By Karl North: An agroecological model for the end of the oil age

Today’s guest essay by Karl North discusses how agriculture practices must change as oil depletes and we no longer have the diesel for machines and the natural gas for fertilizer that underpins our current industrial agriculture system.

Karl recently published this essay on his site and approached me about re-posting here. I read his essay and was impressed.

I’m not a farming expert however I have some relevant knowledge and experience having taken a one-year course on small scale farming, and having worked on four small organic farms over the last fifteen years.

One of the most sobering lessons I have learned is how completely dependent farms are today on non-renewable inputs, including small farms doing their best to use sustainable practices.

Examples of non-renewable inputs that are a challenge to farm without include:

  • plastics and metals for irrigation tanks, valves, pipes, and drip lines
  • rare earths, copper, and other materials for well and irrigation pumps
  • plastics and metals for greenhouses
  • steel and plastics for fences
  • refrigeration equipment and insulation for produce storage coolers
  • polyester for row cover fabric
  • plastic for haylage wrap
  • metals for hand tools
  • electricity for irrigation pumps, coolers, and seedling bed heaters and lights
  • diesel for big machines like tractors and combines
  • gasoline for small machines like walk-behind tractors and strimmers
  • gasoline for trucks to get supplies and to take produce to market
  • lithium, cobalt, and copper for battery operated machines
  • energy used to manufacture and transport fertilizer, including organic fertilizers not made from natural gas
  • plus a LOT of non-renewable energy and materials to manufacture and maintain all of the equipment mentioned above, with emphasis on the word “maintain” because everything on a farm breaks on a regular basis – I know because I’m the fix-it guy.

One of the farms I worked on made a heroic effort to not use any machines or non-renewable inputs. We did almost everything by hand including scything and threshing grains and legumes. It was a LOT of work and I’m pretty sure I could not sustain that level of effort today having aged 10 years. Despite this effort we were still completely dependent on non-renewable irrigation equipment and a truck for transport, and we were blessed with unusually fertile soil that could be drawn down for a few years without having to replenish it somehow.

With this experience I am certain that 8 billion people cannot be fed when oil soon becomes scarce or unaffordable. I do however believe that a much smaller population can be fed using different agriculture methods.

Many “sustainable agriculture” methods promoted today are in my opinion naive and not grounded in reality. They often feel like an excuse to sell books and courses. I often wonder why it is necessary to sell books and courses if the idea being promoted produces a bountiful surplus. I did not get this feeling from Karl North as he seems grounded in reality and has built an impressive farm.

I like Karl’s model because 1) it includes animals 2) it sets aside the majority of land for the animals 3) it understands energy and ecology and takes a systems perspective 4) he understands that getting from here to there will be very difficult, and it won’t be easy when we do get there.

I did spot one important issue not addressed and my follow-up question with Karl’s answer is appended at the end of the following essay.

Introduction

Modern civilization is urban down to its rural roots, hates nature, ignores nature, depends on nature, destroys nature, yet expects nature to keep on giving. Now nature is striking back. The result is a slow-motion tragedy of catabolic collapse[1], like the oroboros tail-eating snake. To withstand the collapse, a revolution in food production will be critical. This essay is a contribution to that revolution.

My exploration of this subject will be based on three premises:

1. Following the laws of energy and matter known to scientists as the Laws of Thermodynamics, the geological record shows that affordable access to the resources that underpin industrial economies is finite and rapidly declining on earth due to ever more mining by those very industrial economies.

2. Human society is subject to the laws of nature we see working in natural ecosystems. Ecosystem science teaches that any species, including ours, that overshoots the carrying capacity of its resource base eventually goes into collapse. Hence, the science of ecosystems is the proper disciplinary framework to design ecologically healthy, durable farms to weather the collapse. That is, we must conceive farms as agroecosystems.

3. Our world is characterized by connections, and functions in wholes. Any attempt to understand it by looking only at parts will produce limited results, and ultimately, failure. Three centuries of scientific research looking at only relations of a few parts produced a body of knowledge whose technological consequences are reliable only under those laboratory conditions. A holistic approach to problems is essential to bring the process of advancement of knowledge back into balance.

These premises are not widely understood, and are actually often denied or opposed by currently dominant beliefs. Modern society holds these deeply indoctrinated myths: ‘resources are infinite and material progress has no limits’; ‘man is in control of nature, not the reverse’; ‘the miracles of technology prove that reductionist/laboratory science is good enough to solve all our problems’. Therefore, before presenting my thoughts on an agroecological model, the following discussion will expand on the perspective of each premise in the hope of gaining a better basis for understanding what follows.

Premise #1 – Resource Scarcity

A first premise of this essay is that the industrial age and the fossil energy that fuels it is gradually ending. This assumption will be bucking a headwind, the apparently secular religion of industrial times, that these times and their associated technological miracles will go on forever. The religion persists for two reasons: it is partly due to ignorance of the conclusive evidence from the historical, geological record of accelerating resource depletion, carefully kept from most of humanity’s sources of information. Faith in industrial progress also endures partly due to willful ignorance, because the end of the three-century industrial bonanza is too insufferable for most people to contemplate.

Therefore, this essay will target that slowly increasing marginal population that is open to taking the premise seriously. In short, the geological evidence from the extractive industry is that the easy oil (and all other raw materials essential to sustaining an industrial society) has been consumed. When we have to drill through a mile of seawater and another mile of bedrock in an extremely risky project in the Gulf of Mexico called Deep Water Horizon, which ended in a disaster that wiped out the fishing and tourist industries from Tallahassee to Houston, that should tell you that the age of easy oil is over.

The pattern of raw materials extraction is always to harvest the low hanging fruit at any given time. In most cases, humanity is now harvesting the dregs, throwing ever more scarce energy at the problem to temporarily keep the flow of raw materials going that the industrial economy needs to survive. An extensive literature documents this ‘energy descent’ from cheap finite resources to their increasing scarcity that is now occurring, so I hope readers will be prompted to do their homework on this critical issue. Moreover, the literature includes conclusive evidence that the attempted replacement of fossil energy at any significant scale by “renewables” will be too costly in fossil fuel itself as access to it declines. I provide homework suggestions from the energy descent literature in the references[2].

Consequently, this essay will offer a model of adaptation to living with increasing scarcity of fossil energy, a model of increasingly radical emancipation from external inputs and devotion to input self-sufficiency. And it will suggest a pathway from the luxury of the current energy-intensive distance economy to a decentralized, local one. It will focus on the challenges of adaptation of food production systems, one of the essentials of survival, to increasing resource scarcities. Viewed as a goal pursued incrementally, this historic paradigm shift will be more manageable. Rejected as impossible or insufferable, it likely will diminish chances of survival for multitudes of humanity.

Premise #2 – Subservience to Nature’s Laws

One way to convey the second premise might be that while man appears in control, nature bats last. It is easy to revel in the current bonanza of technological miracles and not see the undertow of consequent damage to the natural resource base on which our survival depends. We can see the laws of nature working out this way in the legacy of the ancient societies that were the cradle of Western Civilization. From an ecological perspective, the historical result of the advent of agriculture and the subsequent rise of urban civilizations in the ancient societies in Western Asia was progressive desertification, visible and continuing in the region today. Where today are the fabled cedars of Lebanon, which held the soil on the hilltops? Overshoot of its resource base, leading to erosion of its carrying capacity, has been a major factor in the rise and fall of civilizations ever since. As an ancient philosopher observed, ‘where man walks, deserts dog his heels’.

The science of ecosystems is replete with demonstrations that the survival of all species, including the modern human primate, is dependent on holding consumption of resources within the carrying capacity of its resource base. Ecology teaches that the wholes called ecosystems consist of interacting clusters of species whose populations are regulated in large part by the fact that each species is food for others. Thus, the capacity of the resource base of each species to ensure its survival varies as a result of a complex interdependency of many elements of the whole. When one species (ours, let’s say) overshoots the carrying capacity of its resource base, it can throw the whole food web into violent oscillation and even collapse. Ecology has demonstrated many examples of the oscillation, collapse and even extinction of species populations locked in a food web of interdependency. To give a simplified example, the tundra supply, the arctic hare population that feeds on it and the arctic fox population that feeds on the hare all experience complex changes and severe oscillation over time that are the result of interdependency in an arctic environment low in species diversity (and the resilience that diversity affords).

Farming in a future increasingly less dependent on fossil energy and its related external inputs must therefore rely more on internal inputs provided by a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and the complex interactions of the many parts of the wholes that farmers will have to manage primarily as agroecosystems, not just production systems. The size of the human population and perhaps its ultimate survival will hinge on such a redesign of the food system.

This challenge is daunting. Today, few farmers, including organic farmers, study ecosystem science, nor is it the basis of programs in agricultural schools. Farmers in the organic farming movement have developed many practices that will be useful. But lacking exposure to the study of how natural ecosystems work as complex wholes, few have undertaken the design of whole agroecosystems. This essay will offer examples and initial steps as food for thought along these lines.

Premise #3- A Holistic World

It is easy to see that our world is characterized by connections, and functions in wholes. But to claim that the pursuit of knowledge must acknowledge this reality challenges the dominant way scientific research has been done since the 17th century. It challenges and exposes the limitations of the reduction of inquiry to studying the interaction of two or three variables – known as the reductive method – when in the real world whole clusters of elements interact and are often interdependent, with very different consequences. It challenges us to find ways to understand how these real-world webs function and change over time. Holistic methods of inquiry have shown that only by studying a problem behavior over time in its relevant systemic context can we hope to explain those nonlinear behaviors generated by the interaction of elements in the whole. Known to complexity science as emergent properties, they are all too common in our world, as the time graphs included below reveal.

Despite three centuries of scientific advancement of knowledge, we have only a limited understanding of the workings of living systems, from earth science down to the science of organisms like ourselves. Why is that? Decades ago, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described a progression in scientific inquiry where anomalies accumulate that the dominant paradigm or way of doing science cannot explain, and this eventually provokes a revolution. The revolution in scientific inquiry that is now challenging reductionist laboratory science goes by various names – system dynamics, complexity science, holism, chaos theory or simply systems thinking. The prototypical systems science is systems ecology depicted in premise #2, not only because of its methods, but also because it brings all other fields of inquiry under its umbrella. Thus, the need for a holistic perspective discussed here and the need for an ecological perspective (premise #2) are clearly related, and must work together to address the present state of ecological scarcity.

