Today we have a heartfelt post by marromai from Germany sharing his experience of becoming overshoot aware and how he deals with the knowledge. The essay was written in German and translated to English.
Life is wonderful – sometimes at least. But most of the time it is a very monotonous thing. And the older I get, the more often I wonder about the purpose of it. Every day, every week, every year the same procedure – enjoy the little moments, but for the rest of the time, hope that it passes by as soon as possible. Most days consist of a typical routine like getting up, sitting at work for what feels like an eternity, having a short and stressful time with my family, and then either doing chores or attending social gatherings now and then. Get the house in shape on Saturdays, and on Sundays rest or do something with the family. Rinse and repeat, every day is groundhog’s day.
Although one could think I’m blessed, because I live in the best Germany ever1. I’m married to a wonderful wife – as wonderful as they can get in their late 30s – I have four adorable children whom I love very much but who often get on my last nerve, a house and a garden where there is always plenty of work to do for which I have neither time nor money nor desire, and my dream job as an electrical engineer, which nowadays is unfortunately all too often just another bureaucratic clerk who only sees the soldering iron from afar. So basically, I should be doing very well, you would think. I just sell a bit of my lifetime for money and can enjoy a decent life.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Personally, my biggest problem is this: Working as an employed engineer has lost its magic – it often doesn’t even make sense to me, it just sucks. For the most part, it consists of bureaucratic stuff that doesn’t solve any problems but is just to be done for its own sake. Consequently, I complete tasks at the last minute with minimal effort, which you can’t even call work to rule. Everyday work is dull, lacking real tinkering challenges and practical problems to solve. The “always having to be there” and the resulting disproportionate amount of wasted life time kills any motivation and makes me strongly question the purpose of the whole mumbo jumbo called “gainful employment”. Maybe work makes life sweet – but in this respect I have diabetes… Now and then I think about self-employment and alternative income possibilities, combined with more personal freedom – but the chance to earn enough money to support a family is close to zero. Especially since the difficult economic times that are looming mark a very unfavorable time for this. How nice it would be to have a 4-day half-day job, with full pay, of course. Or even better, if they would just transfer my salary to me, I would know what to do with my time, wouldn’t I?
Since a while it feels like I have no time at all for personal activities. Even on days off I don’t really know what to do with myself. Apart from the tasks on the house and garden, which absolutely have to be done, I often don’t manage to start anything, although I have so many ideas – but rarely the motivation to actually begin. Or too little time, that starting is not worth it – at least that’s what I tell myself. So, I end up just like at work, where I spend most of my time in front of a computer, trying to avoid getting bored while reading in some online forums. As it turned out afterwards, this was the point, where my problems began, resulting in a total destruction of any purpose in life.
You may ask, what is it, what one could read, that is so depressing?
Beside electronic forums (for new ideas, which I will never implement) I read mainly alternative news and discussions about current events. This made me realize a long time ago that official media are nothing but propaganda channels – and I really can’t listen to them anymore. Russia here, Ukraine there. Evil Putin will destroy us all. Corona is so dangerous, be sure to get vaccinated… I can’t understand how the majority of the population can believe this bullshit – but that’s another topic. It will soon matter little anyway, once you understand that all of this are just side effects to a superordinate set of issues I came across while browsing over some threads of my favorite forum.
Most people will dismiss the following problem as absurd and unrealistic. Some will understand it but will not feel affected by it or will not want to admit it. And the tiny remainder? They are left with no one to talk about a matter, for which the great majority will laugh at them as end-time prophets and declare them crazy. It is the realization that our entire civilization could only grow so fast with the help of fossil energy – and that we are running out of this energy source now. Not because we planned it so or think we can replace it to get a grip on the ridiculous CO2 climate change issue. (I think it is rather presumptuous and a huge farce to try to control the temperature of a whole ecosystem and save the planet by reducing a single trace gas in the atmosphere, while not being able to provide a solid weather forecast for more than 2 days.) But the decarbonization that politicians are longing for will happen anyway. Just not in the way they envision. That’s because fossil fuels currently still cover the main demand for energy, and the much-vaunted renewables can’t even replace a fraction of that. Now we have reached the limits of what our planet can provide. What we are currently experiencing with our gas and electricity prices is only the beginning of the coming shortages. The Ukrainian-Russian war, which actually is driven by the USA, is in fact an economic war – and the economy only works with energy. Without energy, all the money in the world is useless: “Our main problem is a caloric one. We can print money like hay, but not a single drop of oil”2. The coming lack of oil will tear everything apart and cost billions of people’s lives by cold and hunger.
How it could come so far is what nobody dares to speak about: There are simply too many people on this planet who have already consumed too much raw materials and energy and always want more. It is only through coal, oil and gas that humanity has been able to multiply so enormously. But without maintaining these energy flows, the population numbers cannot be sustained. There are 10 calories of fossil energy in every calorie of food. But the soils are depleted and no longer yield anything without artificial fertilizers, agriculture is so thoroughly industrialized and complex that it can no longer be run on pure muscle power, certainly not to feed a country as densely populated as Germany. And now, of all times, we are running out of fossil energy?
The promised rescue by renewable energies is just window dressing and cannot free us from this predicament, nor can nuclear power plants. They supply only a fraction of electrical energy, but no raw materials for industry, as can be seen well in the current European gas shortage situation. No fertilizer can be produced from solar cells, and we cannot melt steel with wind energy, not even with 10 times the number of windmills. In addition to oil and gas, many other natural resources are now depleted that are required to build alternative energy sources. Fossil energy has enabled exponential population growth and unprecedented prosperity with ever increasing complexity and interconnectedness. Likewise, future energy shortages will cause an abrupt reduction in complexity – which is called collapse. And no, this will not be in a distant future, we are already in the middle of it. The coming times will be bleak. And it can go much further down very quickly when “winter is coming”, as the current situation in Europe shows.
