishment" with blinders, and its objectivity needlessly disallowed unless new energy production methods are introduced through establishment science only. The test for introducing a new energy production idea, even if it is an apparent perpetual energy device that violates all establishment scientific laws, should be empirical evidence: Does it work? Does it achieve what its developer claims? Take for just one of many examples US Pat No 6,960,975, publicly accessible on line.

Good idea to re-post this. Perhaps a few others?

Thank you Ugo,

I am just finishing off a great book, (albeit somewhat dated with the election of Obama), called, " The End Of America....Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot", by Naomi Wolf. It describes ten common attributes that all facist and totalitarian states embark upon to limit democracy and seize power. It was interesting to see that in the period post 9/11 and through 2006 just how far along that process evolved, and how complicit the American people were in allowing the march towards this end. With the limit of capital and lurching from failures to crisis and back again, it is easy to see the swelling need of priorities....and an apparent decisive leader to make this happen. When? Baby first steps in November and the jump 2012?

GPS a priority? Maybe. Healthcare and global warming mmmm? Foreclosures? Why, when the banks can take over an insured product, underwritten by the Federal Govt.? Grid limitations, high oil prices, unrest due to unemployment and endemic shortages in the richest country in the world, + (those failing schools and lazy 'unionized' teachers) all suggest a population used to believing in 55 minute solutions seizing upon a simple fix of leadership to get things done. A kind of drill baby drill slogan just waiting to be heard.

"But, in any case, it is a sign of the times: the fifth problem."

The US has already swayed to Facism over the rise of rights and importance of the corporation vrs. the values of the Constitution that focused on citizens and democracy. A private army has been used on American soil to enforce security (Blackwater at NO Katrina). The president now has the right to imprison citizens without trial or contact at undisclosed locations (offshore brigs and secret prisons); a power granted by Congress that is ultimately controlled by corporations. Not only are email and internet accounts spied upon, I would suspect that there are files on numerous TOD members. The military industrial complex our parents might have warned us about has been supplanted by the security industry and Homeland Security, itself.

Scarce capital will shaft many into unrest as "the way it used to be" becomes the mantra for a new approach to fix this mess once and for all.

As the MSM has declined, I have enjoyed turning to the Net for news and a way to share ideas. I was pleased to see the reporting by cell phone videos on blacked out protests. I believed that this would help to keep us free to stumble on in our private lives. I'm not so sure, anymore. Will the new leadership cadre be good men/women, or will it be Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? How about nice little Donny Rumsfeld?

Best hopes the Military Commissions Act is repealed, and all troops come home to country worth working for.

Respectfully, Paul

A MASSIVE source of capital

Reduced consumption.

In particular the USA consumes too much for our own good (see retail space/capita, obesity and much much more). Redirect, over time, 15% of that consumption into investment and capital is no problem.

Alan

China invests/saves almost as much as it consumes. See the explosion of infrastructure and productive investments.

Any world model like the one leading off this thread has got to focus more thought on the model's central element, population. Each of these elements are not of equal significance when we consider the future of human wellbeing and environmental health. If we successfully address the human-driven global challenges posed to the human family by capital, agriculture, pollution and natural resources but choose to ignore and, thereby, leave the population element unaddressed, we could end up with 4 Pyrrhic victories and still lose the war for survival of life in a planetary home fit for human habitation.

Another way of looking at this situation could be by thinking of the population element as belonging to the denominator and the remaining four elements belonging to the numerator in a common fraction.

Population is the proverbial "mother" of global threats, is it not?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://www.panearth.org/

we need a central plan what to scrap first then put the rest of money in essntial things.

"Limits To Growth was right"
"Limits To Growth was wrong"

what do these two statements in common? They are both wrong. Limits to Growth predicted approximately exponential growth until 2020 and then collapse (standard model). Until 2020, LTG is difficult to distinguish from All Is Fine. Therefore, no judgement can be made until 2025 apporoximately. So, call again in 2025.

There are no limits to growth considering the size of the universe.
The real limit is excuses from people who think small.

Ugo,

What assumption does this model make about technological progress? The reason that the limits to growth crowd has been pilloried is that they ignored technological progress and the market. I believe conventional oil is close to peaking.

But I am not comfortable with the Apocalypse Crowd. They are not rigorous in their analysis.

Any model of energy consumption and production has to include subsitution away from energy. It's that simple. Leave it out and all bullets will be flying in your direction.

