Turnkey Tyranny and Energy Decent

"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."

"And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather then a stipulation of law. And because of that a new leader will be elected, they'll find the switch, say that 'Because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."

Edward Snowden, theguardian interview video of Edward Snowden; 2013/jun/09 and Interview Transcript

Often, those of us aware of peak oil and energyconsider, perhaps wishfully, the decent side of oil production curve as ushering in a return to an energy poorer, but simpler, more localized lifestyle, analogous to what existed in 18^th or 19^th century. 

Jim Kunstler’s  the World Made By Hand series of novels, the Archdruid’s green wizard project or the transition town movement are some examples that readily come to my mind. 

In the face of ongoing slow energy decent, however, we have continuing revelations about a global surveillance system that Snowden’s interview and document releases have shone a latest fresh light on.  

The Present State of the Police State

Perhaps you have been living on the dark-side of the moon, chained to a desk, or only watching mainstream media news, and so you have no idea of what I am talking about?  

Here’s an extended summary of some recommenced articles or podcasts showing the length and breath of the present global surveillance system. 

A good place to start is that June 9 2013 Guardian’s interview of Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton employee working as a contractor at an NSA installation in Hawaii, and, already referenced above:

NSA and intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.

Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so."

Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.

Also there is this June 7, 2013 Democracy Now interview of the Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who with the aid of Laura Poitras, interviewed Edwards in Hong Kong:

There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want.

Those NSA documents released by Snowden correspond to a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts for the NSA or their contractors.  What was actually released by the Guardian and Washington Post on June 6 2013 were 4 of those 41 pages.  The released pages broadly outline how NSA’s (and apparently Britain’s GCHQ and other partners) access to the central servers of Internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc... enables, for the past several years, NSA’s access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs (i.e., metadata).   On June 29 2013, the Post released a few more slides, with redactions and annotations added, to protect the guilty, and to ease the public’s mind that total surveillance and the permanent storage of all of your personal communications isn’t that bad after all.

Lest you think that the surveillance state is somehow only limited to the USA’s traditional enemies, we have Snowden’s interview in the South China Morning Post revealing that the NSA’s tapping of communications to and from Hong Kong and mainland China for many year. 

And, we now also have this recent series of Spiegel articles from Laura Poitras et al., reporting on further information provided by Snowden:

Snowden's NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world's most powerful intelligence agency's work over a period of around a decade. SPIEGEL has seen and reviewed a series of documents from the archive.

The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.

No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, "The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do."

from How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe

You should not be sanguine if your among the so-called handpicked excluded groups of UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. We already know that GCHQ is part of PRISM and the Canada’s CSEC is similarly conducting massive surveillance of its citizens.  I am sure that you find the analogous agencies in Australia and NZ. 

In fact, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, the five countries that are signatories to an agreement to share surveillance communications data, the so-called ECHELON system.  ECHELON was ostensibly intended to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, but its scope has expanded far beyond that now.

As pointed out in the Spiegel articles, these agencies and others now share their gathered information to create a global matrix of “boundless surveillance:”

What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance. Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.

Lest you think that “boundless surveillance” only refers to the collection of metadata, let’s go to this June 17 2013 interview of Russ Tice at Boiling Frogs (from 8:00 to 11:00 minutes):

No one in the main stream press wants to ask this question: is the NSA collecting the content of phone calls and emails and Skype sessions and all these other communications, and storing them in-mass?   

And I saw a little over a month ago; I was watching CNN and there was, as a matter of fact, a fellow Marylander gal, Erin Burnet who was on and she had an FBI guy on there.  Tim Clemente I think his name was. And he came out and said that the FBI has the ability to go back in time and look at the content of communications. And this via an intelligence agency that deals with that deals with national security. 

Well, you know, that had my red flag go up, because back in the day when I talked with Keith Olbermann NSA did not have that capability, not because they didn’t want it, but because they didn’t have the processing capability and literally they didn’t have the electrons, the power, the infrastructure at Fort Meade to run that sort of thing. And they didn’t have the storage capability to store all that information.  Imagine this conversation that we re having now and all the other conversations around domestically in this country.  That is a lot talking going on. So that is why they were being judicious about that and going after, back then, the metadata.  And that is what we know from Snowden’s initial release. 