All in all, a huge complex of topics, in whose importance I have no doubt – but the momentous realizations from it are simply devastating and destroy any further motivation and search for meaning in life – a nihilistic vicious circle of demotivation, effects see above. And the worst thing is, that one suffers all alone from this knowledge. Because the majority of people are not able to even see this unpleasant reality, let alone understand: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”.
So how to continue? One may try to convince as many others as possible of this reality and build a low-tech community. With a group of collapse-aware people, surviving could be much easier, when the crisis fully hits. Unfortunately, in Germany this is very difficult, since most people are totally brainwashed by official media. So, for me, I have decided to just try to enjoy as much free time and remaining prosperity as possible – while it’s still possible. Since I need money for this, I have to work, which is contrary to “Carpe Diem”. So I go to work, but don’t really do work – not perfect, much more like business as usual. What a shame – denying the un-denial… not knowing in the first place would have been much easier.
But as long as the hamster wheel turns and turns, you inevitably have to run with it. You have to learn to control the speed, otherwise you die of exhaustion. For someone who has recognized being in a hamster wheel, one may eventually be inclined to consider a premature exit. But that should not be a solution – especially not if you have a family, which you don’t want to leave in the lurch. Besides, aren’t you too curious to see what happens next? How bad will the crisis get? How long does such a collapse take? And what will life be like in the future? Maybe there will be challenges and problems to solve that you missed so much in your current job, for example finding food every day? Doesn’t this give you an ultimate purpose in life? You’ll probably miss the days spent in the warm office, browsing through internet forums and dreaming up gloomy fantasies about the future…
I leave you with a favorite quote from a relevant episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
Seize the time Maribor. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.
Footnotes:
[1] German Bundespräsident F.W. Steinmeier on German Unity Day 2020: “We live in the best Germany of all times”.
[2] https://archiv1.dasgelbeforum.net/index.php?id=193123 (A German forum of critical thinkers)
un-Denial 
Turned on PBS for a couple minutes. No journalists are crying this time. All must be good with the election.
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Many times in the past I told myself that when the interest rate rises, we are nearing the end and should brace for impact.
Nevertheless somehow I haven’t been thinking too much about the implications of today’s rising interest rate.
Chris Martenson today runs the numbers and reminds us that it’s a really big deal.
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Good talk by Martenson. Not sure if he is right that there will be a great reset and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Many things happening at the same time. Ukraine, collapse of Western Civilization, climate change and a collapse of agriculture, energy limits. CBDC only seems possible if all governments collude and become authoritarian. I think collapse is far more likely.
AJ
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I agree with you. They might try again for a CBDC by never letting a good crisis go to waste but I think most citizens will be too ornery to let them get away with it. So collapse it is.
I think that if we had wise leaders with integrity, a CDBC would be a very good idea to help manage the decline. But ALL of our leaders have proven with covid that they are stupid and/or evil and cannot be trusted.
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Some good insight into China and the lockdowns;
Basically China has shifted its position on housing/real estate to “houses are for living in, not for speculating on”. This is huge as 70% of Chinese wealth is in housing.
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I found this latest interview with Art Berman by Nate fascinating. It’s mainly technical around the oil refining processes, complexities and limitations but touches on the macro issues too. I note Art says at one point that most of the world’s problems are due to too many people and that without the Haber-Bosch process population would have been limited to around 2 billion people. He also talks of Putins PhD in energy related challenges for Russia. Says that Putin knows more about energy than probably all the other world leaders put together.
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It was a good interview. Can you imagine a one-on-one negotiation between Putin and any one of our western leaders? He would demolish them all.
How did we fall so far? It’s not like our leaders are simply mediocre. They lack every category of character and competence that we need right now. Very strange and worrying.
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Nice short presentation on the events needed to initiate, and the consequences of, a nuclear war.
Putin and Biden will have 30 seconds to make their decision to launch and destroy civilization.
God help us. Biden needs more than 30 seconds to decide if the traffic light turned green.
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With all of the converging predicaments we face it seems inevitable that our global technological industrial civilisation will collapse fairly soon (oh for a crystal ball but soon compared to human lifetimes). This is scary in the extreme but I wonder why I don’t actually feel scared? I wonder if all those optimistic noises coming from environmentalists and, perhaps, all those denials of human caused climate change (just one of our predicaments), along with apparently no concerns over resource depletion, are somehow infiltrating into my subconscious and causing me a certain amount of unwarranted calm.
Out in the blogosphere and social media world, there seem to be no end of people who seem to think they know the answers, are know someone who does. We have the solutions, just ignore realities and you’ll see that smart people will have all manner of ideas to get us over this hump.
Of course, physics, chemistry and geology will determine what humans can do and when limits will raise those brick walls, finally waking people up to reality, including myself.
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I feel calm about collapse too. Not sure why.
Maybe I don’t like our species and don’t care what happens. Maybe having an understanding of what’s really going on and why is calming.
I do not feel the same calm about bad covid policies. They really upset me. Perhaps because I still do not understand how so many people can be so wrong about so many things that cannot be explained away with genetic denial of unpleasant realities.
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Tim Watkins today with a nice big picture recap of our energy predicament and how it is influencing all of the important world affairs.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/11/10/the-slaves-revolt-the-elites-cant-defeat/
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It is really starting to remind me more and more of the failing Roman Empire. Trying to micro-manage every aspect of the economy while really making every problem worse
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h/t James Howard Kunstler
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Something seems to be happening to the ponzi built on another ponzi.
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Scratch my theory that some combination of overshoot collapse prep, stupidity, and evil explains the covid insanity.
