Shooting completed for Judge Dredd

[JOE SOAP]

As ever we disagree.The number of 1million plus cities in China alone is expandinng exponentially (frighteningly fast really).Sure they are going through growing pains, as western cities did a century ago, but technological advances (solar powered self-heating buildings, more  efficient electric cars, improved transport infrastrucure , ever higher skyscrapers, better use of renewables, increased recycling etc will gradually overcome these problems).

You need oil for every one of these things to exist, you need oil to manufacture power cells, electric cars, charging batteries, grow food etc. etc. before you run or use anything, to transform any infrastructure to another power source equal to oil's energy output -if such a resource even existed- would take several decades and you need oil to make that transition happen in the firstplace. 88 million barrels is consumed everyday, the largest/latest oil field discoveries only amount to a few hundred million, a few days supply. We need about three new Saudi Arabias to keep up with our 'current' lifestyles and Saudi Arabia have overestimated what is left of their own supply and they'll be keeping it for personal use. So growth is not an option and the population will decrease. When oil was first discovered it was almost a 1:1 ration power source,youcould prick a hole in the ground and it shot out, that doesn'thappen anymore, it's getting to the point where it's more expensive to pull the oil from the ground that there's no fiscal point making the effort. The Middle-East is not war ridden for democracy but because it's last the region with easily available oil that is shrinking.

You obviously haven't seen the news in the statistics but the city dreams in the funny papers. Theses aren't growing pains, they are the pains of implosion and instability. Peak oil, peak credit, peak food, peak resources, peak politics...


As for China's 'expansion' -a country with a water shortage- it's a completely phantom phenomenon, if it wasn't so tragically a misallocation of resources chasing the western capitalist myth of 'unlimited' growth and 'suburbanism' I could laugh. China's in the shithouse with rest of us.

'64 million empty apartments in China...':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E

[TordelBack]

That's what I love about our Joe "Sunshine" Soap, he sugar-coats every pill with a glaze of starry-eyed optimism.

[JOE SOAP]

That's what I love about our Joe "Sunshine" Soap, he sugar-coats every pill with a glaze of starry-eyed optimism.

Believe it or not I think it's a good thing! Just imagine the ale you'll be brewing in the back-lands of Tallaght-fornia...back to nature! What this country needs is a bit o' community spirit and walkable neigbourhoods and towns. Ya never know we may even get a squared jax-paper prog back too but it will cost one month of veggies and a water pack. Or you can wait for the retro-engineered UFO tech to save you arse.

[TordelBack]

Just imagine the ale you'll be brewing in the back-lands of Tallaght-fornia...

Already there, squire.  Haven't had to buy booze for nearly 6 months now, growing veggies, swapping labour, baking bread and cakes, freecycling... life with bugger-all money has its ups: if it wasn't for the c**ting mortgage sucking the marrow from our bones it'd be the bloody Good Life up here.  Employer to crusty in less than a year, gotta love it.

[JOE SOAP]

Don't worry when we officially default, with the rest of the planet, that mortgage will evaporate out Ireland's ear when the EU/IMF double-cock is withdrawn and anyone else will be buying houses for cash. With the increasing number of allotments sprouting up round here, I think many are aware the crunch is coming.

[O Lucky Stevie!]

Just watching Andrew Marrs MEGA cities, Carlos Ezquerra you should blush being a mere 30 years plus ahead of the curve

TSFTFY -- John had walked out at this point after the deal that would have given him & Pat the rights for 2000ad had fallen through.

[The Sherman Kid]

Jesus Joe, a little optimism here.You remind me of those world-enders from the 70's , and the slew of hollywood dystopian films that came out then.We're still here and making progress, albeit slowly.

In the meantime I nominate you as official Human spokesman if we are faced with alien invasion..

'Surrender or die!' ,alien superfiend

'Nah, you don't want this place mate, it's a right shithole and far more trouble than it's worth.Try next door'

 

[Peter Wolf]

Lots of very interesting points made here about cities ,de-population of the countryside and growing your own food.Too many to comment on for the time being.

