Dooms that Failed: Resource Scarcity; Overpopulation; Climate Catastrophe

Doom and utter devastation tend to get one's attention. The human mind is programmed to home in on signs and portents of doom or catastrophe. Clever con men have taken advantage of this tendency for millenia, for purposes of profit and power. Modern times are no exception.

Here is a short list of failed predictions of doom -- many of them coming from people who might otherwise be considered respectable and reliable (h/t WUWT):

 In 1865, Stanley Jevons (one of the most recognized 19th century economists) predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a standstill.
    In 1885, the US Geological Survey announced that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California.
    In 1891, it said the same thing about Kansas and Texas. (See Osterfeld, David. Prosperity Versus Planning : How Government Stifles Economic Growth. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.)
    In 1939 the US Department of the Interior said that American oil supplies would last only another 13 years.
    1944 federal government review predicted that by now the US would have exhausted its reserves of 21 of 41 commodities it examined. Among them were tin, nickel, zinc, lead and manganese.
    In 1949 the Secretary of the Interior announced that the end of US oil was in sight.
    Claim: In 1952 the US President’s Materials Policy Commission concluded that by the mid-1970s copper production in the US could not exceed 800,000 tons and that lead production would be at most 300,000 tons per year.
    Data: But copper production in 1973 was 1.6 million tons, and by 1974 lead production had reached 614,000 tons – 100% higher than predicted.
    Claims: In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb and declared that the battle to feed humanity had been lost and that there would be a major food shortage in the US. "In the 1970s ... hundreds of millions are going to starve to death," and by the 1980s most of the world's important resources would be depleted. He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980-1989 and that by 1999, the US population would decline to 22.6 million. The problems in the US would be relatively minor compared to those in the rest of the world. (Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York, Ballantine Books, 1968.) New Scientist magazine underscored his speech in an editorial titled "In Praise of Prophets."

    Claim: "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

    Claim: Ehrlich wrote in 1968, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever."
    Data: Yet in a only few years India was exporting food and significantly changed its food production capacity. Ehrlich must have noted this because in the 1971 version of his book this commented is delted (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1981, p. 64).
    The Limits to Growth (1972) – projected the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993. It also stated that the world had only 33-49 years of aluminum resources left, which means we should run out sometime between 2005-2021. (See Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: New American Library, 1972.
    Claim: In 1974, the US Geological Survey announced “at 1974 technology and 1974 price” the US had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.
    Data: The American Gas Association said that gas supplies were sufficient for the next 1,000-2,500 years. (Julian Simon, Population Matters. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1990): p. 90.

Population and Poverty

    In the mid 1970s the US government sponsored a travelling exhibit for schoolchildren titled, "Population: The Problem is Us." (Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population, San Francisco: CA, Ignatius, 1988, p. 21.)
    In 1973, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's vote in Roe v. Wade was influenced by this idea, according to Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong: "As Stewart saw it, abortion was becoming one reasonable solution to population control" (quoted in Newsweek of September 14, 1987, p. 33.).
    In 1989, when the US Supreme Court was hearing the Webster case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor brought the idea of overpopulation into a hypothetical question she asked of Charles Fried, former solicitor-general, "Do you think that the state has the right to, if in a future century we had a serious overpopulation problem, has a right to require women to have abortions after so many children?"
   World Bank president Barber Conable calls for population control because "poverty and rapid population growth reinforce each other" (Washington Post, July 16, 1990, p. A13)
    Prince Philip advises us that "It must be obvious by now that further population growth in any country is undesirable" (Washington Post, May 8, 1990, p. A26)
    37 Senators wrote President Bush in support of funding for population control (Washington Post, April 1, 1990, p. H1)
    The Trilateral Commission and the American Assembly call for reduction in population growth (U. S. News and World Report, May 7, 1990)
    Newsweek's year-ending cover story concluded that "Foremost of the new realities is the world's population problem" (December 25, 1990, p.44)
    The president of NOW warns that continued population growth would be a "catastrophe" (Nat Hentoff in the Washington Post, July 29, 1989, p. A17)
    Ted Turner (Atlanta Journal Constitution, Wed. Dec. 2, 1998) in an address to the Society of Environmental Journalists in Chattanooga - blamed Christianity for overpopulation and environmental degradation, and argued that the people who disagree with him are "dummies." He stated in part, "The Judeo-Christian religion says man was given dominion over everything, and his salvation was that he was to go out and increase and multiply. Well, we have done that ... to the point where in Calcutta, it’s a hellhole. So it's not an environmentally friendly religion."
    Ellen Goodman laments "People Pollution" (Washington Post, March 3, 1990, p. A25)
    Herblock cartoon shows that the U. S. neglecting the "world population explosion" (Washington Post, July 19, 1990, p. A22)
    Hobart Rowen likens population growth to "the pond weed [which] grows in huge leaps" (Washington Post, April 1, 1990, p. H8).
    A Newsweek "My Turn" suggests giving every teen-age girl a check for up to $1200 each year that she does not have a baby "in order to stop the relentless increase of humanity" (Noel Perrin. "A Nonbearing Account", April 2, 1990, p. 9).

Climate Change     Claim Jan. 1970: "By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half." Life Magazine, January 1970. Life Magazine also noted that some people disagree, "but scientists have solid experimental and historical evidence to support each of the predictions."
    Data: Air quality has actually improved since 1970. Studies find that sunlight reaching the Earth fell by somewhere between 3 and 5 percent over the period in question.   Claim April 1970: "If present trends continue, the world will be ... eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." Kenneth E.F. Watt, in Earth Day, 1970.
    Data: According to NASA, global temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1970.
   Claim 1970: "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." Paul Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970.

    Claim 1972: "Artic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000." Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.
    Data: Ice coverage has fallen, though as of last month, the Arctic Ocean had 3.82 million square miles of ice cover -- an area larger than the continental United States -- according to The National Snow and Ice Data Center.