So I contacted...this is over a month ago, I contacted one of my main sources at NSA, and we had a meeting .... He wasn’t quite sure if it was everything then, so we had to, he had to, do some investigating, .... I just got the confirmation this past Saturday, that yes, it is everything.

NSA is copying every domestic communication in this country, word-for-word content, in every phone conversation, like the one we are having now. Every email, everything.  They are collecting everything in bulk, and they are putting it in data bases. 

And, ultimately in that facility out there in Utah is already online.  And they haven’t even said that.  But they are putting stuff there now, even though they are supposedly not going to open that thing up until later on this fall.  That thing is sort of like the Death Star, in Star Wars.  They said it was only half-way done, or whatever, but it had the capability to blow up some other Alderaan or something.  But that Death Star in Utah is already starting to function to store every communication in this country—word-for-word content.

Among other security positions, Tice was a former NSA intelligence analyst, who in 2005-06 blew the whistle on unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens and further raised public awareness of domestic spying via the ECHELON system.

By the way, you can find a transcript of that CNN interview of Clemente here, where Clemente said:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

Could it be that the FBI would not want to present this in court because they know it’s obtained illegally?

Lest you think that the NSA and its counter-parts in other countries are working alone, consider this, also from Poitras’s Spiegel article:

According to the documents seen by SPIEGEL, a particularly valuable partner is a company which is active in the US and has access to information that crisscrosses America. At the same time, this company, by virtue of its contacts, offers "unique access to other telecoms and (Internet service providers)." The company is "aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors," according to a secret NSA document. The cooperation has existed since 1985, the documents say.

Apparently, it's not an isolated case, either. A further document clearly demonstrates the compliance of a number of different companies. There are "alliances with over 80 major global corporations supporting both missions," according to a paper that is marked top secret. In NSA jargon, "both missions" refers to defending networks in the US, on the one hand, and monitoring networks abroad, on the other. The companies involved include telecommunications firms, producers of network infrastructure, software companies and security firms.

The Official Response

Here’s a few more quotes from that Democracy Now interview of Greenwald, illustrating the US government official’s responses to these leaks:

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

....

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong.

.....

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

....

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

And let’s not forget this tidbit from the President:

BARACK OBAMA:  So point number one: if you’re a U.S. person then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your e-mails unless it’s getting an individualized court order.  That’s the existing rule.

There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden -- allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place and that caused all the ruckus.  Program number one called the 2015 program.  What that does is it gets data from the service providers -- like a Verizon -- in bulk.  And basically you have call pairs.  You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number.  There are no names, there’s no content in that database.  All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place.  So that database is sitting there.

Charlie Rose interview June 17, 2013

Obama is a sharp lawyer and politician, so you need to parse these statements very carefully and keep in mind that this interview was shortly after Snowden’s initial disclosers which refer to the collection of metadata, and, about the same time as Russ Tice’s disclosure that all content is being recorded.  It is probably true that the NSA is not “listening in” on all phone calls or reading emails, in real time as they occur, without a court order—besides that would be the job of the FBI.  And, it is probably also true that your emails are specifically “targeted.” 

Rather, the NSA and its counterparts are recording all communications of everyone, metadata and content, for later analysis.  The Obama might be able to argue that therefore you are not being targeted.   But I would argue that this means that everyone is targeted.  And, the President Obama’s statement that there no names or content in any of the NSA’s databases is highly likely to be false.

Here’s some more of the US government’s response:  

"In response to your question about access to the guardian.co.uk website, the army is filtering some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," said Gordon Van Vleet, a Netcom public affairs officer.

"The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative 'network hygiene' measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks."

The army stressed its actions were automatic and would not affect computers outside military facilities.

"The department does not determine what sites its personnel can choose to visit while on a DoD system, but instead relies on automated filters that restrict access based on content concerns or malware threats," said Van Vleet. "The DoD is also not going to block websites from the American public in general, and to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."

Similar measures were taken by the army after the Guardian and other newspapers published leaked State Department cables obtained via WikiLeaks.