Examples of the necessary marriage of the two perspectives have appeared to nourish the revolution that Kuhn described. Using the methods of system dynamics to study a planetary system that is both social and biophysical, the Limits to Growth world model[3], which originated fifty years ago, generated these dynamics (how things change over time):

Updates since then have shown that the model tracks the historical record to date regarding at least the shape of change:

In another example, in 1980 William Catton was one of the first to combine the perspectives of social and ecological science in his book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change[4], in which he said that the advent of fossil fuels had led to an unsustainable “phantom carrying capacity” in natural resource use. He called it phantom carrying capacity because it permitted temporary human population levels and in the rich societies, per capita resource consumption levels, that took the planetary ecological load far above real carrying capacity. Eroding carrying capacity due to overshoot would cause collapse, as would become clear once fossil fuels became scarce.

The systems revolution is not meant to displace reductionist science or to deny its utility, but rather to acknowledge its limitations and go beyond them. By studying problems in a real-world context that requires understanding of many disciplines, it challenges the compartmentalization of inquiry. An academic acquaintance once described his ivy league university as a gaggle of warring fiefdoms connected only by parking lots. Inquiry into the complexity that typifies our world must become transdisciplinary.

The investigation of complexity has revealed the limitations of even a systems approach. Although it can produce insights about how things work in holistic context, and can sometimes predict the rough shape of change, it can never completely crack the nut of complexity as a given way the world works, so it cannot deliver the predictive accuracy of laboratory science. Nor has any other existing method of studying problems in their real-world context, where cause and effect often feed back to generate unexpected consequences that are not accurately predictable.

However, the study of complexity has shown that, while revealing the limitations of science,  systems thinking can improve with practice because, like proficiency as a musician, it is somewhat of an art. Peter Senge[5] advises The Five Whys (just keep asking why) to get to root causes in complex situations. Alan Savory[6] has created an accessible tool to gain practice in holistic thinking and decision making. Two of us organic farmers have adapted Savory’s work for farm planning in the US Northeast[7]. Such tools all train us to see problems in terms of their relevant larger systemic context.

To conclude this introductory discussion of premises, it appears that failure to take them seriously has led to a world whose ecosystems are so depleted and ecologically damaged as to threaten the collapse of our species as well as many others. In the words of William Ophuls[8], who has been tracking the process for fifty years:

“We have been spoiled by ecological abundance, a false abundance based on cornucopian premises, into thinking that the wants of the individual are more important than the needs of the human and natural communities.”

Because of strong resistance to accepting these premises, the revolutionary overhaul of all industrial societies will likely not be due to policy changes except at the very small scale, local level, and will be forced on society by the train of events. This essay will present some possibilities for adaptation in farming systems designed in ways that acknowledge and work within the premises I have outlined.

Agroecosystem design: natural ecosystems as models

Our planet consists of ecosystems, of which humanity and its works are a subservient subset. Ecosystems are clusters of elements, some animate, others not, that interact and become interdependent in complex ways, and are dynamic, changing over time. Long before the advent of our species, life self-organized into these complexes, whose interaction achieved two important synergies:

  1. They often maximized the carrying capacity of the system – the maximum biomass that the land could support.
  2. They also achieved a degree of self-regulation via food webs – a matrix of predator-prey and cooperative relationships – that enhanced the sustainability of the whole.

“To put it in thermodynamic terms, nature’s tendency is to internalize costs and thereby wring a maximum of life from a minimum of energy, trapping it and using it over and over within a given ecosystem to produce biological wealth before it decays into dispersed, random heat as the Second Law ordains.” – William Ophuls – The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization. 2023.

Historically, Nature’s ‘farming systems’ have a much better track record for durability than ours. This is why, in the words of two pioneering agroecologists[9], “farming in Nature’s image” needs to become our design standard. While no replacement for serious study of ecosystem science, this section will outline ecosystem processes and principles sufficiently to give direction to thinking about farming systems as agroecosystems. Thinking about sustainable design to respect carrying capacity has effectively focused the attention of ecological scientists on maximizing the long-term health of four fundamental ecosystem processes in agroecosystems:

Mineral cycle

Mother Nature does not buy fertilizer. Minerals tend to cycle through the plants, animals and microbes in the food web where each living thing becomes food for others, and back to the soil where they become nutrients for plants and subsequently for the rest of the food web all over  again. The implication for farming is to design the agroecosystem so that each organism is best managed to carry out its function in the mineral cycle.

Water cycle

Mother Nature does not seed the clouds or dance for rain. Driven ultimately by solar energy, water cycles from earth to clouds and back, and is captured in various ways for use in the ecosystem. Good agroecosystem design will enhance that capture in many ways, not least in the organisms in the food web themselves.

Energy flow

Mother Nature is off-grid, relies entirely on the sun and its derivative energies, like wind and wave. Solar energy enters the system through plants, thus called ‘primary producers’, and flows through the food web, but is ultimately lost as heat to outer space. Continued flow, including storage for later use, is a necessity of survival. Farm systems that maximize the primary producer population and its productivity will capture the most energy for re-use in the rest of the system, and thus maximize productivity in the whole. Species diversity will store energy for re-use.

Biological community dynamics

Mother Nature puts all the organisms to work together for the health of the whole. Nature is not just competition: ‘bloody in tooth and claw’. Cooperation is essential for survival, not only of individuals, but of the whole ecosystem. Species collaborate in symbiosis, enhancing health and productivity of each. They perform regulatory roles to keep population growth of other species in check. Farm design will include not just production species, but all species that can work toward the health of the whole, deliberately placed in collaborative roles. It will include a species diversity that fills all niches in the ecosystem that are relevant to agroecosystem health and durability. It will include species that perform important functions in the recycling of energy, water and minerals.

The ecosystem processes described above all exist on farms, and work either for or against each other, depending on how we manage them. The weakest one will be the limiting factor that determines the health of the whole agroecosystem. As in all living systems, improving the weakest link in a chain will do the most to improve the whole. This general rule, known as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum was first stated in the 19th century by agronomist Justus von Liebig who discovered that the uptake of the minerals in plant nutrition is inhibited by the least available one.

Agroecologists have shown that sustainability pertains only to whole farming systems. Hence, thinking only about practices must become part of a larger design and management approach that judges practices according to their ability to improve the ecosystem processes and therefore the whole system. If that sounds complicated it is because farming in Nature’s image takes much more knowledge than conventional agriculture.

However, a focus on these four ecosystem processes has led to the development of principles or attributes of sustainable agroecosystem design intended to maintain, or in many cases regenerate, the health of these ecosystem processes. Some of these principles and their implications are:

  • Low external inputs – Input self-sufficiency.
  • Low losses – Relatively closed water, nutrient and carbon cycles that avoid losses of valuable resources, leaks that eventually cause environmental damage.
  • Stability – Resilience – Adaptive Capacity – These qualities of sustainability are all necessary, but since they exist somewhat in tension, one must attempt a balance among them. Stability is the quality that produces reliable results and minimizes risk, but in excess, stability can become rigidity. Hence, a certain flexibility is required for resilience, which is the ability to rebound from sudden change, weather events like a dry period in the farming season. Flexibility also includes adaptive capacity to respond to slower environmental changes, both man-made and natural, that have been a constant for millennia. These include invasive species, decimation of keystone species, weather disasters and climate change with long-term consequences and management policies that provoke ecological succession or even its reversal, all of which are disturbing the natural tendency toward a rough balance in the ecosystem. Reserves of material or energy, overlaps, redundancy, or other slack in a system provide that flexibility, but at the price of efficient use of resources.
  • Knowledge intensity – Reliance on technologies that are powerful but derivative of a narrow, specialist knowledge base will give way to a broader, more demanding knowledge of farms as complex ecosystems of interdependent species, a knowledge that enables the creation of biodiversity to capture synergies, to biologically control pests with trap crops, for example.
  • Management intensity – Farming for input self-sufficiency and limited leaks will require more labor devoted to management planning and monitoring to replace other resources or use them more efficiently to maximize sustainable yield: productivity/acre.

Food for thought: historical models of agricultural systems

Some of the most durable and productive low input farming systems in history are designed around two concepts:

  1. Animals that can accelerate the growth and conversion of plants to fertilizer. Because they are highly multifunctional, ruminant mammals rank highest among these. Beyond their manure production function, they can consume fibrous perennials unusable for human food. These perennials can grow on hill land too rocky or too erodible for food cropping. Used as work animals, ruminants multiply the energy input from human labor many times. They provide a source of concentrated protein food that can be conserved and stockpiled for winter consumption. They provide hides and fiber for clothing as well. Cattle, sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas and bison are ruminants that we can most easily use in agricultural systems in our environment.
  2. 2. Water management schemes that integrate streams, ponds, paddies, floodplains or wetlands. Examples are Aztec Chinampas[10], East Asian rice-fish-duck paddy systems[11] and flood plain management systems in colonial New England[12]. Learning from models such as these, instead of draining wetlands, farmers could manage them for high production per acre, while retaining their function as wetlands that provide ecosystem services to the region.

Animal integration has emerged as a key to successful agroecosystem design. According to Albert Howard, regarded by many as the father of organic agriculture, Nature never farms without animals. A major revolution in animal integration was first documented in detail by the French farmer/scientist, André Voisin[13]. High organic matter soils are central to achieving healthy water and mineral cycles, and soils in humid temperate regions are exceptional in their ability to store organic matter and accumulate it over a period of years. Voisin’s book Grass Productivity demonstrated over fifty years ago that pulsed grazing on perennial pasture is the fastest soil organic matter building tool that farmers have, at least in temperate climates.

Based on Voisin’s methods, so-called ‘rotational grazing’ methods have spread among farmers in the US organic farming movement, but few have grasped the holistic nature and importance of Voisin’s work – to make intensively managed grazing the driving core of a crop/livestock agroecosystem that is highly productive with minimal external inputs. A notable exception is the group of Cuban agroecologists who came to the rescue of Cuban agriculture in 1989 when it lost access to the imports that its essentially high-input agriculture required. Building on Voisin’s thesis, their research showed that a system with roughly 3 acres of intensively managed forage land will both sustain itself in fertility and provide a surplus of fertility via vermicomposted manure to sustain roughly 1 acre of cultivated crops (Figure 2).

Like the Cubans, we operated Northland Sheep Dairy in upstate New York using insights from Voisin’s research. We designed our farm agroecosystem to adapt and improve on the natural grass-ruminant ecosystems that helped create the deep topsoils of Midwestern North America. In summary, the design focus is on three areas that are crucial to manage to maximize tight nutrient cycling. Key points of the farm nutrient cycle:

  • Pasture management for a synergistic combination of productive, palatable perennial forages, kept in a vegetative state via high density, pulsed grazing throughout the growing season to maximize biomass production (according to planning principles developed by range ecologist Alan Savory[14]);
  • Manure storage in a deep litter bedding pack built under cover during the cold season to maximize nutrient retention and livestock health;
  • Vermicomposting the bedding pack at a proper C/N (carbon/nitrogen) ratio during the warm season to maximize organic matter production, nutrient stabilization and retention, and spreading the compost during the warm season as well, to maximize efficient nutrient recycling to the soil.