My University lecturer showed me a grainy video of the original presentation by this academic Donald Meadows way back when.
I had never heard of him before but I understood his message.
I did not sleep for a week.
Eventually the panic subsided but the message had sunk down deep.
I woke up one Sunday morning and there it was again on the radio.
And now it is coming in thick and fast.
I can describe my life since then as a an attempt to find some advantage that I can give to my Grandsons.

You will know when you understand the message.

It is when your Limbic is in agreement with your Cortex and you are functioning as a fully integrated organism.

For your amusement and gratification I offer you this transcript on Occam's Razor about the peak we had in 2008.

Long time reader, first time poster. Thank you for the good-natured erudition of this site; not that all posters are good-natured, but the site as a whole comes across without the shrillness of less assured forums.

I want to suggest something that I think The Oil Drum in general has gotten wrong in its attempt to create a physical-economial synthesis. I agree that any progress towards the creation of such a synthesis, whether by rigorous modeling, intuition, anecdote, change of perspective, etc... is much needed. Hopefully in this spirit, the below is a stylized version of what I think the underlying philosophic tension is between the two approaches.

I call this the dialectic of price.

One camp of people believe it is never possible to run out of something that is correctly priced. This theory of price rationalization is the intellectual foundation of such disparate beliefs as: we have geopolitical peak oil if we have it at all vs. the key to solving peak oil is having very high oil prices. Many people trained in the economic tradition, using that word very broadly, don't realize that this is the premise, the pre-thought foundation, of their deductive processes regardless of what conclusions, often very disparate as noted above, they come to on a given issue.

Another camp of people believe that you're guaranteed to run into problems if you apportion certain key things based on their market price. You could call this notion the theory of the revenge of physical systems. Again, very disparate beliefs rely on this foundation. From the notion that we'll use more of cheaply priced resources than we have any moral right to vs. the often opposite idea that we'll use more of cheaply priced resources than we rationally ought to given their knowable future scarcity.

The economic camp sees price as the great epistemological tool. If you have a problem you cant solve, its because it hasn't been correctly priced. End OPEC or the ban on offshore drilling and you'll have cheap oil, or if you don't get cheap oil you'll find an alternative. Put a price on carbon and you'll have greater societal utility. If people don't want a price on carbon its because they don't truly value climatic stability. If climatic stability is a concept that has any usefulness then it will be necessary to show that people are willing to pay for it. If they're not, then its not a useful concept.

A useful way to categorize this series of ideas is as follows: In a world where everything is functionally constrained by price, nothing is fundamentally constrained by anything else.

The physical camp sees price as a flawed epistemological tool. The flaws are too numerous to list given different critiques, but there seem to be two main avenues. The first is that price as a man made construct deliberately destroys the things that don't have obvious and immediate value to man, whether these be eco-systems, species, the climate, and ultimately the planet. The second is that the epistemological theory of price errantly presupposes that a solution in the future exists to every problem correctly priced in the present. There is a subtle but profound difference in how these two critiques think of technology. The first thinks that man will use every technology available to destroy non-human systems until eventually...the second thinks that man will incorrectly assume that there is a technological solution to all problems until this supposition is proven false and we confront a problem we cant solve, even if the problem is correctly priced.

A useful way to categorize this series of ideas is as follows: In a world where our desire to do what we want is not functionally constrained by price, there are important ways in which our ability is fundamentally constrained by things other than price.

Now this post is already too long...so Im going to stop and outline what I intend to do next.

First I intend to summarize what I view as Gail's (and TOD"s) view of a physical critique to the epistemological theory of price. Namely, that at certain critical junctures high prices will reveal underlying physical realities that cannot be solved by those corresponding high prices. At these junctions the aggregate economic system will contract until enough economic activity is destroyed to regain equilibrium with the physical system constraints.

Next I intend to offer a measured critique of this synthesis. The general approach will be to argue that the constraint is not the physical system limitations, but rather the fact that we lack a way of coordinating economic activity, and specifically the intermediation of savings and investment, at these junctures. Its not that our capital stock in the present doesn't produce enough surplus to allow for current and future prosperity, but rather that we have no new conventions to utilize resources in the present based on what we think they'll be worth in the future. In this narrative, peak oil is a challenge to the underlying meta-narrative, the future will look like the present Keynesian certainty convention, that has allowed for much risk taking and investment ultimately (but not obviously) based on cheap fossil fuels.