US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve 'network hygiene'

“This is a theater-wide block,” reads a page that loads when troops in Afghanistan using the Defense Department’s non-classified internet protocol (NIPR) network attempt to access the Guardian online.

“There are many reasons why this site might be blocked. It may be blocked for your protection, the protection of DoD assets or blocked based on Usfor-A [US forces command-Afghanistan] information systems security policy enclosure 18, Centcom regulation 25-206, joint ethics regulation (JER) 5500.7 or DAA directives,” the routed site reads.

Usfor-A is the US component to the Nato command in Afghanistan known as Isaf. It is unclear if the block on the Guardian’s website applies to non-American personnel in Afghanistan, but if they use the DoD’s networks to get online, non-American service members would not be able to access the Guardian website either.

US military blocks entire Guardian website for troops stationed abroad

I don’t find it very comforting that the decision to block the Guardian websites is being done by a computer automated filter instead of a human being.  I find it interesting that the Washington Post is apparently not blocked—perhaps because its content is already controlled by the DoD it real time?  And, I wonder if Spiegel will get automatically blocked as well, in view of the series of articles by Laura Poitras et al., published a few days ago.  If they don’t perhaps because it was already vetted before release?

The present threat

The NSA and it foreign counterparts have created a communication time machine that will allow them to go back to trace and listen in conversations that occurred in the past.

The opportunities for present abuse are enormous. 

To give you some idea of what this could involve, here’s a Corbett Report interview of Sibel Edmonds discussing how in the past the FBI illegally acquires and stored permanently private information and uses this to gain leverage over politicians and judges: 

The people promoted in the White House or presented as viable candidates are hand selected by the establishment ... Republican and Democrats ... no matter how you pick its going to be our guy. That is the reality to the US’s election and presidency today and the same is true with the lower level House and Senate representatives. 

(from 20:00-21:00)

you use this information, when the time comes to protect the FBI, to protect the Justice Department. and protect whoever is the President.  The FBI servers the President and the President serves the establishment.  So basically you are protecting the establishment by using this information as blackmail method on these elected officials. 

(from 27:00-28:00)

the judges that were squeaky clean, the judge candidates, they were discarded immediately, and the ones, the federal court judge candidates, that had the highest number of irregularities whether there sexual orientation, sexual life or who they are calling if they cheated on their tax, if they hired a baby sitter who was not a US citizen, and illegal immigrant etc... Those were the ones that were selected as the most viable candidates.

(from 43:00-44:00)

I think that it is obvious that the NSA’s “communication time machine” can be used to similarly target virtually anyone going forwards.  The communication history of politicians, judges, corporate executives, public officials, anyone, could be pulled up and reviewed to find something embarrassing that they might want to hide, and then, hold this information above them, to protect the establishment: the president, the NSA, the FBI, CIA, DHS etc....  And, of course, this applies not only to individuals and establishment in the USA, but anyone, anywhere.    Anyone with access to this kind of information in their country can become a tyrant—a turn-key tyrant, as Snowden says.

The future threat

I don’t think that the NSA is listening in on all global communications in real time at present. 

Not because they don’t want to, but because they simply don’t have the resources to do so at present.  It’s the same resource problem that Tice discussed, and why the NSA would initially focus on metadata.

At present, at some point, it may still take a human being to watch, listen and read previously recorded communications, and use this to build a profile for an individual and for interactions between groups of individuals, that is, a social network profile, and then interpret the resulting profiles as triggering a national threat, or, not.   Well maybe just a threat to the establishment is sufficient to put you on a “person of interest” list.

Global spying programs such as Stellar Wind, are designed to take this profile building and analysis out of the hands and minds of humans, and automate the process using algorithms that can be programmed into the processors of NSA’s computers.  In a 2012 MIT talk, NSA whistleblower Willam Binney, discusses some of the details of such automated systems here, or, you can listen to it here.  Binney’s efforts to bring the illegalities of these programs to the attention to the government, and the personal consequences to him, starts at about 55 min in this 29c3 talk.

When these programs are in place, the NSA will have near-real time dynamic content reading, analysis and profiling of all global communications.   As Binney points out in his talks a computer program may target you as a “threat,” without any human intervention.

We are well on our way.