This design is working well on our farm and confirms Voisin’s thesis: in a few years forage production tripled on land previously abused and worn out from industrial methods of agriculture, and soil organic matter is slowly improving. Like the Cuban system, it provided a gradually increasing surplus to fertilize cropland.

Conclusion: A Historical context

What are the chances that the agroecosystem approach will prevail?

It helps to put the age in which we live into historical context. The era of cheap energy permitted the mechanization and chemicalization of agriculture. In turn, this produced the largest increase in food production since the advent of agriculture. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, although very energy-intensive, alone was responsible for tripling the global population since its use became widespread. At least 80% of the energy in food production comes from oil. Mechanization has permitted economies of scale, and driven out family scale farming in many countries. Where the small farm has survived, in the organic movement for example, it has found a niche or a gentrified market. As one US Secretary of Agriculture warned, farmers have to “get big or get out”.

In the short to medium run therefore, designers of agroecosystems will contend with powerful  forces in the political economy of agriculture that oppose any change from the dominance of the industrial model. Moreover, as the collapse of industrial society progresses, elites desperate to maintain social control are already resorting to policies that are ever more desperate and violent in every area of society, including the farm economy and the larger food system. This complex subject merits separate treatment, which I may undertake in a sequel to this essay.

However, as the oil age wanes, industrial agriculture, its associated large-scale farms and distance food economy will be less affordable and will fade away. This will provide the opportunity to return to small farms that serve a local economy. In the best of scenarios, energy and raw materials depletion will be slow, thus offering the time to transition gradually to such a relocalized agrarian society. On the other hand, unfavorable scenarios are likely. The demise of industrial agriculture could easily accelerate due to wars over depleting resources and a resultant collapse of global supply chains, which will hasten the collapse of the industrial system as a whole, not just agriculture. Moreover, as depletion progresses, net energy and net mineral per unit energy will decline ever more rapidly (see graph), and accelerate the increasing scarcity of essential resources.

For longevity, natural ecosystems historically have far outperformed human managed ones in the modern age and every other age in the last 5000 years. All two dozen major civilizations since the advent of agriculture have crashed and burned from overshoot of carrying capacity and depletion of their resource base, or were overrun by peoples who still had resources to spare.

Whatever chance humanity might have of reversing this pattern will require a paradigm shift in the way we see ourselves and the world. A main thesis of this essay is that it will compel an acknowledgement of the premises on which I dwelt early in the essay. The shift must occur not just in our thinking, but in the way we live.

Despite lip service to learning from nature, only academic renegades and ecologist outliers like the Odum brothers, Holling, Wes Jackson, John Todd, Peter Rosset, Alan Savory, Miguel Altieri and Steven Gliessman learned enough ecosystem science to make serious contributions to improving agricultural sustainability to where food production might outlast the industrial, fossil fuel age. At least Altieri and Gliessman made the effort to write the first agroecology texts. These people are all outliers because almost no attempt has been made in academia to put agricultural science on a rigorous disciplinary basis, which is ecosystem science/systems ecology. Relying on these pioneers for inspiration and guidance, farmers will need to design their own agroecosystems to survive in the post-petroleum era. They should start now.

[1]A holistic view of catabolic collapse

Scenarios on the Downslope: Insights from Greer’s Ecotechnic Future

[2] My papers:  Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society, The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone

Books: The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

The Long Emergency

Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil

The Crash Course: An Honest Approach to Facing the Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment

[3] Meadows et al. Limits to Growth. 2004

[4] Catton, William R. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. 1982.

[5] Senge, Peter.  The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization.2006.

[6] Savory, Alan. 1999. Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making.

[7] Henderson, Elizabeth and Karl North, Whole Farm Planning – Ecological Imperatives, Personal Values and Economics. Northeast Organic Farming Association. 2004

[8] The tragedy of Industrial Civilization: Envisioning a Political Future. 2023.

Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. 1977.

[9] Piper, Jon and Judith Soule, Farming in Nature’s Image. 1992.

[10] http://www.chinampas.info/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa, Ancient Mayan Water Control Systems

[11] King, F. H.(Franklin Hiram). Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan

[12] Donahue, Brian. 2004. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

[13] Voisin, André. 1959. Grass Productivity. Philosophical Library, New York. Island Press Edition, 1988.

[14] Savory, Alan. Holistic Management. A Common Sense Revolution to Restore Our Environment. Third Edition. 2017

________________________________________

After reading his essay I sent Karl the following message:

“I agree with your ideas in the essay but have a question that the essay did not address.

Assuming a farm embraces your approach, and exports nutrients off of the property via the sale of food, do you believe that farm can be sustainable in the long run without being dependent on non-renewable imports to replace what was lost?

Basically I’m wondering if any form of commercial agriculture is sustainable in the long term, or will we eventually have to return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles?”

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your reply. Un-denial has been a quality source for me in recent years, attested also by the quality of your commentariat.

In Western history, I trace my concern with your question to Justus von Liebig’s concept of a metabolic rift (in the mineral cycle), exemplified he said by the pattern of London dumping its sewage into the Thames rather than trucking it back to the farms, ending with the impoverishment of the English farmland, forcing England to import guano and Chilian nitrates. In the East, I trace it to the widespread traffic in ‘night soil’ from the cities back to the farms. This seems to have sustained East Asian farming longer than it would have otherwise.

If humanure could be kept pure, it seems technically possible to mend the metabolic rift in a scale limited only by the economics or transporting the (composted) sewage. The main problem I see is political. Under capitalism, the maximization of profit whatever the cost overrules most ecological concerns. Hence, I am not optimistic about the sustainability of commercial agriculture beyond small agrarian communities practicing horticulture that might agree to something similar to the night soil solution.

I wrote about this question briefly in part three of a six part series, Visioning County Food Production, which was commissioned and published by an energy descent educational group in Ithaca, NY. The county, of which Ithaca is the urban center, has a population of about 100k. Here is some of what I wrote:

Because the agriculture of the future will need closed nutrient cycles, fertility for all county food production cannot be considered apart from county organic waste streams.[vi] To maintain fertility, organic waste must return in some form to food production sites. As the dense urban population produces the bulk of the waste, public institutions will need to take responsibility for separate collection of the purely organic component of the urban garbage and sewage waste streams, recycling part of it back to rural farms.[vii]

Fertility in urban and peripheral agricultural soils can be sustained with compost from the city organic garbage stream alone. A study of one urban community revealed that urban agriculture alone could absorb 20% of the organic waste production of the city.[viii] This will require a municipal policy and program of careful triage, collection, and composting at optimum C/N ratio by mixing high-nitrogen food garbage with high-carbon sources like leaves and shredded paper trash. The city could assign responsibility to urban institutional sources, such as schools and restaurants for moving their large organic waste streams to composting facilities at specific peri-urban food production sites. A map of existing Tompkins County composting sites demonstrates the composting potential (Figure 3).[ix]

As for sewage, eventually Ithaca will have to desewer, converting to urban night soil collection, biogas extraction, and the recycling of residual organic matter to county farms that will be necessary to maintain the mineral content of rural agricultural soils. In the short run, guerilla humanure composting from backyard compost toilets can build toward full conversion (Figure 4). These household facilities are satisfactorily self-policed, because the product will be used in closed-cycle residential food production.

[vi] For information about local waste processing facilities, see the TCLocal article “Wasting in the Energy Descent: An Outline for the Future” by Tom Shelley, http://tclocal.org/2009/01/wasting_in_the_energy_descent.html

[vii] Tom Shelley has recently begun to prototype this process with “The Sustainable Chicken Project,” which returns nutrients to the land by collecting kitchen scraps in the City of Ithaca on a subscription basis and feeding them to chickens at Steep Hollow Farm three miles outside the city in the Town of Ithaca. See http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2010/01/sustainable-chicken-project/ and the farm’s blog at http://steephollowfarm.wordpress.com/

[viii] Mougeot, Luc J.A. Growing Better Cities: Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Development. Ottawa: International Development Centre, 2006. http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/226-0/

[ix] http://www.co.tompkins.ny.us/gis/maps/pdfs/CompostMap2000-E.pdf

249 thoughts on “By Karl North: An agroecological model for the end of the oil age”

  1. I certainly agree with the agroecological methods described by North and the importance of nutrient cycling underpinning those methods. My only reservation is that I doubt these methods can be applied to the kind of commercial agriculture required for the support of large urban populations. High urban population means low rural population (by definition) and that means mechanized agriculture. Because mechanized agriculture cannot continue without high flows of outside inputs, most of which are non-renewable, it means modern cities are doomed to failure.

    But North suggests that with a slow enough failure of industrial agriculture, “this will provide the opportunity to return to small farms that serve a local economy.” I agree that this would be an ideal solution to the precarity of urban populations, just move them to the country and let them become their own food producers. It allows all of things that are truly sustainable over the long haul, the nutrient cycling, high manual labor, and skilled intensive management of a variable ecological landscape, including pasture, woodlands, orchards and arable crops.

    But the same constraints on the continuation of industrial agriculture, diminishing availability of non-renewable inputs, especially fuels, will preclude any wholesale reruralization of urban populations. I have lived on two small “homestead style” small farms for almost my entire adult life, since 1975, and I know how much infrastructure even a low-energy subsistence farm requires. Equally important, I know how steep the learning curve is to be able to produce all the family necessities off of a small patch of land. There are just not enough resources available to maintain the urban status quo, even at rapidly diminishing standards of living, and also provide the rural infrastructure, training and interim support for millions of people leaving cities for life on the farm.

    This means that industrial nations are stuck with the infrastructure and living situations they have developed over decades and centuries. It’s a shame, but there it is. A few individuals, families and small groups may be able to segue to a low-energy farm life, but the vast bulk of urban populations will die where they now live. As fossil fuels deplete and available surplus energy declines ever more rapidly, those dimishing resources will be concentrated on industrial agriculture and its inputs just to keep urban populations alive as long as possible. When those urban populations can no longer be supported, they will die, and the legacy of urbanism and industrial agriculture will be a vast wasteland of sterile and eroded soil, soil that will take a long time to recover enough to be any use to the subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers that remain.