Obviously this whole post is more than a little presumptuous and I am uncertain whether the above ideas are even interesting to other TOD readers, or whether they just represent my own grappling with the issues I see and read here every day. If there is interest I will continue with the approach I outlined above. If not, Ill write it for my own private benefit and say thanks to all at TOD for the stimulation.

tyler.

Real Capital, must come from energy, as long as the sun still shines, there will be capital available. But with peak oil, and peak coal, the amount will be a lot less,new capital all the time is needed to maintain the population, hence Peak Energy, means the end of population growth, initially, then the population will begin to decline until it matches the Solar energy available. With all of the horrors that will mean.

Old Ari.

It may very well be that much of what we are seeing now is a symptom of peak capital approaching: airports, roads, bridges, dikes, dams, and about everything that goes under the name of "infrastructure" are decaying everywhere in the world.

The complexity was achieved via cheap energy, so it seems logical that reductions in complexity occur during a net energy decline. Call it peak capitol or just call it a sympton of post peak oil.

Peak Cap?

No, not by a long shot.

The gov will borrow from wall street. They just create fiat money and give it to them at 0%. Then wall street buys some bonds with the 0% loan and pockets 3% profit. The taxpayers will be stuck with paying it off.

In this day and age they don't even need ink and paper to create money. Trillions are created just by the work of a few electrons magnetizing a silicone chip. The only way the gov 'cannot create' is with fossil fuels.

Capital is not the limit. What we lack is: 1)time and 2) a plan.

It's lack of a plan that will caollapse the economy. Actually that already happened because we had no plan for dealing with the slowdown in productivity that began 100 years ago.

There is no lack of capital. After all, we built the whole modern world with an infinitessimally small amount of capital compared with today. 200 years ago we still had wooden machinery and almost the entire world was hungry, poorly clothed and housed, and without transportation except for horses and sailing vessels.

We have massive amounts of untilized labor. The average work week is 33 hours in the US. 200 years ago it was 70 hrs/wk, 100 it was 60. So there is no lack of labor to build tomorrow's world. We just don't know what it needs to be.

There is no doubt that resources will be a limit in the next generation or two. That means the end of disposable goods.

With the inevitable degradation of our smart infrastructure, we should use 'the time we have left' to provide some eternally-useful infrastructure before the end of the mineral energy era.

With GPS we could at least upgrade the celestial navigation opportunities by placing in stationary geosynchronous orbit a series of large reflective spheres in constellations at 15 or 30 degree intervals. Each constellation would have a 'target' 'star' surrounded by some lesser 'moons' that identify the constellation by their number.

Then in a lower orbit at 90-degrees to the stationary geosync plane run a series of other stars that cross the geosync constellations at regular times of say one hour, thus providing a simple perpetual solar 'clock' that can be readily ready by anybody who can see the sky. Daytime stellar shots are quite viable provided you know where to look.

The outcome of this will be provision of a very high quality navigation system for thousands of years before the orbits degrade or the 'stars' get pinged.

All this requires a mineral energy powered industrial base to get set up, but it will provide our remaining great great grandchildren with a useful navigation system, or at least some neat legends!

There are lots of other things like that we can do to leave a useful legacy of our otherwise wasteful expenditure of the earth's mineral energy resources. But it needs acceptance of our condition, and a will to act. Keep praying!

I have been reading about the problem of overfishing. It seems to me that economists, business and governments are for the most part cornucopians. Their motto is "More. More of everything. Just keep growing, year after year, things will always, somehow, work out." 30-40 years ago this motto was applied to the world's fisheries. Professional fishermen for the most part happily went along with this. But things didn't quite work out as expected, and a lot of people still can't quite believe it.

LTG= hogwash. A reallocation of resources is all that is necessary. Fewer lawyers and Wall Street wizards, more oilsands workers, potash miners, more intensive farming, better use of fresh water resources etc. As I sit at my computer I can see the South Saskatchewan River send billions of gallons of fresh water on its way to Hudson Bay unused by mankind. We have huge untapped resources in this province due to lack of manpower, nothing else. Some things may become more scarce than others but mankind can easily adapt. A copper orebody grading 0.3% would have been left in the ground 20 years ago but is now viable. And there is three times more copper mined these days than when the boys in Rome fretted over running out. So it is just the relative cost of outputs that change over time, not the total disappearance of one resource or another. Lots of earths crust untapped out there. If I can't get from A to B with petrol some day, I can sure do it with electricity.