It’s 100% evil according to Dr. Aseem Malhotra and Dr. Mike Yeadon.
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Problem is neither Aseem nor Mike have enough information to think otherwise. They both believe that the US, modern western society is benign or even benevolent.
TPTB, the morbidly wealthy, the multinational corporations and those who control them have been practicing “demand destruction” on the global population for generations. Mostly through banking, finance, trade agreements (which are not even close to “agreements”), sanctions, forced austerity, all of which have killed and oppressed countless millions.
When you understand all this then C-19 pales in comparison.
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I really wish I had held my ground and not got vaccinated 😦
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Been seeing a lot of tweets and blogs about overpopulation. It’s clearly a problem and could even be thought of as the main problem but the population has increased because of other factors (e.g. the green revolution and the advance of medical technology and drugs). Given that it would probably be impossible to get population down quickly, I think we might have to wait for the underlying support mechanisms for the large population to go away. Even up to about a couple of hundred years ago, average life-span was half of what it is today. Imagine what the global population would be if that was still the case.
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I have noticed a big movement building among the pseudo-intellectuals on LinkedIn and YouTube worrying about the human population reducing. And trying to encourage people to have children. All that has actually happened is the human pop growth rate is declining. But the population itself is still growing, just at a slowing rate. But someone people like Peter Zeihan convince themselves that this means we will run out of people in 100 years. Denial surely has some role to play here
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Wow, that’s pretty stupid. At current deaths per year, even zero births from now on would still leave us with 2 billion people in a hundred years (rough calculation). As we don’t have zero births, we definitely won’t run out of people any time in human lifespan terms. If we have a civilisation collapse or a series of country collapses then population would likely fall quite quickly (over decades).
Yes, denial definitely has a role to play.
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I think they would consider a 2 bill population as a failure. I get the impression they think human numbers need to be high and stay high. A few 100 million humans is more than enough for long term sustainability. I hope we don’t have horrible suffering to get back to that number over the next couple of centuries. But it is a fool’s hope (to quote Gandalf from LOTR)
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Remember I told you about a dinner party where I listened to a young guest smugly spew venom and hate at anti-vax conspiracists before I exploded and told her she was a fucking idiot and then left before dinner was served?
I got confirmation that my relationship with the host has been permanently destroyed. Scratch another friend. Not too many left.
There is a price to be paid for only caring about truth and not caring what the tribe believes.
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And it is getting harder and harder due to the tribes believing more and more ridiculous ideas. I feel sorry for my kids as they face this very issue. They are more critical thinking than their friends (due to parents influence) but this puts them in a awkward situation as having an enquiring and questioning mind stresses their friendships. They will have to learn young how to walk amongst the sheep and bleat along without revealing they are a goat.
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Of course different people “know” different things about some subject. Some of those “knows” are compatible with reality and some aren’t but reality is rarely known with certainty. I am also prone to almost hating people I’d previously cared about because of some, IMO, crass belief or action. Sometimes, I turn out to be wrong and regret my reaction. Sometimes it’s recoverable, sometimes not.
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I was very tentative in the early days with my doubts about what our leaders were telling us about covid. It took a long time with much study of evidence on many independent threads to conclude with near 100% confidence that all is not ok. I may be wrong on one or two of the dozens of things they did and are doing wrong, but the overall conclusion that evil is afoot is no doubt correct.
So, when someone spouts hate speech towards “anti-vaxers” I have zero tolerance and will sacrifice any relationship.
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Right. Hate speech towards “anti-vaxxers” or anyone who takes a different view is difficult to forgive.
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“Zero tolerance towards hate speech”. Hypocritical; much? These people are scared, lied too by ALL the “experts”, and simply lack the information they need to understand what is happening.
So is hating these folks the right thing or does it just make you feel better?
Do you see what I did there?
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I have this issue with gender stuff because I don’t mind saying to friends / family that it is impossible to change your sex and I don’t care WTF people identify as … they’re still either male or female. I feel sorry for reality sometimes
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You have to separate two different issues here. One is biological and one is cultural. Biologically there are obviously two genders. Culturally it gets a lot more complicated. For example you find many non-civilized cultures where gender is definitely not as strict. That’s the reality as far as I can see.
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I have a degree in anthropology. I’m pretty clear on this topic. There are only two SEXES. It’s not complicated at all. Gender norms and roles will change throughout time and culture, but none of that changes biological reality. Just like how there are lots of religious beliefs in different cultures, there is still the objective truth regardless of what people believe.
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True. But the reality is slightly more nuanced than “there are only two sexes” in that, rarely, some humans have atypical sexual organs. I’m not sure what the proper medical term is but I recall someone like this on a discussion group (20 years ago) who got upset when others made the assumption that they were either male or female.
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Sexual reproduction is binary, either producing small gametes or large ones. A self-fertile plant can produce its own small and large gametes. If a plant isn’t self-fertile, you know you will need a male tree and a female tree. Same situation for all mammals.
What you are probably thinking of is people with Disorders of Sexual Development, which encompasses a range of conditions with chromosomes and hormonal and sexual development. People with DSD have sex characteristics of the opposite sex to what they are. Some DSD are life threatening, some require ongoing medical treatment.
The previous term for DSD was ‘intersex’. Some people try to argue that intersex people prove sex is a spectrum. Not correct, intersex people are still either male or female.
I am not overly knowledgeable on DSD, but there is plenty good information about it online. These conditions are complex and you do need some general knowledge of medicine and biology to understand them.
We had an intersex family friend when I was growing up, so I was aware of the condition from a young age. Unfortunately, treatment for intersex conditions used to be pretty haphazard (to put it mildly) with doctors making mistakes. Some intersex people may have never even had their condition properly explained to them, especially a few decades ago.
