"...Then We Will Eat The Birds Out Of The Trees"
As the go to site on the web for cutting edge peak oil news and information, Peak Oil Barrel naturally attracts a diverse audience, including a number of well known celebrity supporters. Here one of Ron Patterson's many famous fans, Ozzy Osborne, poses for the camera to help Ron visually communicate his extreme doomer perspective on the future of mankind to a wider audience. No one on earth has a darker view of the future than Ron Patterson; it simply isn't possible. Period. And anyone claiming to have a bleaker outlook will not last very long at peakoilbarrel.com.
This is another in a series of hard hitting investigative pieces about the peakoilbarrel fraud scandal. Make of it what you will.
on february 25, 2015, i received this e-mail from ron patterson:
Ron Patterson darwinianone@gmail.com
Futilitist,
If you would like I could include a short essay on "in collapse" in a post. That is, I could insert it at the bottom of a post as a guest essay.
Let me know,
Ron
If you would like I could include a short essay on "in collapse" in a post. That is, I could insert it at the bottom of a post as a guest essay.
Let me know,
Ron
i was quite flattered with this offer. one thing people might not understand is that i had been a fan of ron's ever since his early days at the oil drum as "darwinian". he was always the one voice i identified with at that site.
Loren Soman @gmail.com
Hi Ron.
I would be honored to write a guest essay on the evidence that we are already in collapse. Thank you so much for offering. Writing such an essay would help me a clarify my thinking on the subject. How many words?
Best,
Loren
I would be honored to write a guest essay on the evidence that we are already in collapse. Thank you so much for offering. Writing such an essay would help me a clarify my thinking on the subject. How many words?
Best,
Loren
in his next e-mail, ron patterson repeats a quote that i remembered him making on the oil drum. it is in bold below:
Ron Patterson darwinianone@gmail.com
to me
I have spent the last couple of days watching Youtube videos on collapse. It has dawned on me that there are two ways that we could experience collapse. There is economic collapse and ecological collapse. And of course these two are connected but some people don't make the connection.
I think you concentrate more on economic collapse but I concentrate more on ecological collapse. It may surprise you but I have been an ecological doomer since the mid sixties. It turns out that the civilization is a lot more resilient than I thought it was but in the process of surviving so long it has done far more damage to the earth than I thought possible.
My opinion right now is there is no hope. When collapse does come, and it will, the destruction of the natural world will get worse, far worse. We will eat the songbirds out of the trees. We will cut down the last tree for heat and cooking fuel. We will leave the earth a virtual desert.
Anyway, I am looking forward to reading and posting your report.
Take care,
Ron
I never did get around to writing the post that ron requested. i was too busy arguing with idiots until the day i was banned.
MARCH 26, 2015 at 11:10 pm
”
-In reality, a very steep mountain down-slope, or what is called a “shark-fin” type of collapse is far more likely.
”
”
I always had a problem with calling it a shark fin profile. The down slope on the trailing edge of a real shark fin typically bends backwards, making it an unphysical representation. In other words, It would mean that time would go backwards and people would scratch their heads over this. The accusation is that Peak Oilers are always exaggerating and this doesn’t help counter that view.
Futilitist says:
Hi WebHubTelescope.
“The accusation is that Peak Oilers are always exaggerating and this doesn’t help counter that view.”
‘Peak oilers’ is a Madison Avenue invented term. There is no peak oilers club or movement. Most websites that concern themselves with the peak oil issue are either outright denial sites, or sites which sidle up and try to soft pedal the issue, like this one.
There is no ‘we’ that is always exaggerating the peak oil issue. ‘We’ have nothing to be ashamed of. ‘We’ don’t need to get together to counter a false meme. The idea that ‘we’ need do so is itself a false meme.
The shark fin is a good analogy for a Seneca Cliff, which is a good analogy for fast collapse. There is no reason to soften the analogies. It does no good to soften the truth for the squeamish. If anything, ‘we’ should be more forceful if ‘we’ want to be heard.
Most websites that concern themselves with the peak oil issue are either outright denial sites, or sites which sidle up and try to soft pedal the issue, like this one.
That’s a load of horseshit if one ever existed. I don’t soft pedal anything here.
But they will all decline, taper off until none is economically recoverable any more. The first to go will be crude oil, then natural gas and finally coal. Crude oil will peak in this decade and be almost completely gone by the end of the first half of this century. Then natural gas and coal will go in the second half.We will not hear warnings of impending disaster and act. We will wait until the disaster is upon us then react. It is simply in our nature to behave in such a manner. And then we will eat the birds out of the trees.
Ron Patterson, Of Fossil Fuels and Human Destiny
Futilitist says:
Hi Ron.
