Teasing out the shape of Australia’s future

Some of histories patterns are universal; e.g., Overshoot, imperial rises, imperial falls and the cycling of Civilisations, while others are specific to an area and/or civilisation type. E.g. the cyclical rise and fall of Chinese empires, the relative permanence of European borders (Gaul is roughly in the same are as France), the cycle of empires in the Middle East, the conflict between the East and West (its far older than Islam or Christianity) and the contests between settled and nomadic peoples. From these patterns it is possible to see the broad shape of the future (though not the details) over an area, the larger the area, the more accurate the vision. This is one of the reasons that makes historical analysis useful, many of the factors that determine how history plays out; such as geography, climate and agriculture potential, are relatively stable. Unfortunately, for Australia, this sort of useful historical analysis is unavailable.

We can’t look at pre-European history, since the Aborigines lived as hunter-gatherers and so had a radically different relationship with the land, therefore the factors that affect them affect us differently (to separate degrees). Since Australia’s original inhabitants were almost wiped out by European diseases (about 90% fatalities) and predation, most post-European history of Australia is that of colonisation and parts weren’t settled until after Federation. So, while some of our history is useful for this task, for most of it Australia wasn’t a settled country with established cities, populations and cultures, unlike Europe and Asia and for the section of history that is has, oil has been in major use. Since we’re entering the downturn phase of overshoot with established cities, populations and cultures, the situation has changed considerably. And then there’s the fact that the sections of our history that are similar have all taken place during the upward phase of overshoot, with rising fossil fuel usage and international trade. In short, historical analysis in the specifics is very difficult or impossible for Australia, even while universal historical analysis is possible.

This leaves us with a question, how do we see the broad shape of Australia’s future? What roles will the central desert and long coastline play? The Great Dividing Range? The tyranny of distance? The States and Territories? New Zealand, Indonesia, Pacific Islands and New Guinea? These questions need at least a cursory answer and I will be going over some of the possible questions and answers.

Federation vs City States

One of the most important and far reaching political decision (really lots of decisions under one overarching one) Australia will have to make in response to overshoot is whether to dissolve the federation and effectively become a nation of city states, roughly analogous to the current states, or to keep the federation in some modified form. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages, which one is the best will shift as both the world internal and external to Australia changes in response to the downside of Overshoot, much as it changed to the upside. Another option is to shift between the two as the situation dictates, however this option is more complex and would require considerable organisational resources, so here I’ll focus only on the initial extremes, as opposed to the absolute extremes (such as dissolving the state governments). Note that while I’m treating this decision as a binary, it’s actually a spectrum, this is just simpler and highlights the important details.

Federation: This choice entail keeping the broad shape of our current governmental structure, Local<State<Federal, and possibly changing some of the details, such as the exact border/territories, rights, responsibilities etc.

Advantages:

• Continuity with the past
• Combines all the militaries
• Allows simpler trade and economic laws
• More unified resistance to imperial or other incursions
• Pushes Australia’s competitive energies to the outside world, rather than internally
• As it stands now, there are no major forces for disunity
• Allows more collective resources to be used to solve or mitigate problems
• can create uniformity when needed
• Allows Free trade inside the nation, while tariffs outside
• single foreign policy
•  

Disadvantages:

• Is an extra layer of complexity
• requires both physical and organisational resources
• can create uniformity, when diversity is needed
• if the system becomes corrupt, it all becomes corrupt
• Diseconomies of scale are introduced
• Less internal competition
• Model is untested for a non-fossil fuel era, unlike America’s is
• Provides a single target for hostile powers
• Some interstate rivalry

While some of the advantages and disadvantages are intrinsic to federation, other important traits depend on the context of the times and external world, particularly the ones to do with imperialism. If imperial incursions or the overall level of violence increases, then a combined military will ensure a safer environment and less predatory action by foreign powers. its main disadvantage is that the downside of overshoot normally brings a decomplexification.

City-states: This choice would be to simply dissolve the federation, with new countries based on the current states, the territories would be either absorbed or let go, with the capitals where they currently are. The capitals will stay where they are for a few reasons, they’re all ports, most have rivers and currently contain the greatest concentration of human resources, materials, population and infrastructure. Similar to Renaissance Italy or Ancient Greece, hopefully without the constant warfare, just with far greater distances.

Advantages:

• Is a new order which could kick-start more innovation and experimentation (political and social)
• Provides internal competition
• Encourages diversity when needed
• Is at a lower lever of government complexity
• More adaptable
• if one part becomes corrupt, the rest is protected
• No single target
• Less diseconomies of scale
• Is one of those highly tested models

Disadvantages:

• Vulnerable to divide and conquer tactics
• Has difficulty stopping imperial, or other, incursions
• can create diversity, when uniformity is needed
• Hinders international trade and a integrated economics
• No major forces backing it
• Potential for internal wars
• Less collective resources for mitigation and problem solving
• Could cause further decentralisation

If anything, this option’s traits are even more contextually dependent and since it lacks the advantages of centralisation and standardisation, under stable or growing conditions this is the worst of the two options. However since we’ll be going through a contraction phase, these disadvantages are not necessarily in play. Otherwise it lacks good defences from foreign powers, relative to federation,  this needs to be considered in the final decision. Its main advantage is that the human world is entering the environment that makes this option an adaptable one.