You may have come across the athlete Caster Semenya in the news. Caster is an intersex person who is male, but was raised as a female, and possibly grew up believing he was female. There were quite a few articles written about Caster. How society treats people with DSD definitely requires a lot of nuance and kindness.
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Homosexuality has been observed in just about every mammal species. It usually correlates to environmental stresses, depletion of readily available resources, aka food, but has also been documented as what seems to be random occurrences.
By the way most mammals also practice abortion/self induced miscarriages under similar circumstances so it would seem that God doesn’t give a fuck about these issues and if we were truly a “sapien” species we would not be so inclined to over population.
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I’m not a native speaker so some nuances might have been lost there. It seems to me we agree anyway.
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The language has been made more confusing on purpose. There’s a lot to unpack on this topic
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“. . . there is still objective truth regardless of what people believe.”
Well said.
I was raised in a “conservative” religious family (not fundamentalist). When I hit my teenage years I started questioning the beliefs I was raised on (it was the 1960’s so go figure?). One of the things that always popped up when I thought of religion was; “how is it that I was born and raised in the only true religion?”. If one truly entertains that question it would seem that luck of the draw is an inadequate (and illogical) answer. Hence, I looked around at other religions and noticed that most of them taught that they were the only true religion too. So, I then asked if there was any self-correcting philosophy and found my way to Science (as practiced by Karl Popper). Science may not always achieve that “objective truth” but at least in its pure form is open to closer approximations of it.
AJ
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If someone doesn’t believe in objective truth, then what even is the point in debating anything with them? And I so agree with you on “the science” 🙂
I was raised an atheist by atheist parents. Several of my grandparents and greatgrandrents were also atheists. It was so difficult as a child to answer my Christian friends about why I didn’t believe in god. All I could really come up with was, “well known told me to believe in him”.
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Illness and deaths from covid trending down.
Illness and deaths from some unknown factor trending up at an alarming rate.
Must not be a cause for concern because our leaders are ignoring it.
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That’s funny that there’s a Government warning on this video. It’s almost like an admission of guilt
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I told my recently lost friend that I looked for experts that analyze data and support her beliefs and could not find anyone. Not one.
She did not reply “please check out these experts that I trust”. She said nothing and looked at me like I was crazy.
It’s clearly not about science or truth. It’s about belonging to a frightened tribe.
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And the more highly educated you are – the more susceptible you are to it for some reason! Crazy times. Does it remind of you of Iraq where lots of otherwise smart people convinced themselves Iraq did have WOMD. I was like 12 years old going ‘clearly this is about oil’.
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If the CDC and the WHO told you jumping off a bridge is good for your health, would you do it!? bahahaha
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I sometimes wonder if the blame lies with citizens like my friend rather than our leaders. The frightened majority demanded a solution to protect them. They were offered a miracle high technology invention that in the early days thanks to pharma obfuscation looked promising. Once injected they were all in and the last thing they’ll tolerate now is a leader standing up and saying, whoops, so sorry, we made a mistake. So, everyone pretends it’s working, and they ignore anything that threatens the happy story. Deep down they want to force the non-team players to be all in too, just in case they’re right.
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Useful tool for managing overshoot collapse.
But requires wise leaders with integrity that understand what’s going on.
Which we don’t have.
As proven by covid.
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Tim Watkins today on the oil death spiral.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/11/15/welcome-to-the-oil-death-spiral/
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I saw a tweet thread by Andrew Dessler today or yesterday where he tried to claim that Simon Michaux’s work (mentioned in a reply) was irrelevant and that the minerals would be found and mined when needed because that’s what happens. And he cited the supposed example of the Erlich/Simon bet in the 90s as proof. Seems delusional and I suspect he didn’t even look at Michaux’s work.
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People can be so dumb. Just because something hasn’t happened before, doesn’t mean it will never happen ae!
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Yep, LaRouche has some wacky ideas. So sad. Many people understand a piece of the puzzle but it seems the 7 people on the planet that understands it all hang out at un-Denial.com.
I’m done with these idiots but will continue to watch some of their intelligent anti-war guest speakers.
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The video is only 17 minutes long and has no intellectually challenging concepts – but because of his inane broad brush statements (e.g. Malthusian suicide cults) I had to figuratively “step away”.
He conflates elementary philosophy and elementary physics into a word salad. Some people may be impressed by what he says, but as per your quote, he reveals the true depth of his stupidity.
“… we create energy. The laws of thermodynamics do not apply to the human economy” at 14:40 https://youtu.be/kt4xj4UnP84?t=880
The Schiller Institute quoting Friedrich Schiller ; “It is Through Beauty, That One Proceeds to Freedom”
The USA ; freedom founded in, and maintained by, violence.
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Far out!
Also what is with people using Malthus’ name like an insult? If someone called me Malthusian I would take it as a compliment 🙂
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Sad news from Mike Stasse. A good man has died.
https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2022/11/17/rip-colin-campbell/
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Mac10 on COP.
https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2022/11/worse-than-expected.html
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https://srsroccoreport.com/public/the-300-ton-mighty-china-coal-brontosaurus-in-the-room-the-massive-increase-in-chinas-coal-production-this-year/
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I’ve noticed a new and growing group of people that believe we are making a fatal mistake by letting covid rip through society which will eventually result in a more deadly variant.
They seem to favor masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, and they think China will be the last man standing in 10 years thanks to their zero covid policy.
I haven’t seen them push for vitamin D, healthy diets, weight loss, and anti-virals like IVM which makes me question their credibility.
Have any of you been following this theory? Any credibility? Is it a variation of Dr. Bossche’s hypothesis?
