By Bill Rees: On the Virtues of Self-Delusion—or maybe not!

Dr. Bill Rees, Professor Emeritus from the University of British Columbia, gave a presentation on our overshoot predicament earlier this month to a zoom meeting of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR).

I’m a longtime fan of Dr. Rees and consider him to be one of the most aware and knowledgeable people on the planet.

This is, I believe, the best talk I’ve seen by Dr. Rees and he covers all of the important issues, including topics like overpopulation that most of his peers avoid.

Presentations like this will probably not change our trajectory but nevertheless I find some comfort knowing there are a few other people thinking about the same issues. This can be a very lonely space.

The Q&A is also very good. I found it interesting to hear how much effort Dr. Rees has made to educate our leaders about what we should be doing to reduce future suffering. He was frank that no one to date, including the Green party, is open to his message. Not surprising, but sad. Also inspiring that someone of his stature is at least trying.

Summary

Climate-change and other environmental organizations urge governments to act decisively/rapidly to decarbonize the economy and halt further development of fossil fuel reserves. These demands arguably betray:

– ignorance of the role of energy in the modern economy;

– ill-justified confidence in society’s ability to transition to 100% green renewable energy;

– no appreciation of the ecological consequences of attempting to do so and;

– little understanding of the social implications.

Without questioning the need to abandon fossil fuels, I will argue that the dream of a smooth energy transition is little more than a comforting shared illusion. Moreover, even if it were possible it would not solve climate change and would exacerbate the real existential threat facing society, namely overshoot.

I then explore some of the consequences and implications of (the necessary) abandonment of fossil fuels in the absence of adequate substitutes, and how governments and MTI society should be responding to these unspoken biophysical realities.

Biography

Dr. William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus, and former Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

His academic research focuses on the biophysical prerequisites for sustainability. This focus led to co-development (with his graduate students) of ecological footprint analysis, a quantitative tool that shows definitively that the human enterprise is in dysfunctional overshoot. (We would need five Earth-like planets to support just the present world population sustainably with existing technologies at North American material standards.)

Frustrated by political unresponsiveness to worsening indicators, Dr. Rees also studies the biological and psycho-cognitive barriers to environmentally rational behavior and policies. He has authored hundreds of peer reviewed and popular articles on these topics. Dr. Rees is a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada and also a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute; a founding member and former President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics; a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative; and a Director of The Real Green New Deal. He was a full member of the Club of Rome from 2013 until 2018. His international awards include the Boulding Memorial Award in Ecological Economics, the Herman Daly Award in Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize (jointly with his former student, Dr. Mathis Wackernagel).

I left the following comment on YouTube:

I’m a fellow British Columbian and longtime admirer of Dr. Rees. Thank you for the excellent presentation.

I agree with Dr. Rees’ prescription for what needs to be done but I think there’s a step that must precede his first step of acknowledging our overshoot predicament.

Given the magnitude and many dimensions of our predicament an obvious question is why do so few people see it?

I found a theory by Dr. Ajit Varki that provides a plausible explanation, and answers other important questions about our unique species.

The Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory posits that the human species with its uniquely powerful intelligence exists because it evolved to deny unpleasant realities.

If true, this implies that the first step to any positive meaningful change must be to acknowledge our tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

Varki explains his theory here:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-25466-7_6

A nice video summary by Varki is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqgYqW2Kgkg

My interpretations of the theory are here:
https://un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-short/

https://un-denial.com/2015/11/12/undenial-manifesto-energy-and-denial/

918 thoughts on “By Bill Rees: On the Virtues of Self-Delusion—or maybe not!”

    1. Interesting article. Since we can be fooled by our own desire to avoid cognitive dissonance we have to put our (and everyone else’s) “rationality” to the test. To avoid confirmation bias and so called “pruning the hedge” of our hypothesis we need to use Science to test our evidence. And not just Science as too many practice it (which is confirmation bias and pruning the hedge). We have to vigorously attempt to falsify our hypotheses (thanks Karl Popper). Doing that we can arrive at closer approximations of the truth (uncomfortable as they may be).
      I think our civilization is in terminal overshoot and we may go extinct. I would prefer that wasn’t the case, but most of my fellow “homo sapiens” seem to not believe we have a problem. I could be wrong but all arguments to the contrary appear to be based on denial or optimism bias. And evidence to the contrary appears non-existent. I could be wrong – show me where?
      AJ

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      1. nah
        Human beings like all biologically evolved organisms are incapable of perceiving reality (knowing the Truth). All we have access to are small streams of information from the outside world filtered through our evolved sensory organs. Our sensory organs evolved to help us reproduce, not to accurately perceive the world.

        So we are stuck with ideas that are more or less useful, under particular sets of conditions, for getting useful answers to some types of questions.

        we don’t so much deny reality as we deny our representations of reality.

        And none of that changes that we are deep denial about the ecological overshoot of modern civilization..

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        1. I find your response interesting in that I agree with some of it’s slant but think it is a non sequitur to the article that I was commenting on. Did you read the article? It was about motivated reasoning and confirmation bias and how that is used by people(including some scientists) to get rid of evidence that would otherwise cause Cognitive Dissonance. I was agreeing with that theory of mind but stating that I thought rational scientific testing, with attempted falsification, tied to empirical evidence had the best chance at allowing us to get to reality (scientific laws and explanations about how the universe works).
          I would agree that we only see a slice of that reality – (can a human mind comprehend what came before the Big Bang? the entropy death of the universe? quantum mechanics? the duality of electromagnetic wave v. quanta nature of photons?). I also believe that such problems are solvable/knowable (perhaps not by human minds?). Our sense organs and all of our facilities for perception evolved to provide us with sufficient knowledge of reality to avoid immediate death and then to have the best chance to pass on genes. If we didn’t know something of reality (arguably more than a small stream of information) we would not have evolved. And our brain evolved to figure out complex small group relationships so as to pass on our own and that group’s genes. But, such a brain can be used for other purposes (such as figuring out reality via rationalism and science). Without science and rationalism there is no way of knowing reality; any other way of knowing is entirely subjective (and idiosyncratic nonsense).
          Yes, and none of this stops denial of/and overshoot.
          AJ

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    1. Great video by JP. I especially enjoyed the recording of the woman who tells the prime minister to his face that as a traitor he should be hung.

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  4. I’m still trying to make sense of the covid insanity. It really bothers me. Our leaders have got 100% of the covid decisions wrong. Something is going on that needs an explanation.

    I re-listened to this excellent presentation on our energy predicament by Steve St. Angelo in which he concludes that our leaders can’t discuss the problem for fear of panic and losing their jobs, and the only intelligent thing for us to do is to orchestrate a managed degrowth.

    Is covid a managed degrowth orchestrated by the Great Reset people?

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    1. Rob: with all due respect, perhaps you’re being too “rational” about this? If you keep pursuing that path, you will find no “rational” explanation for what is going on. It does not fall under the rubric of rationality. Do you not understand the nature of evil? It rises up from time to time throughout history, and leaves senseless damage in its wake. Let yourself go there. I say this sincerely and with the best of intentions.

      https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda-and-censorship

      Dr Mel Bruchet & Dr Daniel Nagase on Using Medical Imprisonment to Silence Doctors Published January 3, 2022

      https://rumble.com/vrvffz-dr-mel-bruchet-and-dr-daniel-nagase-on-using-medical-imprisonment-to-silenc.html

      Listened to CBC lately? Read anything from TorStar?

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      1. Yes I hear you and depending on how I feel when I wake up I sometimes agree with you.

        It’s the global nature of the wrong “public health” response that troubles me. My little province with it’s left leaning government and probably well intentioned leaders is making the same crazy decisions.

        If indeed covid is a managed degrowth plan then we are not witnessing evil but rather wise leaders trying to reduce suffering.

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    2. From my point of view, this is definitely a possibility. But how does a country like Sweden fit into this with their much less restricted policies? Maybe they didn´t need that much bullying and coercion to get the Covid vaccines due to a high trust in the government (even though it seems that this is also eroding due to other problems in Sweden, e.g. gang warfare).

      And if this is a degrowth plan, shouldn´t we be supportive, even though it seems pretty stupid?

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      1. For the record, I think capture of our leaders, news media, and social platforms by unethical pharma money is a much higher probability of explaining what we observe.

        If covid is part of a degrowth plan, I’m not going to inject a novel substance that has been insufficiently tested into my body to support them, especially when effective and safe treatments for the disease exist. I can think of much better ways of monitoring and controlling the population, like digital currency.

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    3. The Great Reset
      Why we should be worried of the agenda pushed by the WEF.

      https://mtmalinen.substack.com/p/the-great-reset

      Tuomas Malinen
      Let’s be honest. A year ago, I would not have written this piece.

