Dividing up the trophy wives/bimbos

I've edited the blog below today (May 7th for greater clarity and to find out if I actually had a point when I wrote it).

I've taken some criticism from friends when I've made the point that I wished that our oil addicted society would collapse now instead of in a more distant future. I'll explain my reasoning below, but first to respond to the idea that I want it to happen now for personal reasons, not from any altruistic concern for society as a whole. Apparently my hidden agenda is that collapse brings down the rich fat cats to my level thus raising my pathetic status to near normal. I would essentially have my social position raised by the collapse of the capitalist system. Maybe so. I can't really pretend to understand my own motivations. However that is not why I wish the collapse to happen sooner than later.

The reason which ALSO drives me, besides the huge supply of ex-trophy bimbos who would see me this future time as "studly" with my newly raised status, is much more serious and universal in application. Any species in overshoot doesn't just die, it also destroys the carrying capacity of its environmental niche before dying. This makes the number of survivors much smaller than the original carrying capacity would have sustained. It means we cannot go back to 1859 and support that population level, and the longer we stay in overshoot the more we destroy, eat up, and lay to barren waste; the smaller that can be supported in the future. Collapse now, today, leaves a larger resource base intact, and a better future, for your great grand children, but it kind of sucks for you and your kids now (but not for me of course, I'll have increased future status!).

Below is a clip from a discussion group on Yahoo. Ron is responding to Paul Chefurka's article that I linked a few days ago - on carrying capacity. Paul had defined overshoot as declining population, and several people corrected him. Here is the essence of why overshoot is actually a right now experience, even while world human population continues to grow.

OVERSHOOT
"A species may greatly overshoot the long term carrying capacity of its environment. (Its population may become greatly larger than its environment can sustain.) Overshoot becomes possible when a species encounters a rich and previously unexploited stock of resources that promotes its reproduction."
http://www.energybulletin.net/4735.html


"Can our numbers still be growing though we are in overshoot? Of course! Overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the long term carrying capacity of its environment. Like the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. They were probably in overshoot when their numbers reached 1000 but they continued to multiply until their numbers reached 6000 before there was a total collapse.

"While they were in overshoot, the reindeer completely destroyed their support system, the lichens they were living on, so their numbers plunged to under 30. We are currently deep into overshoot. Were it not so we would not be destroying the environment. We would not be drawing down the water tables, drying up rivers and lakes, destroying the rain forest, destroying our topsoil, over fishing the oceans, causing deserts to expand, driving thousands of species into extinction, polluting our water and atmosphere, and a thousand other things.

"But things are far worse than that. I am saying, even with our current consumption of fossil fuel, we are still deep into overshoot; else the above things would not be happening. But look close at The Energy Bulletin article. 'Overshoot happens when a species encounters a rich and previously unexplored stock of resources that promote reproduction.' We are in overshoot because we found a rich store of detritus, or fossil fuel. This enabled us to produce massive amounts of food which enabled our population to explode.

The long term carrying capacity of Homo sapiens, if fossil fuels never ran out, would probably be somewhere between two and three billion people or four at the most. But the long term carrying capacity of Homo sapiens without fossil fuel, including coal, is probably less than one billion.

So according to my estimation we are either three billion into overshoot, if our fossil fuel lasts forever, or about six billion into overshoot if it does not." - Ron Patterson

To put a point on that in case you missed it - everyone knows the fossil fuels are finite, running out, the discussions are all about when, not if.

Meanwhile I've been out tagging rich trophy wives with small dye markers for roundup later when my social status has improved.