    Claims 1974: "... when metereologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere--from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice int eh waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data fro the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadia Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round."
    Later in the article, "Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip teh climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years."     Source: "Another Ice Age," Time Magazine, June 24, 1974. 
    Claim 1989: "Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010." Associated Press, May 15, 1989.
    Data: According to NASA, global temperature has increased by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1989. And U.S. temperature has increased even less over the same period.    Claims: "Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives."
    "Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and ... are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters--which scientists are attributing to global climate change--produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries."
    "London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991." "Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community."
    According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years "children just aren't going to know what snow is" and winter snowfall will be "a very rare and exciting event." Interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.     "David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow."
    See "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past." The Independent. March 20, 2000.
    Data: "Coldest December Since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10 C bringing travel chaos across Britain." Mailonline. Dec. 18, 2010.

    Claim: "[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots ... [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michel Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle, Dead Heat, St. Martin's Press, 1990. Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He is the Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at the Wilson School. He was formerly a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, the largest non-governmental organization in the U.S. that examines problems and solutions to greenhouse gases.
    Data: When asked about these old predictions Oppenheimer stated, "On the whole I would stand by these predictions -- not predictions, sorry, scenarios -- as having at least in a general way actually come true," he said. "There's been extensive drought, devastating drought, in significant parts of the world. The fraction of the world that's in drought has increased over that period."
    However, that claim is not obviously true. Data from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center show that precipitation -- rain and snow -- has increased slightly over the century._Dooms that Failed

This is just a hint of all the failed predictions of doom over the past few decades. Remember: While there is certainly a sucker born every minute, there is also a grifter born at least every few minutes. The cleverest grifters take advantage of a sucker's gullibility in order to become rich and powerful -- and sometimes popes and presidents.

Matt Ridley: Apocalypse Not

Ronald Bailey: Remembering Peak Oil Madness

Environmentalists' Wild Predictions

Doomsday Prophecy for Environmentalists

Coping When the World Doesn't End

Peter Glover: Ehrlich, False Prophets, . . .

A Few of the Last Chances to Save the World

Peak Oil Doomers Must Adapt to New Realities or Go Insane

Something very odd has happened on the way to peak oil doom and societal collapse: Reality happened, and it spoiled all the doomers' fun.

Some doomers have proven themselves able to adapt. They have rolled with the punches and come up singing a new song more closely in tune with real world developments. Andrew McKillop is such an example of a former doomer who started to pay attention to what was happening in the real world:

The Olduvai Gorge theory of Richard Duncan was that human society would be forced back to the anthropoid ape stage of evolution by peak oil and energy scarcity... Duncan's angle, developed in the late 1990s, was that peak oil and energy resource depletion would firstly make inevitable, then speed up this retreat and defeat of Humanity, as human society was forced back to hunting and gathering....

How the World Might End

Among the admirers of Richard Duncan and his "back to the jungle" theory, Britain's Prince Charles and the USA's Bill Clinton have surely consumed a lot of jetfuel kerosene as well as motor gasoline in their lives, to date, and kept away from hunter gathering, as shown by their ability to avoid paperazzi and photo opportunity hunters. They also kept Duncan's gory theory of mass human die off and backward evolution to hunting-gathering, due to Peak Oil and fossil energy depletion, out of nearly all of their speeches. As we know, certainly in recent years, the elite fear of peak oil has been replaced by global warming fear - as the best excuse to impose "world government", unelected of course.

GOOD BYE PEAK OIL

Duncan's theory was given significant media attention about 10 years ago, and was heavily cited by supporters of the US Gas Cliff theory, promoted by writers including Julien Darley and Michael Ruppert in 2004-2006, and by promoters of Doomsday energy shortage and oil soaring to $200 a barrel, such as Matt Simmons. The Gas Cliff theory, we can note, argued that gas resource depletion was running so fast, that US gas resources would be "practically exhausted" by about 2015. Today, we know that we face a towering cliff of unconventional gas resources - discovered since only 2007. Discoveries of unconventional gas march on and up, implying that probably 200 years, or more, of current world gas consumption are now available as exploitable resources, worldwide.

...Olduvai Gorge theory may have been exciting, to Prince Charles or Bill Clinton, but other changes have happened and are happening in global energy in a global macroeconomic context that itself is changing very fast. These fundamental changes will continue to build going forward, making for the unsurprising forecast of further decline in oil's role in world energy, geopolitics and the economy. This role will gradually erode and fade as the oil price starts to converge, at a lower level, with prices for all other forms and types of energy. Like Hubbert's theory of the 1950s, and the PO theory of 1998-2008, the Olduvai Gorge theory posited ever declining world consumption of oil - dictated by supply side decline. Demand side decline is also possible, in fact current reality, but the mechanism and process of decline and shift, away from oil, are light years away from Olduvai Gorge._Andrew McKillop

But for some peak oil doomers, the money is just too good to pass up. They struggle to keep the faithful within the flock, so as to keep their cash flow coming in. One of those who continues to make a lucrative living off of doom is James Howard Kuntsler. Although he may take a licking from reality's callous slings and arrows, he keeps ticking along with the same old message of doom & collapse:

Here’s why the shale oil story is not the “game changer” that the wishful claim it is: the price required to get it out of the ground (between $80-90 a barrel) will crush the US economy. Since prices are already in that range, the economy is already being crushed.

The result is an economy in more-or-less permanent contraction. As demand for oil falls with declining economic activity the price of oil falls – below the level that makes it worthwhile to conduct expensive shale oil drilling and fracking operations.

...I have one flat-out prediction, one I have made before but deserves repeating: Japan will be the first society to consciously opt out of being an advanced industrial economy. They have no other apparent choice really, having next-to-zero oil, gas, or coal reserves of their own, and having lost faith in nuclear power. They will be the first country to enter a world made by hand. They were very good at it before about 1850 and had a pre-industrial culture of high artistry and grace – though, granted, all the defects of human psychology.

I don’t think the US can make that transition in an orderly way. We’re too stricken with techno-narcissism and grandiosity...My guess is that being predisposed to superstition and religious fanaticism, the American public will violently reject science and rationality and retreat into a world of shadows.