The point of the above comparisons isn’t to sway you one way or another, I have done my best to be impartial, but to simply highlight some of the important differences and show that each option comes with its ups and downs. Also that some of the advantages are also disadvantages, there is no perfect option.

How will this decision affect the common person? An important element of any political decision of this magnitude is, how are the lower and middle classes (the upper classes can look after themselves) affected? How does the decision affect farmers, workers, craftsmen, artisans, artists, small businessmen, merchants, local or regional government officials, fishers, loggers and so on?

While in an important way this decision doesn’t affect the lower classes that much, one boss is much the same as another and chances are most of Australia will be democratic anyway, in an important way it does. How easy is it to trade goods or move across borders markedly affects merchants and thus the goods available to people, while also affecting local industry. The economic policies of the government, from taxes, incentives, infrastructure and others, affects everyone and dictates the opportunities and day-to-day economics of individuals and families. The governmental structure will affect how many wars are fought, where they are fought and of what type they are, this further compounds in the civilian support structure e.g. will a farmer will be taxed 10%, 30% or 50% of his crops/biofuels to support the military/civil infrastructure. Education and healthcare are similarly affected, along with the legal and justice systems. The majority of the effects will be felt not in the immediate years after the decision, since the structures will take time to change, but in the decades after as the differences pronounce themselves, this is why is requires careful consideration. The point of the above is to simply correct what can sometimes be a problem in political discourse, especially ideological discourse, in that the effects on the common person are either ignored or glossed over. The effects on day-to-day or year-to-year living are the most important part of this sort of political decision, both the long and short term.

My take on it: Now that we’ve finished with the analysis of the issue and you the reader have started to form an opinion on what is in essence a political question with important military, economic and cultural implications, I’ll give my own opinions. Feel free to give yours in the comments, reasoned discourse is the lifeblood of both democracies and republics.

For the short (10-20 years) and medium (20-50 years) I favour the federation option, for the long term (50+ years) I think that the decision should be left up to the generation after the next, since that why more experience will be accumulated and a wiser decision made. My reasons are thus; It’s always easier to destroy than create, so if keeping Federation turns out to be best, but we’ve dissolved it, is a harder mistake to correct than keeping federation when dissolving it is necessary and for some structures, such as standardisation and the military, the federation is appropriately big. This isn’t to say that the federation shouldn’t be weakened in some areas, just that for certain things it is far better than city-states. The other reason is that the world is likely to become a more violent place and the next imperial powers could easily look at previous allies of America to fortify their claims, a larger military would certainly help in dealing with these twin problems, both here in Australia and our overseas interests. The overseas interest are everything from outposts in Antarctica, access to trade routes and joint treaties with other countries

Historical comparisons for a potential mass migration from Indonesian

One of the things that happens when an area goes through Overshoot is that populations will sometimes respond by picking everything up and move somewhere else (other options include dwindling, internal war or other forms of collapse). While it’s certain that this will occur somewhere during our current process of Overshoot (which is more or less global in scope), I’ll look at the specific potential of an Indonesian mass migration to Australia. In this post, I’ll look at the similarities and differences to this possibility of three past mass migrations and in one case a theoretical one. This is a broad analysis as opposed to a detailed one.

The broad characteristics of this migration would be:

• North-South Migration
• staging point of the North Coast (for further expansion)
• Multiple hops as opposed to one via long distance Sea travel
• Established population on the other end
• Fuelled by overpopulation
• in a decline phase
• The North Coast is a very inhospitable place for agriculture, by Indonesians and Australians
• Potential military invasion and a large (in the millions) population movement

1) The Austronesian Expansion

The colonisation of Islands as far east as Easter Island and Madagascar, is the main migration (non-western) in the Asia-Pacific’s history via Sea.

Similarities:

·         Fuelled by population growth

·         Long distances travelled by Sea

·         Done by the ancestors of Indonesia’s current population

·         Variety of environments and land types encountered

So, as can be seen the Austronesian expansion shares some important traits, not least of which is the shared people as well as a potentially similar technology (once motors pass away).

Differences:

·         West-East migration rather the North-South

·         Mostly to uninhabited islands

·         The majority of Islands were fertile or had good access to food

·         Generally, only small amounts of people were moving at any one time; say by the hundreds or thousands in any one year as opposed to tens of thousands.

However, these differences are quite big and the difference of scale for how many people involved completely changes the logistics and organisations involved, the size of ships needed as well as the lack of previous settlements.

Verdict: While it does share the large distances involved, this migration was more the colonisation of virgin land or in some cases a slow process of interbreeding with the locals rather than the displacement of another population. Also, the northern coast of Australia was continually visited but never settled by the Austronesians. This marks the Austronesian expansion as an unsuitable model of a potential Indonesian mass migration.