Ultimately cities create dependency as you cant grow your own food en masse in a city as well as everything else and also cities are touted as being green by Agenda 21 etc who think that everyone living in cities will save the planet when in  actual fact unless everyone is living in a slum then cities require more resources than what would be used if everyone was still living off the land so that doesnt add up.

During the industrial revolution in the UK everyone moved into the cities that were growing at the time so now that China and India for example are going through their industrial revolution the same thing is happening with a mass migration into cities.At the same time the West is declining so there is less employment which means less income so simply to survive those that have access to land to grow food will do so as there is a mass movement in the US to do exactly that as they really have no choice unless you want to stay living in a cities living on foodstamps therefore being totally dependent on govt.

.People will not move out enmass to the countryside or small towns again any time soon simply because the labour requirements are no longer there and will never return.Intensive mechanised farming is here to stay , just look at the US Mid-west, populations have been dwindling for a very long time whilst the cities continue to grow.

Andrew Marr is over-the-top and still a bit of a bumbling twit though 

Thats exactly what they will do in the US as it sinks more deeply into a depression or at least a percentage will as city life doesnt suit everyone either.There arent any labor requirements in a lot of cities in the US anymore and in a lot of ways its possible to have a better quality of life in the countryside than in a city if you have no work.The labor requirements are obvously not enough to go round for everyone even in India which is why you have slums and its why slums are not going to disappear but its interesting how they make the most of what they have which is virtually nothing.

You can drive through parts of France and see whole deserted villages as no one wanted to live in the countryside anymore as they were seduced by life in cities but as they slowly sink deeper into recession/depression over the next decade they will slowly return to the countryside and a lot of them will wish they hadnt sold off their land and homes to foreigners who wanted second homes.

Cities are not a panacea to the worlds problems in terms of a way of life as they are more of an ideal and a vision that promises a utopia like Modernists and Brutalists but they can become traps unless you just pack up and leave.

Like @Garageman said why import food when you are capable of growing your own  ?

The West is going into a manufactured decline so self sufficiency is the way forward but thats very difficult in cities so if you dont have access to land ,no job,no money then you are basically screwed and you will be living on very little with no means to be self sufficient and eating GM food and Solyent Green or recycled shit burgers*.

*http://www.naturalnews.com/032715_turd_steaks_human_waste.html

[JOE SOAP]

Jesus Joe, a little optimism here.You remind me of those world-enders from the 70's , and the slew of hollywood dystopian films that came out then.We're still here and making progress, albeit slowly.

As usual you completely miss the point and value of what I said and what counts as not your opinion as being the negative rather than being pragmatic.

As I have all ready said, I didn't view it completely as a bad thing -which I take it you must- we need to clean the cobwebs out, it's people who cling to iphones, SUVs, lattes and expect life-on-a-plate who will find it hardest. My point is, there will be no Mega Cities, if you see that as a bad thing I only despair at what you think is actually 'positive' about such vast constructs and the energy needed to keep them going plus the environmental damage that results. Fanboy fantasies of living in a tighly packed tech-conurbation are best lived on the page, the reality wouldn't be too nice. It's your opinion of the expanding city I find negative or naive. Why would you see over-population, destruction of vast tracts of land/squandering resources as a good thing or even desirable?

[The Sherman Kid]

Jesus Joe, a little optimism here.You remind me of those world-enders from the 70's , and the slew of hollywood dystopian films that came out then.We're still here and making progress, albeit slowly.

As usual you completely miss the point and value of what I said and what counts as not your opinion as being the negative rather than being pragmatic.

As I have all ready said, I didn't view it completely as a bad thing -which I take it you must- we need to clean the cobwebs out, it's people who cling to iphones, SUVs, lattes and expect life-on-a-plate who will find it hardest. My point is, there will be no Mega Cities, if you see that as a bad thing I only despair at what you think is actually 'positive' about such vast constructs and the energy needed to keep them going plus the environmental damage that results. Fanboy fantasies of living in a tighly packed tech-conurbation are best lived on the page, the reality wouldn't be too nice. It's your opinion of the expanding city I find negative or naive. Why would you see over-population, destruction of vast tracts of land/squandering resources as a good thing or even desirable?