      However, during the past year, I have come to the realization that something could be seriously wrong in the way most of us see the world. The often disproportionate corona-fighting measures, like lockdowns, c-passes and mandatory vaccinations, led me to question the “sincerity” of our political leaders.

      Moreover, the wide-spread use of these measures led me to question our democratic processes. I started to wonder, whether our politicians were guided/manipulated from some central-source?

      Such a scenario naturally also possesses massive and partly invisible economic and financial risks. If we are being led into a centrally-controlled economic system, it would be a major threat to the income of investors, banks and households. This led us to study the issue deeper and publish our findings in a special report late December.

      To extend our analysis, I also started to give online-lectures on the Great Reset -agenda (giving lectures is the best way to learn). Lectures also made it possible for me to concentrate fully on studying the issue. Lecture material is currently available only in Finnish, but we will publish it in English during the Spring.

      In this piece, I present a summary of our/my findings.

      What is the ‘Great Reset’?
      In the blog accompanying the report, we detail the main buildings blocks of the Great Reset. They are:

      Governments would steer the market towards “fairer outcomes” using taxation, regulatory and fiscal policies, including wealth taxes and removal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and impose a new set of rules governing intellectual property, trade and competition.

      Ensure that investments advance “shared goals”, like equitability and sustainability, through government led large-scale investment programs, like the Recovery Fund of the EU (and the infrastructure bill of the U.S.).

      To “harness” the innovations of the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution to address health and social challenges.

      These naturally sound all nice and ‘“fluffy”, but, unsurprisingly, the ‘devil’ is in the details.

      On markets, intellectual property and “dystopia”
      The first idea of steering the market is decades—if not centuries—old. Many think that “markets” are something we need to have control over. This view lacks the understanding that we are the markets. We, the people, set the prices and steer the allocation of capital. Governments are rarely good investors, especially when they are driven by universal agendas, like “fairness” (see below).

      The GR agenda also does not clearly state what the new rules concerning intellectual property, trade or competition should be. This vagueness in action-statements, which surrounds the GR agenda, is always a big risk, as they may be filled with covert, competing, and sometimes highly destructive political agendas.

      The vagueness becomes even more pressing when one considers the overall aims of the GR program. As it aims to promote the political and regulatory reach of big corporations, shouldn’t we assume that the issues concerning intellectual property and trade would be aimed towards that also? This could mean, e.g., that regulatory hurdles could be constructed to prevent SMEs from participating in global trade.With competition the issue becomes even more worrying, if laws were put in place that, for example, erode patent and/or privacy protection.

      A similarly worrying picture emerges when we consider the privacy aspects. In their book (p. 68), Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret conclude that “dystopian scenarios are not a fatality”. This is a disturbing statement, as it basically opens the door for, for example, the creation of a techno-totalitarian state.

      Governments steering investments? A bad idea.
      The idea that governments or intra-national bodies should ensure that investments advance ‘shared goals’ (whatever they are), is a dangerous one.

      It’s very well known that government investments are often wasteful and what’s even more damaging is that policians rarely can admit defeat but continue on the chose path, regardless how destructive it is, to “safe face”. Sure governments can handle simple infrastucture projects, like building railroads, but letting them to set the path to future, is like blind ideological man leading the blind.

      It is well-documented that, for example, the investment programs run by the EU have been very inefficient. This applies to many ‘green revolution’ programs run across the globe (see, e.g. this, this and this)

      Also, somewhat strangely, the International Monetary Fund, or “IMF”, has started to support the government-run investment agenda, against which it has argued for decades. From the very start, in 1952, the main aim of the emergency assistance programs the IMF grants to countries has been to remove inefficient government subsidies (see, e.g. this). Now they are advocating for them. I would like to know why?

      “Stakeholder capitalism” or new form of fascism?
      At the heart of the publicly-stated objectives of GR is something called ‘stakeholder capitalism’. The principle is that corporations would be required to balance, or to be accountable for, the costs and benefits they produce for society. Deeper analysis revealts the massive risks and the likely aim of this policy.

      The breadth of the proposed co-operation, published in 2010, is breath-taking. The initiatives of the WEF would practically bring every area of human existence under global governance, which is, essentially, what we are talking about: the formation of a global government. Thus, the idea of “stakeholder” capitalism is that corporations would become bigger players in an even bigger, and more intrusive global decision-making system. Governments and customers (and stockholders) would be just ‘stakeholders’.

      While some authors consider that ‘stakeholder capitalism’ would lead to world over-run by big corporations, they tend to forget the role of governments and multinational institutions in governance and regulation. While big firms can lobby governments and authorities, the latter still hold the upper hand, at least as long they have the control over legislation and the institutions upholding the rule-of-law.

      Alas, the true worry here is that ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is just a fancy name for the alliance of big corporations and governments, known in the past as fascism.

      Where are we heading?
      The Great Reset is about extended global co-operation enacted by increasing the role of big corporations and governments. This plan, driven by the World Economic Forum, or WEF, has an extremely worrying historical context, as it has been used previously, e.g., by several highly suppressive regimes.

      The influence the WEF can have on our political leaders should worry us all. For example, the Young Global Leaders -program, which includes for example Finnish PM Sanna Marin, may seriously distort the sovereign democratic decision making.

      This is the true threat of Great Reset. Such initiatives can, and probably will, take decision-making to a global level into undemocratic and often opaque institutions. They are, quite simply, direct threat to democratic processes and decision-making. They threaten, or have already taken, the true power from citizens to ‘halls’ of supranational entities. So, the way we are heading, is truly worrisome.

      To note. Klaus Scwab and Thierry Malleret have recently published a new book: The Great Narrative, where they argue that it shows what the way forward could be, and what the role of cooperation, innovation, morality, public policies and business can be. I have not read the book, yet, but it’s a great media move to change the title from something that has become rather ‘stained’ to something neutral. In any case, I believe that the book will, through expert interviews, lay a similar dystopian path for the world, than what Great Reset did.

      In the December report, we envisaged three scenarios where the Great Reset -agenda could lead us. I’ll return to them in my next post.

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      1. Thank you. The author seems to lack an understanding of the context within which the great reset is operating. Namely that we face near term collapse due to overshoot and optimal responses for managing degrowth will require global coordination to minimize suffering.

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        1. The elites (for example, Leadership and Governance | World Economic Forum (weforum.org), Young Global Leaders – Wikipedia et. al.) certainly have some plans about the future. Homepage | UN Global Compact I suspect their belief that they can shape the future will prove to be hubris when we enter the period of fossil fuel energy descent. The geologic forces of resource depletion, climate change, environmental destruction and the human animal instinct for survival will hold sway.

          But maybe it possible that even as we begin the energy descent, for a period of 10-20 years the electric and communications grid will be sufficiently stable to support a fascist digital technocracy that can maintain some semblance of social and economic order.

          Who can really say? Maybe those truckers, angered because there is no diesel fuel for their trucks, will rise up in protest again against some other mis-guided government overreach. Or maybe they will be leading the marches on citizens who are not complying with the techno fascist government mandates. We shall see.

          I bought groceries today, I swear the prices were 5% more than last month.

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  5. Rob – I would suggest you relax and have a beer to get your mind off COVID, but b/c you’re currently abstaining you might benefit from meditating – there are a lot of wonderful meditation apps out there. Take a deep breath and listen to Calm. It starts with cicadas, ocean waves crashing on the beach…

    Comedies are also a nice break. I watched “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” this weekend and quite enjoyed it.

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    1. Thanks for the tip.

      For me too much social media is really toxic. I created a burner Facebook account to monitor the trucker convoy. I felt a lot better without Facebook.

      I spent the day sorting the best-by dates in my food cache. I feel a little better. 🙂

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      1. Charles Eisenstein suggested in one of his latest essays to have some kind of news fast. From the point of view of mental health, this seems like a good suggestion, but currently the fear of missing out is stronger within me. So I keep on reading everything related to the current panic that gets into my hands, mostly on Substack. I am not sure, whether meditation would help. Maybe I try the discursive meditation as proposed by John Michael Greer on his blog and in his books (The Druidry Handbook, I recommend this even for people that are not into the supernatural stuff). With discursive meditation, you train and reorient the mind instead of shutting it down. This seems more interesting as the vanilla meditation of getting the mind free of thoughts.

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          1. I just had a quick look at healthy activities activation the parasympathetic nervous system: reduce stress, meditation, massage, breath work, yoga, nutrition, exercise, osteopathy, enough sleep, talking therapy.
            When I look at the list like this, I’m not surprised that I’m pretty mentally exhausted. Stress since Covid is constantly high, this has induced a weight gain due to unhealthy eating and not doing any exercise (I am normally hiking a lot). Maybe it is time to get some of these activities going (again).