We’re already well on our way. _JamesHowardKuntsler

Kuntsler was very angry at a recent IEA report that predicted that the US would soon out-produce Saudi Arabia in terms of oil production.

Kuntsler feels threatened by the idea that industrial societies may not be on the brink of collapse after all. And he should feel that way. If his many followers begin to doubt his gospel, he may soon lose the greater portion of his income.

The peak oil doom believers are in a quandry. Who are they to believe? Their prophets of doom, or their lying eyes that tell them that -- year after year -- their societies do not seem to be ready to collapse just yet, despite the decades of doom predictions.

For the quasi-religions of overpopulation doom, environmental doom, and energy scarcity doom there is no scarcity of true believers. There is "a sucker born every minute." In a rapidly ageing western society, there is a senile brain born every minute. And these senile brains are ripe for the picking by the doom prophets.

Not to mention the millions of young and dumbed down brains, courtesy of government factories of indoctrination and perpetual incompetence otherwise known as government schools. Abundant fodder for the prophets of doom indeed.

But as the years pass by without such dooms coming to pass -- despite the best efforts of sensationalist news media, opportunistic politicians, and a well-conditioned academia to drum up deep feelings of crisis, doom, and imminent collapse -- a cognitive dissonance tends to set in. Either the true believer will adapt to real trends that break through the cultural smokescreen, or he will begin to lose his ability to reason independently.

Much money is riding on mass belief. Whoever controls public opinion -- and counts the votes -- will stand to gain power and wealth beyond imagining.

An analysis of predictions that the world will starve for lack of phosphorus and potash

Matt Ridley: Apocalypse Maybe?

Megacities and the Pandemic of Doom

ON OCTOBER 2nd a British traveller, flying home to Glasgow from Afghanistan, began to feel ill. Within hours he was diagnosed with Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever, a virus nasty enough for him to be put onto a military transport aircraft for transfer to an isolation hospital in London. Less than 24 hours later he was dead.

This outbreak, on top of another death last month in Saudi Arabia from a previously unknown virus, a cousin of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), has set global health agencies on edge... _Economist

Metropolis of Tomorrow

Fast global travel brings the people of the world -- and their emerging infectious diseases -- closer together than ever before. Pandemics and plagues are spread by travelers, over distances both long and short. The human consequences of a widespread pandemic involving an emerging and deadly contagion, can be severe:

In the 1500s and 1600s, European epidemics killed perhaps 90% of the aboriginal Americans. In the 1400s, the plague killed one third of the humans in Europe. The worldwide influenza of 1918 killed 30 million, and AIDS had killed at least half that by 2000... newly-arising pathogens rarely seem to extinct their host species even in their initial outbreak. Genetically-engineered pathogens may be different. _Future Global Catastrophes

A pathogen would have to be designed to spread easily from person to person, persist in the environment, resist antibiotics and immune responses, and cause almost 100% mortality. Designing for long latency (e.g. months) might be necessary to ensure wide distribution, but no length may be enough to infect every last human. _Bioterrorism

There are barriers to the spread of epidemics. Airports, seaports, and train stations can be shut down for the duration of an epidemic. Infected travelers can be rapidly diagnosed and whisked into quarantine.

But in the emerging age of megacities, how would you stop an epidemic that has already established a strong foothold inside a city of 50 million people?

Infected persons would seek medical help soon after the outset of symptoms. If the early symptoms are not too severe, cases may be medicated and sent home -- but not before passing the infection on to health care workers and others they may have come in contact with in waiting rooms and in transit.

The contagion would rapidly spread through schools and workplaces across the megalopolis, perhaps infecting millions before the extent of the problem becomes apparent. By then, any modern methods of quarantine would not likely be effective at stopping the pandemic.

There are now 23 megacities in the world, compared with just two 60 years ago. Just over half of the population currently dwells in cities, and with the urban population expected to nearly double by 2050, that proportion is projected to approach 70%. “Almost all this growth will take place in the developing world,” says Jalkanen. _Nature

There is nothing new about large scale devastation and collapse from epidemics and pandemics. But the rise of megacities provides emerging infectious diseases -- to say nothing of engineered pathogens -- with an opportunity for devastation that may be too good to pass up.

Human history has been punctuated frequently by epidemics, and occasionally by pandemics, that have shaped the rise and fall of civilizations and the victories and defeats of warring armies. The outcome of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.) between Athens and Sparta—and the future course of Western civilization—might have been very different had it not been for the epidemic that decimated the Athenians at the beginning of the war. Some epidemic diseases, such as the plague, smallpox, typhus, and influenza, have persisted throughout recorded history. Smallpox was eradicated worldwide by 1980. Cholera appeared along the world's major trade routes in several devastating epidemics beginning in the eighteenth century, and it still causes massive epidemics, most recently in South America in early 1990s. _Timelines of Great Epidemics

If the contagion is sufficiently disabling, megacities will lose their health care systems fairly early on. Soon thereafter, parts of the critical infrastructure will begin to drop off line, one by one, as key personnel are put out of action -- or attempt to flee the pandemic.

Public supplies of necessities will be rapidly depleted -- first lawfully, then by mass looting. Organised law enforcement and fire departments will be among the first to go down, leaving most of the megacity to the mobs. Collapse of any remaining services should follow soon after.

There are inevitable problems when one tries to put all his eggs in one basket. Large systems are prone to chaotic instabilities that tend to grow along with the size of the system. It is possible to design redundancies, workarounds, and other attempts at resiliency. But in the third world and emerging world -- where most megacities are appearing -- few resources will be devoted to resiliency when poverty is already rampant, and open sewers are the norm rather than the exception.

The tendency toward centralisation and hyper-urbanisation appears to be inevitable across most of the world. Yet there are many vulnerabilities to such concentrations of people, resources, and infrastructure. Many people have no choice, if they wish to enjoy some of the many benefits and opportunities of civilisation.

But dangerous children know how to bring civilisation along with them, wherever they go. It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood.

More: Where will the next global pandemic originate?

Even More: The Armageddon Virus

Countdown to the End of Days: December 21, 2012

The end date of the Mayan calendar has been confirmed as December 21, 2012. Doomers of all stripes have latched onto this date, convinced -- once again -- that the end is near.