    If anyone and their descendents are to have a chance at being among those who remain, it’s long past time to get out of the city. It may now be too late to make the move, but with a little luck there still may be enough time if one leaves now.

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    1. I agree with your excellent points. I did say in my introduction that the proposed agricultural model will be able to feed a much smaller population. I should have said MUCH smaller.

      I too know how much infrastructure is required on even the smallest of farms. Basics like fences are going to be a big problem without an industrial machine.

      Cities will indeed be a gong show. But so will many small towns. I spent my adolescent years in Campbell River, a prosperous town of 10,000 on the east coast of Vancouver Island that exploits nearby forest and mineral resources. In its earlier days before my arrival it was known as the salmon fishing capital of the world and there was plenty of fish to feed the population plus export surplus in cans. The salmon are now depleted. Campbell River is a lovely place to live and has grown to over 30,000 with high density condos sprouting everywhere for retirees cashing out their homes and escaping the cities. The thing is, Campbell River, like many small towns in British Columbia, has zero agricultural land. So all the new residents will have lovely lives until the trucks stop running, and then it will take only days to transform from a paradise into a gong show.

      No matter which way one prefers to view our overshoot predicament, there is only one good path: rapid population reduction. I find it gobsmacking that so few overshoot aware people promote population reduction, and this partly explains why I started this site to explore our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

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    2. I agree that urban populations of any significant scale will disappear permanently. Even my scenario for the city of Ithaca, NY and its county hinterland would be a challenge. See my six part series, Visioning County Agriculture under Core Papers (http://karlnorth.com/?page_id=9).

      Readers may find my Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios worthy of critical comment (http://karlnorth.com/?p=553). In that article I viewed the metropolitan wasteland Joe Clarkson describes as also a salvage area, and the suburban belt as rebuilt into small farm communities. These farms would trade with the small remnant salvage mafias that remained in the cities.

      Homesteading and herding in rural France, I lived in a village of compact clusters of farmhouses as they still are after centuries in many parts of Europe. That experience tells me that, to achieve the necessary multiple synergies, agrarian communities will have to be nodal clusters -, not isolated farms as in the present US. Even the Amish have a farm size limit (ideally) of 100 acres – to keep the neighbors close, as the Amish say.

      As I mentioned in the article, on our NY farm I experimented with some of the steps toward a post-petroleum model. We did a lot of work with draft animals, built to passive solar design standards, built to some extent with local or salvage materials, and were self-sufficient in heat and hot water. But I realized that we were still a long way from cutting ties to the petroleum economy.

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      1. When I said, ” urban populations of any significant scale will disappear permanently”, I was thinking of the sort of cities produced by industrial civilization. We know that large cities existed in ancient times, but they depended on a mainly agricultural base, with some metal mining. A striking but not very well known example is Cahokia in the Mississippi Valley. At its height in 1050 AD the city covered six square miles and in pre-colonial times was the greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico. So it is plausible that after agriculture and its soil base recovers from the oil age, cities of some sort could reappear.

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    1. Thanks, very good essay by Gowdy. So refreshing to see someone call for aggressive population reduction policies.

      Here’s the abstract:

      For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet’s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures.

      And the conclusion:

      Climate change has been a major driver in the biological and social evolution of the human species. For some 97 % of our existence we lived as hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene, a geological epoch characterized by extreme climate swings from ice ages to warm periods. Agriculture, perhaps the major social evolutionary transition in our history, was made possible by the unusually warm and stable climate of the Holocene. That climate stability is already being undermined by the fossil fuel CO2 injected into the atmosphere by the industrial economy. The climate system will be overwhelmed if we continue to burn fossil fuels for just a few more decades. Without climate stability and the cheap, abundant energy of the 20th century it is unlikely that agriculture will be possible in the 21st century and beyond. Civilization will either collapse or gradually disappear over the coming centuries.

      The fact that civilization is likely to end does not mean that we should give up on climate change mitigation, radically changing the world’s industrial agriculture system, social justice or the rest of a progressive political agenda. Our prospects for survival will dramatically improve if we hold temperature increases to 3 °C, rather than 6−8 °C, by instituting social and environmental policies to reduce the worst climate change impacts. In the long run, the vision of returning to a hunting and gathering way of life is wildly optimistic compared to the technological dystopias envisioned by many science fiction authors and social philosophers. Every characteristic that defines us as a species—compassion for unrelated others, intelligence, foresight and curiosity—evolved in the Pleistocene (Shepard, 1998). We became human as hunters and gatherers and we can regain our humanity when we return to that way of life.

      Excellent quote from Paul Ehrlich:

      Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism, of sexism, of religious intolerance, of war, of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems.

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    2. Gowdy’s paper is very good. One of my few quibbles is the lack of consideration of tropical agriculture. Tropical agriculture can include ruminents, tree crops and tubers (I’m not including rice here). Climate warming will likely make the deep tropics marginal for human habitability, but the margins of the tropics may well allow many of the current tropical crops, except perhaps for tree crops, which need several years of stable climate to grow the tree and have it bear fruit or nuts. It’s also important to remember that mountainous terrain allows for a rapid change of climate just by changing elevation. I live on a tropical island that gives me access to all the climatic zones of the earth (except permafrost) within a day’s walk.

      Also, Gowdy’s comparison of the post-Holocene climate, especially if it is a hothouse earth, with the Pleistocene climate is suspect. Agriculture was much tougher in the Pleistocene not only because of climate variability but also because it was much colder. I think it is safe to say that we don’t have models that can predict anything about the details of the much hotter climate to come except that it will be much hotter.

      In sum, while it is certainly true that large-scale industrial agriculture will soon be gone, mostly due to fuel shortages but also due to climate disruption, small scale horticulture and pastoralism are still likely to be able to provide a lot of food to future generations. Finding the right spot may require some migration, but humans have always been very good at that.

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      1. It’s probably more accurate to describe the effects of increasing CO2 levels as Climate Disruption, rather than just heating. While the global average temp. will increase, for example, the destabilisation of the atmospheric jet stream can lead to periodic unseasonal low temperatures in some regions. Another effect is if the AMOC (Gulf stream) stops, that leads to significantly cooler temps. in the U.K. and Europe, as well as precipitation changes. There is a long list of highly probable disruptive effects that will occur. Rainfall patterns from the Hadley cell changes leading to rainfall being distributed at higher latitudes. So in Australia, the Hadley cell rainfall currently deposited in Southern Australia will be deposited in the ocean to the south. Stronger cyclones. Less snow giving less snow-melt irrigation water to various regions. Sea level rise. Oceanic changes will have severe effects from the acidification and heating occurring.

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          1. Normaly Sabine is top notch but in this she is …. inaccurate. She focuses too much on land mass, surface temperatures, and wind. We are an ocean planet, it is Mostly about ocean temps and salinity.

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  3. Authorities in Nevada were investigating a death at the site of the Burning Man festival where thousands of attendees remained stranded Saturday night as flooding from storms swept through the Nevada desert. [Related: Carbon footprint of Burning Man: 27,000 tons of CO2 per year –Des]

    Organizers closed vehicular access to the counterculture festival and attendees trudged through mud, many barefoot or wearing plastic bags on their feet. The revelers were urged to shelter in place and conserve food, water and other supplies.

    https://desdemonadespair.net/2023/09/one-dead-at-burning-man-as-flooding-strands-thousands-no-one-is-going-to-have-sympathy-for-us.html

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  4. I have been practicing sustainable food production on a very small scale for over 20 years using the techniques taught to me by John Jeavons at growbiointensive.org. It works especially if you have ruminant animals to provide manure. I think you can have a pretty sustainable system if you recycle everything including your own poop and have the animal manure. The trouble with ruminants in a temperate climate is they need a lot of winter feed. Making and storing hay by hand is a huge amount of work. Of course one bad harvest and you are in trouble, like we had here this year with all the rain and flooding. Even with good luck this method cannot produce a huge surplus

    As a practical matter farming on a large enough scale to feed masses of people can only be done in a few select places like the Nile river valley or the Tigris-Euphrates that get annual flooding to replenish nutrients naturally. Such places no longer exist since humans have built dams to control flooding. Going back to hunter-gathering is not possible either since humans and domestic animals now make up 96% of the vertibrate biomass. Therefore we are doomed.

    “Some of us are lucky. We’re going to be dead soon.” the late Jay Hanson

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    1. In addition to the Nile I think some rice paddies in Asia are a sustainable system without fossil energy by drawing nutrients from gravity fed glacier melt water which will work until climate change eliminates the glaciers.

      This year here in the Comox Valley we had a poor first cut and no second cut of hay for the first time in my memory due to drought.

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  5. With respect to the overpopulation problem if people think they may need to become farmers some of them may decide they need to raise their own farm hands. I have a niece that is doing exactly that.

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      1. One of the few countries to successfully manage population stability in an agricultural setting was Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868. How they did it is still something of an anthropological dispute.

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    2. See the book by Greg Jeffers, Prosperous Homesteading, 2017 for the extended argument in this vein. Also Better Off, a book by an MIT engineering grad who took his bride to live in an Amish community for a year (title is three way pun I think.).

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  6. Tim Watkins today does a lovely job of describing the rock and hard place that squeezes the morons that lead us.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/09/04/trapped-in-the-maze/

    Imagine for a moment that you are Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer – the minister charged with overseeing the economy. Don’t worry if you haven’t got the first idea how an economy runs… he doesn’t either. Nevertheless, your boss – the man who lives next door to you in Downing Street – has set you something of a conundrum. With a general election next year, he is demanding that at the very least, the economy doesn’t get any worse. And ideally, he would like you to somehow engineer the fabled “soft landing” from the current cost-of-living crisis.

    Perhaps the most obvious difficulty with this is that you have already outsourced the management of the crisis to the Bank of England, since they claim to know a lot more about the economy than you do. Which is true, but that is hardly a recommendation, since the Downing Street cat has more of a clue than the officials at the Treasury and the Bank of England combined. Nevertheless, the Bank of England officials have told you that since the “inflation” looks a lot like the 1970s, the solution is to do what they did back then – raise interest rates until something breaks and prices are forced down again.

    This though, flies in the face of the instructions from the man next door, who would like to present the electorate with a recovering economy rather than a repeat of the depression of the early 1980s. And so, you might be thinking about increasing public spending to make a bad situation more bearable for the voters – like you did last winter, when you paid the essential part of everyone’s energy bills… except that it was exactly this type of stunt which triggered the inflation in the first place. In any case, because the global banking and financial institutions have become increasingly concerned about the government’s ability to repay its outstanding debt, they are less prepared to lend you the currency to allow you to fund a pre-election giveaway.