2) Why it’s called Anglo-Saxon

Overly simplified summary: The decline of the Roman empire left Roman Britain weakened and under constant Pictish assault, as well as a large famine and plagues. So they hired Saxon mercenaries to defend themselves, purportedly to bury the dead as well. Said mercenaries liked the place, so after two invasions (the guy who Arthur is based of stopped the first one) they took over and then interbred with the locals while dramatically changing the culture (e.g. back to paganism instead of staying Christian). More a cultural change than an ethnic change, but we can treat it as ethnic to explore possibilities.

Similarities:

• Happened during an Overshoot period of history
• Happened to a peripheral part of an imperial system as that system declined
• Happened to a settled area

The overall context from the human element is effectively the same, no small thing. It can clearly be seen why a comparison is so readily drawn between this example and our vision of the future.

Differences:

• East-West migration rather than a North-South
• Britain is really small compared to Australia, e.g. the Woomera test range (in South Australia) is as big as England and used to be twice as big
• The north coast is relatively infertile (as in barely farmable) compared to England and natural land routes out of it to the rest of Australia are through deserts and/or mountains
• No equivalent to the Picts, however famine and plague is possible.
• Completely different motivators, as far as I’m aware the Saxons weren’t overpopulated and were just opportunists

While it clearly shares the human context, as seen above an equally (if not more) important element is completely different, the environment and natural world in which this process took place is very different to Australia’s.

Verdict: Shares the context of our situation and while there are only three similarities, they are important similarities.  However the differences are equally massive and affect both sides e.g. their aren’t going to be many locals who are going to support the invasion compared to the Saxon invasion, who were supported by several cities who rebelled and aligned with the Saxons. There also lacks the positive feedback loop in the initial stage to reinforce their migration by bringing more easily farmable land under control with each step. While useful, large differences exist and need to be kept in mind because they are potential game-changers.

3) Failed Greenland Norse colonisation of Vinland (America) and a successful alternative history version, similar to Britains colonisation of America and Australia.

The Norse Greenland colony shows the importances of having a well-resourced and equipped staging point if the journey can’t be done in one go. British outposts along the way for supplies and way stations helped the white settlement of Australia. The Vikings abandoned their settlement in Vinland due to a variety of factors, lack of equipment, support, numbers, hostile natives and problems back in Greenland which prevented adequate support. Britains colonisation was under entirely different circumstances and didn’t suffer most of these problems, such as over 90% of the natives being killed by disease and therefore not putting up major resistance. The successful alternative has a concerted attempt by the Norse (non-Greenland included) to colonise Vinland, using Greenland and Iceland as way stations.

Similarities:

• Has the jumping points, similar to the role the North coast would play
• Greenland’s habitability is the closest to the North Coasts compared to all the other alternatives. Note that the climate cycle (on the 100-year ranges) favoured the Norse in Greenland.
• Distances are in the same realm rather than being different by magnitudes.
• Is to a settled area
• A concerted effort is a possibility

The closest of the scenarios surveyed so far, superficially this looks like an appropriate model.  

Differences:

·         Neither population is in a similar position as their counterparts, e.g the Norse weren’t overpopulated and the Native Americans weren’t in decline

·         East-West migration instead of a North-South

·         Wasn’t a period of great change, among which the dominant transport option is in decline.

The Vikings could rely on most of their boats and the underlying tech, the modern world doesn’t have this luxury and since boats are a relatively complex technology (compared to feet and carts) which require appropriate infrastructure to build, run and maintain, not traits that facilitate mass usage during catabolic collapse. With fuel supplies declining, it will be increasingly harder for standard maritime operations, let alone the successful settlement of the North coast, which would require supply runs and boats taken from other operations, since new ones can’t be built quickly and sail based ships will still be redeveloping. In their own way, these differences are important.

Verdict: While this scenario is the closest, there are still large gaps and to succeed the alternative history required the Norse to unite behind this single goal and bend their power towards it, which requires a strong stable government. In current terms it would mean that the Indonesians would have to reallocate significant resources during catabolic collapse (unlike feet, fleets have to be built) which isn’t a trivial task. Also, while Greenland was in its habitable phase of its many cycles, the northern coast doesn’t have a habitable phase as its problems are to do with the soil and wildlife rather than climate.

Important notes:

• All of these past migrations were East-West or West-East rather than North-South, this is a massive difference. Climate and biome types (e.g. desert, tundra, taiga, grassland, forest etc) changes slowly or not at all when travelling East-West (assuming altitude stays the same) but changes rapidly when moving North-South. for a full discussion on how this affects technology and population movement I recommend Guns, Germs and Steel (by Jared Diamond). This means that an Indonesian migration would have to either skip areas (like Europeans skipped to South Africa) or spend a long time adapting, which would require a good transport and communications network to use all of their options, since no one place will have them all
• The Austronesians annually travelled to Northern Australia but never settled there for two reasons. First, the Northern coast isn’t a good farming area, its barely marginal and its telling that 50 years of Industrial agriculture has failed to succeed, and if any farming system can ignore the negative local conditions it’s the Industrial system (since that’s a large part of its design). Second, due to the effect mention in the paragraph above, the Austronesians who travelled to Australia lacked the appropriate skills, crops and animals that were only available further north. Since this is mostly solved the Indonesians (and hey, potentially the New Guineans as well) will certainly settle the Northern Coast (well, bits of it, since large sections are uninhabitable except for hunter-gatherers). I’d guess at a population of around 10-50 thousand with the lower range more likely.