Modern humans have lived in the shadow of doom for as long as we have had printing presses. And before that, for as long as we have had scribes to copy religious texts and assorted prophecies. And before that, for as long as we have had a spoken tradition, and the "wisdom" of the village shaman. The tradition of predicted doom goes back as far as language.

But as always, there are skeptics and doubters among us:

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

...In the 1970s scientists discovered a decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs, and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits, while The New York Times reported “an increase in Twilight Zone-type reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts” in Patagonia. But all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.

There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.

...“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” said Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. Sending food to India was a mistake and only postponed the inevitable, William and Paul Paddock wrote in their best seller, Famine—1975!

What actually happened was quite different. The death rate fell. Famine became rarer. The population growth rate was cut in half, thanks chiefly to the fact that as babies stop dying, people stop having so many of them. Over the past 50 years, worldwide food production per capita has risen, even as the global population has doubled. Indeed, so successful have farmers been at increasing production that food prices fell to record lows in the early 2000s and large parts of western Europe and North America have been reclaimed by forest.

...In 1977 President Jimmy Carter went on television and declared: “World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But sometime in the 1980s, it can’t go up anymore. Demand will overtake production.” He was not alone in this view. The end of oil and gas had been predicted repeatedly throughout the 20th century. In 1922 President Warren Harding created the US Coal Commission, which undertook an 11-month survey that warned, “Already the output of [natural] gas has begun to wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.” In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14 trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.

All these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to rise during the past 50 years. Gas reserves took an enormous leap upward after 2007, as engineers learned how to exploit abundant shale gas. In 2011 the International Energy Agency estimated that global gas resources would last 250 years. Although it seems likely that cheap sources of oil may indeed start to peter out in coming decades, gigantic quantities of shale oil and oil sands will remain available, at least at a price. Once again, obstacles have materialized, but the apocalypse has not. Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus, doomsayers have tended to underestimate the power of innovation. In reality, driven by price increases, people simply developed new technologies, such as the horizontal drilling technique that has helped us extract more oil from shale.

...Over the past half century, none of our threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. Some came partly true; some were averted by action; some were wholly chimerical. This raises a question that many find discomforting: With a track record like this, why should people accept the cataclysmic claims now being made about climate change? After all, 2012 marks the apocalyptic deadline of not just the Mayans but also a prominent figure in our own time: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said in 2007 that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.” _Matt Ridley in Wired

And so it goes, from apocalyptic crisis to apocalyptic crisis. "Defining moments" come and go, according to the pleasure and convenience of one vested interest or another. In the case of climate change, the lure of $trillions of funds to be redistributed via the United Nations' climate and environmental agencies would seem to be ample motivation for the climate grifters to twist and falsify the evidence.

But every prophet of false doom has his price, for which he will be willing to do and say almost anything. Fame, wealth, power -- or simply something to do.

Meanwhile, mind the countdown. You will not want to be caught flatfooted when the world ends on December 21, 2012, at precisely 11:11 PM.

Behind the Scenes of The Green Doomer Eco-Fascist Cult

This article was previously published on Al Fin Energy blog

Green doomer eco-fascist cultists all follow similar guidelines: Slash the human population of the planet, although they themselves are unwilling to go first.. Blame free markets and western civilisation for most of the world's problems. Eschew all viable forms of large-scale energy in favour of those which are exorbitantly expensive and innately unreliable. Hate advanced technology, and want to push the world toward primitive lifestyles and global poverty. They are essentially anti-individual and pro-collective.

Members of any doomer cult will recognise the litany, whether from the climate change catastrophe cult, the peak oil doomer cult, the overpopulation doom cult, the global pollution doom cult, the biodiversity doom cult, etc.

Here is more from one of the horses' mouths:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth .

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:

Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

_azizonomics.com

H/T Zerohedge

This fellow is not actually so extreme, for a green. He may be a bit more honest and open about his convictions than most, but that is changing. Even the WWF -- which has written many of the supporting "studies" for the IPCC climate change reports -- has come out in support of policies which would ultimately result in a large scale human dieoff.

Is this also the face of the peak oil doomer cult? Certainly you find a lot of peak oil cult wankers fixated on doom porn, compulsively getting their doom fix whenever possible. It would be easy to assume that they actually want to see suburbia burning, that they would like to see the end of civilisation as we know it.

Not that most of the incompetent athols would survive very long after such an event. More: Europe as the canary in the coal mine

Early dissent among former believers in the CAGW orthodoxy and carbon hysteria warming cult

Your Regularly Scheduled Peak Oil Doomsday Has Been Postponed Several Decades to Allow Humans to Convert to Advanced Nuclear Power

The following article was adapted from multiple articles previously published at Al Fin Energy and Al Fin Potpourri blogs

Massive Hydrocarbon Resources Beginning to Unfold Humans have been unexpectedly handed several decades in which to convert their power infrastructure from a dependency on combustion energy to the use of advanced nuclear power. The explosion in the available natural gas resource -- from the shale gas bonanza to the coming gas hydrates boom and beyond -- should reassure us that we have time to move to advanced nuclear fission, and eventually fusion. For the next few decades, it is likely that natural gas -- particularly LNG and GTL -- will assume a rapidly growing role in the global energy trade.

New giant gas fields have been discovered in such previously unpromising places as the Mediterranean off Israel’s shores and deep Atlantic waters offshore near Brazil. There are extensive deposits of gas-bearing shales in Europe (particularly in Poland) and enormous resources in Asia. Recent reductions in the cost of gas liquefaction coupled with increased sizes of LNG tankers (they now rival the size of ships carrying crude oil) made LNG into a trade equivalent of oil: It can now be transported to consumers on any continent, bought without restrictive long-term contracts, and delivered at increasingly affordable prices. The totals speak for themselves: Global LNG trade rose roughly eightfold between 1980 and 2010, and it now accounts for 30 percent of the worldwide natural gas trade.