As Andrew Marr said, you could say Mega Cities are here already Tokyo 31 mill, Jakarta 21 mill, New York 20 mill, Mexico 18 mill.These will undoutedly continue to grow.A good thing or bad thing?Some cities are far superior to others, New York for example is an excellent city I've been too, and most New Yorkers are happy to live there.Other cities fare less well.What it is though is a NECESSARY thing.If the population spread out to try and become more self-sufficient ,that simply wouldn't work.If 7 BILLION people spread themselves out it would have a devastating effect on the ecology of the planet.
As for the question of resources  OIL we still have around 40 years worth left,  coal over 100 years, nuclear till the heat death of the universe,  add green power wind ,wave,solar and tidal, then hydrogen cells as we ll and we can cope for a while yet. Replacement energy sources will need to be found as reserves dwindle and I have no doubt they will.
Going for the Good Life option, simply isn't a realistic prospect.Those who 'cling' as you say to iphones, SUV's etc are called 'consumers' and they are the driving force of the capitalist system on which the world depends for creating jobs and providing an ever increasing standard of living.They are NECESSARY, as they sustain progress in ALL fields including science and medicine.

[JOE SOAP]

As for the question of resources  OIL we still have around 40 years worth left,  coal over 100 years, nuclear till the heat death of the universe,  add green power wind ,wave,solar and tidal, then hydrogen cells as we ll and we can cope for a while yet. Replacement energy sources will need to be found as reserves dwindle and I have no doubt they will.

There is no real logic in your argument, only vague references to perceived technologies and that they somehow easily slip-in, integrate and retro-fit into what we presently use, they don't.

All I can say is you're not connecting the dots of what makes all of those alternatives possible, oil, without it there are no alternatives since they all require equipment manufacturing and processes which all involve oil to build and extract the energy of which the final output energy ends up being less than what was put in to produce that energy in the first place, this is the general myth behind the 'alternatives'.  This point alone is the core flaw in your alternative argument. To treat the alternatives as separate entities like solar, wind etc. that don't require another more productive energy resource, oil,  in order to work is the elephant in the room. We can only hope that an alternative that is close to 'fusion' or the mythical 'over-unity' is out there but if they are, there's not much push to bring them out into the open

If Hydrogen, electric or solar powered cars/machines etc had any real hint of being as genuine alternatives, we'd all be driving/using them because the major oil corporations and governments would have jumped on them to make money and sell us the goods in our 'consumer' culture. They wouldn't be spending entire GNPs in costly/dangerous wars and killing millions in the regions where the last major reserves exist. It's hard enough for the world to get together and solve the simplest issues, there's no indication that any real push is there for global energy alternative, so alternatives for living will be generated in non-established quarters and they won't be on the scale of transforming modern socirty to operate in the fashion we're used to.


Population only grows when the energy is there to support it, that's basic math. Before the oil age of the last century, the world population was 1 billion, in 100 years that increased exponentially to 7 billion. As the oil companies and governments have all ready admitted oil production everywhere is decreasing and reaching the cruder, harder-to-get-to oil miles beneath the crust can cause disasters like the BP gulf accident, the writng's on the wall. Fukushima has more or less dampened the increase of Nuclear reactors with Germany being the first to announce the shut down of all it's reactors within the next deacde.

If 'the Good Life' option (in my opinion it won't be so rural as you imply but it will be a mass economic/distributive/resource contraction in an overstretched world) isn't a realistic option how could man have survived for so long?, we are reaching a 2 steps back moment in history, anecdotally, the  Romans, masters of plumbing, had flushing toilets, after their empire fell there wasn't a flushing toilet in Europe for a thousand years.

Without vital mass energy producing resources, populations and cities will shrink.