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I don’t know. I read that there are now over 300 variants circulating (a record), with none being really dominant yet. Hospitalisations are rising here in NZ. Masks seem sensible; don’t know about the other ideas.
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I’m happy to wear a mask if asked to do so because it’s a nice disguise to hide the fact that I disagree with the majority of my tribe, however I’m unaware of any credible study that demonstrates common cloth masks have ANY positive effect at reducing transmission.
I find it remarkable and damning that our leaders have not conducted such as study over the last 3 years. Yet more evidence that our leaders are completely incompetent.
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Oh, it’s quite likely that a real world study would not show much efficacy in that respect. However, I’ve seen plenty of research that shows good masks worn properly does reduce the amount of virus that gets through those layers. They can help protect those who wear them properly, which also helps protect others if the wearer is shedding virus. I always wear a P2 or N95 mask at the supermarket and in other retail places that could be busy. If I have remembered to have one with me, that is, which is most times.
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You seem to be saying two conflicting things:
1) real world study would not show efficacy of masks
2) plenty of research shows masks provide protection
Please clarify.
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Sorry. I mean that good masks worn properly would reduce transmission (to me, this just seems plain obvious and was one of Chris Martenson’s early oft-pushed messages). However, in the real world we see so many people, when required to wear masks, wearing poor masks or wearing masks badly (under the nose, not closed around the nose, loose around the cheeks, over thick or even thin beards) that I wouldn’t expect the reduction in transmission to be significant, in statistical terms. Our political leaders also never set good examples on this (apparently, it’s OK for them to remove their masks to speak (one of the times of greatest virus shedding), for example. I only saw one prominent bearded person in NZ (our police chief) shave his beard off (he followed my example, of course).
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Got it. I tend to agree with you, and I will wear a mask when I feel a threat, however people more knowledgeable than me, like Ivor Cummins, say there’s no evidence masks make a difference with covid.
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I went to an emergency doctors in NZ. All the staff wear N95 masks correctly. All the visitors must wear surgical masks. The doctor said they had practically zero spread of covid in their workplace. Their staff only got covid from their families at home. Just an anecdote, but yea they felt they were getting good results from enforcing correct mask procedures.
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Good to know. I believe N95’s worn properly are effective, as is vitamin D.
Why then did my government not require N95’s and provide usage instructions, nor recommend vitamin D?
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This was perhaps the worst response of our NZ government. No good mask guidance. Eventually, they did mandate “good” masks for situations where masks must be worn but it was a weak message never reinforced and almost no messaging on correct wear of the masks. Also exemptions were quite easy to obtain. One of the things I noticed about the spread of the disease was that from supermarkets being the most common place where the virus was transmitted, cafes and gyms became the most common once the ill-fated covid pass was introduced (if you were vaccinated, you could go to cafes, gyms and a few other places, without masks).
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Hello friends,
Hope everyone is going as well as can be, one day at a time closer to what we know is for our times. Thank you for all the comments which are such an anchoring point in these choppy seas. It’s part of my daily routine to check in to assure myself that there are more than a handful of us who will go down with the ship but knowing how it got to this point, and that’s comforting in not a small way.
Rob, you introduced me to the Climate Casino site (along with everything else) and I am very grateful because in Eliot Jacobson’s writing I also find much resonance. His latest post I think is worth a read and a reflection because it goes very well here under marromai’s A Purpose essay.
https://climatecasino.net/2022/11/beyond-grief/
Sadness, overwhelmingly yes, but like Eliot, I choose not to fathom depression but keep on keeping on as I can. The miracle of being here and conscious is in no way abated by our circumstances of the hour, if anything, even more magnified for its wondrousness despite all else. I totally agree with Eliot that being kind, generous, and of service is a good life, full stop. Thank you everyone for finding and creating your circle and purpose, it is all we ever can do that defines our existence.
Namaste.
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Hello all. Hope you are doing well.
As human population tops 8 billion (shouldn’t we celebrate :grin:), you probably saw the latest world population report by the UN https://population.un.org/wpp/. There are some nice graphs here: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Line/900.
The data portal is even nicer. I find these selections interesting.
* total population https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/49/locations/900/start/1950/end/2022/line/linetimeplot
It took 12 years to get from 6 to 7 billion (1998-2010) and again 12 years (2010-2022) to get from 7 to 8 billion. Isn’t this good news for once (it is not accelarating anymore)
population change https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/50/locations/900/start/1950/end/2022/line/linetimeplot
Even though, there is a small rebound in 2022, the net increase is (quite brutally) back to the 60s: roughly 65 million vs. 85 million 5 years ago.
world crude death rate https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/59/locations/900/start/1990/end/2022/line/linetimeplot
and birth rate https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/55/locations/900/start/1990/end/2022/line/linetimeplot
(Unfortunately), it seems the change comes mainly from recent (starting in 2019) hike in death rate (even though birth rate has been regularly falling for a long time)
This is also reflected in the life expectancy at birth, which recently changed course: https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/61/locations/900/start/1950/end/2022/line/linetimeplot
I wonder if all this is not pointing to the fact that:
* we have already crossed the peak of energy useful for society as it is organized currently. My terminology is not very precise, but by that I mean taking into account the real energy content and the increased cost of extraction (rather than just all liquid quantities). In other words, I mean the world is not able to provide food, healthcare, heat, shelter for as many people as before, hence the increasing death…
* this decade will prove to be world population peak
Just a hunch…
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I expect you are probably right that population will peak this decade. We might actually see a decline in population due to nuclear war.
I listened to a clip of the COP27 keynote speech in which it was roughly said, “what will the 8 billionth child who will be born in a few days think of us for not acting to prevent catastrophic climate change?”
That sentence tells you our leaders don’t have a clue. He should have said, “climate change is caused by the human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet”.