Why did you give a tireless climate change denier, like Javier, a guest posting at the top of your site? It does not reflect well on your judgement.
The birds in the trees thing sounds real scary and all, but there is no time frame given. That is soft pedaling.
And that is pure bullshit. Only a fool gives exact dates for future unknown events.
Why did you give a tireless climate change denier, like Javier, a guest posting at the top of your site? It does not reflect well on your judgement.
Several people have emailed me questioning my judgement as to why I let such a bullshitter like yourself continue to post on this site. I am beginning to see their point.
-----NOTE: My answer to ron's comment above ends up in a memory hole and results in my banning. i do not have a copy of that comment. but the interesting thing to notice here is that, after all of the controversial things i ever said on his site, this little discussion about birds gets me banned. i must have really hit a nerve.
People, the comments are now all screwed up. I was deleting a bunch of Futilitist’s posts and apparently I deleted one that had a reply to it without being aware of the reply. When that happens that screws up the all comments and makes them appear as if it was an original comment instead of a reply.
That’s the bad news. The good news is Futilitist is gone forever. I just got tired of his shit and banned him.
I will have another post later today. It will be a short post because there is not much data to post about. But that will fix the comments problem.
-----NOTE: the cover up has begun. the entire site needs a major clean up at this point. My presence has altered ron's plans considerably. Ron makes his new post just to get people off the page containing my banning.
all this seems pretty par for the course for a propaganda machine like peakoilbarrel. Back to business as usual.
But Ron's next move totally catches me by surprise. He soon makes a brand new post:
The Competitive Exclusion Principle
Evolution is all about a struggle for survival and reproduction. For predators it becomes an arms race. For hundreds of millions of years predatory animals have honed their offensive weapons while prey animals have evolved ever more effective defensive adaptations. Each animal, predator or prey, carved out their particular niche and occupied that niche until they were driven out, to another niche, or went extinct, or still occupy it today.
And that’s the way it went for hundreds of millions of years. Every species multiplying its numbers to the limit its niche or habit would support. Species waxed and waned, predator and prey maintaining a balance. When the prey numbers would expand the predator numbers would expand and when too many predators reduced prey numbers, then the predator numbers would also wane.
...
Until about 10,000 years ago, give or take, humans depended entirely on the natural world for its substance. Killing animals that they could find and gathering what fruits, roots and tubers than nature provided them. Then slowly the Neolithic Revolution started to happen. People began to plant seeds and domesticate animals. However Homo colossus had not yet appeared.
...
Homo colossus appeared about 250 years ago. That was when man began to spend nature’s non renewable carbon deposits as if they were income.
William Catton: When the earth’s deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel.
However we need to get back to the subject of this post, the competitive exclusion principle.
Wiki: The competitive exclusion principle, sometimes referred to as Gause’s Law, is a proposition that states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim “complete competitors cannot coexist“.
The competitive exclusion principle usually describes the competition of animals for a particular niche. But humans are animals also. We have been in the competition for territory and resources for thousands of years. And we have been winning that battle for thousands of years. But it is only in the last few hundred years that our complete dominance in this battle has become overwhelming. We are winning big time, we are quite literally wiping them off the face of the globe.
...
Of course some animals will survive because their numbers are so great and their niche is so diverse. The rabbit and the dingo will survive in Australia and rabbits in other parts of the world will likely survive also. There is no doubt that rats and mice will survive and hopefully animals that feed on them, like the some owls and hawks will survive also.
Every large animal in Africa, the lion, the giraffe, the rhino, every great ape in Africa, will all disappear. Every large species in Asia will go also, the tiger, the elephant the orangutan, the panda and even the bears of northern Europe, Asia and North America will all become extinct. They all occupy territory and take resources that can be taken by Homo colossus and Homo colossus will take that territory because it is simply in his nature to do so.
We will kill them all.
All this would happen even if we never have economic collapse. But when economic collapse does happen, every creature that is made out of meat will become a source of food. Economic collapse will just greatly accelerate the decline of the all that is wild.
Futilitist says:
What made Homo Colossus so destructive to every other living creature on earth was not just our numbers. It was our industrial technology that gave us the capacity to drive so many wild animals to extinction. In a rapid collapse, our ability to destroy nature will be greatly diminished almost immediately, taking pressure off of wild species. Our demise will certainly be beneficial to all other animals on the earth.
Futilitist says:
Futilitist says:
Of course I can't really comment directly here since you banned me, but this whole birds in the trees thing is a bunch of crap, Ron. It is obvious that, once collapse begins in earnest, it will be very rapid. There won't be any time for humans to eat "every creature that is made out of meat".
HouseBent says:
Good grief, Ron.