Summary: None of the historical examples are fully adequate to examine a potential Indonesian mass migration because all have major differences, and since all these factors affect each other, the similarities aren’t actually as good indicators as a glance would show. This doesn’t mean they’re useless examples, but is has to be recognised that as Australia is also a continent, the differences it causes among human patterns are just as great as those between Europe, Africa or Asia. The human patterns, structures and processes of Europe (or any other continent) are an imperfect model for human patterns, structures and processes in Australia. As Overshoot progresses we will see these differences manifest as the fossil fuels that have been used to ignore environmental conditions go away in the wind.

The Decline Of global Imperialism

The Spanish empire started the trend of their being only 1 or 2 global empires that dominated the world stage. Great Britain was at the zenith of this trend when it directly ruled 20% of the world’s landmass and controlled the majority of world trade; this trend (and Britain) has been on the decline since. In the wake of Britain’s soft collapse the USA and the USSR fought, during the cold war, to claim Britain’s lost position of dominance for themselves, the USSR fell and so the USA gained status as the world’s sole superpower, and the end of the USA dominance is now approaching. In the wake of its decline and collapse, new world orders will appear, most likely after the competing powers have sorted themselves out through the standard imperial sorting method of war, strategic positioning and international politics. In a continuation of the current trend, another (or two) global empire/s would arise, the main contenders currently including China and a now resurgent Russia. However, with the process of overshoot entering the decline phase, this assumption needs to be questioned and alternatives examined. The decline of global transport and communication infrastructure will hamper force projection, whether it’s economic, militarily, cultural or political projection. Relocalisation of industry will strengthen local powers at the expense of imperial ones, the technology gradient that has existed since the days of Spain when European armies could outfight any locals using superior weapons, training and tactics has diminished greatly and military tactics/technology has changed in favour of the defender as opposed to the attacker. See the 2006 Lebanon war where Hezbollah used defences to negate the Israeli armour and airforce. How can a global hegemony function in these conditions? What imperial structures can exist and thrive under the stress this change brings? I propose a potential model based on the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations with a potential, though unlikely, continental European empire.

This system would mark a dramatic shift in the way major powers relate to one another and act in the world. Under the current system, each empire (or group of empires) has only one major opponent at any time and everyone coalesced around one of the contenders. Think of the Axis and Allies or the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. This new system is more like the constantly warring Greek city states or Renaissance Italy, with multiple powerful factions unable to permanently dominate, note this system can and has changed into a similar form of what we have now e.g. the Peloponnesian war or France and Spain entering Italy, Machiavelli mentions this in the Prince. For each major power, there are now multiple major enemies at any time and they are restricted how far they can act against any other power, major and minor, before their ability to respond to other powers is compromised. This creates a highly complex playing field where even minor powers can have significant effects on the grand scheme. To accommodate these changes Australia’s foreign policy and actions on the world stage would have to adapt. I’m assuming the Federation will remain for mainland Australia, however this isn’t a certainty and it would further complicate things if the federation dissolves.

Gearing for a more independent role and more ties with the other regional powers around us, rather than choosing America or China as imperial powers (yes, China is a regional power but the relationship is very different) and worrying about global problems or areas far away, like Iraq or Afghanistan, is the sensible path forward. Since the global empire/s would have less control overall than the USA or Britain did and we live in a peripheral part of the world (less than the days of Britain but still peripheral), we and our neighbours will now have an opportunity to write our own history (bloody as it may be) independent from powerful outsiders. Moving our military focus towards our navy (but in a non-expeditionary way) as opposed to our current focus on our army and expeditionary forces (see the Canberra Class), we’d still have an army, just a modified form, would be among the first steps since Australia and all our neighbours are islands, instead of simply allying with the next rising power, instead becoming a fully independent actor with which an imperial power entering our region must entreat, and deal with. Using our strategic position, isolation and superior local forces we could wring a few concessions out of them and via the support of local resistance (guerrilla or otherwise) we could drain the forces of any imperial power that decides to enter our region against our will. This path will require us to take more responsibilities and a far more active approach in our region; alternatively, we could become highly isolationist.

So what could relations among the BRICS’s empires look like? An important detail is their respective strengths in light of their locations and different strengths and weaknesses. Russia and China are likely to be the strongest of the five empires, for historical, economic and military reasons, however Brazil and South Africa are on their own continents and so they will mainly act with the others in colonial or local sphere of influence events, as well as being distant from RIC, where their powers have a home advantage. India is in a more interesting situation since it sits on the opposite side of China compared to Russia and is in a very good position to cut of China’s sea routes to Africa and Europe, especially the Malacca strait, which India has looked into. While on its own, China could easily overpower or bully India into submission, Russia could be very interested in an alliance to contain China. These sorts of power plays would be quite common, the more empires there are, the more common, and complex they become. This is where Australia could affect the world stage in a substantial way, leveraging our strengths for or against one side, acting as a lynchpin of some plan or other or even as deal breakers or makers.