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        1. Thank you.

          The opening lines say all that that needs to be said:

          we do feel compelled to make a few additional comments on specific faults in this rebuttal.
          To begin with, Fthenakis et al., do not seem to have read our paper.

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        2. Thanks! The two big debate techniques I have learned from Rees is that I have to continuously beat the drum on (1) climate change must continually situated in the context of overshoot, and (2) any successful resolution of overshoot would involve both lower population and less consumption.

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          1. It’s funny how they barely even need citations to critique the critics because the “critics” reasoning is so bad. It just continues to astound me how dumb supposedly smart people are about renewables

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              1. I can see how it might apply to….let’s say, The Propulsion Parameters of Penguin Poop but what about – Can Pigeons tell a Picasso from a Monet? I’m not sure an understanding of thermodynamics is strictly required in the latter case.

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              2. Anything that reduces the number of PhDs or university graduates in general would be positive from my point of view. As I went through a PhD program myself, I can confirm that this academic rank does not say anything about the quality of the graduate. Even in the natural sciences, there are so many stupid people graduated, that the degree certificates aren´t worth the paper they are printed on.

                As a side effect, we wouldn´t have the problem of having too few skilled workers (e.g. caregivers, craftsmen,etc).

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                1. I agree. Universities are now growth oriented businesses selling dreams and leeching off public debt, just like the health care industry.

                  Just one really hard advanced thermodynamics course would weed out the culls and anyone making it through would have a solid grounding in how the world actually works. Especially required for the disgraceful discipline of economics that advises our leaders.

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                2. “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power”

                  It takes years of tireless dedication to write this way so let’s not be hasty in our judgements Secret lest we be accused of being anti-intellectual or worse.

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    1. It starts looking like a hyperbole… Usually a sign of market frenzy and coming reversal.
      But when the crash hits?? Who knows?

      I used to believe it all would be ended by 2020. Nowadays I am not so sure… Maybe even next 10 years is possible with usage of differents tricks and cons…

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        1. How very Hatfield & McCoy of you and here I was thinking you were a man of reason. LOL. That kind of thinking is why the Middle East is so unstable – honor killings, never ending cycles of violence…sometimes it’s just better to put the club down and walk away.

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          1. You do understand that many hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily because effective early treatments were blocked to maximize profits, and because of the side effects of unnecessary lock downs? It’s called murder.

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            1. I understand harm has occurred and a lot of bad decisions have been made. But more as a result of incompetence, panic, or lack of good information than by design or evil intent. You seem like a compassionate guy, so I’m surprised you would characterize people with whom you disagree as evil or people who deserve to be harmed. I don’t think it’s helpful to demonize the other side as murderers b/c sadly the other side will do that to you & your side and then we all end up in a downward spiral. And if we are indeed hitting energy limits, as I suspect we are, then we need to keep this precarious ship we call civilization and civil society going so we can maybe, just maybe collectively make some positive adjustments.

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  10. Despite his partisan defects, Kunstler sure can turn a witty phrase.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/death-wish-2/

    Reality is intruding now, though, with the help of its twin sister, Truth. Particular truths are emerging to fortify reality and weaken the Left’s efforts to beat-down the peoples of Western Civ. For instance, the implacable truth that the mRNA vaccines don’t work and that they gravely injure people. In the face of this obvious reality, government and corporations persist in their irrational campaigns to vaxx-up every last man-woman-and-child. Why, at this point, despite all the free Kit-Kat bars you could stuff down your craw, would any sane employee of the Hershey’s Chocolate empire opt for a vaxx that could make you stroke out at your desk? The ridiculous official answer, of course, is: to protect the already-vaccinated. Sshh-yeah, right….

    Ditto, the unfortunate, put-upon citizens of Austria, such a tidy little country, too, and so hopelessly lost in its daze of mass formation psychosis. This week, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland are dropping all Covid-19 restrictions and impositions, while Austria makes its vaxx mandate a national law. (How many Austrians are secretly studying Hungarian now?) The cognitive dissonance must be unbearable, like a kind of 5G-induced tinnitus that afflicts an entire population, making them want to bang their heads against the nearest wall.

    Likewise, the absurd government of Canada, led by the clueless ponce Justin Trudeau, who refuses to take his patent-leather go-go boot off the neck of Canadian truckers. The truckers aren’t having it anymore, of course, and neither are the towing services that the government is trying to enlist to get rid of the truckers’ trucks. Meanwhile, the premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces have thrown in the towel on Covid-19 restrictions, leaving Mr. Trudeau in his fortress-of-solitude, exact whereabouts unknown, desperately hurling objurgations at the “racists, Islamophobes, and transphobes” seeking to end his career as a turbaned, cross-dressing, blackface political entertainer.

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  11. Excellent new video from the Canadian Covid Care Alliance.
    More evidence that some of our leaders need to go to prison.

    In our latest video “Dispelling the Myth of A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” we reveal shocking truths using Ontario’s own public health data. A proper analysis of this data shows that the vaccine mandates have completely failed to control COVID-19 case growth and that the fully vaccinated are contracting COVID-19 at higher rates than the unvaccinated. Even more, it shows that hospital capacity is being stretched by the vaccinated and not the unvaccinated. And to top it all off it provides definitive proof that the pandemic has been over since early March 2021 when the death counts due to COVID-19 became negligible.

    This means that the government has been unjustly extending emergency measures and limiting the freedoms of Ontarians for almost a full year!

    https://rumble.com/vtt9ge-dispelling-the-myth-of-a-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated.html

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    1. They killed the GoFundMe Campaign. Our democracy, “-pseudo” as it was, is fucking over. This is astoundingly depressing in what it signifies. They have succeeded in convincing the clueless and bovine majority “public opinion” that the truckers convoy protest is some kind of “terrorist” entity. And the public have swallowed it. We are beyond fucked in this country….and for that matter globally.

      I seriously fear for what comes next.

      https://westphaliantimes.com/gofundme-returns-donations-to-freedom-convoy-donors-due-to-law-enforcement-saying-peaceful-demonstration-has-become-an-occupation/

      And for the record, I’m sick of msm here in Canada constantly admonishing us that we have no right to compare what is transpiring to any historical precedent. That is Bullshit.
      https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-biological-state-nazi-racial-hygiene-1933-1939

      I for one, am not a stupid ungulate.

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          1. I could not believe what I have read about the move by GoFundMe to cancel the funds for the truckers and their anti-social (or criminal) behaviour afterwards. I am glad that a least the people get their money back.

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  15. Looks like Turkey might be the first domino to fall. They have 50% and rising inflation and they are lowering their interest rate. Notice that their energy costs are up 140% because they have no energy resources of their own. Also note that their main export is minerals and they are becoming less competitive due to rising mining energy costs.

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  16. Interesting article over on Peak Prosperity by a Canadian. If you read the whole thing he had some insight into the “poll” numbers and public opinion in Canada (by corollary also the U.S.). It appears that their is a significant chance that opinion is being manipulated against the truckers by a group inside/outside the government to conform to their narrative (that the truckers are bad). Propaganda and manipulation is what western liberal governments have turned to. It portends badly when the shit really hits the fan, i.e. economic collapse/food scarcity/war.
    https://www.peakprosperity.com/cold-comfort-the-discussion-we-need-to-have/
    AJ

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    1. Apropos to your comment AJ see these links and sniff around “Policy Horizons Canada”. I could not make this stuff up:

      https://horizons.gc.ca/en/2017/07/03/behavioural-insight-brief-the-role-of-narrative-in-public-policy/

      https://horizons.gc.ca/en/2013/10/01/agile-policy-on-complex-terrains-nudge-or-nuzzle/

      https://horizons.gc.ca/en/our-work/bi-in-brief/

      Scroll to the bottom of the page of that last link and look at the “Tags”. Human augmentation? Gig economy? Internet of Things? Telepresence? Virtual Reality?

      What “future” do they envision for us little maze rats?

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      1. Brian,
        Read those links you posted. I was shocked that they were on a government site. The hubris of the bureaucracy is mind boggling. I took a couple of years of psych as and undergrad but they have come a long way since Skinner (behaviorism).
        These bureaucrats see no problem with manipulating the populace for whatever their masters (politicians and the elites that own them) require. They must have studied 1984 and Brave New World to get their playbook.
        Yeah, and I’m sure they see most of their constituents as maze rats.
        AJ

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        1. Just learned that Ottawa “Law Enforcement” is finally going full-on Darth Vader. This is tragic and underscores that there are forces at work here that will not relent. The synchronous global brutality is chilling and should be raising alarm bells everywhere. Wasn’t this supposed to be about “Public Health”?