...Before the end of 2005, the U.S. price of natural gas rose above $15/1,000 cubic feet, nearly 12 times the all-time low reached in 1995. Production was down by about 8 percent compared to 2001, news reports speculated about supply shortages, and gas companies were gearing for expanded imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas. Six years later, by the second week of April 2012, the market price of U.S. natural gas fell to less than $2/1,000 cubic feet (to levels not seen since January 2002), nationwide gas extraction in 2011 was nearly 12 percent above the 2009 level, and record production was expected in 2012, when all storages would be filled to capacity. No wonder that gas companies are now planning to export LNG, and that new drilling projects have been shelved in the anticipation of gas glut.

...Little has to be said about high oil prices (the price spread between liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons has reached an unprecedented level), but the conversion efficiencies achievable by furnaces and turbines burning natural gas are not sufficiently appreciated. New, super-efficient household gas furnaces convert up to 97 percent of the fuel into heat; combined-cycle generation (using the waste heat from a gas turbine to raise steam and generate more electricity in an associated steam turbine) now produces electricity with 60 percent efficiency (and 70 percent will be possible in the future).

This amazingly abrupt change of gas fortunes has been due to the rising production of shale gas. _Vaclav Smil

But an even larger resource of unconventional hydrocarbons has recently presented itself for human use: gas and methane hydrates. Methane hydrates represent the largest resource of hydrocarbons in the planetary crust. Up until now, humans had not devised a good way to tap into this immense energy wealth. But a report from the DOE today may point the way to a new era in abundant energy for human societies:

May 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday announced a breakthrough in research into tapping a possibly vast fuel resource that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.

By injecting a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a methane hydrate formation on Alaska's North Slope, the department was able to produce a steady flow of natural gas in the first field test of this method. The test was done from mid-February to about mid-April this year

"While this is just the beginning, this research could potentially yield significant new supplies of natural gas," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.

The department, which partnered with ConocoPhillips and Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp for the test, said it will offer $6.5 million this year for further research on tapping methane hydrates, and will request an additional $5 million for research next year.

Gerald Holder, dean of the engineering program at University of Pittsburgh and who has worked with the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory on the hydrate issue, said before this announcement he had been skeptical about what researchers would be able to accomplish. He said the main problem until now was finding a way to extract natural gas from solid hydrates without adding a whole lot of steps that made the process too expensive, so the success of this new test is significant. "It makes the possibility of recovering methane from hydrates much more likely," Holder said. _Reuters

While it is true that experts are probably understating the actual resource of gas hydrates by a significant factor, the same could be said for estimates of crude oil, coal, natural gas, bitumen, and kerogen resources.

But today's announcement should initiate renewed research in labs around the world, toward devising more efficient and economical ways of extracting gas hydrates from the enormous, "quasi-renewable" resource.

Using unconventional gas and gas hydrates as substitutes for crude oil in the production of fuels, electricity, high value chemicals, lubricants, polymers, and other important materials, will give us extra decades to convert to high energy density, safe, clean, abundant, cheap advanced nuclear power. But that is just the beginning of the energy bonanza coming our way, if we can only eject the energy starvationists who have hijacked our governments and other important institutions.

Advanced high temperature nuclear reactors give human industry the abundant power and high quality process heat to achieve clean economies of production only dreamed of in the past.

It comes down to the high quality, high temperature process heat that gas-cooled reactors provide. Here are some of the things that high quality process heat can do:

1. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in oil sands (PDF)
2. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in coal to liquids and gas to liquids (PDF)
3. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in oil shale kerogens 
4. Provide abundant industrial process heat for production of fertilisers, refining fuels, making plastics, etc 
5. Split CO2 into CO to use as a hydrogen carrier 
6. Overturn conventional fears of EROEI and Peak Oil 

_Source

Brian Wang has also taken a look at this topic

One particular gas cooled modular reactor has been selected by the Next Generation Nuclear Plant Industry Alliance as the best design for the category:

The Alliance said that it had selected an unspecified Areva reactor concept, presumably based on the Antares design, "as the optimum design." It said, "The Areva HTGR technology's capability and modular design would support a broad range of market sectors, providing highly-efficient energy to industries such as electrical power generation, petrochemicals, non-conventional oil recovery and synthetic fuel production." Areva, it said, "has the technical and design capabilities to develop a HTGR for the process heat co-generation and generation markets."

It added that "additional investors are being pursued to fully capitalize a venture in order to build an initial fleet of HTGR plants for industry." The Alliance noted, "Deploying next generation nuclear technology is a critical step in solving the long-term needs for secure sources of energy, conserving fossil fuels and slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean, safe nuclear energy from HTGR would increase US energy independence and extend the life of domestic oil and natural gas resources." _WorldNuclearNews

More here

Perhaps a stimulus from the private sector will help to spur the revolution that the US federal government under Obama appears to be resisting with all its might. Regardless, it is critical for a wide range of intelligent people within various industries and sectors of the economy to understand the importance of this potential qualitative transition in possibilities for production of future energies and fuels.

Nuclear energy systems that utilise efficient fuel burn and recycling (with combined Gen III and Gen IV + reactor synergies) offer thousands of years of electrical power and optimised fuels production. Only rational nuclear energy possesses the energy density and massive fuel supplies to allow humans to transcend fears of energy scarcity in order to move into a future of relative abundance.

We are developing clean and cheap ways of utilising the truly massive energy resources of this planet. But that is just the beginning. The resources discussed above can take humans ahead centuries or longer. But it is likely that forms of economical fusion power will be developed before the turn of the century. Once fusion is tamed and scaled, we are looking at the opening of the resources of the entire solar system -- out to the Oort cloud.

Your regularly scheduled peak oil / resource scarcity doomsday has been cancelled. Enjoy the unexpected age of abundant energy which will be coming to you instead -- contingent upon your disposing of the energy starvationist parasites of the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgy persuasion, who have latched onto your institutions of government, academia, news media, and popular cultures.

Surviving in Your Doomsday Bunker with Power to Spare

This semi-satirical article was first published on Al Fin Potpourri blog and subsequently re-published on Al Fin Energy blog:

After the Apocalypse
After the doomsday bell tolls, you will want to have a safe hideaway, packed with your favourite foods, beverages, people, and prescription drugs. But no matter how safely your bunker is designed, you cannot survive long without a source of heating and electrical power.