What is a city?

Cities are one of the main ways humans inhabit the landscape and organise themselves, though they have only recently, historically speaking (Data), become where most people live. They, historically, made up for their lack of population with concentration and by being major economic, cultural and political centres. While climate potentially change the locations of our major cities, possibly further inland, I think its more than likely that our current cities will exist during and shortly after overshoot. After all Sydney was founded by convicts with no access to fossil fuels and only indirect assistance from them (in the form of the British Empire). Therefore, if cities will play a role in overshoot the obvious question must be answered.

What is a city?

To aid the answer here is an appropriate extract from Terry Pratchet’s Night watch

    Everyday, maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chicken and geese. Flour? He’d heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn’t particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problems these were the facts that got handed to you.

   Everyday forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And to think of the horses dragging this stuff, and the windmills… and the wool coming in, too, everyday, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN DAY….

And that was now. Back home, the city was twice as big….

   Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent their life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed….

…and it gave back the dung from its pens and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions and ideas and interesting vices, songs and knowledge and something which, if looked at in the right life, was called civilization. That’s what civilization meant. It meant the city. 

So we can see that a city is also a process as much as a place and includes the immediate area it gains resources from and its products go to, e.g. in the past ¾ of some cities were metal works. From the hinterland come the raw (and sometimes refined) resources, such as wheat, eggs, ore and timber, that a city consumes and out it gives the refined products (like steel, weapons and tools), culture and now days machines/equipment. What can form from this is a symbiotic relationship that enhances both the city and rural communities. 

Here’s an example; a village machine shop maybe able to produce almost all the villages needs but lacks the skills, resources and time to make some of its own high precision equipment. Now instead of cutting other services to be able to remake this equipment or losing whatever capability the equipment provides. The machine shop could instead import the equipment from a city, which has far more machine shops, engineering works and the like. The village machine shop could then maintain the equipment without sacrificing capabilities and allow the village to produce more using the machine shops products. This can feed back into greater exports to the city and hence the overall economic activity and technological complexity. This form of symbiotic relationship will be important if we wish to keep a relatively high level of technology/technical skills.

The level of technology is quite important when thinking about sustainability on this scale as the smallest unit shifts as the tech level increases. While at most levels the village is the most basic unit as the tech level rises it becomes the village- town relationship and then the village-town-city complex. If we want an eco-technic future, we need more than eco-villages, at a minium we need eco-towns as well and then eco-cities. This is not to say that village level sustainability isn’t worthwhile, since villages can more easily downshift tech level, simply that to have an eco-technic future, rather than a medieval future, the cities that exist today will need to be involved.

How Will the World’s population die?

Of all the major trends, overshoot will bring , one of the most important is how the global human population will shrink to a sustainable level. this is assured as current population levels well exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity with only renewable resources available. The basic graph looks like this.

For us humans the declining carrying capacity has two parts;

Loss of non-renewables: Fossil fuels belong to this category, anything that requires them to access and ores deep in the ground, the main industrial materials in this category (recycling is a different matter). For agriculture the main loss is the relatively stable climate, other losses include fossil aquifers or deposits of Phosphates and other nutrients. Once this section of carrying capacity is lost it won’t be regenerated over anything but geological timeframes.

Loss of renewables: Soil fertility, fisheries and forests are the most common; this includes elements that can renew themselves over time,normally biological systems. However, once depleted many of these elements stop regenerating, examples  include the collapse of the North Atlantic Cod fishery and the deforestation by the Anasazi of Chaco valley (Collapse by Jared Diamond). Action can be taken to create renewable resources; reforestation, recycling of metals (renewal of stocks), building soil fertility, silviculture etc.

While the ultimate carrying capacity is variable and will fluctuate over time due to climate, ecological and cultural variables (consumption levels), it will be well below current population levels.

The important question now becomes how the world’s human population will decline. On a global scale this is likely to follow a smooth curve down, shown on the graph above, however what we care about for Australia is the local/regional of us and the Asia-Pacific change. Here’s an example of the differences between global (or continental in this case) and local.  2011 was for the US an average year in terms of rainfall over the entire nation, but when each state was looked at separately what was found was that more extremes had happened. Simply put there were more floods and droughts but when the entire nation was analysed they cancelled each other out.

As such there are two ends of the spectrum of population collapse; fast or slow. Dimitri Orlov describes the slow process in his book Reinventing Collapse as a changing in the birth/death ratio so a population exponentially decays (say 2-4%). This is a fairly peaceful and stable way for population to decline, if we have a choice we should aim for this. The fast way includes (and makes other fast collapse more likely) mass migration, plagues, wars, famines or other disasters. These can quickly change population levels and in the process cause great discord and chaos. We should try to avoid these events. The worst action we could take is to maintain current population levels as this just prolongs the collapse.