          Look, just look: https://t.me/s/TheMarieOakes

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    2. “Propaganda and manipulation is what western liberal governments have turned to.”

      It was always like that. I think it was Noam Chomsky who said that in a dictatorship you can just beat people on the head if the do the wrong thing (i.e. against the regime). That’s not possible in a liberal democracy so the elite has to control what the common people think which might be less violent but is it any better?

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  19. The science supporting vitamin D for covid risk reduction is overwhelming. It’s also cheap and super safe. The fact that our leaders never discuss vitamin D is proof they are corrupt and do not have public health as a priority.

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  20. Until today I had this vague notion that there were a handful of wise countries, like maybe Russia, that were relying on old fashioned tried and true vaccine technology to protect against covid.

    This excellent Whitney Webb podcast episode shows that Russia suffers from the same profit seeking pharma grift that provides cover for the WEF great reset agenda as almost all western democratic countries.

    In this episode, Whitney is joined by Moscow-based journalist Riley Waggaman to explore the oligarchs and bankers behind Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and their ties to the dystopian rollout of Digital ID and CBDCs in the country.

    https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/02/resources/show-notes/russias-sputnik-v-and-the-wef-with-riley-waggaman/

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    1. Funny that this comment would arrive in my inbox just as I’m watching this:

      Dump Davos #1: Data Colonialism & Hackable Humans January 29th, 2021 (2:26:58)

      https://odysee.com/@UnlimitedHangout:a/Yuval-Noah-Harari-Davos-2020:c

      (In this video series investigating the people and agendas of the World Economic Forum, Whitney Webb and Johnny Vedmore analyze a recent speech given at Davos by Israeli “futurist” historian Yuval Noah Harari that exposes the WEF’s agenda for the “useless class”, the rise of exploited data colonies and the creation of an internal and external surveillance state.)

      recent article by Mr. Schwab hisself:

      This is what Governance 4.0 could look like to enable change | World Economic Forum
      https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/this-is-what-governance-4-0-could-look-like/

      How deep, exactly, does this rabbit hole go?

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      1. That’s a good way to spin the Great Reset for public consumption.

        If we assume most leaders are good people with good intentions, the real agenda which they can’t discuss for obvious reasons, might be how do we fairly ration energy and other scarce necessities, and how do we control social unrest, when the monetary system breaks down due to excess debt and limits to growth?

        What I’m suggesting is the hidden agenda might not be evil, except they tried to implement this agenda by forcing people to inject an inadequately tested substance, which does at a minimum make them corruptly captured by pharma grift.

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  21. So I was listening to Soundscapes on TV and this little gem of a quote appeared.

    “There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.” William James

    I am not sure where this precious little nugget of so called wisdom ranks in the hit parade of stupid and demonstrably false BS quotes – maybe between “That which does not kill you makes you stronger” and “Failure is impossible “ Susan B Anthony.

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    1. Here is something astounding. Are these folks a “front group” manned by bots? This is utterly nonsensical. Machine-gun tweets aimed at some bizarre inversion of reality.

      https://mobile.twitter.com/CdnHumanRights/status/1491141716992135169

      Here is a video that literally made me weep:

      The Last to Leave Ottawa – Romanian Trucker Speaks Out – Feb 6, 2022 (9:03)
      (Scroll to embedded video)

      https://strongandfreecanada.org/partner-video/the-last-to-leave-ottawa-romanian-trucker-speaks-out-feb-6-2022/

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      1. Thanks, looks like the deranged woke mob that took out Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying at Evergreen college. Facts are irrelevant to them. Got a bad feeling that many of them are employed by our governments now because its hard to get a job anywhere else if you have a bullshit arts degree.

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        1. Welcome to the Woke Industrial Complex.

          Re: Bret – Yes, it was not about justice or mutual accommodation, it was about seizing POWER. Heady stuff. Probably wise not to expect better from a bunch of hierarchical apes.

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  23. Her Rob, go onto Bing.com and type Vaids. Then go onto Google.com and type in Vaids. I have no idea if Vaids is real. Could be total bullshit and hysteria but the difference between the results of the two search engines is pretty stark.

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    1. Fascinating. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo and also tried it.

      My interpretation is that censorship is bad with Google, less bad with Bing, and there may be no censorship by DuckDuckGo.

      Glad I switched to DuckDuckGo. It also has less tracking.

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      1. I’ve been using Firefox and DuckDuckGo for the last 6 months or so. I love Google’s integration with all their “tools” but hate them as a company. It seems all organizations over a certain size end up becoming evil (money being all that matters). Not sure if I buy VAIDS as a valid syndrome, but I would always error on the side of caution. Wish I hadn’t gotten that first shot. No boosters for me. At this point all I (or anyone) can do is try to maximize your health. Even that is hard to do. Exercise is good, sleep is good, lowering stress is good, staying young helps (wish I knew how to do that!!) generally drugs are no good (maybe a little in moderation???). Food becomes a problem only because everyone has an agenda. Low fat diet, whole foods diet, keto diet, paleo diet. Each has a proponent who appears to cherry pick studies supporting their “advice”. I just try to stay slim and eat food that is as unprocessed as possible (what our distant ancestors ate (which was generally anything that didn’t kill them – because K calories are hard to obtain without cheap fossil fuels)). And LOL, all that probably won’t help me much.
        AJ

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        1. Yeah AJ I’m not sure on Vaids either but I found the difference between the two search engines results to be enlightening. As for not getting old, so far the only known way to extend life is through caloric restriction. There are some good books and YouTube programs about it. It appears that caloric restriction slows the aging process. So if you can put up with being hungry all the time you might live a decade longer than you might have otherwise. Start in your twenties and your potentially talking several decades if experiments on monkeys are anything to go by.

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        2. I also have no knowledge or opinion on Vaids. I tend to pay attention to issues when Dr. Malone, Dr. McCullough, Dr. Weinstein, Dr. Martenson, Dr. Kendrick, and Dr. Bossche say they are important.

          On the other hand, if the minister of health in my government said Vaids was nothing to worry about I’d know for sure it was a huge threat. Seriously. I wonder if our governments have any idea how much damage they have done to their credibility?

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          1. I think they simply do not care. We’re at Solzhenitsyn’s “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

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  25. “I’ve Never Seen A Market Like This”: Goldman Sees Shortages Of Everything, “You Name It, We’re Out Of It”

    “I’ve been doing this 30 years and I’ve never seen markets like this,” Currie told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Monday. “This is a molecule crisis. We’re out of everything, I don’t care if it’s oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminum, you name it we’re out of it.”

    In a reversal of the event from April 2020, when WTI oil briefly hit a negative $40 per barrel as speculators paid others to take deliverable oil contracts off their hands as they had no storage for it, futures curves in several key markets are trading in super-backwardation – a structure that indicates traders are paying bumper premiums for immediate supply. The downward sloping shape in prices is generally taken to mean commodities are severely undersupplied.

    The shortage of, well, everything has translated into record price of virtually all commodities: the Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index, which tracks 23 energy, metals and crop futures, has touched a record this year. That has been driven in part by surging oil prices, which have hit their highest level since 2014 and earlier today Brent rose as high as $94, assuring even more pain at the pump.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ive-never-seen-market-goldman-sees-shortages-everything-you-name-it-were-out-it

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    1. Our wins so far include removal of the federal conservative leader and removal of all covid mandates in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I predict more wins to follow soon. Total donations made via GiveSendGo now equal CDN$9M which equals the amount previously donated via the corrupt GoFundMe. Fuck Trudeau and Horgan.

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      1. Go Canada! What do you think of Pierre Poilievre as a possible new leader of the conservative party and successor of Trudeau? I am not very versed in Canadian politics but the few videos I have seen of him were quite positive. He put´s the finger where it hurts.

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    1. Superb-the basics in 6 minutes, but I still have a feeling that its only for the choir. Every time (increasingly rarely) I say anything about this stuff, in even what would be considered well educated circles, I’m met with derision. The answer they always give is that we will figure it out.
      I’m not sure how Nate stays positive enough to keep working on this but, as a member of the choir, I’m glad he does.
      How do I give a like to comments?-do I have to have a wordpress account and what is it?

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        1. Yep, great video. Nate really knows how to hit all the salient points. I wish he would put a word or two more on how long it took evolution to make multicellular creatures (2 – 3 billion years) and how unusual they appear to be in the universe. Other than that this was a superb video. I too have no one (save one daughter) who gets this and sees where we are going. Yes, reality denial is on full display. Oh so sad.
          AJ

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    2. If I look at the average temperatures for Santa Monica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Monica,_California#Climate), 21°C is not unusual for February. If I look at the daily mean temperature, there is only a 5 degree difference between the hottest (Aug, 19,4°C) and coldest months (Dec, Jan, Feb, 14,1°C). So, no cold winters for Santa Monica.

