Children of the Club of Rome

Sarah Palin's story that Obama's health care legislation called for death panels to determine who would receive medical care, and who would simply be allowed to die in the new medical order, has rightly been described as the lie of the year for 2009. However, a recent post on the Oil Drum by Megan Quinn Bachman tells us that a form of death panels is emerging among people who believe that the Ehrlich/Forrester/Meadows/Club of Rome theory of global collapse of industrial civilization/resources/population . The post, titled "Leading the Way to a Low-Energy Future" describes what Bachman calls lifestyle leaders. Lifestyle leaders are people who are

building gardens, weatherizing their homes, getting rid of their cars, moving off-grid, bartering with neighbors and joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

According to Bachman these lifestyle leaders are pioneering the new order by forging a new set of careers appropriate to the new post civilization order:

I would argue that these people, the Children of the Club of Rome, are the death panels for hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Yet the Club of Rome model predicts a mass human die off:

Thus Bachman's lifestyle leaders are preparing for a Club of Rome apocalypse, which features mass human die off.
I am fond of Gail the Actuary (Gail E. Tverberg), an Oil Drum Editor who is associated with the "we are headed for collapse" point of view. i see Gail's work as having a positive aspect in that she and her guest posters repeatedly point to problems which are otherwise unvoiced. i do disagree with some assumptions and with the chain of argument which inevitably leads to negative conclusions about the future of a high population, materially wealthy civilization. I disagree with the view that the collapse of material civilization is inevitable. In addition I view the projected collapse of material civilization as an unmitigated catastrophe. This is what Chris Clugston suggests:

i disagree with this perspective because it assumes a far more limited future resource picture than I do. My viewpoint can be stated simply, we are not running out of energy, material resources, or food. A combination of two technologies, Hydraulic Fracturing (fracking), and in-situ leaching, offers the potential for high material resource recovery with favorable EROEI, from what was previously considered low grade ore. It is inevitable that the use of such recovery technologies will be applied to resource recovery, and the recovery of Uranium and thorium as part of the process will assure a favorable EROEI. Both fracking and in-situ leaching are highly tested technologies and thus appear to offer a path to a continuation of high energy/high material output civilization. Through the use of efficient and safe technologies like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, the population of earth can be assured of a high level of material prosperity for as long as there is likely to be people around.

Thus the future resource picture may not be nearly as bleak as Gail the Actuary and her associates would have us believe. Nor is the supposed mega-famine, which Paul Ehrlich, Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome have predicted, nearly as likely to occur, as they suggest. Ehrlich's famine predictions were thwarted by the so called "Green Revolution," which dramatically increased agricultural yields in countries like India.

A recent review of global agricultural resources, published in Science, titled "Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People." argues,

the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, . . ..

Thus in a high energy uranium/thorium based economy, the food supply is likely to be continue to be assured. The argument for the inevitable collapse of civilization can be falsified with some certainty, the impending image of mass death through the starvation of most people can be written off as a fantasy. Bachman's "lifestyle leaders"can be seen for what they are, a misanthropic death panel for the human race, whose lifestyle will turn against them as the population of earth continues to survive and increasingly prosper.