Here we all are, on the new Darwinian Despair website.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but this economic collapse thing could have the opposite effect. Things may well go very fast, and while it will increase the need for us to devour every living thing, it doesn't necessarily increase our ability to do it. Additionally, we will turn on ourselves first. Really, it seems possible that our population could be dramatically decimated in a matter of weeks. Conflict, starvation, weather, and disease could make fairly short work of this mess, particularly in the overdeveloped areas of the world,
Hell, the more I think about it, yeah, I'm too optimistic.
Naw, you are missing something here. We already have the ability to destroy every large animal on earth, and we are doing it right now. We just don’t have a need to do it any faster right now. But we most definitely have that ability. And our ability will not be greatly diminished after the collapse.
No, we won’t turn on ourselves first. I do not believe we will turn to cannibalism before we have devoured everything else edible. So if we do have collapse the megafauna will all be gone within 10 years after the beginning of the collapse. But if we don’t have collapse it could be another one hundred years before they are all gone.
And our ability will not be greatly diminished after the collapse.
That makes no sense at all, Ron. When industrial civilization ceases, so will our ability to harm the environment.
Most people live in cities. Most people don't know how to hunt. Once industrial civilization collapses, New Yorker's may eat every bird from the trees of Central Park, but that will be about the last thing those people ever eat.
No, we won’t turn on ourselves first. I do not believe we will turn to cannibalism before we have devoured everything else edible.
I thought you were convinced we would have a rapid collapse. That is what the Korowicz paper was about. Widespread cannibalism is not going to be the big problem. Starvation, disease, and violence are the main concerns.
So if we do have collapse the megafauna will all be gone within 10 years after the beginning of the collapse.
Okay, what the hell? What do you mean IF? The David Price paper, which you have at the very top of your site, and which you claim to be in total agreement with, says that collapse is inevitable. You should say WHEN, not IF. And if the collapse is rapid, as suggested by Korowicz and recently by Tainter, humans will be all gone within much less than 10 years.
But if we don’t have collapse it could be another one hundred years before they are all gone.
So, in the very next sentence, you suggest we might not even have a collapse?!?
I explained why oil prices were never going to rise sufficiently to pay the full cost of production and you said I was nuts. You refused to honestly debate my theory with me.
I made a visual representation of my idea to help convey the concepts better, and I called it the Futilitist Collapse Challenge. You refused to even look at it. No one on the site could beat the challenge.
I tried in vain to get you to look at the Etp model. The model confirms my theory about oil prices. You run an oil depletion forecasting website, and the Etp model is a definitive oil depletion forecasting tool, but you are just not interested. The model's creator shows up to answer questions and you ignore him. Sure, that makes sense.
Then, when I make fun of your oh so very scary "And then we will eat the birds from the trees" quote, which you have repeated endlessly since The Oil Drum days, you ban me from the site. And then you post "The Competitive Exclusion Principle" to make yourself look all tough again, so you can get on with your real job, soft-pedaling collapse! You are like a cartoon, Ron.
You are a great deceiver; either an oil industry shill or a government spook. You should shut down your website before you expose yourself, and all of your co-conspirators, any further.
And your eat the birds slogan, as bad assed as it sounds to your tin ear, is not impressing too many people:
Lloyd says:
And since the future is so unknowable and all, maybe the birds will eat us instead...
No, we won’t turn on ourselves first.
Ron, you’re missing the point: I don’t have to kill you to eat you, I have to kill you to eat what you would eat over the rest of your life.
Ron, you’re missing the point: I don’t have to kill you to eat you, I have to kill you to eat what you would eat over the rest of your life.
I suspect there will be genocide once it becomes an issue of everyone not having enough or reducing the number of people who constitute “everyone”.
-Lloyd
I haven’t heard much from Jay Hanson of Dieoff fame in recent years. But I did encounter a couple of posts indicating that he is currently studying the history of cannibalism.
Billions of birds flying in the sky. Geese and ducks are going to continue to fly after the ‘collapse’. Thousands upon thousands of geese flying north these days. You’ll be able to bag a couple if you have any luck. Wait until they land, fire a couple of high-powered rifle shots into the gaggle and you’ll have your geese for supper. I doubt very much that the birds will be wiped out, the populations are too high.
The Tragedy of the Commons: Oil.
This is wrong.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to predict the future of complex systems. There are FAR too many equally possible outcomes to allow any prediction of any value.
It is easy for me to visualize a quite possible post-collapse future filled with little isolated islands of sanity, wisdom and deep knowledge despite surrounding anarchy and miserableness for the great majority.
Even in this ordinary place I live in, there are not a few people who live stable lives in the surrounding hills who would not care AT ALL if the town I live in vanished, and all the people in it.
There are millions of such people scattered all over the planet.