While the general trend will be decline, areas will experience population growth. The northern coast of Australia will likely see a boom as desperate refugees (climate, war or other) migrate there. This would then be followed by a crash as the lack of agricultural potential causes famines; the graph to the right shows such a process with reindeer. Some areas will keep a stable population; New Zealand is a good candidate for that., while Indonesia (among many others) is set for a dramatic reduction in population.

A note on time frames: if we use 300 years as a benchmark for the the massive population growth which is now going to be reversed, the decline will probably take 200-300 years overall and places will alternate between fast, slow collapse and points of stability (or even growth).

Population changes it will have dramatic effects on our economic, political and military systems. Anticipating and preparing could negate unnecessary misery and ease the many transitions we face

While its a bit late for any drastic changes to the outline, basic preparations could still help. Most of the standard response to overshoot (summed up as a mixture of using less resources and switching to more sustainable production/agriculture modes). Other options include slowing, then stopping, major international food trading while making food importers more self-sufficent, using organic agriculture or massive agricultural research into agriculture in third world countries.

Time Scale of Collapse

In discussions of collapse, specifically if it will be a fast collapse or a slow decline of our current civilisation, what can be forgotten is that slow or fast are relative terms and change from varying viewpoints.

Heres a Terry Pratchett extract (Reaper Man) to illustrate

              ‘A city is alive. Supposing you were, a great slow giant, like a counting pine, and looked down at a city? You’d see buildings grow; you’d see attackers driven off; you’d see fires put out. You’d see the city was alive but you wouldn’t see people, because they’d move to fast.’

What looks fast to the counting pine above looks slow to us and what looks slow to it is a lifetime for us. Civilisations operate on such a timescale. If the collapse takes 3/5 the time it took for industrial civilisation to rise (300 years) then collapse would be 180 years – several lifetimes. What’s fast for a civilisation is still a slow process for us humans.

Then there’s all the other processes, trends and civilisations happening at the same time. After all Industrial civilisation was born within previous civilisations and people can live partly in multiple civilisations. The figure above for the life of Industrial civilisation (300 years) is wrong in an important sense; according to Lewis Munford’s Technics and Civilisation it was actually born in the early middle ages, which puts it at about 1000 years old. The last 300 years marks the time when it became the dominate part of civilisation and began impacting larger and larger segments of society. From this we can confidently say that an ecotechnic civilisation has already been born, possibly from the time of Augustine Mouchot (French pioneer of solar cooking and engines)  possibly earlier, and is slowly gaining the strength and pieces it needs. same with all the other civilisations that are forming in the twilight of Industrial civilisation.

As people and societies, slowly or quickly, drop out of Industrial civilisation they will enter into another; salvage, ecotechnic, herder, agrarian, nomadic, sailing or one of the many possible cultural civilisations around. This can be in steps or piece by piece e.g. A craftsmen who works salvage using charcoal to trade for industrial goods, the urban organic farmer living in an industrial city and other such halfway points.

This could easily mask the broad decline of Industrial civilisation and hide its eventual death. The driver for all these changes is overshoot as it weakens the dominate civilisation and allows new ones to compete in what has become an intensely Darwinian environment.

What is the Role of Governments?

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is a useful concept to understand the priorities a human being has, it isn’t perfect and the order can be shuffled somewhat. I am going to examine the basic goals of government based on this concepts view. So what are the foundational goals (equivalent to Physiological and Safety) of governments? Before questions of morality or righteousness can be asked, what does a government have to do?

The modern ideologies that need to be discarded to properly answer this question are many, free-trade,

Neo-liberalism, libertarian, objectivism etc. All say that government regulation is always bad and we should rely on the private sector for almost everything. Given that history shows otherwise, how long have governments been around? Several thousand years at least and still going strong, I can safely say these ideologies are missing important details. This isn’t to say that all government regulations are good and the private sector is useless, Soviet Russia is an example of rampant regulation, only that both need to be used and understood.

A government’s first job is survival, of both itself and its people (after all, the government is normally a part of the people) and this goal is fulfilled in multiple ways. The obvious way is the sheer physical survival of its people and this task involves a few parts. The provisioning of food and water, then distributing it to the population is an iconic form of this. Many of the original governments formed around this goal, organising waterworks, actually distributing food, looking after the granaries, setting up a market system and building the transport infrastructure required. Waterworks could take generations to build and then required careful management, provided by the local government (or bigger if part of a kingdom). The failure of governments to satisfy a society’s need for food and water is normally, and rightly so, greeted by social unrest, in the form of bread riots, rebellion etc.

Basic law and order is also another important role and to illustrate this I will use the Fayu, a New Guinean tribe, as an example. The Fayu used to number 2000 but reduced their populations to 400 within 1 generation due to revenge killings, using sharpened stakes and stone knives. Once a population reaches a certain density some form of conflict resolution is required and while other social structures (religion is one) can fulfil this role, to an extent, at any point Australia will be at a government will be needed for this. Justice can be carried out by any governmental form, from a council of elders to an invested judge.