Wise leaders would have cancelled COP27 and convened POP1, a new conference on population reduction to address climate change PLUS the dozens of other overshoot calamities we face.
Unwise leaders default to nuclear war to reduce the population.
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Tim Garrett takes an alternative position in a Twitter thread:
He points to an older blog entry which covers some of the ground:
https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2019/06/it-seems-so-easy-to-blame-excess.html
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Thanks. I’m aware of Garrett’s theory that growth into overshoot followed by collapse is unavoidable, however despite much effort I’ve never understood the essence of his argument.
His math is sound but I’ve never been able to get him to articulate clearly why constraining growth is not possible. If his argument was based on evolved behaviors like denial or the “desire” of genes to replicate then I could understand his case, however that’s not what he is saying. His argument is based (I think) on thermodynamics.
I say all we have to do is acknowledge and override our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities and then vote for an asset (preferably energy) backed full reserve monetary system.
Done, easy peasy.
BTW, Nate Hagens also thinks Garrett is wrong on this matter.
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It’s OK for people to disagree. A lot of this is opinion.
I also have difficulties with Garrett’s angle though he usually makes a lot of sense when he takes time to try to spell it out. Unfortunately, he’s not as good a communicator as some.
Constraining growth (like many ideas about dealing with environmental problems) is technically possible, but maybe not practically possible with humans. We need to do far, far more than constraining growth, we need to contract economies. But any species will use up resources as fast as they reasonably can. Humans may be supposedly intelligent but are just a species, though a particularly gifted one (in terms of tool use). Maybe this is what Garrett is getting at, without saying it explicitly. Population overshoot is a symptom of how humans act as they develop tools and access resources. So we can’t really hope to rein in resource use and, therefore, planetary damage, until we physically can’t consume those resources as quickly. I still believe that collapse is the only thing that will do that. If humans survive the collapse, I have no doubt that eventually they will start unsustainably damaging the planet again. That’s a rather depressing thought but I really don’t see how I can expect anything else (not that I’ll be around for that resurgence).
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Hi Rob,
Thanks for posting about Colin Campbell.
Almost twenty years ago he suggested the Rimini Protocol for fair distribution of remaining fossil fuels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimini_protocol
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Colin Campbell was one of my favorite experts when I was learning about peak oil.
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HHH @ POB.
Heated words around HHH’s prediction of a depression. Peak oil boys can’t imagine price might fall.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/july-non-opec-oil-production-hits-post-pandemic-high/#comment-748920
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I left this comment on Bret Weinstein’s most recent interview.
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http://benjaminthedonkey-limericksofdoom.blogspot.com/2022/11/beat-rush-collectibles-dont-wait-till.html
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Nate Hagens today on Russia and nuclear war.
In summary, the west is committing suicide thanks to our idiot leaders.
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I’m not sure I’d summarise it quite like that. Some of what Nate says seems reasonable, other bits I’d have a more nuanced view on. However, what struck me most was that much of the podcast seemed to be worrying about how the fall-out from the Russia-Ukraine war could impact BAU. However, Nate clearly stated he doesn’t want BAU. And I would add that BAU would definitely lead to a collapse in BAU anyway. So should we worry about what this so-called proxy war might result in when we’re heading there anyway? Of course, a nuclear war, if triggered, would put even something short of Nate’s dreams of a utopia in jeopardy but let’s not worry about anything short of nuclear war given that we desperately need a non-BAU world but all world leaders, including Putin (and Nate doesn’t elevate Putin over other world leaders), are trying to keep BAU (or their version of BAU) going.
It’s a continuation of what I think I said before. Almost everything I read about or hear, assumes a continuation of BAU, with no, or little, realisation that we’re heading for a very different world and not actually preparing for that or trying to plan that transition.
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Trump’s back on Twitter. Let’s hope the same rules applies to covid heroes like Dr. Robert Malone.
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Excess deaths up in all age groups. All of our “leaders” deny the problem, probably because acknowledging it would mean having to admit they damaged their own health and harmed billions of others.
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I am wondering if it would be interesting to have data for excess death correlated with vaccination status…
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Wise leaders with integrity that actually care about public health would make it a priority to collect and publish that data.
But they don’t.
Ditto for long covid.
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Salomon boots 25% off this week.
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Have you all seen this study? It’s really good – was linked in an article by Heinberg.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049022000524?via%3Dihub#bbb0020
To know ‘how much oil remains’ the statistic to use is the estimated ultimately recoverable resource (URR) of the class of oil in question, from which production to-date must be subtracted. Certainly we need better and independent international vetting of data on oil resources.
There are many different ways to estimate URR values, but in this paper we use Hubbert linearisation as this requires only data on past oil production in a region, data which in general are both available and fairly reliable. We then combine our URR estimates with logistic production curves to forecast production of four aggregations of oil type. Our results suggest that global production of conventional oil, which has been at a resource-limited plateau since 2005, is now in decline, or will decline soon. This switch from production plateau to decline is expected to place increasing strains on the global economy, exacerbated by the generally lower energy returns of the non-conventional oils and other liquids on which the global economy is increasingly dependent.
If we add to conventional oil production that of light-tight (‘fracked’) oil, our analysis suggests that the corresponding resource-limited production peak will occur soon, between perhaps 2022 to 2025. If then we add tar sands and Orinoco oil, the expected resource-limited total peak occurs around 2030, although there is a major question over whether significantly increased production rates of the latter two classes of oil is possible. Finally, the resource-limited production peak of global ‘all-liquids’ is expected about 2040 or a bit after if the latter liquids are also produced at the maximal rate.