      I had relatives living in Los Angeles during the 1990s. The lowest temperatur they ever had was 12°C in December. I visited them multiple times in the summer, where some parts of Greater LA are unbearably warm (around 40°C). Santa Monica was always colder due to being on the Pacific Coast.

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  29. Really good essay from Dr. Malcolm Kendrick today. He’s one of the few experts I trust because he has sufficient intelligence, integrity, and self-awareness to say “it’s complicated and we don’t know the answer”.

    In this essay he argues we have grossly overreacted to covid. He does not speculate if this was due to incompetence or malfeasance.

    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2022/02/10/some-observations-on-the-infection-fatality-rate-of-covid19/

    Yet, despite their stunning ignorance about such things, certain individuals and organisations grabbed the reins of influence in order to convince those in power that they had the answer.

    The most important ‘answer’ being that COVID19 has an IFR of one per cent, which is at least ten times that of a serious influenza epidemic. Then, as the ‘germ’ is obviously everything, the only way to prevent hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of deaths was through lockdown, mask wearing, societal control, and suchlike.

    We must stop spread, the ‘the germ is everything brigade’ cried. Although, with a 75% re-infection rate it is hard to argue that we have managed anything of the sort.

    If this IFR figure was grossly inflated, which certainly seems to be the case, then all that we did was to create untold damage – for no good reason. I shall leave you with a post that I put up in a WhatsApp group recently. It followed a study from John Hopkins which estimated that COVID19 lockdowns only reduced deaths by 0.2%. [A study that will be attacked remorselessly, no doubt].12

    ‘Did lockdown work? No, the difference it made was marginal, at best. Were the models that we relied on accurate? No, they were bloody useless. Are the vaccines safe and effective? – Jury is out. Is there anything that was done justifiable by the evidence, in so much as it can be relied upon. I do not believe so. What we certainly did was to explode the economy, pile vast debt on UK Plc. create a massive backlog of work for the NHS. Fail to diagnose and treat hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer, and suchlike and create a tsunami of mental health problems. We also ran roughshod over incredibly important human rights, that have taken centuries to take hold and grow. In my opinion, almost everything that was done has caused more harm than good. What is the counter-argument? If we hadn’t done all these things, it would have been far worse. The evidence to support this position is sadly lacking.’

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    1. I translated the sentence to German because I could not make any sense of it. After translating I still cannot make any sense of it.

      A famous German blogger often says that you can no longer tell satire and reality apart.

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    2. The insanity will continue until some part of the market delivers a “punch in the nose.” This being the best way to get a drunk persons undivided attention.

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  31. Good analysis of Alberta oil production. Albertans will soon need to return to farming.

    https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/02/10/a-case-study-of-fossil-fuel-depletion/

    On the whole, we expect Alberta’s future Hubbert curve to look like … a Hubbert curve. Having already peaked, there’s nowhere for conventional oil-and-gas production to go but down. So Alberta’s future will be marked by exponential depletion. Of that, we can be more or less certain.

    More interesting (and more uncertain) is what might happen under the Hubbert curve. Figure 10 shows what will occur if the low-hanging-fruit trends (decreasing lifetime production and decreasing half life of wells) continue into the future. Essentially, the depletion contours become steeper and steeper until they are nearly vertical. In other words, long-lasting reserves become a thing of the past. In the future, Alberta oil-and-gas production will come almost exclusively from wells that are only a few years old.

    What this means is that the Alberta oil industry has no long-term future. Of course, we already knew that. But Figure 10 is a pretty way of looking at it.

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  33. Many of my friends oppose the convoy saying we have no right to hold the country hostage.

    My response is that we are both wise and entitled to defend the Charter of Rights if you are unwilling to show the data and logic used to justify emergency measures.

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    1. “Many of my friends oppose the convoy saying we have no right to hold the country hostage.”

      You are right…only our government gets to do that.

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    2. “Many of my friends oppose the convoy saying we have no right to hold the country hostage.”

      Do they also oppose climate activists blocking streets to attract attention to their agenda? I often sense double standards in such cases, whether the people like the cause of the protest or not. At least in Germany, climate protest is an approved version of holding the country hostage, as the government basically let´s the activists get away with it.

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      1. Not to get too political. . .
        But it’s just like in the U.S., riots by BLM or Antifa participants (not wearing masks or social distancing) is reported with approval in the MSM. But, any info at all about anti-Covid treatments or anti-Covid protests in Canada is either not reported or subtly denigrated.
        If you support the elite/corporate/Pharma/government messaging – you get good MSM coverage. If you don’t you are either not reported on or denigrated.
        I hope Trudeau gets shot down in Parliament? Is that wishful thinking.
        Oh, by the way. . . we’re going to have a war? And the U.S. is doing it to defend democracy, the rule of law, and international stability (as long as the U.S. gets to pillage everyone with impunity and gets good press).
        Oh, and doubly by the way. . . look out for a potential downturn in the economy? (it’s really a buying opportunity (buy the dip! (sarcasm))).
        Best of Monday to you!!
        AJ

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        1. I agree. Talking about “mostly peaceful” protests in front of burning buildings is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

          Here in Germany, there is a deep relationship between the so called left wing parties (SPD, Die Linke) and Antifa. You could say that they are a paramilitary unit sponsored by the government. During the reign of Angela Merkel, they were even used to scare her opponents. It´s no wonder that some people get the impression of a block party when they look at the German party landscape. The only opposition to the government seems to come from the AfD and a fraction of Die Linke led by Sarah Wagenknecht.

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    1. It makes me sick. The really troubling thing is I suspect most of my friends and family support the government actions. The vaccine mandates have nothing to do with science because the majority of citizens are frightened herd animals unable to think independently. The government is just reacting to the herd.

      God help us when we are soon faced with true threats to survival like food and energy shortages.

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  36. Karl Denninger today points us at what to focus on.
    https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245164

    Uh, This Is BAD

    The headline number isn’t the story, despite what people will try to tell you.

    Look at the intermediate table.

    Click to access ppi.pdf

    What’s worse is that through the various processing stages there is no evidence that it is abating either.

    This data shows you wild processing-cost increases, particularly over the last 4-5 months. That’s labor/cost-push inflation and it is the sort that there is exactly one way to cut it off: Significant liquidity pulls and rate increases — now.

    If you think they won’t do it, yes they will. This cannot be allowed to continue as it threatens to destroy the economic base of pretty much everyone in the 50 percentile and under.

    There’s been evidence of this for a while as I’ve written about and this is further confirmation.

    Buckle up.

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      1. I’m waiting for Trudeau to get Canadian intelligence services to ban you Rob! (You are putting out damaging information about Covid and vaccinations ;)) And watch out for that propaganda about the Russians – we all know they are evil and the U.S. is GOOD (only if you are aligned with biden & co.). (lot’s of sarcasm above).
        Chuck Watson (who I have linked to previously) had a new post on Ukraine yesterday. It was good and insightful as usual.
        https://blogenkiops.wordpress.com/2022/02/14/the-surreal-ukraine-situation/
        Hope Trudeau gets his comeuppance soon.
        AJ

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      2. This is one of the best analyses I’ve come across of Russia’s foreign-policy decision-making process. The West is focused on Putin as if he is the one pulling all the strings, but there is an entire bureaucracy in Moscow that has been formulating policy for years. One commenter notes that as a KGB veteran of overseas assignments, Putin must be well aware of the problems of spun intelligence, which led to bad decision-making, and was one of the many reasons for the downfall of the Soviet Union. I think we are dealing with a much more rational actor in Russia now – their decison-making is based on facts and data.

        https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/02/americas-putin-psychosis/

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        1. It was good, thank you.

          I think the US meddling in the Ukraine is no different than Russia meddling in Mexico. Everyone should mind there own borders. Instead we’ll risk a global war, over what exactly? Weapons money and pharma money seem to cause the same irrationality in our leaders, I wonder why?

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          1. The U.S. is now the one dealing with the consequences of spun intelligence. Colin Powell said that his biggest mistake was going before the U.N. Security Council in 2002 with the presentation on Saddam’s supposed possession of WMD. That story was cooked up by the Dick Cheney cabal – not one intelligence analyst believed it.

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            1. If you put yourself in Cheney’s shoes at that point in history when fracking was not yet a thing, and conventional oil was peaking, and if you were a ruthless unethical leader that cared only about protecting the American way of life, then occupying Iraq, which had the last best undeveloped oil reserves, makes perfect sense. I suspect most Americans subconsciously understood what was going on, which is why he got away with it.