Another aspect of survival is that of the group and its identity, this is important because government is an abstract concept, a system and a group of people. As a social construct its survival is directly linked to a societies cohesion and mental framework, destroy this and any government will cease to exist (the lose of legitimacy is the common form). This manifests in many ways and is normally tied to other social forms; state religion, controlled press, national identities etc.

These form the primary task of any government, the maintenance of internal survival.

The next step up is maintaining security (from other groups) and maintaining/improving infrastructure. Organising; defences, militia, armies, supply/communication lines etc is the main way to fulfil the first of these goals. The infrastructure part comes in many forms; roads, bridges, electricity grids, ports, railways, bureaucracy, hospitals etc and this is what allows economic integration and centralisation to occur, modern corporations are completely dependent on such infrastructure. This level isn’t strictly necessary but is required for the higher levels to be achieved.

These considerations are the first that must be asked to decide if a government is defective, before moral and ethical values are examined. The most brutal tyrannical government that fulfils these goals is better that the freest democracy that doesn’t (let alone the fact that the democracy would be quickly overrun by the tyranny in this case). Current governments cannot, especially in the face of collapse, just coast on their prestige of being democratic while ignoring these concerns. Doing so only imperils democracy and threatens either a collapse into feudalism (like the dark ages) or a rise in tyranny (another round of Hitlers and Mussolinis)

This process of governments failing in their basic duties has happened before; the rise of Hitler and his compatriots was no accident and helped by the political failure of his day. The current economic and political crisis’s are currently on the path for a repeat of this pattern as the current governments refuse to implement the solutions necessary (such as a default and rebuilding of their economies for the transition and Overshoot).

These basic levels of governance in the context of transition need to be figured out well before the question of democracy, morality or any of the other questions that are commonly asked of governments can be contemplated. The government systems that will survive overshoot and flourish after it need not be democratic or just, it is preferable but not necessary. If we wish for these types of governments to survive the basic support structures on which they rest must be secured or they will wither and fade away until a new form of government replaces them. 

Biofuels

Biofuels are one of the many approaches being tried to solve peak oil, all the word means is fuels derived from organic matter (organic in this case means from living things, generally plants). To explain why we’re trying I have just pulled out a paragraph from my chemistry textbook from the chapter on biofuels (it’s a small chapter and they’ve just added it recently). I find it surprisingly honest about what’s happening for its source

   

Peak oil

‘Peak oil’ is the time when worldwide oil extraction can no longer keep up

with increasing demand.

The greatest amount of oil discovered in any one year was in 1964,

and since then the new reserves found have gone down in size each year.

Meanwhile demand for oil has increased as the world population has

increased and lifestyle expectations have risen. The actual timing of ‘peak

oil’ is debatable. We may be there now!

The situation provides motivation to devise renewable and sustainable

sources of the carbon compounds, both for fuels and to provide feedstock

for the organic chemical industry.

The statement above is mostly accurate but many of the realities of biofuels are ignored and need to be stated here.  It uses agriculture that generates chemical energy as a fuel rather than as food, it suffers from the limits and faults of any agricultural system used to produce them and will change along with the rest of the agricultural system. It also competes with food production, which limits the production levels. While alternatives to using food are available, most of them suffer drawbacks and would still require nutrient cycling to remain sustainable.

Now the dominant form of agriculture is the industrial from, which suffers from an acute case of unsustainability. So, any biofuels produced under the current model also suffers from a case of unsustainability. Of more concern is the fact that the current agriculture system uses vast quantities of fuel energy and so any biofuel production would first have to compensate for its own production. Since the fuel use of industrial agriculture is so high this means that most biofuels produced today have a low or nil EROEI. High EROEI biofuels are produced mostly by hand labour (e.g. ethanol from Brazil) and can reach about 10. This means that replacing current farming practices with the various organics modes before introducing major biofuel production is the better option, since the supporting system is figured out first and it can then be decided if it is worthwhile.

 Biofuels also can’t replace petroleum and other fossil fuels in both amounts and usage. This doesn’t make them worthless, just that their role will be highly limited and needs to be supported with other energy sources.

So what are the biofuels?

Solids: The oldest biofuels, traditionally wood, normally used for fire & cooking, there are currently efforts to increase the range of sources of solid biomass available for heat energy. Charcoal is a refined form of wood and was used extensively in metalworking and glassworks. It’s actually superior to coke but costs more and its increased use caused large scale deforestation across large areas in Europe and America. Any organic material can be used as a feedstock for the new types being invented and as long as proper nutrient cycling takes place long-term soil fertility won’t suffer. Raw biomass does create large amounts of pollution however, which limits desirability.          

While it will not easily power motor vehicles (except electric or trains), it can easily supply heat in stationary operations or electrical/mechanical power production. Due to its difficulty to transport (relative to liquid fuels), the main constraint on use will be its availability in the immediate area and rural areas should have the greatest access while cities will probably use it as a small supplementary energy source at best. For military use, mostly cooking, supplementary heat and a local source of electricity.