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    1. He did a good job of trying to explain the complexities of the economic system in the U.K. and how they have an even more fragile economy than the U.S. (if that is possible?). Still most of the economic “system” confounds and makes no sense to me. I’m certain our leaders don’t understand it. The world economy is such an interconnected (fragile??) system I doubt if one country collapses the system as a whole (Global South??) can continue functioning. And this is a problem before a shooting war could break out between the rapidly being defeated west (in Ukraine) and Russia.
      AJ

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  7. HHH@POB today with an interesting insight: “inflation is ultimately deflationary”.

    I suspect this means we’ll adjust with a bang rather than a gradual decline.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/steo-and-tight-oil-update-august-2023/#comment-762728

    China needs lower oil prices as their economic model is imploding. BRICS are already at odds with the oil producers needing higher prices and the #1 importer needing lower prices.

    Higher oil prices will put further stress on the Chinese currency. Which is already doing very poorly.

    Inflation is ultimately deflationary. That’s why I won’t change my mind on much lower oil prices coming.

    Inflation pops the credit bubble that brought on the inflation in the first place.

    …we are caught in a liquidity trap. Every time central banks step in and governments step in and stimulate it’s in response to liquidity disappearing.

    There is no exit because as soon as they exit liquidity starts disappearing again. And with a lag we are right back facing major deflation risk.

    It’s no surprise we are facing major deflation 2 years after they did the biggest stimulus ever during Covid.

    So can central banks and governments continue doing what they do until the end of time or do we going into a recession or depression that we don’t really ever recover from?

    Debt levels in China are way worse than they are here in the US.

    China is in the middle of their oh shit moment where nothing they do will fix the problems.

    The deflationary shockwave coming out of China is going to be in a class of its own. Nothing to compare it to in the past.

    All stimulus really is, is an increase in the debt load that the economy can’t payback.

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  8. Thank you for a great and focused post on a fascinatingly complex topic.
    I like that you stress the fact that both a paradigm shift in the philosophical basis of our society and resulting concrete actions are necessary.
    Yes, farmers who are willing to adapt need to start now. Unfortunately, I am unsure large farmers will be willing. There probably aren’t any good large scale solutions to ensure the continuation of their revenue. Or maybe some form of neo-feudalism. In France, we have an ongoing controversy around the privatization of water through ‘mega-basins’ (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/water-mega-basins-reservoirs-france-drought/674313/). A feud between large land-owners and the state against small farmers and ecologists.

    Reading your post raised thoughts which I am unsure make sense. I will shout anyway. Do you think there is a kind of theoretical “best” natural ecosystem which varies on earth both according to location and evolving climate?
    If so, should our agricultural systems try to mimic these natural optimums, so that maybe cattle based system would make more sense in America, and forest based system in Europe?
    Also, about cattle, doesn’t it need to move across the whole continent? Wouldn’t private property be a hindrance? Change one thing, change everything?

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    1. Ecologists have developed the concepts of ‘succession’ and ‘climax succession’ as an evolution toward a best fit of an ecosystem to its environment. Despite criticism that it is too rigid, I think that used flexibly it still explains a process we often see after a disruption (such as farming), where an ecosystem redevelops in stages toward an end stage (the climax) that is typical of a givern environment. This is the closest thing I know of to what you suggest. The problem is that succession does not always lead to the same climax. In the Amazon, clearcutting large areas of the rain forest for cattle farming is not leading back to rain forest. So your idea of agroecosystems imitatimg cimaix is interesting, but maybe should be used with caution. For example, the climax succession of conifer forest where I farm in Maine, USA would severely limit my farming options.

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  9. Gail Tverberg today on the link between energy and covid.

    Fossil Fuel Imports Are Already Constrained

    There was a big downward shift in 2020. This can be interpreted in many ways. The world had a big financial problem, looking like it would push us into something like the Great Recession again. The world had a huge energy problem, with oil production seeming to have hit a peak in 2018, and oil imports reached a peak a little before then.

    There is considerable evidence that the illness that caused covid was directly or indirectly the result of bioweapon research undertaken by the military operations of a number of countries around the world, including the US, Canada, France, Italy, and Australia. US efforts had been shifted to China a few years ago, after the US congress declared the US efforts to be too risky. No one can pin blame on any one country because too many countries funded the research and participated.

    The strange shutdowns make little sense based on approaches used to handle epidemics in the past. The shutdown in the US was overseen by the US military. As a result of the shutdowns, a huge amount of debt could be infused into the economy. The use of oil, particularly as jet fuel, dropped significantly. The financial benefit of the shutdowns still partially continues, with student loan repayment still not having restarted, and some other kinds of subsidies not entirely gone away.

    As I see the situation, our real problem is an energy shortage with an overlaid financial problem (including inflation and bank problems). In fact, that is China’s problem, right now, as well. Covid, and the vaccine responses, are cover for the real problems that are occurring. The focus on climate change, wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs are all covers for the real problem. The real problem has not gone away. It is lying in wait.

    Seems to align with my thinking here:

    What would you do?

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      1. Where is reliable evidence that the US was funding bioweapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or any other lab in China? The whole concept makes no sense. It would be like the Department of Energy cooperating with Russia on the design and testing of nuclear weapons. Not very likely, to the point of absurdity.

        An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. An announcement by Biden and Xi admitting joint bioweapons research would be what it would take to convince me.

        The National Institutes of Health was indeed funding research on corona viruses at WIV, but that is all I am aware of. The Office of the Inspector General has been looking into this research funding for quite a while.

        https://www.science.org/content/article/federal-watchdog-finds-problems-nih-oversight-grant-funding-bat-virus-research-china

        I know that this is your site Rob and you can do what you want, but your last two comments are not increasing its credibility.

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        1. I agree with you on bioweapons research. Does not make sense. But there is plenty of evidence that US funded GOF research at Wuhan lab.

          Not sure which other comment you are referring to. Perhaps we disagree on Ukraine? Wouldn’t surprise me because everyone I know disagrees with me on Ukraine.

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          1. I thought you were promoting the concepts in the italicized text of your 10:19 am comment and that your question in your 11:26 am content was requesting information to back up the assertion that China and the US were cooperating on bioweapons research. It appears that I misinterpreted your views. I apologize.

            By the way, where did the italicized text come from? I couldn’t find it in the Tverberg post, but I may have missed it.

            As for Ukraine, I prefer not to go there since I subscribe to the mainstream view that the war was initiated by Russia.

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            1. Thanks. Italicized text was a comment made by Gail Tverberg today. I pasted the link to her comment but WordPress changed the link to her essay. Here is the comment link with the http:// removed:

              ourfiniteworld.com/2023/08/31/fossil-fuel-imports-are-already-constrained/comment-page-3/#comment-434642

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  10. An excellent essay pulling together the general themes and threads of food production in harmony with nature. A good essay to send to anyone you are trying to onboard this way of thinking: paradigm shifting. It fits in with Joe Brewer’s Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth and related nascent movement. In Canada the organic sector is ramping up a new strategy to increase organic share of production, led by Canadian Organic Growers. (www.cog.ca) Ben Hartmann’s books on Lean Farming are another excellent framework for reducing the energy inputs to small scale intensive food production.
    “In the short to medium run therefore, designers of agroecosystems will contend with powerful forces in the political economy of agriculture that oppose any change from the dominance of the industrial model. Moreover, as the collapse of industrial society progresses, elites desperate to maintain social control are already resorting to policies that are ever more desperate and violent in every area of society, including the farm economy and the larger food system.”

    “At least 80% of the energy in food production comes from oil. Mechanization has permitted economies of scale, and driven out family scale farming in many countries. Where the small farm has survived, in the organic movement for example, it has found a niche or a gentrified market.”

    “Historically, Nature’s ‘farming systems’ have a much better track record for durability than ours. This is why, in the words of two pioneering agroecologists[9], “farming in Nature’s image” needs to become our design standard. While no replacement for serious study of ecosystem science, this section will outline ecosystem processes and principles sufficiently to give direction to thinking about farming systems as agroecosystems.”

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  12. Great essay North! It’s got me thinking about what I can do with my own 11 acres. We have a small stream running through it. I would like to add a big pond, and re-design my paddocks for better rotational grazing. I’m interested in raising Wiltshire sheep and a small flock of chickens.

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    1. The greater the colossus of our decadence surely the harder our fall. It’s so depressing to think that many in our society think a trip on such a folly as this would be an ultimate achievement of a lifetime of work. Speaking of which, I’ve been off radar as of late because I’m partaking in a small facsimile of such behaviour, and not by choice for myself. I am taking my elderly mother on a holiday up in this area of Far North Queensland because I feel it is most likely the last time we will have this opportunity and it seemed the right thing to do for her enjoyment sake and sharing this time together. It has been so difficult for me to set aside my collapse/doom tinted glasses with which I am now fully accustomed to view the world to pick up the “BAU, consume and enjoy as is our god-given right” pair of rose-coloured spectacles that is the tourist persona.

      Like Rob, I could not walk onto a city street without feeling the weight of impending collapse to follow on the indulgences that we have all taken for granted. I feel as a stranger in a strange land in this so-called civilised environment after so many months in my rural setting hardly leaving the property. Every shop, cafe, and entertainment offering just highlighted how unprepared we are for what is upon us. It is still high tourist season here and there are visitors from all around the world to see the main draw, the Great Barrier Reef, which will probably endure catastrophic bleaching this summer. On one hand, I am cringing with despair but interestingly enough, I began to adopt the view that since all of our time on a liveable planet is limited now, who am I to judge how people choose to spend theirs? What has been most challenging is pretending to enjoy myself as to not diminish my mother’s enjoyment.

      I trust everyone is keeping well and finding beauty and joy in this changing of seasons.

      Namaste.

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      1. Thanks for checking in Gaia. Glad you’re ok and hope you enjoy time with your mother. I wish I had spent more time having meaningful conversations with my mother. It’s too late now. Pretty good chance though she wouldn’t enjoy my definition of meaningful conversation. There’s a lot to said for denial. 😦

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  15. Ouch! Decoupling isn’t happening. This paper: “Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries.”

    Findings The emission reductions that high-income countries achieved through absolute decoupling fall far short of Paris-compliant rates. At the achieved rates, these countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1·5°C fair-shares in the process. To meet their 1·5°C fair-shares alongside continued economic growth, decoupling rates would on average need to increase by a factor of ten by 2025.