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  39. Two of my favorites talk about fossil fuels for the first time! Check out Michael Green and Lacy Hunt at 1:07.

    Hopium to follow, but good to hear them say it!

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    1. Thanks.

      To the day I die I will remain amazed that the best and brightest that run our world don’t have a fucking clue how the world works.

      They see the problem is global, they see it is unprecedented, they see it spinning exponentially out of control, and they have not a clue about the cause. They do understand that austerity is the only good path forward, but they think austerity is impossible because citizens won’t accept it. Well duh, if our experts can’t say the words “end of growth” or “overshoot” or “declining net energy” and explain to citizens that although austerity will be painful, the alternative will be MUCH worse, it’s no wonder citizens will reject the only good path.

      I note they did mention population, but only in the context that it’s not growing fast enough. You can’t make this shit up.

      Our species deserves what’s coming.

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      1. “They see the problem is global, they see it is unprecedented, they see it spinning exponentially out of control, and they have not a clue about the cause.” Exactly. Perfectly concise summary of the situation. Why is this the case? Because they think it is ingenuity and technology (and economics) that has taken us to where we are, at the pinnacle of human civilization. And it is true, without technology/ingenuity (simpler: engineering) our society would not be where we are. 70 years of oil, or more than 200 years of oil plus coal, have moved fossil fuels out of sight and into an unconscious background that is just taken for granted. Engineering schools (as well as other schools) should have much more about mass and energy flows in their curricula. The confusion also arises from the fact that the same quantitative and analytical scientific methods are used to describe technology/machinery, on the one hand, and natural systems on the other hand. It is then easy to focus on technology and lose sight of natural systems and their mass and energy flows, and fall into the trap of “it all comes from human ingenuity”. Working at a technical university, I see this every day. They really believe – fundamentally believe, beyond any rationality – that technology is everything and will save us.

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        2. Well said. I think your observation that “They really believe – fundamentally believe, beyond any rationality – that technology is everything and will save us” is a manifestation of our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT. The evidence that technology will not save us is too simple and too obvious for there to be any other explanation than MORT.

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          1. So, what we see in many respects is not an intentional scheme or a plot, but it is a metaphysical void that they fill with the belief in technology, growth, eternity, redemption. It is very wrong and very sad.

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          2. Yep – the nice thing about the Hunt/Green video is that they at least acknowledged it was about energy, as fossil fuels. They also descussed The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Gordon) which traces the diminishing returns of technology.

            They are missing overshoot and denial from their analysis.

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            1. Please correct me if you saw something different, but what I saw was 65 minutes of detailed discussion of economic theories and data that demonstrated we are in trouble, but provided no insight into the cause or path forward.

              Followed at the very end by one guy making a 30 second comment that we need a new energy source to replace fossils, with no apparent awareness that this might be impossible, or the timeline that that it must be accomplished, with the other participants listening without comment, and then the video ended.

              In other words, they discussed everything except what needs to be discussed.

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  40. I read this article, and it has an interesting take on social class.
    They divide up society by grouping the “physical” vs the “virtual”

    “It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening. The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable.” – https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back

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    1. Thanks, it’s an interesting theory but I’m not sure I agree with it, simply because I really don’t understand what’s going on with covid. An equally good argument can be made that the majority trusted their leaders and injected a vaccine for the common good and now simply don’t care if it was the right or wrong decision. Anyone who did not do the same is no longer a good member of the tribe.

      The piece that still troubles me the most is why our leaders aggressively suppressed effective early treatments and advice on lifestyle/diet that could have prevented the majority of deaths. And why they have a pushed risk on to children to reduce risk in the old and fat. To me these are unfathomable crimes, and yet most countries did the same. WTF?

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      1. Rob, you’re about 10 steps behind where you need to be on this. No wonder you “don’t understand”. How could anyone? It’s like a bad Hollywood villain movie, only we’re in it right now. Here is some enlightenment. Pay attention to this linked article and remember : the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is about 8 months! Ha! Some “laughing matter”, this is!

        WEF/Young Global Leaders The greatest conspiracies are hidden in plain sight
        https://nakadai.substack.com/p/wefyoung-global-leaders?r=12te6f

        and read some history dammit!

        Writing the News – United States Memorial Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia

        “Shortly after taking power in January 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis succeeded in destroying Germany’s vibrant and diverse newspaper culture. The newly created Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda handed out daily instructions to all German newspapers, Nazi or independent, detailing how the news was to be reported…”

        https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/writing-the-news

        Best, Brian

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        1. Thanks, that’s a very good essay on the WEF agenda. I’ve been chipping away on a new essay that discusses the same thing but draws a different non-evil conclusion.

          Here’s a different way to think about the WEF agenda.

          All of our big predicaments are global and will require global cooperation to mitigate and minimize suffering:
          1) Low cost fossil energy depletion.
          2) Climate change.
          3) Eco-system collapse.
          4) Debt backed fractional reserve monetary system implosion without growth.

          If you really understand these issues then you can predict with certainty the scarcity of survival essentials, and violent social unrest that will make the situation worse, and war.

          Implementing some tools to control the activities and consumption of citizens might be a really good idea if controlled by wise people with good intentions. I suspect covid has been used to advance this agenda.

          Was covid created to advance this agenda? I’m guessing not, but I’m not sure about anything.

          Are our leaders wise with good intentions? I’d like to think the majority are but I’m really troubled that they were willing to kill many by blocking early treatments, and are adding risk to children to reduce risk in the old and fat, doubly so given it’s likely that vaccinating children will not reduce risk to the old and fat.

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          1. About 10 years or so ago I was entertaining the notion that “global techno fascism is the only thing which can save us.” Unfortunately after reading Tainter I don’t think this is possible. Faced with limits, we can’t expect increased global cooperation, increased application of technology, or anything which looks like more complexity. Simplification is coming – which means less of everything, I think.

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            1. Yes you’re right, the future is local and simple.

              I suspect the WEF people honestly believe that climate change can be “fixed” with global cooperation. Also, in the interim while we sort of keep BAU going, we’ll need international cooperation for trade and the movement of people.

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  41. Jack Alpert is the only overshoot thinker on the planet that has a technically & thermodynamically feasible plan for what needs to be done to minimize suffering from collapse and to maintain an advanced civilization.

    He gave a new talk yesterday to the Canadian Club of Rome. It’s 2.5 hours long so I have not watched it yet but will soon.

    Here is more work by Alpert that I’ve posted in the past:
    https://un-denial.com/?s=alpert%3A

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    1. The new presentation was sobering. I appreciate his work but consider it a pipe dream. Interesting exercise! I keep in mind we don’t live in “one civilization” even if we have a shared global economy. We live in a plurality of civilizations, many of which are by no means willing to entertain this. It’s kind of a western intellectuals delusion that we could find some democratic way through this.

      Bill Rees had the most sober comment/question at about 1:14.

      The rebuttal is that Alpert believes a bottom-up change is possible if people can be made to see what he calls the “potential injury” or consequences. While that is logically possible, I don’t think it is actually possible.

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      1. I left the following comment on YouTube:

        Thanks to Jack for an excellent presentation. I’m a longtime admirer of Jacks’ work and think he has developed the only technically and thermodynamically feasible plan that both avoids much suffering this century, and retains an advanced civilization when fossil energy is depleted.

        The problem of course, as discussed in the Q&A, is how to get a majority to vote for a radical but necessary plan when 99% of people don’t even see our predicament.

        The first step to ANY better path forward must be to understand what prevents our friends, family, neighbors, and leaders from seeing our obvious overshoot reality. It’s not for a lack of intelligence or information, some other powerful force is in play.

        I think the human species with its unique intelligence and extended theory of mind exists because it evolved to deny its mortality (and all other unpleasant realities like overshoot) as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory, and therefore the first step to implementing Jack’s plan must be to focus on MORT awareness.

        I’ve discussed MORT with Jack one on one and I observe he didn’t acknowledge it as a keystone in this talk so I assume Jack thinks MORT is not true or not important. That’s too bad because MORT is a powerful theory that explains why otherwise brilliant people believe we’ll feed 8 billion and keep modernity going with solar panels and no diesel.

        Here are links to a paper and video on MORT by Dr. Ajit Varki:

        https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-25466-7_6

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqgYqW2Kgkg

        What I didn’t say there but will mention here is that it was very depressing to see Bill Rees, Paul Beckwith, with support I think from Alpert, aggressively state with confidence that the freedom convoy is wrong for opposing covid policies.

        I try really hard not to form opinions without a lot of evidence and weighing of contrary views. I respect Rees/Alpert. One of us is clearly wrong on the covid reality and this might be another example of our tendency to deny unpleasant realities. I hope it’s not me doing the denying.