Issues of energy density dictate the need for a nuclear power and heat source -- either fission or fusion. The choice seems to come down to either a small modular nuclear fission reactor -- such as the NuScale or Wilcox and Babcock models, vs one of the new scalable fusion reactor models. The Lawrenceville Plasma Physics focus fusion device pictured below, appears to be the leader of the pack in terms of timeline for proof of concept, prototype, commercial demo, and mass production.

All images below taken from Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc (PDF) (via) NBF

Five megawatts baseload power should be enough to supply the power and heat needs of most medium-sized doomsday communities. When living in an underground environment, it is easy to underestimate needs for space lighting and grow-lighting, as well as power for supplying pumps, compressors, blowers, fans, filtration devices, and various electronic devices.

The diagram above attempts to illustrate energy flows and losses in the focus fusion system. Operation of the reactor will be highly automated, but a certain amount of oversight will be necessary, to assure smooth function and to limit the need for unscheduled maintenance shutdowns.

Baseload power generation means that the reactor produces 5 MW at all times. Any heat and power produced above the needs of the doomsday community will converted as needed, and routed to storage or to a sink. Since the reactor utilises hydrogen and boron as fuel, a significant amount of excess power will be used to maintain hydrogen stores. The hydrogen can be used as fuel in either the focus fusion reactor, or in backup fuel cell CHP generators.

The timeline for production of the LPP focus fusion reactors is particularly optimistic, with estimates for mass production as early as 2016.

Keep in mind that US federal and state regulators are unlikely to approve these devices for sale in the US anytime within the next decade. This means that any US citizen wishing to use these reactors as backup power supplies for their home, seastead, polar outpost, or doomsday bunker, will either need to locate outside the US, or will need to find extra-legal ways of installing their nuclear fusion (or SMR fission) reactors within the borders of the US.

In the event of doomsday, it is expected that nuclear enforcement by US federal or state officials will be suspended for a number of years. In such a case, issues of survival are likely to be paramount, over issues of bureaucratic red tape.

What do Doomers Do When their Predictions Fail?

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin Energy blog:

Many doomers -- particularly the thought-leaders of doom movements -- can be quite versatile and resourceful in the face of their many failed predictions. For those who make a living from doom, it helps to not only be clever, but to have an eye for the gullible rube, or sucker. Here is how doomer Paul Ehrlich has made a lucrative life from predicting countless dooms which never came to pass:

Ehrlich came to prominence in 1968 with the publication of his environmental blockbusterThe Population Bomb. The book’s central Malthusian thesis is that a growing population is unsustainable in a world of dwindling finite resources. As Malthus’ scenario failed to materialize, so too Ehrlich’s apocalyptic vision of hungry and dead bodies on the streets in the 1970s proved a total fiction. Not that this has deterred Ehrlich. He has continued to make a healthy living from a litany of population predictions – not one of which has come to pass.

The truth is that Ehrlich is the greatest failed prophet of our age. Yet amazingly, not only does he continue to collect his university stipend and pick up lucrative public appearance and book deals, for all his blatant failures, is still feted by the media. Take the journalistic drivel with which John Vidal’s Guardian article began at the end of April. Vidal’s interview announces Ehrlich as “the world’s most renowned population analyst”. So what track record of predictive success to date warrants such approbation? Ehrlich’s prophecies include:

That the battle to feed humanity was over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people, including Americans, were going to starve to death. (Of course, if eco-warriors butted out, GM foods could easily eradicate global hunger within a decade. But, in any event, food production is running well in excess of global population growth. To top it all, the obesity epidemic currently kills hundreds of thousands every year.)

England would not exist in the year 2000 (I just looked out of the window. It’s still here.)

“Smog disasters” would kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles in 1973.(Not only did it not happen, both cities continue to have the best air quality they have had in decades.)

In 1976, “before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity...in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (Heard of the shale gas and oil revolutions that are set to last for hundreds of years and, beyond that, centuries of methane hydrates?)

In an Atlantic article in the late 1990s Ehrlich maintained that anyone who believed technology would provide the answers to the problem of scarcity was either a liar or a fool. (Heard of the technique of ‘hydraulic fracturing’ that has set in motion the energy game-changing shale revolution – not to mention deepwater reserves – facilitating century’s more of both gas and oil and cutting US gas prices by a quarter?)

In 1972 Ehrlich suggested adding a forced sterilization agent to “staple food” and to the water supply. (Shades of the SF movie Soylent Green? Would you trust any government who effectively ‘poisoned’ the food and water supply as part of a program of ‘forced sterilization’?)

All of Ehrlich’s solutions to his predictions are, of course, rooted in the need to overthrow democracy with a world government controlling and enforcing a global program of distribution of food and energy consumption. Ah yes, world domination – and a final solution. And if the very thought of this 1984-style one world government turns your liberty-loving stomach, consider what Ehrlich-esque policies have already achieved. In the 1950s the UN imposed a global ban on the use of DDT after environmentalists complained a few birds were accidently killed by DDT (actually through slight over-use of the chemical). DDT was singularly responsible for eradicating the world’s single greatest killer: malaria. As a direct result of the ban by the EPA in 1972, it is estimated that around a million people a year in sub-Saharan Africa alone die from the disease. The “solutions” of environmentalist visionaries should come with a global health warning attached.

No wonder Ehrlich has variously been referred to as “worse than Hitler” and “the Bernie Madoff of science”. To be fair, Ehrlich’s renewed concerns articulated in Vidal’s Guardian interview, about how the earth’s resources can sustain the 9 billion people predicted for 2050, was actually triggered by a new report from the Johnny-come-lately prophets-of-gloom at the Royal Society. Remember when the RS was the doyen of Newtonian empiricist real science? Not anymore. In a desperate bid to become appear “relevant” and justify its increasingly publicly-funded soaring price tag, the RS leadership is increasingly eschewing real science for speculative science.