    Interpretation The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green. If green is to be consistent with the Paris Agreement, then high-income countries have not achieved green growth, and are very unlikely to be able to achieve it in the future. To achieve Paris-compliant emission reductions, high-income countries will need to pursue post-growth demand-reduction strategies, reorienting the economy towards sufficiency, equity, and human wellbeing, while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00174-2/fulltext

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  16. New must watch presentation on overshoot and what needs to be done by Lierre Keith whom I respect very much.

    Lots of clear-eyed reality here. Also nice to hear a little about her inspiring lifestyle.

    At 47:40 she discusses population reduction policies that have been effective.

    At 1:23:20 she discusses why we should declare annual crops a failed experiment and abandon them.

    Keith laments the poor sales of her recent book Bright Green Lies and says she wishes larger publishers had not refused to accept the reality of what she was saying.

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    2. Initially I thought that this would be way too long to listen to. IT WAS NOT. In listening to her talk, I was somewhat critical in thinking the she was living with some kind of hopium. The comments and her interaction with the commentators disabused me of that notion. She understands where we are and the future ahead of us looking very questionable. If not downright dire. She sees Mad Max as a possible future. I think because of MPP and Denial it’s probably where we’re going. Everyone should listen to this talk. I will buy the book.
      AJ

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      1. I originally found out about peak oil by accident when I watched a documentary on it. I then googled peak oil stuff and Lierre was one of the first people who came up. I’ve read a bunch of her books, especially the Deep Green series with Derrick Jensen. It’s been nine years now of not being in denial, for better or worse.

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    4. Nice to hear an update of the Lierre and Derrick show, which I had not followed in recent years. The most dramatic example I know of the success of the population control policies Lierre describes occurred years ago in the South Indian state of Kerala, where after a series of socialist governments, Kerala demonstrated markedly different demographics from the rest of India.

      Lierre’s grand lines approach to the planetary situation and her litany of sordid consequences is always welcome. The risk of that approach is to reduce terms like ‘agriculture’ and ‘hunter/gatherer’ to monolithic categories, and then to reduce them further to epithets (agriculture) or panaceas (hunter/gatherers). Surely she is familiar with the theory that the prehistoric hunters wiped out the megafauna during the several hundred thousand years of human history that she says were relatively environmentally benign.

      A finer grained look at supposedly pre-agrarian human land use reveals a huge variety, in which it becomes almost impossible to see where the line is crossed into agriculture. First humans in North America modified landscapes in many ways, quite apart from the large corn plantations that the first Europeans encountered in New England. Following the cardinal rule that intervention in complex systems never has just the one expected result, it becomes difficult to even judge how positive or negative the overall effect of pre-agrarian land use was, especially given the paucity of archeological data. What we can say is that all species, including humans, must impact their habitats, recreating them over time in complex interactions with other species, whose ripple effects are hard to calculate. Environmentalists seeking simple solutions tend to forget this rule. A perspective that acknowledges the limitations of understanding complexity in living systems raises questions like, What is an invasive? And when is it destructive or benign, and what are the criteria for judging that? All species were once invasive, no?

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      1. Very good points.

        For me, all good paths, regardless of the lifestyle and technologies we employ, require a much smaller population. Conversely, there is no good outcome, regardless what we do, with 8 billion people. This should be the bedrock position of all people still trying to make the future less bad. But it’s not. Almost every influential overshoot intellectual, and every environmental organization, does not promote population reduction policies.

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      2. Yes, I think Lierre (for whom I have a great deal of respect) has not quite grasped that humans are a species and it would not be all sweetness and light, if civilisation collapsed though numbers would fall dramatically, giving the other species a chance to recover somewhat.

        I don’t know why some people need to overstate things in order to convince others of some terrible environmental damage (Guy McPherson is an extreme example). It’s pretty clear that agriculture did untold damage to the ecosphere but to claim that agriculture is the clearing of land of all other life, even bacteria, to grow crops is just bizarre. With chemical agriculture one may be able to claim that, but, before that era, humans didn’t have the capability to sterilize a plot of land before planting crops. I recall film and photographs of flocks of birds following a plough, to get at all of the life still left in the soil. Those tracts of land most certainly did still have life, then.

        I haven’t listened to it all, yet, but do intend to. Most of it is right on the money, so far.

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        1. I also don’t like her frequently repeated claim about sterilizing the land. I believe it’s true for non-organic strawberries in California but not many other crops that I’m aware of. It’s probably a sound bite that’s become muscle memory since I’ve heard her say it many times.

          The best part of the video is the discussion after the presentation. Her awareness of reality and authenticity becomes clear.

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          1. I think I’ve become more of a doomer in the last few months. I probably would have taken what Lierre said about actions as solid. But now, she appears delusional when she says the actions are simple. Do this, do that and this will stop. She even seems to think that there are examples of countries which have done the right (in her eyes) things. But all of these actions seem to be actions with civilisation still intact. Civilisation is something she wants to tear down. So that seems a disconnect. Lowering birth rate seems a sensible thing in a civilisation that is in overshoot but it would just put a bigger burden on that civilisation, as the demographic changed. And it would still be unsustainable, so would collapse. In a collapsing civilisation, who knows what the survivors would do but it might involve having more kids, as death rates increased.

            Anyway, I was sitting on our (partially built) verandah on this sunny Spring day, having a beer and listening to some nice music as I looked out on a sparsely built rural scene. I could live with this, I thought. Then I got selfish. I hoped the collapse would hold off for a couple of decades so I could see out my life in relative comfort and enjoyment. That hope isn’t based on anything concrete but I can dream.

            Gosh, I’m critical of everything anyone seems to say on all sides of this debate. I think a dose of reality would be nice but few people seem to think it through. Even a hunter-gatherer existence might not be sustainable, if they use tools, especially anything more sophisticated than a branch or rock. So much damage has been done that there really is no prospect, whatsoever, of a soft landing.

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            1. Thanks for your honesty. I do find you somewhat critical of everything and supporting of nothing. I recently read Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter Ward. We have a VERY rare and special gig on this planet. Doubly so if Varki’s MORT theory is correct which Peter Ward is unaware of.

              Despite the near zero odds of implementing them, I think we should support the few people on this planet that have plausible plans, like Lierre Keith and Jack Alpert. If someone doesn’t like these plans, they should propose a different plan.

              We all know what will probably happen if we do nothing and allow business as usual to unfold.

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              1. You’re right, Rob. I don’t know how to stop thinking critically though. If a plan doesn’t seem that it would prevent the coming catastrophe, then I will criticise it. I don’t need to offer an alternative.

                My plan? Slowly remove health services, apart from palliative care, and increase voluntary euthanasia. That would start to bring down population. Outlaw any business that sells frivolous stuff. Outlaw billionaires and multi-millionaires, redistributing excess funds to the poorer folks and to paying off national debt. Plant food forests almost everywhere, using native plants wherever possible. Stop road building. Change all constitutions to outlaw promotion of economic growth, promoting sufficiency only. Educate everyone on the reality of species and ecosystems. Introduce the death penalty for all anthropogenic climate change deniers and rational optimists (that is a double win). Confiscate and destroy all weapons above the level of bows and arrows.

                That’s a start (and off the top of my head) but would still not prevent civilisational or ecological collapse. However, Alpert’s and Keith’s plans would also not do that. So my plan is no better, and no worse, than theirs. Perhaps I should support theirs. Go Alpert and Keith!

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  18. Excellent detailed discussion from an insider on the events that provoked Russia to invade Ukraine.

    I’d love to hear an equally knowledgeable person with high integrity present the mainstream view.

    As with covid, I’ve been unable to find anyone intelligent with integrity that can make a strong case in support of our western leaders.

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    1. I’m tip-toeing here but let’s just say that whatever the perceived provocation, Putin’s incursion (in 2014 and 2022) was a choice. Agreements, either legal or handshake, are only made at one point in time. As Trump showed, new leaders can push for different outcomes and tear up even legal agreements. Countries (as represented by their elected or autocratic leaders) will always do what they perceive as in their best interests (rightly or wrongly), including interfering in the internals of other nations. None of this is right or wrong, good or evil, it just is what it is. I find it incredible that some people seem to believe that agreements, or just statements, made at one point in time by people around decades (or, in the case of NZ, centuries) ago must persist ad infinitum.

      No country HAS TO invade another country though those that are invaded may argue that they are forced to fight to defend themselves. It is a choice. One can agree with the choice, or not, but I doubt it could be argued that it wasn’t a choice.

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      1. I agree that no country HAS to invade another, but any super power, including the US, that is threatened by weapons on its border WILL invade.

        The US did it with Cuba, and would do it again if Russia put weapons in Canada.

        Our western leaders should have put themselves in the shoes of the Russians but did not, and now the world is paying the price for their stupidity and lack of empathy.

        Nyet means nyet.

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  19. Rintrah, as with Kunstler, requires us to turn on a big filter to ignore political nonsense mixed in with often excellent overshoot observations.

    I cut Rintrah some slack because I understand he’s very angry about the denial of our overshoot predicament, as was I until I discovered Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.

    Rintrah today debunks John Michael Greer’s and Gail Tverberg’s claims that we are not facing a climate change catastrophe.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/a-look-at-john-michael-greers-climate-change-comments/

    …John Michael Greer does not believe that climate change is going to lead to any sort of apocalyptic outcome. Instead, he sees it as one more problem that fits into his model of the gradual collapse. For context, Greer is not alone in this among the Peak Oil crowd. Gail Tverberg also seems to think the climate problem is exaggerated.

    I would argue the peak oil crowd found themselves betting on the wrong horse, expecting that humanity would not have to confront the climate crisis because resource scarcity would be such an acute problem that CO2 emissions would naturally come down.

    No such thing happened of course, fossil fuel use has merely continued to grow in every year since we stopped hearing about the term “Peak Oil”. In a sense, I think the Peak Oil crowd psychologically anticipated the climate catastrophe before anyone else. Rather than being worried about peak oil, they hoped that increasing extraction costs would force us to halt our march towards oblivion. This did not happen.

    So, seven degree Celsius of global warming in a decade, 9600 years ago?

    Sorry, that did not happen. The guy who wrote that book made a pretty awful error. There is just no way to reconcile it with the data that we have. His 7 degree Celsius of global warming in a decade estimate is off by at least an order of magnitude.

    This is the central claim of John Michael Greer’s post. He argues that we have seen far more rapid warming during the termination of the Younger Dryas, so today’s global warming is not unprecedented. I have now shown you why this is incorrect.

    Unfortunately, tens of thousands of people will be reading Greer’s post and making a conclusion that is psychologically convenient for them: The extremely rapid global warming we are experiencing today pales in comparison to what happened 9600 years ago. Then they will happily drive their SUV back to their office and complain about autistic Swedish children and hysterical climate alarmists.