Energy decent to the recue?

I have long thought that energy decent will cause, or at least be concurrent, with economic decline, and, that economic decline will result is a great deal of political discord.  I see the protests and civil disobedience in Europe, Brazil the Middle East and Africa as on-going examples of this. 

If the hope is that such discord will cause changes within the establishment, then I think you can see what an uphill effort this will be.    

When the general public becomes too poor to own a computer, cell phone or have access to the internet, perhaps the scope of the global surveillance system will be reduced?  

Maybe. 

But, the government could simply introduce or expand the hand-out of free cell phones to the poor, as presently done in Nigeria, California and elsewhere in the USA, as a means of maintaining the scope of the surveillance network.  

Could declining energy availability itself cut back the global surveillance network? 

Maybe, but, if it does, then this is going to take a long time, I think.

In his interview, Russ Tice mentioned the “Death Star” in Utah, which is actually referring to the NSA’s Date Center in Bluffdale Utah.  You can see this facility in Poitras’ documentary “The Program” and some of NSA whistleblower William Binney’s discussion of the Stellar wind program here.

In The State of Surveillance, (54 min) Steve Gibson, mentions that the Bluffdale Data Center will use up to about 65 MW of power supplied from its own power relay station.  That number seems to be confirmed in this Salt Lake Tribune article. 

That’s enough to power a small town of 30,000-50,000 people, but, certainly not enough to pose a problem for the establishment to deliver now or in the foreseeable future.  The natural-gas-fired Lake Side power plant on the eastern shore of Utah Lake could supply 10 times this amount of power, for example.

And, it is safe to say that the power necessary to support and expand, this, and similar Data Centers throughout the world, will not be subject to financial sequestration or restrictions. 

I expect that this and other data centers would be last customers to be power-limited, even if this meant people in living in surrounding towns going without any power at all.  Of course, power blackouts or rolling black-outs in those towns will also limit the flow of communications data into the "Death Star".  To effectively survail everyone, everyone has to be on the power and telecommunications grid. 

The Future Police State

So what would a near-future state of the police state look like with energy decent? 

Here’s what Binney said when was asked where he sees all this going 5 years, 10 years, from now:

It is going to be a totalitarian state.  We will have an imperial President, a dictator.

Unless we do something. 

You know everybody in Congress stood up an took an oath to defend the constitution.  They are all violating that oath.  So every time you see one, you need to say what are you doing with this privacy stuff; you are violating your oath by supporting this kind of activity.

William Benney – The Government is Profiling You  (113 minutes)

How about a large percentage of the population living a 18^th or 19^th century energy poor lifestyle, but, with high-tech government-issued smart phones and free internet so that their thoughts and interactions can be tracked for potential threats?  Eventually, this stragety will be rendered increasingly ineffective at real time monitoring as the power grid becomes intermitant. 

How about a small percentage of the population living an energy-rich, networked lifestyle, with total allegiance to maintaining the establishment.  Of course, this elite group would be under intense, automated, continuous monitoring.  If any of these elite were to publish something online that the NSA’s computer’s deem to threaten the establishment, well, these publications could simply be automatically blocked. 

Welcome to 1984.

Post Peak Oil Economic and Population Scenarios: Part 10 summing it up

A long journey

It has taken me about a year-and-a-half to get here. 

The foundations for this work started in the winter of 2012 with my series, Inter-Regional Trade Movements of Petroleum.  A little-discussed portion of the annual BP reviews “Statistical Review of World Energy” contained data that allowed me to analyze what kind of trends existed in petroleum exports to and from nine different regions of the world over the past decade.  I even animated the results of the series in two short videos (Part 1 and Part 2), but, at total views of less than 300 after one year, I can see that this was not a very effective communication form. 

After finishing my analysis of trade movement trends, in the series, Relationship between Petroleum Exports and Production I quantified the relationship between domestic production and the inter-regional exports for each of the nine regions.