We compare our oil forecasts with those the of the US EIA and the IEA. In our view the current US EIA oil forecast appears unrealistic, as it exceeds our estimates set by URR constraints. By contrast, the IEA’s current ‘Stated Policies’ forecast is in general agreement with our forecasts, but where the IEA’s sees future global oil production as declining due in part to demand limits, ours see similar declines but caused instead by resource limits.
In terms of climate change, in agreement with a number of earlier studies, we find that our URR calculations indicate that IPCC ‘high-CO2’ scenarios appear infeasible due to resource limits, but also show that considerable amounts of oil must be left in the ground if current climate change targets are to be met.
Overall, we conclude that unless rapid and significant reductions in global oil demand are achieved by political measures to tackle climate change, the resource-limited oil supply constraints identified in this paper will continue to have increasingly significant economic and political consequences, and can be expected to have significant impacts on sustainability however defined or considered. Finally, we suggest that the data and ‘production peak at about URR mid-point’ model used in this paper be incorporated into wider energy and climate-change modelling to better inform policy-making.
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Thanks. From your excerpt it seems they may be missing another important piece of the puzzle. If the end of growth caused by a plateaued energy supply coupled with high debt levels causes an economic depression such that consumers can only afford lower priced oil, then supply may decline much faster than a purely geologic analysis suggests.
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That’s the thing right, we’ll never get all these reserves produced if our economic system is in free-fall, which it will be. But at least that will be better for the climate…
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Right. The study does mention EROEI (or EROI) but doesn’t seem to consider how that might affect the peak (it could mean an earlier peak of supplied product). It’s hard to imagine things holding together long enough to get a peak of “all liquids” around 2040.
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@Mike, When I first saw the Net Energy Cliff diagram, that’s when I realized the peak is the end.
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Thanks. I don’t recall seeing that extra curve regarding maintenance etc. If that is accurate, the energy available to the economy for day to day living and growth goes down very quickly beyond some point. I don’t recall off-hand but I think the EROEI for just a basic society to operate is something like 5:1, might even be more. The cliff edge could be close.
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Don’t forget the export land model which says those countries dependent on importing oil from growing exporting countries will experience a decline rate much higher than the exporters.
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Wow I haven’t seen that one! That would mean NZ is really screwed. Especially as because we are so green (cough cough), we refuse to develop/produce our own oil and gas and rely on importing from not-green countries – we all have iron knees over here 🙂
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Here’s some info on the Export Land Model.
See for example the growth of Saudi Arabia’s population over the last few decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Land_Model
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Maybe. I remember reading that all the forests will be gone in about 10 years when people switch to wood for cooking and heating their homes.
We’ve got to get the population down quickly. No other path leads to a reasonable outcome.
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I can’t think of any way that would happen, though. Other than through unreasonable outcomes that we’re trying to avoid.
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When the goal is to reduce suffering, 8 billion minus 1 is a success, and 8 billion minus 2 is twice the success,
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After learning of Simon Michaux’s recent work on the scarcity of materials needed for “energy transition” I found his paper from 2019 titled Oil from a Critical Raw Material Perspective.
Click to access 70_2019.pdf
It has a graph on page 210 that I find to be the most germane to the broad topic of Peak Oil. I was going to attach it here, but WordPress doesn’t seem to be letting me. Basically, it graphs cumulative oil discoveries and cumulative oil production (use) for the last 100 years. It also graphs the difference (discovered-burned) which peaked roughly in 1980. If you extrapolate by mirroring symmetrically on 1980, in round number, we will find and use around 2 Tb of oil by 2040.
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Thanks, looks like a very interesting paper. Michaux is an impressive person. He single-handedly destroyed the denial enabled plans of pretty much every leader in the world and the millions of scientists and engineers working on green energy transition plans.
Instead of being depressed about running out of oil we should be grateful to be alive for the 100 out of 4,543,000,000 years on a rare planet that through a miracle of photosynthesis and geology produced 636,000,000,000,000 (= 4Tb * 159) liters of oil for us to enjoy the peak of what may be possible in the universe.
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I am so grateful! Our chances of being alive today, rather than any other time in human history is 1/11. Both my partner and I would not be here without fossil fuel enabled modern medicine. One mother would have died from pregnancy and the other was unable to carry any baby to term without medical intervention.
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Yes, but having enjoyed the energy slaves, it’s going to be horrendous without them.
I saw some reference to Michaux on Twitter but Ketan Joshi tried to rubbish it and promised a more thorough critique of his calculations but that was months ago. I guess he’s finding it difficult to critique. Not surprising as it’s not too far off what the IEA were saying in a 2021 report and what Mark P Mills (don’t know much about him) determined in another report a year or two ago.
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Hmm, “having enjoyed the energy slaves”. Exactly. I am proud and grateful to be living this orgy of energy consumption. Lives before and after are not so tempting from my current perspective 😉
We can see Kyiv live how it works in the long-run. Not too pleasant I guess.
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Yes, I’m one of those millions of engineers working on green energy transition, and also struggling with depression, though I think of it more like pre-traumatic stress disorder.
Estimates of how much oil we have left vary greatly and it’s hard to know who to believe. I’ve also seen the number 3.6 Tb will be recoverable, almost double Michaux’s graph. I just found an online countdown clock that says we have 47 more years worth; color me skeptical. Art Berman says 10 to 20 years and that fits with Michaux’s graph and also my intuition.
Are you basing your 4 Tb figure on the Hubbert Curve notion that since we are now at the time of peak oil we’ve only burned half? I think Hubbert’s curve, which models individual wells and whole oil fields well, breaks down per Ugo Bardi’s Seneca Cliff idea. My mental model is the shape of waves in the open ocean verses what they do when they reach the shore. I believe the Delta on the graph above will be a normal bell curve but the plot of oil usage (not cumulative use like above) will definitely be a breaker.