    How many people will read my post, in which I point out the error in his argument? A few dozen, if I’m lucky.

    See also yesterday’s very aggressive post directed at climate change deniers.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/introducing-the-low-iq-low-status-white-male-challenge/

    Between 1920 and 2020, CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere increased from 303 parts per million, to 414 parts per million.

    In other words, in a 100 year period the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increased by at least 36%.

    Now my question to you is: Can you, the low IQ low status white males who think climate change is not a real problem we need to do something about, find some other period in geological history:

    1. During which CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased by at least 36% in 100 years.

    And:

    2. Which was NOT associated with an episode of mass extinction?

    See, here’s the thing. During the next to last deglaciation, back when the world transitioned into the Eemian, you see a very rapid increase in CO2. What is a rapid increase in CO2? It’s 21 parts per million in 300 years. We achieved 111 parts per million, in 100 years. The rate of increase during that rapid period was 0.06 parts per million, per year. Right now, we’re achieving about 2 parts per million, per year.

    So, right now we’re screwing things up almost twenty times faster, than during that period of “rapid” CO2 increase in our atmosphere.

    In fact, many of the mass extinction episodes in geological history saw a rapid increase in CO2. But that rapid increase in CO2, was much less rapid than the currently ongoing rapid increase in atmospheric CO2. And that’s why the temperature increase right now is also more rapid than during previous periods of mass extinction.

    Maybe your low status white male gurus are all correct and global warming is actually just a giant hoax. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I’ll play along with you.

    Well, here’s the thing: Oceanic PH depends on buffering reactions with carbon too. All the carbon entering our ocean right now, is causing rapid acidification. This causes huge problems for the ocean, including for plankton species that perform important functions in regulating our climate.

    Again, find me some previous period in geological history, in which the ocean was acidifying as rapidly as it is today, not accompanied by mass extinction of oceanic lifeforms. I’m not promising you a million dollars. You’ll do just fine without my million dollars.

    In case you didn’t notice yet: Yes, this is not a topic you can understand through Fox News soundbites, edgy memes or clever tweets by anonymous bodybuilders. You can either decide to trust that people smarter than you have already properly looked at this problem decades ago and figured out catastrophe is approaching, or you can do the work yourself.

    To me it’s pretty obvious that we’re toast. I would say that bad things are going to happen, but they are already happening. People in Uganda and other countries are already getting screwed over by massive droughts. Vulnerable species are already going extinct from the rapid change in atmospheric conditions.

    I’m pretty sure this catastrophic experiment we have unleashed on our planet will result in billions of deaths. My hope is to die with some dignity intact. It’s embarrassing that this country is still throwing billions of dollars in subsidies at fossil fuel companies.

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    2. OK so having read both, I don’t think Rintrah has done a good job rebutting JMG. Looks like JMG made a significant mistake relying on one author for one fact. Take out the said paragraph the mistake is in, and the rest of JMG’s essay still stands on its own.

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            1. Well I spent some time reading through a few of Rintrah’s posts and I think he is doing his best to explain the shit show humanity finds itself in. He’s one of a few writers that I’ve come across that has written about covid vaccine harms and is not in denial about climate change or other symptoms of overshoot. It was interesting reading the comment section. He has quite a few detractors (deniers?). I wonder if he frequents this sight occasionally. It wouldn’t surprise me.

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              1. Many people make every issue political. Experts on covid crimes frequently deny climate change because they view both as government overreach into their lives. It’s sad. Both are scientific issues, not political.

                I expect this partly explains why covid crimes are frequently dismissed as crazy talk since the same people deny climate change and vote for the enemy party.

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            2. JMG doesn’t think the climate threat is overblown. He just doesn’t think we’re all going to die next week. JMG has been warning for years about rising sea, drought, changing climate, harvest fails, mass migration, changing weather patterns, extreme weather, etc. What he has made very clear is that predictions of climate doom have a long track record of failing to appear; and that climate activism / policies have had zero measurable reduction in carbon emissions.

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                1. There are a few things making it worse at the moment:
                  – Solar maximum.
                  – Adding water vapour for 10 years follow Tongan volcano eruption – water is a potent greenhouse gas.
                  – Reduction in aerosols during covid = additional sun through the atmosphere.
                  – Regulations on shipping again reducing aerosols.

                  These factors would all balance out again over coming decades maybe?? I don’t know how to factor tipping points into this.

                  I think climate change is baked in now. I think humans will burn all the rest of the carbon we can until we collapse 😦

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    1. When I went to the RealGND site and saw that William Rees was a director, I was encouraged to explore the site. Unfortunately, nothing of real substance seems to be available without paying for a paper that outlines their recommendations. Perhaps you can summarize them for us.

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        1. Abstract

          We add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible.

          4.2. Population Reduction

          The second front in a one-Earth living strategy is a global one-child fertility standard. This is needed to reduce the global population to the one billion or so people that can thrive sustainably in reasonable material comfort within the constraints of a non-fossil energy future and already much damaged Earth [101,102]. Even a step as seemingly bold as this may be insufficient to avoid widespread suffering, as such a policy implemented within a decade or two would still leave us with about three billion souls by the end of the century [91]. Failure to implement a planned, relatively painless population reduction strategy would guarantee a traumatic population crash imposed by Nature in a climate-ravaged, fossil-energy-devoid world. (A human population crash imposed by a human-compromised environment (not Nature) may already be underway. Controversial studies have documented evidence of falling sperm counts (50%+) and other symptoms of the feminization of males, particularly in western countries, caused by female-hormone-mimicking industrial chemicals; see, for example, [103]).

          Concerns over the restriction of procreative freedom, racism, and physical coercion that dominate much of the present discourse on population reduction must be put into perspective. Population is an ecological issue that, if left unchecked, can have catastrophic consequences. The human population growth curve over the past 200 years resembles the boom, or “plague”, phase of the kind of population outbreak that occurs in non-human species under unusually favorable ecological conditions (in our case, the resource bounty made available by abundant cheap energy). Plague outbreaks invariably end in collapse under the pressure of social stress or as crucial resources are depleted [104].

          Previous cultures have recognized this fact, along with the need for population regulation, for thousands of years [105,106]. A judicious balance between the freedom and well-being of individuals and society involves knowing when to arc nimbly between these poles as circumstances change. There is perhaps no greater rallying cry for the restriction of certain individual freedoms than the imminent threat of global social–ecological collapse.
          Though it hardly seems worth stating, a universal one-child policy applied globally is not discriminatory. Moreover, it is entirely justified when the restoration of ecological integrity for the well-being of present and future generations—of humans and non-humans alike—is the motivation. Fortunately, there is a full toolbox of socially just and humane tools for bringing about the necessary population reduction [107,108]. That some inhumane practices have been used in particular circumstances historically is no reason to ignore the gravity of contemporary overshoot and the ample mechanisms available for sustainable population planning. When it comes to both the environmental and social aspects of overshoot, no other single individual action comes close to being as negatively consequential as having a child [109].

          We should note that the human population at carrying capacity is a manageable variable whose magnitude will depend, in part, on society’s preferred material standard of living. This is a finite planet with limited productive capacity. A constant, sustainable rate of energy and material throughput will obviously support fewer people at a high average material standard than it will at a lower material standard.

          We cannot stress enough that a non-fossil energy regime simply cannot support anywhere close to the present human population of nearly eight billion; this urgently necessitates reducing human numbers as rapidly as possible to avoid unprecedented levels of social unrest and human suffering in the coming decades. (This flies in the face of mainstream concerns that the falling fertility rate in many (particularly high-income) countries is cause for alarm; see, for example, [110]).

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        2. I think this is the key takeaway from the paper: “(We must) face head-on that material life after fossil fuels will closely resemble life before fossil fuels”.

          I agree, but must also point out (as does the paper) that the pre-fossil-fuel life cannot be lived by 8 billion people. World population before widespread fossil fuel use was well under a billion people and world carrying capacity was far greater then. Without fossil fuels, a couple of hundred million people is more plausible. The transition from 8 or more billion to 200 million is not going to be easy.

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          1. Bingo. This is the most important fact about our predicament, and yet only a tiny minority of people who study overshoot discuss it.

            For example, Nate Hagens, who is one of the most impressive overshoot intellectuals, has never once mentioned this, and I know because I’ve watched and read pretty much all of his work over the last 15 years. Nate also disrespects and refuses to interview Jack Alpert, who is the only overshoot intellectual that not only acknowledges this fact, but has created a plan to humanely deal with it and retain some of our best accomplishments.

            To be clear, I’m not picking on Nate. I could easily list a hundred prominent polymaths and overshoot intellectuals that never mention this fact.

            I’d say it’s more compelling evidence in support of Varki’s MORT.

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            1. I think Nate has interviewed a few people who have talked about the need for massive population reduction (Bill Rees comes to mind) and I am very familiar with Jack Alpert’s proposals for rapid population decline, but I still don’t see how it is to be done.

              Jack’s proposal is for everyone to agree that women will just stop having babies (births to go from 80 million per year to 500 thousand per year). I just don’t see a global “no babies” agreement as plausible even though it makes perfect sense.

              Everybody is now relying on the demographic transition, whereby educating girls, giving them access to paid work, and coupling these with increased affluence results in a decrease in the total fertility rate (TFR). But the TFR is creeping up again in rich countries and the environmental cost of affluence for everyone would be horrendous.

              I think we are stuck with the traditional four horsemen for our population reduction needs. The hoofbeats are already getting louder. They will be here soon.

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              1. Jack’s proposal is for most, not all, women to stop having babies. A democratic law would be passed requiring a birth permit to have a child. Any couple wanting a child would apply for a permit and once a year a fair lottery that could not be influenced with money would randomly allocate permits to about 1 in 200 applicants. We would need to do this for only about 50 years, then it would be business as usual. In return for a couple generations of sacrifice we get a healthy planet with thriving biodiversity, and a small human population that can continue with some comforts and some advanced technology for hundreds and maybe thousands of years (fyi it’ll be hundreds of years if we can’t make fusion work before the hydro dams silt in).

                Yes a few of Nate’s guests have discussed the need for population reduction but none have said, nor has Nate, that we’re on a path to a couple hundred million via horrific means as soon as oil becomes unaffordable, and there is nothing we can do to avoid this destination.

                We could reduce the suffering along the way, and perhaps retain some things worth keeping, if we proactively reduced our population rather than letting the four horsemen do it for us.

                A good first step would be to get a bunch of people with audiences, like Nate, who understand what’s going on, to speak clearly. Even if political realities prevent us from implementing policies like Jack’s lottery, just having the conversation will cause many people not to have children, which is a success because n-1 is better than n suffering.