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        1. You are not wrong Rob. The covid reality is as you see it. Many smart people also see it – Chris Martenson, Malone, Kory and many others. Covid is being used to curtail our freedoms and attempt to put us in tribes. I have found that there are numerous people who I used to respect that have gone full psycho on covid. One I just couldn’t read any more is a fellow Canadian of yours – Category 5. https://darkgreenmountainsurvivalresearchcentre.wordpress.com/
          He used to write a very insightful and practical blog on collapse survival, but since Covid has gone completely off the rails and sees nothing wrong with the Canadian government going Nazi on the Freedom Truckers protest. He’s now pandemic crazy. I can’t read him at all now.
          You are sane and rational, others are trapped by fear and denial. Keep up the good work.
          AJ

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        2. The COVID and Convoy discussion did depress me, too. They may have rightly fit it into the pattern Alpert noted of “the existing systems breaking down,” but not in the way we see it – i.e. break down of institutions of politics and science, rather than breakdown of social order. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

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    1. Surprising to me! With Xi’s new commitment to “common prosperity” most China observers were predicting the losses would be left on the developers. Which of the two is more likely: (1) the common prosperity push was never intended to deal with inequality, contrary to other recent actions such as crack-downs on celebrities, or (2) the government concluded the risks are too high to stay the course?

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          1. I heard that yesterday! The last time I had encountered the concept was in the fiction book The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047, a story of economic collapse. LOL A good fiction book! But the conclusion is bad.

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  43. Jason Bradford is one of my few heroes. He understands our predicament, tries to educate others, and sets a good example in his personal life.

    This recent interview of Bradford by the Planet Critical podcast is very good.

    Which animal consumes more energy producing food than it does eating that food? None, except industrialised humans. You don’t need to be a scientist to know that’s bad news.

    Jason Bradford is a biologist and farmer working on how to transform food systems to make them more rural, sustainable, and to provide a net-positive energy consumption. He explains the failings of our current food production and encourages everyone to learn to farm as soon as possible.

    But beyond that, Jason provides a beacon of hope for the future, revealing the positive changes in his life and his community’s since they began their own food production. Without over-simplifying “the great simplification”, he thinks it could be a positive transformation.

    Listen to discover why veganism isn’t the answer and why everyone needs to upskill their practical abilities in the next decade.

    https://www.planetcritical.com/p/transforming-food-systems-to-transform?utm_source=url

    P.S. Thirteen years ago Bradford had his own podcast, The Reality Report, which is still my all-time favorite podcast. I posted one of the episodes with the godfather of doomers, Jay Hanson, here:
    https://un-denial.com/2018/03/26/by-jay-hanson-reality-report-interview-november-3-2008/

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    1. On the importance of animals for sustainable farming…

      The little organic vegetable and fruit farm I assist has given up on the idea of building a proper composting facility that I wanted to construct for them. The cost of the concrete is high, and benefit is low because we don’t produce enough high quality organic waste to make it worthwhile.

      The cost of organic fertilizer is rising and supply chain issues are making delivery sketchy. In addition, there is no reliable local source of manure we can truck in.

      The plan being considered now is to graze our small pastures with a few head of beef and collect the manure, rather than selling hay.

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      1. Yeah, most small scale organic farmers I have read about tend to buy compost. This includes The Market Gardener and these guys: https://www.singingfrogsfarm.com/

        I personally did the “square foot garden” method and found that I generated enough compost. I supplemented with a lot of leaves stored in the fall, which is the most important part on small scale (dry browns). I also included coffee grounds from my office and a few other found sources.

        I was never involved with this on my family’s farm – but I believe for their dairy they spread manure, but also took egg shells from a local manufacturing plant. I believe they also occasionally used some form of byproduct from a local wastewater treatment facility?

        Sad to hear, nevertheless. I also volunteered at a CSA which teaches urban youths for a career in organic agriculture. They make compost but note they don’t generate enough dry browns. You’d have to team up with something like a landscaping company for ground wood chips.

        But on a personal level, I found that a 50 gallon drum of brown leaves worked perfectly. Every time I added greens (garden waste and kitchen scraps) I added a few scoops of browns.

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        1. Collecting leaves from your yard and composting them is a very good tip for the home garden but is usually not practical for farms. implicit is the assumption that you have much more land not producing food than land producing food. That’s not the case for most modern small farms. Preindustrial farms had about 30% of their land producing food for their machines and larder (animals) and another 25% fallow to naturally replenish nitrogen. Which leads once again to the conclusion that a sustainable civilization, regardless of the standard of living, must have a much smaller population.

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          1. Yep. They also had wood lots. Sadly, even if you have access to lots of leaves, eventually the trees/forests need those leaves for themselves. The only viable world is one with significantly fewer humans. Permaculture systems work, but ultimately need to keep what’s extracted local to the property. Including human waste.

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  44. https://www.peak-oil.com/2022/02/europas-energiekrise/#comment-400281

    Patrick says:
    February 18, 2022 at 08:55 am
    “While Germany has prescribed itself an energy turnaround, it has been stepmotherly and inconsistent and is now leading to the issue of energy prices becoming relevant again.”

    And this energy turnaround is leading us exactly…where?
    We’ve been going in circles here for years.
    I stand by the realization that a world based primarily on wind and solar can only accommodate a tiny fraction of today’s population.
    And even this wind/solar generation technology will disappear not too long after fossil disappears as well.

    Our overriding problem is not climate change, but quite simply and banally an exorbitant overshoot.
    Climate change is only a symptom of it.

    Why should we continue to dither around it and imagine a world powered by hydrogen, wind and sun?
    It simply won’t happen.
    If the fossil industrial age ends, then the absolutely predominant part of mankind will also end.

    The most that can still be done is to mitigate the maximum nosedive a little bit and to change to a not quite so steep descent.
    So we are only delaying the inevitable a little.

    For better or worse, we will have to resign ourselves to a healthy dose of fatalism in the future.

    The complexity of the global economy goes beyond what is often mentioned here. Supply chains can be permanently destroyed, demographics, migration(s), wars/civil wars, currency collapse…there are so many things at play that can influence whether or how much oil and gas we can still extract in energy terms.

    Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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  45. El gato’s very good today. Our mass psychosis (aka reality denial) is amazing.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/an-epidemic-of-self-delusion/comments?utm_source=url

    it’s like the last vestiges of observational capability have finally been beaten out of a meaningful portion of the population.

    truly, we have entered the post rational world of the unfalsifiable claim.

    “it would have been worse if i had not!”

    it’s such a wonderful meme. so pervasive. so persuasive. and so totally, utterly impervious to contradiction.

    it’s the perfect brainworm to justify what you did.

    you can show them all the societal data you like about higher rates of hospitalization this year than last in groups that were 95%+ vaccinated.

    it does not matter. no aggregate data can refute any individual belief about one specific datapoint among many.

    “i’m sure it helped.”

    this belief lets anyone feel good about vaccination and boosting even as they fall ill.

    it literally turns the contraction of covid by vaccinated people into the belief that covid vaccines worked for them.

    this may be the most successful piece of product positioning in human history.

    cognitive bias becomes cognitive dissonance becomes an iron bar certainty that your virtuous behavior saved you.

    as a perfect pathway to self justification and validation of priors, it’s near 100% effective if you simply believe hard enough.

    the alternative is admitting that you were played for a chump. people are highly averse to such conclusions.

    of course, spotting the chump is easy:

    ask such a person what would convince them that the vaccine did not prevent covid from being worse.

    see if they have an answer.

    if they do not, well, then it’s pure presumption.

    that which cannot be falsified cannot be proven either.

    bingo. chumpitude verified.

    and boy do people not want things proven.

    we’ve reached the point where agencies will no longer publish objective data because it does not support their conclusions.

    “we cannot provide data because people might analyze it!” is not much of a mantra, is it?

    of course, not everyone is going to stop doing analysis.

    it feels like we’re giving birth to a whole new field of the anthropology of epidemiology.

    at least we’ll have a goodall time…

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  47. Net importer you say? Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

    Maybe not so smart repealing in 2015 the 1975 law that generally prohibited the export of crude oil produced in the United States.

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  48. Karl Denninger reminds us how fragile we have made our modern civilization. It’s not hard to imagine how any one of many possible (probable?) disruptions to world trade would collapse the infrastructure we need to survive, very very quickly. There’s lots of candidates: economic collapse, diesel shortages, trade dispute, war, viruses, climate event, accident, etc.

    https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245184

    TSMC, for example, is a Taiwan company that accounts for about fifty percent of all semiconductor fab revenue worldwide. The United States used to be responsible for about 40% of chip capacity in 1990 but today is responsible for about 12%.