With these relationships in hand, I spent the last half of 2012 to January 2013 working on the series, Predicting Global and Regional Petroleum Consumption Trends where I introduced and applied my PIE analysis.  The PIE analysis concept is simple.  Petroleum consumption for each region is given by Production + Imports – Exports.  If one can predict the domestic production rate, import rate and export rate trends, then these data can be used in the PIE relationship to predict the petroleum consumption rate trend.  As shown in that series, this approach can give quite a different prediction of what the future consumption rate might look like, as compared to a simple extrapolation of the existing consumption rate trend.

Finally, with the predicted petroleum consumption rate trends from my PIE analysis in hand, in the present series, I looked at the economic and population implications for each region out to 2065.  Again, the concept behind the present series was simple.  Project the population of each region out to 2065 (I used the US Census Bureau International Database as my starting point), extrapolate the predicted consumption rate for each region out 2065, and then, calculate the per capita consumption rate, expressed as barrels per person per year (b/py). 

Part 1 provides the basis for my assumptions that economic growth will correlate with the size and direction of changes in per capita consumption, and, that once a region’s per capita consumption rate drops below a certain value, 1 b/py, the petroleum driven food production system fails and the population will start to decline proportionally.  I assumed that the maximum population fall is to pre-petroleum era population level of circa 1900.  And finally, I assessed how the predicted economic and population trends might be altered if the different regions were to mitigate their petroleum exports.

Who is vulnerable economically?

Over the longer term of the study period, all nine regions are vulnerable to economic declines because worldwide petroleum production rates are predicted to decline over the study period.  Even more rapidly declining, however are export rates, which of course, make the net importing regions (NA, EU, JP, CH, rAP) more vulnerable to declines in per capita consumption with concurrent economic declines.  

However, within the overall trend for declining exports there is another trend for exports being shifted anyway from NA, EU and JP and towards rAP and CH (see e.g., Figure 50 of Part 10 of Predicting Petroleum Consumption).  This has a greater negative impact on JP and EU than NA, because the former two regions have virtually no (JP) or rapidly declining domestic production (EU). 

Shifting exports to rAP and CH has allowed these two regions to sustain an increase in per capita conception, with concurrent economic growth over the past decade, but, total exports to these region are about to top out.  Per capita petroleum conception in CH is predicted to increase for a few more years, but not for rAP.  The combination of declining exports, declining domestic production and increasing population all contribute to a predicted decline in per capita consumption for rAP.

Of the four net exporting regions (ME, FS, AF and SA), the present consumption rate trends for FS and AF look rather grim.  Both of these regions appear to be at or slightly past peak production and they are both on a trend of increasing exports as a proportion of their production.  If this trend continued it would drive the domestic consumption rates for FS and AF into the ground by the mid- to later 2020s.

Export mitigation might help FS and AF delay an inevitable decline in consumption but this is to the detriment of the net importer regions especially EU, JP CH, and rAP.  Moreover, mid-stage export mitigation (i.e., export mitigation when per capita consumption drops to 2 b/py) actually hurts AF because its small, but important inter-regional imports from EU and rAP are lost.

Who is vulnerable to a population crash?

The short-term answer is: 1) those regions that are right at the 1 b/py threshold for petroleum-dependent food production system failure (i.e., AF); 2) those regions whose population is growing at a rate that outstrips its potential to increase domestic petroleum production (i.e., AF and rAP); and 3) those regions that are highly dependent on inter-regional petroleum imports (i.e., JP, EU and rAP).  An “honorable” mention goes to FS which as I mentioned above is on track to have a population crash, unless it engages in export mitigation to delay or eliminate the crash. 

The long-term answer is that all nine regions are vulnerable to population declines because worldwide petroleum production rates are predicted to decline, and, I think that it is unlikely that a population of 7 billion or even 6, ...., 2 billion could be fed in the absence of petroleum to facilitate food production. 

Even if all the regions were to equally share the remaining predicted world-wide petroleum production (causing huge economic crashes in NA, EU and JP), I still expect that the global population will break away from the US census bureau’s continuing projected population increase.  The break would occur in the mid-2050s, when the per capita consumption petroleum consumption drops below 1 b/py.

The regional per capita consumption profiles from the PIE analysis suggest that AF is in jeopardy of mass starvation and a population decline about now, and, FS absence export mitigation would follow soon afterwards in the 2020s, with rAP, JP and EU having population crashes in the mid-2030s.