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I hear you. Speaking from experience, overshoot awareness definitely disrupts a “normal” life. It’s easy to understand why denial is important for mental health, even if you disagree with Dr. Ajit Varki’s theory for how denial evolved to create behaviorally modern humans.
I don’t have a strong opinion on how much oil is left. I used 4TB as a reasonable guess to highlight what for me is one of the most amazing things that has occurred on this planet. A staggering amount of life had to grow, die, be buried, cooked, and preserved in improbable reservoirs to provide 636,000,000,000,000 liters of oil for us to enjoy.
My current view is that how much oil remains in the ground is almost irrelevant. The combination of extreme debt and rising cost of oil extraction has constrained economic growth. Our system requires growth to function. Everything breaks without growth. It doesn’t matter how much oil remains in the ground.
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Hello Brent,
I found some interesting calculations about a possible end of oil on a German blog with the familiar sounding name “limitstogrowth.de” (another overshoot aware writer, who’s also strongly COVID sceptic – What a coincidence?)
A physicist has analyzed different datasets to find hints, which could indicate the end of the fossil era. All calculations show, that oil extraction will be discontinued due to economic inefficiency around 2030.
I have translated the most interesting part of the report into English, you can find it here:
https://docdro.id/rdOtjln
The original source is:
Click to access Berndt_Warm_Berechnungen_zur_Lebensdauer_der_Fahrzeugproduktion_Erdoelfoerderung_V2022-10-12.pdf
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You can’t say I don’t try to find evidence that supports covid policies.
Today Michael Shermer interviewed Nicholas Dirks, president of the New York Academy of Sciences. They spent the interview trying to provide a rational explanation for why “anti-vaxers” exist and have crazy beliefs.
I made it about 45 minutes before quitting in disgust. They made one confident assertion after another, without providing a single piece of data to support their statements, and everything they said conflicts with the data I have seen from multiple sources MUCH more intelligent than either of them.
Where are the super smart experts that make a compelling case that our leaders are correct?
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Here’s a very nice example of what intelligent truth seeking with integrity looks like.
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/08/20/houston-we-have-a-problem-part-1-of-3/
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/10/24/houston-the-cdc-has-a-problem-part-2-of-3/
Now let’s find a similar example that argues our leaders care about truth and public health.
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Thank you for these articles. (even though it makes me angry 🙂
You have gift for finding gems among the digital ocean of shallow (dis-)information.
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Thought some here might be interested in this article which tries to put to rest the idea that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214427119
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It looks to me like Robert F. Garry was a member of Fauci’s inner circle involved in the lab leak cover up.
Are you sure he has no conflicts of interest on this matter? How much time have you invested in following Garry to confirm his integrity?
https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/how-covid-19s-origins-were-obscured-by-the-east-and-the-west/
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I, speaking as an anonymous poster who enjoys reading un-denial, saw with my own eyes covit intentionally being spread. Believe it or not. For me has been a frustrating last 3 years of hearing endless debate of where covit came from.
Ruined my life. Was a triathlete before, never made a full recovery.
Was at Loves truck stop in Green River, Utah. End of January 2020, right around Chinese new year. Pulled up and saw 5- 10 tour buses parked. I parked at the gas pump, went inside to get snacks and pay for gas. Immediately noticed that there were 100 chinese folks inside this small convenience store. Next I noticed that every single one of them were sick and coughing. After that I noticed that they were tampering with every single package or drink, taking lids off bottled drinks and putting them back in the fridges, coughing on their hands and touching everything, sticking their fingers in the soda fountain nozzles. Coughing right in my face while passing.
Was about to start filming, but just wanted to get out of there. I also didn’t want to be rude, thought that maybe this is how they live in whatever godless hell hole they came from. Didn’t realize that I walked right in the middle of a black ops multi lateral military operation.
There were lots of other people who got videos like this, a few years ago. Can’t find them as they seem to be scrubbed from the internet. Makes sense considering US universities gave China these bioweapons technologies.
On a seperate note it’s looking like this new WHO pandemic treaty being finalized will be crammed down the throats of most nations including the US, to give WHO complete control over state and local government during the next pandemic. A new pandemic worse than covit will be launched shortly thereafter. Theyre trying to completely destroy the current economic system (will most likely succceed with demolition) and rebuild from the ashes (assuming enough complexity holds together)something that aint too pretty.
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Dr. John Campbell continues his u-turn on covid, today apologizing for trusting our leaders and thus informing his audience in 2020 that covid did not originate as a lab leak.
Changing your beliefs when presented with new evidence is a key sign of integrity. I trust and respect Dr. Campbell. I distrust and disrespect all of our “leaders”.
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Very good. I also like it when people change their minds for good reasons. I’d quibble with a couple of things (treating peer-reviewed literature as gospel and citations always indicating agreement with the cited paper) but it’s great that he’s gone through this and admitted his error, though that wasn’t deliberate on his part.
Did you come across John Campbell in 2020, when he was taken in by the early papers on origins? If so, how did you feel about him at that time?
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I followed him from the beginning. In the early days he was a calm voice of reason analyzing available data. Midway into the pandemic I lost interest in him for ignoring emerging evidence on Fauci corruption, pharma fraud, IVM, lab leak, vaccine harms, etc. and quit him. Nevertheless, I suspected he was a good man without any conflicts of interest seeking to understand the truth based on evidence. It took him a while, but every day now it seems he gets closer to what I believe is the truth. It will be interesting to see what he thinks in 6 months.
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Dr. Malcolm Kendrick today on why one is wise to be skeptical.
I like Kendrick’s summary of covid insanity:
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2022/11/24/cleaning-the-augean-stables-part-i/
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Nate Hagens today with a nice Thanksgiving message on energy gratitude.
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