    What happens if a critical part of that fab capacity is either blown up or embargoed?

    You literally can’t make anything electronic and given the enormous percentage of the whole it would take years, perhaps even a decade or more, to just replace US demand for said chips. Until that could be done you’d get nothing.

    Realize what “nothing” means in this context:
    – No cell phones.
    – No towers to provide service to cellphones, including the extra one in your desk drawer.
    – No “green power” of any sort, since the generation of same is DC and requires power semiconductors in size to be usable.
    – All “modern” electronically-controlled electrical generation (fossil-fuel, nuclear or otherwise) shuts down immediately until and unless said chips and spares are available. Only the older-style, mechanically and manually controlled plants can run without this, and we’ve forced most of them to close, never mind that those who knew how to run them, a highly-skilled process, were all laid off and are gone with many of the plants themselves in such a state of disrepair or even torn down that they could not be restarted anyway.
    – Ditto for all “modern” electronically-controlled refineries, chemical plants and similar. Oh, that’s most of them for the same reason; the “old way” wasn’t green enough and they’ve been torn down or are hunks of rust and cannot be restarted, nor does the skilled labor base required to run them still exist.
    – No “green cars” of any sort, or any car at all for that matter. All modern vehicles are “drive by wire” and without said chips literally cannot be built. While you could build mechanical carburetors they can’t legally be sold and cannot work with modern emissions controls including the basic ones like a catalytic converter as they can’t control fuel:air mixture tightly enough.
    – No washing machines, dryers or dishwashers. You think not? Find me any of the above with mechanical timers. Forget it.
    – Even your electric stove won’t work. The old push-button multi-tap controls and burner elements are no longer made or sold. All today are electronic.
    – Modern gas water heaters are electronic ignition, not standing-pilot, and without electronics won’t work. The others were made illegal because they weren’t “green enough.”
    – Your gas furnace and air conditioner almost-certainly has a VFD-driven blower motor. No chips, no heat or A/C. The older-style PSC motors were less-efficient and basically forced out of the market by government mandate.
    – Most natural gas, petroleum and other refining, handling and pipeline transport stops immediately if there is a failure and no parts. Why? Because all the motors used today are VFD-driven which, you got it, require power electronics. No chips, no controller.
    – All modern Class 8 trucks (18 wheelers, the ones that deliver everything you use) will not start or run without these chips. A single sensor that fails and cannot be replaced forces the engine to either derate to the point of being able only to creep to the next possible place to fix it or shuts it down entirely. If there are no parts, even an inexpensive $50 part, that’s the end of that vehicle’s utility until the parts are available. If that sensor can’t be made due to unavailable chips for two years sucks to be you.

    I can keep going but do I need to?

    In short basically, well, everything we use and enjoy today stops. We could quite-literally be back to worse than the 1700s because in the 1700s all the houses had fireplaces and wood stoves along with candles for light where today most residences and essentially all commercial facilities are uninhabitable without modern power, water and sanitation systems. Don’t even contemplate the food, potable water and sanitation problem.

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    1. And a comment from one of Denninger’s readers The_serb:

      2022-Feb-17 Karl Denninger. Top of form as usual. The part of his excellent analysis I want to contribute to is this:

      Only the older-style, mechanically and manually controlled plants can run without this, and we’ve forced most of them to close, never mind that those who knew how to run them, a highly-skilled process, were all laid off and are gone with many of the plants themselves in such a state of disrepair or even torn down that they could not be restarted anyway.

      Having worked 30 years as an engineer in the major areas of power plants, including fossil (coal), hydro and nuclear, both maintenance and design for one of the worlds largest utilities, I wanted to confirm and add to what Karl Denninger has said. Karl has just touched the surface as regards his comment noted above. Things are worse and will progress to worser (Or as Shakespeare said, ‘I cannot hate thee worser’).

      The utility I used to work for is now systematically bulldozing down perfectly good fossil plants that had modernized up-to-date pollution systems such as scrubbers and no-ox controls. Some of these are power monsters, single units 1,300 megawatts. Most had been upgraded in the last twenty years with new turbine, generator, boiler and controls. Same as buying a nice 1960-1980 car and plunking in a new Jasper engine and transmission. A little bit of tweaking and you functionally have a new car. One large coal facility where I worked a while [and I had worked at all the fossil, hydro and nuke facilities over the years] had three large generators with a combined electrical output of 2,600 megawatts. Folks, that is a lot of juice.

      Now, where these demolished fossil plants have been replaced, they are with large General Electric combined cycle systems which are totally dependent on a reliable source of natural gas and in the winter on the prayers of employees that the ambient outdoor temperature will not fall so low as to drop the gas pressure too low as to bring the unit down. Prayers are also offered to the Go Green Deity that the pipe line feeding the turbine-generator does not experience a mechanical failure or some irate Afghanistan farmer doesnt creep across the open borders along the Rio-Grande along with his buddies to sabotage the natural gas pipe lines. They go then most of the country goes dark for many weeks or a few months, depending.

      Consider life before all this Going Green nonsense helped cripple the American economy. A large utility with fossil plants would typically purchase long term contracts for coal. And the standard at the time was that each fossil plant kept a 90 day supply of coal. Think about that. This reserve allowed for the unexpected such as the occasional coal miner strike. In addition, each power plant was essentially its own business unit. It had in stock everything it needed to keep the generators running usually large warehouses for storage of spare parts such as turbine main bushings, large motors, etc. And, if the occasional sweep of tornados blacked out a region these independent power stations were able to offer the critical off-site power to the downed plants and get them up and running again. Before King Coal was demonized in order to create the go green industry the United States had the most reliable power grid system in the world. All of that has gone away now.

      I could add so much more to what Karl is saying, including why the use of the reliable old mechanical protection relays were so important; how even in a true national power grid emergency there is simply not the technical talent available anymore to recover, and many other things. But let me close with this bit of enlightenment.

      Power plants have to have large, what are called unit and station transformers. None are now made in the once and great U.S.A. I believe the three remaining places where they are built (much by hand) is S. Korea; Asea Brown-Boveri (that may have changed) and China. Now a quick personal opinion Chinese engineering is every bit as good as American used to be.

      Major power plant switchgear is no longer made in the U.S.A. Large transformer bushings (much manual labor) are not longer made in U.S.A. but are repaired here. GE has sold off its hydro division. I am trying to think of what aspect of power utility vital equipment is still made in the decaying U.S.A.

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  49. As Chris Martenson recently discussed, too many shocks to rats in a cage and they become unruly. This is unusual for my province.

    https://bc-cb.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=2130&languageId=1&contentId=73532

    Houston RCMP is presently investigating an incident where individuals allegedly engaged in a violent confrontation with employees of Coastal GasLink, and with attending police officers along the Morice River Forest Service Road near Houston, BC.

    On Thursday, February 17, 2022, shortly after midnight, Houston RCMP was called to the Marten Forest Service Road (FSR) after Coastal Gas Link (CGL) security reported acts of violence at their work site.

    It was reported approximately 20 people, some armed with axes, were attacking security guards and smashing their vehicle windows. It was initially reported that some CGL employees were trapped, but all had managed to safely leave the area.

    Upon police attendance at the 41 km mark, the roadway had been blocked with downed trees, tar covered stumps, wire, boards with spikes in them, and fires had been lit throughout the debris. As police worked their way through the debris and traps, several people threw smoke bombs and fire lit sticks at the police, injuring one officer.

    This is a very troubling escalation in violent criminal activity that could have resulted in serious injury or death. This was a calculated and organized violent attack that left its victims shaken and a multimillion dollar path of destruction, says Chief Superintendent Warren Brown, North District Commander. While we respect everyone’s right to peacefully protest in Canada, we cannot tolerate this type of extreme violence and intimidation. Our investigators will work tirelessly to identify the culprits and hold them accountable for their actions.

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  50. Doug Nolan also now at Defcon 1 today with a very nice global snapshot of the risks (sans energy of course).

    http://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2022/02/weekly-commentary-made-decision.html

    Bubbles inflict tremendous damage upon societies. It has been my greatest fear that the “granddaddy” of all Bubbles would also foment global acrimony, hostility and conflict. I’ve become a broken record on this: I hope things are not as dire as I fear. It’s just that I’ve been closely monitoring these dynamics and pondering the Bubble endgame scenario for some time now.

    I’m deeply concerned, and part of my anxiety comes from knowing people haven’t been paying attention. A Russian invasion of Ukraine has potential to be a highly destabilizing catalyst, slamming fragile global markets, exacerbating inflationary pressures, accelerating financial asset Bubble deflation, and pushing forward the transition to what will prove a particularly challenging down cycle.

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