Biogas: The chemical of interest in biogas is methane, which is identical to natural gas. This allows the use of existing infrastructure of natural gas to be directly used with only 1-2 components added. The production of biogas, anaerobic digestion of biomass, has two products; a solid known as digestate, which can be used either as a fertilizer or as fuel (fertilizer will be the default option) and a mixture or methane, hydrogen, hydrogen sulphide (corrosive) and carbon monoxide gases. This is one of the easier biofuel production processes and is relatively simple and cheap (the Chinese are engaged in massive biogas programs). 

When upgraded (takes 3-6% of the energy in the gas to upgrade) it can power machinery without corroding it, hydrogen sulphide isn’t a very nice chemical. Compression into a liquid can allow easy use in vehicles and has been shown to be able to power trains (Sweden), this also makes it a candidate for military use. Like all biofuels, rural areas will have the greatest access but thanks to its ability to be transported easily by pipes a connection to the rural hinterland could allow a reasonable supply to cities; this also counts for the liquid biofuels.  

Fuel cells offer a highly efficient way of converting methane directly into electricity as opposed to using hydrogen.

Ethanol: otherwise known as alcohol and is made by yeast fermenting sugars anaerobically. Comes in a liquid form, which makes it directly usable in combustion engines; either as an additive or (in Brazil) as the fuel, some engines do need modifications through (it can melt plastics). By-products of production can be used a animal feed (high in protein) or fertilizer but carbon dioxide is also produced. Improvements, like GM bacteria that can use waste products or special breakdown process of plant cellulose, are happening and could help keep basic (limited) motorized transport running. Would most likely be produced in abundance by Queensland’s sugar cane crop, similar to Brazil’s approach. 

Isn’t as good on the engine as gasoline is, but it can be used for fire quite well. E.g. http://www.ozflame.com.au/. Most likely, it won’t be used as the primary combustion fuel (biodiesels are better for that) but it can be used as a solvent, as an antiseptic, chemical feedstock and as a drink.

 Biodiesel: Is produced by the breakdown of triglycerides by Tran esterification (breaks a lipid into 3 fatty acids and a glycerol). Energy density is close (about 9% lower) to petrodiesel but it does offer a higher cetane rating (combustion quality) and better lubricating qualities which helps offset its disadvantages.

Due to the higher energy densities and increased efficiencies of diesel, biodiesels use in heavy machinery, armoured fighting vehicles and ships is likely, if biofuels are used for the military it will most likely be the primary fuel used. Can also power aircraft and in rural areas would provide heavy muscle to add to the other energy sources available. As a sidenote, from the crushing of oil seeds a high protein and carbohydrate meal residue is produced which can be feed to livestock, this makes it more attractive for farms to produce the Biodiesel for themselves.  

Usage Levels and Nutrient Cycling: Two important questions remain about biofuels, how do they fit in the energy mix we’ll have during the transition and ecotechnic phases and how the nutrients used will be cycled back into the soil.

To understand how nutrient cycling will work I’ll list the elements of the fuels and where they come from. For ethanol the nutrient used is glucose which is made of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen, all the fuels contain only this elements (if the fuel is pure) and Charcoal is only Carbon while biogas is Carbon and Hydrogen. In sugar production water is split in the chloroplasts by light (artificial photosynthesis is an attempt to copy this process) to form Hydrogen and Oxygen. The Carbon comes from the Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around the plant and is used to form the backbone to which Hydrogen and Oxygen is attached. Therefore, as long as only the fuel is leaving the farm or local area the plants via the atmosphere can replace the nutrients. Of course, the soil normally gains these nutrients when the plants die and taking them away will make the soil poorer than it would otherwise be. The principal loses are organic carbon and a source of energy (that is what sugar is after all) for the soil organisms and in some way this needs to be compensated, leaving the land fallow could work and there are undoubtedly other approaches suited to each area, biochar could certainly compensate for the lowering of organic carbon levels.

The usage of biofuels will depend on the traits of other energy sources as much as its own traits. Given that wind and solar suffer from intermittency while biofuels can be used whenever you want (after production) then a compensatory role is likely. This also fits with their ease of storage relative to wind and solar, similar to granaries but for energy instead of food. Balancing the amount of food storage with energy storage (since it can be converted only one-way) will be tricky and a vital decision of any society that seeks to employ biofuels.

For storage, a good system could involve two levels. The first level could be considered the day to day use (or in this case year-to-year) and is for individual farmers and towns to supplement other energy sources. This would carry over from month to month and partially from year to year and provides the main usage for everyday life. The second level is made from the surplus from the first storage level and is used for the bigger regional/national energy expenditures. While the first level is used for yearly famines the second can be used for multi-year famines, in effect they allow no biofuels to be produced that year without losing energy, that the first level couldn’t cover. This second level would cover major infrastructure expansions/maintenance and such, major wars, festivals and other big energy expenditures.

Using them in this fashion also has another advantage, large amounts aren’t required. Since it is only acting as a backup energy source, the wind and sun will always be around, instead of a primary energy source the levels needed in stocks only need to be about a month or 2 supply and extra can be produced as needed. Since biofuel production above a certain level (above what waste can provide) will bite into food supplies the ability to only have a small amount is useful.