[TordelBack]

Without wanting to distract anyone from Garageman's argument (which I broadly agree with), the specifics of the 'flushing toilet' anecdote is a bit of a red herring.  Romans had communal latrines that had a water channel directed through them to flush out waste - something the Harrapans and the Minoans and plenty of other ancient world cultures had cottoned to thousands of years previously, and not really what we imagine when we think of flushing toilet.  Such amenities persisted in many areas without interruption almost to the present day - but were generally associated with a concern for urban or military planning.  The absence of similar arrangements across post-Roman northern Europe reflects different modes of living rather than an economic or technological collapse - equally sophisticated arrangements for disposing of shit existed, from the recyclable value of the contents of the urban cess pit to the secure privacy of a medieval gardrobe.

Central heating, now that's a different story...

[Peter Wolf]

NASA recently came out in support of Energy Catalyzer technology as the number 1 energy solution:

[urlhttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:y2YGKLRFoKMJ:beforeitsnews.com/story/677/434/NASA_Chief_Says_Cold_Fusion_is_1.html+energy+catalyser+technology+nasa&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.co.uk[/url]

And not forgetting commercial Hemp cultivation as an alternative to oil of course.

And newly developed very high efficiency solar cells:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&biw=999&bih=629&q=energy+catalyser+technology+&btnG=Google+Search#hl=en&pq=energy%20catalyser%20technology%20&xhr=t&q=new%20high%20efficiency%20solar%20panels%20deloped%20in%20the%20US&cp=50&pf=p&sclient=psy&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&source=hp&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=new+high+efficiency+solar+panels+deloped+in+the+US&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=fb011a95fbb67b53&biw=999&bih=629

If Hydrogen, electric or solar powered cars/machines etc had any real hint of being as genuine alternatives, we'd all be driving/using them because the major oil corporations and governments would have jumped on them to make money and sell us the goods in our 'consumer' culture. They wouldn't be spending entire GNPs in costly/dangerous wars and killing millions in the regions where the last major reserves exist.

And as huge amounts of cash are spent on liberating the Libyans from their oil and anyone else who posesses fossil fuel resources by the present corporate power structure they are less likely to invest and promote the alternatives so its a vicious cycle.

[The Sherman Kid]

Very comprehensive answer Mr Soap, I'll try my best to answer your points.
Nearly 50% of oil is used by cars, another 35% on jet fuel and diesel fuel.As oil supplies diminish and prices rise, there will be inevitably a great push towards alternatives ie far better electric vehicles, vehicles run on hydrogen cells and bio-ethanol, better public transport run on electricity eg trams to prolonging (perhaps marginally) the longevity of oil.Old gas-guzzling cars will become more and more expensive, thus gradually phased out.The essential need for these is not here yet and it's why there isn't such a massive drive towards them, but the push will come.Here is a good example, in the UK alone THOUSANDS of electic charging stations for cars are going to be set up within the next 5 years ,this is fact, and comes well before the dire need has arrived.This alone is a main fact why 'modern' society will continue to run normally  and we will not fall back into the Dark Ages.
Manufacturing will not stop either. Synthetic alternatives for lubricants are already available, so shouldn't present a problem should oil run out.Plastics of course ,require oil to produce the polymers necessary.Here again, work on breaking down plastics to reclaim the oil has already begun.Even without this, it is possible now to breakdown and recycle plastic.A factory can be run on alternative energy to produce anything.
Synthetic oil will be the holy grail and I believe, given the inevitable need and impetus will give the eventual answer.Yes we are not there yet, but as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
The capitalist system demands a concentration of labour, people go where there is work ,so cities will undoubtedly continue to grow.Improved communications allow far more people to work from home, but this is only a marginal effect, that impacts on a limited number of jobs, the vast majority have to physically be present at their place of work.
No, I don't have all the answers (if I did I'd been a millionaire) but I am certain they come through simple necessity.


PS As a History graduate I loved that Roman Empire fact you gave, which I knew (vaguely, erm very vaguely)  
PPS It's Friday night I hope you've been out and had a pint

[JOE SOAP]

Without wanting to distract anyone from Garageman's argument (which I broadly agree with), the specifics of the 'flushing toilet' anecdote is a bit of a red herring. 

I bow to your excellence, though the anecdote was never intended to be strictly comparitive but rather pointing up the infrastructure fragmentation which could occur if such a system as basic as plumbing can't be supported or maintained.