Published in April 2012, the key recommendations of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet are thoroughly Malthusian. Like Ehrlich, the Royal Socity report is concerned about the Earth’s finite resources failing to keep up with population growth. It demands that developed and emerging economies (that’s everyone) “stabilise” and “reduce material consumption”. And, chiefly, that “reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership” to cut “fertility rates”. Pretty much your standard environmental doom and gloom – and based on an erroneous understanding of “finite resources”. As I have written elsewhere, the RS is developing a culture of anti-science by exchanging its empiricist soul for a mess of prophetic theory.

...No one would spend time publicly expounding preposterous prophetic theories that keep failing if there wasn’t a public appetite for them – and if there weren’t mega-bucks to be made in the speculative ‘futures’ market. Public speaking engagements, book tours, disaster movies, headline-grabbing articles majoring on apocalyptic and sensationalism and warnings are all money-spinning themes. Then there are the rewards of academia. In 1990 alone, even as the failed prophecies racked up, Ehrlich pocketed a cool $345,000 through winning the MacArthur Foundations’ “genius award” and another $60,000 being one half of an award from the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. “Genius” then, we must concede. Any butterfly specialist – which is what Ehrlich is – that can screw $400,000+ out of two international science academies must have some chutzpah. _Peter_Glover_via_GWPF_

There is a sucker born every minute. Fortunately for purveyors of doom, many of these cognitive newborns are suckers for stories of doom. From carbon hysteria to resource depletion to overpopulation to global death from pollution, many people just want to see civilisation collapse, or to see their fellow man suffer.

The purveyors of doom, such as Ehrlich, are happy to find as many suckers as they can -- individuals or institutions. Stories of doom are easy to spin -- most of them are just recycled tales of earlier failed predictions, after all. They are making good livings from selling doom vomit, in other words. What a pleasant thought.

TEOTWAWKI Flea Market: Trading Post Apocalypse

Source
What kind of trade goods should you stockpile, in case the world ends? What sort of items are nearly indispensable in a crisis, but are compact and easy to store and transport? Survival Blog offers a list of 25 candidates for high value trade goods in a post-apocalyptic society:

1. Alcohol...[miniatures]

2. Coffee...Sales price--three pouches/cups for a silver dime.

3. Tobacco products...

4. Ammunition...

5. Lantern mantles...Get 50 or so, sell for a silver dime each in your store. (At the current rate of about 24:1, that's a good one for you). You might also want to stock a couple of dozen lamp wicks.

6. Miniature bottles (1/8 oz.) of Tabasco sauce.... Sell two/three for a silver dime.

7. Toothpaste and dental floss....

8. Beano....

9. Antacid tablets....

10. Salt and pepper....

11. Chapsticks.....

12. Rechargeable batteries....

13. "Free lunch." This is another good one. Consider this your "loss leader" and a promotional strategy to attract customers. As you get your "store" started (the first week, maybe), offer customers a "free lunch"--a tasty bowl of chili beans or spicy noodles and a drink of "bug juice" (that's the red Kool-Aid)--for the first 25 customers or so as a promo strategy. After a few days, you can transition to a paid lunch--a dime or quarter in silver (recycling some of that silver change you put into circulation by buying from other merchants and from your customers).

14. The "bug juice" is another good idea. The water we filter/boil/purify may not taste so good and a sweet drink will be big, especially with the kids. I just priced these at the grocery store--packages (unsweetened) of cherry Kool-Aid are $.27/ea. and make two quarts. I bought 100 packages (compact; takes up very little space for the value). Your post-TEOTWAWKI sales price might be a silver dime for three or ten for a quarter.

15. Butane lighters...Sell individual lighters for a dime each or three for a quarter.....

16. Books.....

17. Pool shock.... "Pool shock" is calcium hypochlorite, a dry powder, sold in one pound packages for swimming pool sanitation. This chemical is remarkably effective at sanitizing water. "Recipes" I have seen online state that a grain or two will sanitize a gallon and that a pound package will treat 65,000 gallons...A one pound bag is about $5....

18. Hand sanitizer...Sell those for a silver dime each (or maybe three for a quarter). Also buy several large bottles--two liter dispensing bottles of their private-label version (same stuff--thickened ethyl alcohol--as the branded product)--for $7.95.....

19. Mice/rat traps and poison. This one should be obvious--When the garbage piles up, the rodents will respond to the "stimulus," too....

20. Sunscreen. Again, everyone will be spending a lot more time outside. Around here, even leathery beach people need sunscreen. This is a great dollar store purchase. Several of our local dollar stores have SPF 15 and 30 in six and eight oz. bottles for a buck. Get a couple dozen bottles; sell for a silver dime each.

21. Bike tire repair kits. As soon as the gasoline supply chain fails, all sorts of old bikes will be dragged out of garages and basements. Many (most?) of these will have flat tires and few folks will have tube repair kits--but you will. Again, check the Big Box stores for kits--a couple of bucks each. You might want to get a dozen; sell for a silver half. Bring your tire pump to your micro-store and offer "complimentary" air.

22. Insect repellant. Living in near-jungle as I do, this one has special significance. I go through a number of Off spray cans every year working in the yard. With all the extra time we will be spending outside hauling water, gathering firewood, manning our Micro Store, and so forth, the bugs will be eating better than anyone. Check your local dollar store for deals on repellant. Price accordingly.

23. LED headlights (for your head, not your car)....I would stay away from the ones with "button" batteries and go for the ones that take AAs or AAAs. Depending on your cost, they would sell for about a silver quarter each or a quarter and a dime.

24. Sta-Bil or Pri-G. Consider this liquid plutonium. Get at least a dozen of the small bottles (treats five gallons of gasoline); sell for a [silver] quarter a bottle.

25. Hard candy. Another great promotion item--Get a couple of bulk jars at one of the warehouse clubs and give away candy to the kids (or to the parents to give to the kids) when they come to your store. These will bring everyone back sooner. A plastic jar of 200 "Atomic Fire Balls" was $6.95 at Sam's (the boys love these) and a similar size jar of Gummi Bears was $7.95. _SurvivalBlog

An interesting list for future shopkeepers of the post-doom world. What you are looking for in trade goods, is something that will pry precious silver from stingy fists. A lot of people who may be well stocked in necessities, may give a great deal for relatively frivolous non-necessities, if the cravings hit.