Mid- or late-stage export mitigation delays the population crashes in AF to the early 2020s, and into the 2040s for FS, but then the population decline in rAP, JP and EU occurs sooner in the 2030s and the population declines are steeper for these regions. 

Early-stage global export mitigation would cause an immediate population crash in JP.  In one version of early-stage mitigation, rAP’s population also crashes immediately while in another version, the population crash is delayed to the mid 2020s.  In one version of early-stage mitigation, AF’s and EU’s populations crash in the late 2020s while in another version the crash is in the early 2020s.

Best estimate

I would be amazed if the per capita petroleum consumption curves and population declines for each region were to all exactly follow the curves predicted in this study according just a single one of the several scenarios discussed in Part 8 or Part 9. 

Rather, some regions will probably follow one type of scenario while other regions follows a different scenario.  There could be several such hybrid scenarios that are all plausible, and it is hard to imagine what the individual regional decline curves would look like. 

Still, I would be even more amazed if per capita petroleum consumption just stayed at present levels or increased going forwards, and, the world population would continued to grow to 9.7 billion by 2065, based on the US census bureau numbers discussed in Part 8.

My best estimate is that, absent a major war (which may be represented by the early-stage mitigation scenario) or some form of world government (which may be represented by total sharing scenario) we will see a hybrid scenario ranging from the primary PIE analysis scenario to mid-stage export mitigation, with late-stage mitigation being my favored scenario. 

Considering some questions about this analysis

I find it interesting when I get comments along the lines of:

Why doesn’t your scenario consider the interactions between peak oil, and financial crisis, climate change, soil erosion, fresh water depletions, the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster etc....

You haven’t considered how much more petroleum can be produced from coal, algae, the tar sands, shale, the arctic ocean etc....

After having spent over a year on this analysis, my reaction is typically, oh sure, let me get back you in a few minutes or so, and, by the way, please provide all the data I need for such an analysis.  And, if you could also provide a staff of dozen or so people, that would be just great. 

But, I realize that people hear about all sorts of other problems that could be a limit to economic and population growth, and, at the same time, hear about how there will be plenty of petroleum to feed future growth, including population growth 10 billion. 

Here’s a general response to such comments, in particular, a comment on what this analysis does, and, what it doesn’t do. 

The first thing to understand is that this a top-down type of trend analysis.  That is, for each region, I looked at recent petroleum production rate trends, by fitting the logistic (Hubbert) equation to the recent data, and by analyzing the recent interregional import and export trend using a linear regression fit.  Then I extrapolate these trends into the future. 

This is in contrast to, and much easier than, trying to do a bottom-up type of analysis, where one might try and guess what all present and potential sources of petroleum may generate in the future and then add these all up.  While this might give you an alternative estimate of production rates, it seems that you would still then have to look at the export and imports trends anyways to estimate regional consumption rates. 

One nice thing about a trend analysis is that if any of the financial crisis, climate change, soil erosion, fresh water depletion etc... or new petroleum sources, are factors that have been having had an effect on the recent production, or the import and export trends, then their effects should show up as part of the trend.

One bad thing about a trend analysis is that if some very recent factor(s) have an affect on any of these trends, then a trend analysis will tend to dampen or average out this effect.  For instance, if the real cost (i.e., something more than the nominal non-inflation adjusted price) that society was willing or able to pay for oil were to go up, then I imagine that one or both of the logistic equation parameters, a, and Q_max, corresponding to the yearly extraction rate constant and ultimately recoverable reserves, respectively, would also go up.  But it might take some several years of a consistent trend before one might see a significant change in these parameters.  Likewise, if energy return on energy invested into petroleum production is in decline then ultimately recoverable reserves and net-extraction rates might both go down.  But again, it might take several years of a consistent trend before one might see a significant change in these parameters. 

Here’s the gist of another line of comments:

Your assumption of a fall back to year-1900 population level may be incorrect.  It is too low because the regional you are discussion still have significant non-petroleum dependent food production into the 1950s, 60s...  Or, it is too high because the financial crisis, climate change, soil erosion, fresh water depletions, the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster etc.... will cause a greater population die off.