And what about useful light weight "tools" for the post-apocalypse? Here is a short list of 6 from survivalcache.com:

1. Duct Tape

The fame of duct tape has taken on a life of it’s own. What can you even say about it? (or it’s big brother Gorilla Tape, from the folks that brought you Gorilla Glue)

2. Zip Ties

From handcuffs to lashings and a thousand other ways to tie stuff together, you should have a stockpile of zip ties in every shape and size.

3. WD40

“If it moves and it shouldn’t; use Duct Tape. If it should move and it doesn’t; use WD40″

4. Rope

For those larger jobs that zip ties and duct tape just aren’t going to handle good rope is endlessly useful.

5. Knife

A knife is the bread and butter (pun intended) of every survival tool kit. You really should have one on your person at all times. For a list of good survival knives click here.

6. Pry Bar

or Utility Bar. You can pry, hammer, lift, smash, and just generally mess stuff up. (I need to do a full write up on the Stanley Functional Utility Bar or “FUBAR”) _SurvivalCache

In the comments section at the above link, many people mentioned the multi-tool as an essential post-TEOTWAWKI tool. Some preferred kevlar sail repair tape over duct tape. Others mentioned condoms, tampons, and sanitary pads. And then there are shovels, edge sharpeners, guns, and more. Portable musical instruments such as harmonicas, ukeleles, penny whistles, etc. could also find a market in a world suddenly without many popular entertainments.

Needless to say, anyone who could turn scrap iron into useful tools, implements, and connectors would find a ready market.

Smart, profit-oriented after-doom traders will particularly want to focus on the human vices: alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, marijuana, and items related to sex and gambling. A whisky still and fermenting tanks for beer would make good investments for a trading post.

Growing and selling herbs for seasoning and medicines could also prove a profitable venture for one who knew what he was doing. Soap and candles might also prove useful compact trade goods.

The list is almost inexhaustible. But it is good to consider things like this, if for no other reason than to refine your own prepper's list.

The Coming Human Die-Off: A Little Goes a Long Way

The idea of a coming great human die-off is gaining popularity among those of the lefty-Luddite green enviro persuasion. Whether the die-off will be triggered by resource scarcity, by a voluntary reduction of human fertility, or by more aggressive means, such a great die-off is being seen as a positive event by the trendy and green forces which have taken over most media outlets, Green NGOs, funding agencies, and large segments of academic institutions.

The great human die-off is being backed by some famous names:

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, CNN founder and UN supporter

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, pg.75

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.” - Mikhail Gorbachev

"I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.” - Dave Foreman, Sierra Club and co founder of Earth First!

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” - Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund

Advanced societies are considered "soft targets," because their populations have become so accustomed to things running relatively smoothly. Just a bit of disruption can go a long way toward upsetting such societies.

It is becoming easier for individuals and small groups to trigger events which can lead to momentous calamity in the advanced world. Increased networking of vital infrastructure is making it easier for hackers to commit cyber-terrorism:

Cyber Terrorism

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Government pressure to create "smart power grids" to replace traditional grids, provides malicious hackers with a wide range of new targets to attack, at various scales.

The threat of an EMP attack -- capable of taking out continental scale power grids -- is likewise increased, as nuclear proliferation proceeds across the Pakistan-Iran-N.Korea axis (aided by China and Russia). As many as 90% of an advanced society can be expected to die within 1 year as a result of a large-scale EMP attack.

Chemical terrorism is another way in which advanced cultures could be targeted specifically. Coordinated chemical attacks using various vectors could decapitate leadership and expertise in several vital areas, leading to widespread paralysis of normal infrastructure. Such a paralysing strike might well be a set-up for a more devastating followup attack.

Increasing sophistication of inexpensive tools for "bio-hacking" are also making it more likely that individuals or small groups will create novel microbial agents of mass contagion.

Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,” said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. “Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.” _WaPo

It is not necessary to target the third world, in order to achieve a high magnitude die-off such as is depicted in the chart above. The third world has become so dependent upon the technological infrastructures and products provided by more advanced societies, that if the advanced world goes, most of the third world will quickly follow.

The resulting world of much lower human population, will also be much less technologically capable than the world at present, in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, however, most of human technology will be saved in digital and book form. This means that within 1 to 2 centuries after the great die-off, the higher intelligence populations of the presently advanced world would grow to a large enough size to begin implementing modern technologies on a global scale once again.

In other words, if lefty-Luddite greens are engineering the great human die-off to permanently eliminate high tech civilisations and infrastructures, their efforts will ultimately fail.

But that will be cold comfort for your children and grandchildren who will have to suffer through the bloody mess aftermath left to them by the possibly well-intentioned greens.

It is up to you to make sure that they survive that bloody mess. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Some of the above is cross-published from abu al-fin

More: The conspiracy zone...

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population....The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

...They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said. _Prison Planet

These are some of the people with the ability to sway media outlets -- which they largely own -- along with NGOs, academic research and pronouncements via funding, and a significant number of elected officials, via campaign support, job offers, board directorships, and the funneling of significant investments.

It is not surprising that the super-wealthy would be concerned about population overgrowth, if they truly believed that it would bring about the end of the world. But it is a bit troubling when they deliberately take a cause such as "the great carbon hysteria orthodoxy and climate change crusade," wrap it into a trans-global agenda, and push it into the heart of each new generation's training and education -- from K-12 through university and beyond.

Does this mean that these people are intentionally contaminating third world immunisation efforts, so as to help bring about the great human die-off -- using the UN and NGOs as intermediaries? Probably not. I am acquainted with a lot of the people involved in such international programs, and do not believe for one second that they would be a part of such a travesty.

But now that we know that the richest of the rich have taken an interest in limiting -- and even slashing -- the human population of the planet, we may want to watch what they do more carefully, through their almost countless intermediaries.