Your assumption of starvation due to a lack of food production when per capita consumption drops below 1 b/py may be incorrect, because in the past, region XX with a per capita consumption of less than 1 b/py still had population growth.

I’m not sure why, but some people love to get caught up in the minutiae of exact numbers and dates.   Maybe it is a defense mechanism—if this thing doesn’t happen on this exact date, as predicted, then the entire premise of the analysis if wrong, and therefore, I can ignore everything.

To me, it doesn’t really matter if a region’s population (e.g., rAP) falls back from a population of 3 billion, with petroleum, to a population of 0.5 billion versus 0.9 billion, without petroleum.  Of greater interest for me, is the time range when each of the nine regions becomes vulnerable to starvation due to declining petroleum per capita.

However, to do this analysis, I needed fall back numbers for each region.  I choose the year 1900 as my population fall back year because I was pretty sure that none of the regions substantially relied on petroleum for food production back in 1900, and, I could make estimates of the populations of each of my nine regions for the year 1900. 

I could imagine different, maybe better, ways to estimate a post-petroleum population fall back value.  Maybe it should be the year when the population working on farms dropped below some percentage.  Or maybe, it should be the year when a certain number of farms transitioned to a mono-crop production system.  The problem is, I would have to know what these numbers are for each one of the regions, and, finding these numbers would amount to a study unto itself.

Let's consider assumption of the per capita consumption of 1 b/py as being the limit for starvation and a population decline.  Of course, every one of these regions likely had growing populations in the days before they started using petroleum to facilitate food production and distribution.  However, it is petroleum that allowed a green revolution in food production, and with this, a sharp increase in the population growth rate.  The mechanization of food production made possible by petroleum also shifted millions (billions?) of farm workers off of farms and into urban areas to find work.  The remaining mechanized farms become larger and highly specialized, often growing only one type of crop which gets shipped 100s or 1000s of miles for processing and redistribution.  The children or grand-children (or great-grand children in the west) of those farmers do not have the know-how to go back to the farm and start growing food the old-fashion non-petroleum dependent way.  Usually there is no farm to go back to—it has been swallowed by ever-expanding urban sprawl or absorbed into a large factory farm.  A rapid return to non-petroleum dependent traditional non-mechanized food production be fast enough to avoid mass starvation looks improbable to me. 

Although I did spend quite bit time analyzing this in past series (see Part 9, and, The relationship between hunger and petroleum consumption-Part 1) it is likely that the 1 b/py limit varies from region to region.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the limit for regions like NA, EU and JP are higher than 1 b/py or that the limit for regions like AF, rAP and CH are lower.  If the limit is higher, then any population crash would occur sooner than predicted here, whereas if the limit is lower then any population crash would occur later.  If the shift from 1  b/py is large enough, that could shift the year for reaching the critical limit by several years, in either direction. 

Here’s one final line of comments:

This analysis is too long and is too hard read, and, I just want to know what is going to happen and what I should do.  

Maybe this series gives you a view into the future, but you don’t like that I have clouded up that view by presenting several different plausible scenarios, and now you have to think about which one look most plausible.  Maybe this, in turn, causes you to have some doubts about what you should do?

No apologies. 

As I have remarked a few times on this blog, I have come to see this blog as much of an open log note book of my studies as a commentary.  It is important to put down all of my assumptions and methods of analysis, as much for my future benefit, as the interested reader. 

Perhaps, as a result, the writing style “sucks,” but then, I am not really trying to produce a piece of entertainment.  I am well aware that this will make these posts unappealing to some readers. 

Final thoughts

Well, warts and all, this series is over!

If BP is still around, and still publishes its statistical review, and, if I am still around, then I will revisit this analysis in a few years time. 

Possible lines of improvement in the future could include splitting rAP up into yet more separate regions.  The most obvious splits would be India and Australasia.  

I hope that you were able to get some insights into how your particular region of the world might fare over the coming decades.  Perhaps you will have a better understanding of why the decline happening around, and to, you seems never-ending.

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I need to make some long overdue housekeeping clean ups to this blog site, and, after that, I’ll be back in the coming weeks and months with some "softer" posts, discussing de-growth, the post-doomerism era, and re-visit a few topics that I have wrote about in the past.