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                1. I still think that reducing births is not the way to go to get reduced population because of the demographic problems that would result. Increasing deaths is the best strategy but I’m not offering myself up.

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            2. The idea of retaining some semblance of modern civilisation is delusional, in my opinion. Perhaps that’s why Nate won’t interview Jack? Everything we do, now, is unsustainable, embedded in an unsustainable civilisation. Civilisations will never be sustainable. This is also part of the problem with the degrowth movement, which seems to believe that it’s possible to get down to a sustainable level of economic activity and then stay there. A lot of people are in for a very rude awakening, particularly if they have a life expectancy of more than a couple of decades.

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            3. Nate has acknowledge in personal communication with me that he soft-pedals or just ignores some issues – like the coming die-off – that might turn off large audiences who might otherwise seriously consider the rest of what he says. I admit to doing that myself: in my paper you posted, I never directly discussed the die-off. We are not alone among the energy descent writer network in doing this ‘editing’ of our views when hoping for a larger audience.

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              1. I understand but I think we’re out of time to soft pedal our situation.

                We’ve tried the soft approach for over 50 years and have accomplished nothing.

                In fact less than nothing, because everything is much worse.

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        3. yes, that is a summary of realgnd and actually is the paper that got me to find the website. I did find useful information that was not ‘pay to play’.

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  21. An outstanding discussion between Robert Jungk (Futurlogist) and Ulrich Horstmann (Philosopher) about his book “the beast”.
    Unfortunately only available in german language:

    From 1991!

    https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ulrich_Horstmann

    Thought
    Horstmann puts forth the theory that mankind has been pre-programmed to eliminate itself in the course of history—and also all its memory of itself—through war (thermonuclear, genetic, biological), genocide, destruction of its sustaining environment, etc. “The final aim of history is a crumbling field of ruins. Its final meaning is the sand blown through the eye-holes of human skulls.” Through his analysis of history, he has concluded that our species is engaged in a constant process of armament, with the eventual end goal of wiping itself out through war. History, for him, is nothing more than a slaughterhouse . . . “the place of a skull and charnel house of a mad, incurably bloodthirsty slaughtering, flaying and whetting, of an irresistible urge to destroy to the last.” Although inspired by the already extreme philosophy of Philipp Mainländer, Horstmann ends up with an even more explicit solution regarding the problem of human existence. In his book The Beast he actually goes so far as to suggest the use of nuclear weapons in order to bring forth the extinction of the human race. For him only the annihilation of life would give rise to a universal redemption in which we would once again achieve the existential peace of inorganic matter. According to Horstmann’s apocalyptic vision: The true Garden of Eden is desolation

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  22. Hello again Karl,

    There is something I am wondering about, I did not pay attention to before but just noticed from the graph of the limits to growth model you shared in your post:

    Shortly before the population peak, death rates skyrocket. But birth rates too increase. Why is that? Is this a fatality, a necessity? What element of the model triggers this behaviour?
    We could well imagine both falling birth rates and increasing death rates as a preferable scenario. On the fertility front, it seems that’s actually what’s happening (even though not as quickly and despite messages against it from most governments to Rob’s despair 😉

    Do you personally think there is a reason that births increase could be a necessity? For instance, that a much rapid rate of renewal and the exploration of a highly diverse genetic combinations (at the expense of short lives) are necessary strategies for the species in order to survive a rapidly changing environment?
    Or is it just a model artifact?

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    2. System dynamics modeling of complex systems cannot make accurate predictions, such as when a variable will peak or at what level. The pioneers at MIT from which the Limits to Growth model came were explicit about that in their book. Many users of the method, such as the scientists at the IPCC, falsely assume the method can make accurate predictions far out in time in a system as complex as the earth system.

      Nor can the method predict the exact shape of a curve in a short time frame. So, to address your question, the long steep rise in birth and death rates in the time graph may be mistaken, as I and others have surmised. But like all the other variables except ‘resources’, both births and deaths must peak and fall eventually, due to the collapse of the population. The graph time frame is just too short to show it. The time frame of a century in the graph is only to give a rough idea.

      What the method can do is demonstrate the probable rough trajectory of the variables over time as they interact under a given policy scenario. Thus, in the world model, for a business-as-usual policy scenario, increasing resource consumption causes all other variables to rise. Later, increasing resource depletion must cause all the other variables to eventually peak and then fall. Even pollution!

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  23. Very good discussion with John Mearsheimer on Ukraine.

    Key points:
    1) Inviting Ukraine to join NATO in 2008 was the biggest blunder of our lifetimes.
    2) US does not pay a price for bad decisions due to its geography and economic strength. Europe (and Ukraine) will pay a big price.
    3) No peace is possible now.

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  24. Re.” Bright Green Lies ” book. I liked it, but the analysis of what they advocate is very poor.
    From the “Real Solutions ” chapter : page 433.

    “Industrial Civilisation is incompatible with life on the planet. That makes the solution to our systematic planetary murder obvious,but let’s say it anyway : Stop industrial civilisation. Stop our way of life,which is based on extraction. No,that doesn’t mean killing all humans That means changing our lifestyle dramatically.”

    No mention in the rest of that chapter (or book) of the massive human die-off that would occur if we stopped using fossil fuels . The current human population bubble only exists because of the massive energy input of fossil fuels. Stop fossil fuels now, and around 90% would be dead within a year.
    Maybe that would have been worth mentioning ?

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    1. Thanks. A lot of well-intentioned people miss the point you are making.

      I like having a dentist, eyeglasses, garbage pickup, computer, and internet. I vote for a much smaller population so we can keep them.

      People who refuse to address the population issue will be shocked when there is nothing left of modernity, nor enough food.

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      1. I like having those things too but I don’t see any way they can be retained indefinitely. None are sustainable. None can be made sustainable. Most people can’t imagine life without them (and other trappings of civilisation) and that includes me. Some of us may well have to start dealing with life without them.

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    2. Hey Begonia. This problem is well-covered in their other books, particularly Deep Green Resistance.
      Also I know Derrick and Lierre would say this – we know this system is going to collapse at some point (sooner or later). The sooner it collapses, the more of a living world there is for future generations of humans and non-humans.

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  27. Kurt Cobb with interesting comments on the Panama Canal.

    http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2023/09/climate-change-and-hidden-water-cost-of.html

    You’ve almost certainly read about the backup of ships waiting to transit the Panama Canal, which carries 6 percent of all commercial ships worldwide. While the worry among faraway readers may be concerns about supply chain disruptions that could lead to holiday shopping shortages, the problem in Panama is more immediate. The proximate cause of the backup is severe drought. That makes sense on its face because the canal is full of water and that water has to come from somewhere.

    In a tropical country with copious rainfall—260 cm (102 inches) on average for the whole country in 2021—one wonders what passes for drought. (For comparison, I used to live in Portland, Oregon, a rather damp city with 44 inches of annual rainfall.) But inadequate rain during Panama’s rainy season has left two artificial lakes which feed the canal low on water. These lakes must supply 200 million liters (53 million gallons) of fresh water for each ship that transits the canal, water that is lost to the ocean. During the Panama Canal Authority’s fiscal 2022 year more than 14,000 vessels transited the canal. This matters doubly because these lakes also supply drinking water to half of all Panamanians.

    The result is that the Canal Authority must ration water to the locks, decreasing the depth of the water and keeping many ships from carrying full loads that would cause the ships to hit the bottom of the locks. It has also had to limit the total number of ships making the trip in order to conserve water.

    The problem is not going away soon. The authority has said that restrictions on the number and draft of vessels will remain in effect through 2024.

    The canal is just one more example of infrastructure built with the idea of a stable climate in mind. Elsewhere just last year, shipping on the Rhine River was disrupted by low water levels as was a main shipping artery in China, the Yangtze River. The Mississippi River experienced low water levels in 2022 and may again experience low water this year just as the grain harvest comes in, a harvest that depends on the river to carry much of its produce.

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  29. Finally a aspiring politician you might be tempted to vote for Rob. If only we lived in the US. Well actually I’m quite happy here in NZ but would love someone / group to stand on this platform in our upcoming elections.

    https://davetheplanet2024.com/

    “On day one I’ll declare a national emergency and mobilize government, business, media and the public in an urgent project to shrink our nation’s ecological footprint:
    • contract GDP
    • decarbonize and go on an energy diet
    • work less
    • consume less
    • support and accelerate the current trend toward choosing smaller families”

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  30. Good one from Tim Watkins today reviewing what has happened to renewable energy in Europe as fossil energy prices have risen over the last few years.

    Apparently the often made claim by aware skeptics that renewable energy will become unaffordable as fossil energy becomes unaffordable is true.

    Oops, that’s a rather big mistake because our idiot leaders are wasting a precious depleting resource that should be conserved and used instead to build a softer landing zone.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/09/11/blown-out-of-the-water/

    What happened in the spring of 2020, was that governments around the planet embarked on an economically destructive series of shut-downs which played havoc with fossil fuel markets – at one point the price of oil futures went negative, leading to big falls in profits and an investment flight. So that, when economies opened up again in the autumn of 2021, there was insufficient supply to meet demand. In a market economy, that meant higher – indeed, eye-wateringly higher – prices…

    Nor have the self-destructive sanctions on Russian coal, oil, and gas helped, with prices last winter well above the previous average, and even the cheaper summer months seeing a price far above what the economy can afford.

    If, however, the renewable energy propaganda had been correct, not only should this not matter, but it ought to have led to something of a bonanza as far cheaper renewable electricity undercut fossil fuels. That is, in this moment of high fossil fuel prices, the promised ever-cheaper renewable electricity generators ought to have been raking in millions of pounds on the difference between the promised lower than £35 per megawatt hour cost and the government’s £44 per megawatt hour guaranteed price.

    Instead, companies which might otherwise have bid to build the new offshore windfarms, have been reduced to whining about the cost of steel and the growing wage bill. But these are not the only inputs which have risen in price in the past few years. As the price of fossil fuels have risen to highs not seen since the crash of 2008, so everything made from, made with, and/or transported using fossil fuels has risen accordingly. This, in turn, has highlighted renewable energy’s dirty secret… that it is intimately dependent upon fossil fuels at every stage.

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    1. James today with a very interesting explanation of the underlying forces driving what Tim Watkins observes above.

      Tainter, Ants, and EROEI

      Tainter, Ants, and EROEI

      It seems counter intuitive that falling EROEI would result in greater complexity unless the greater complexity opens new gradients more vast than the higher EROEI gradients left behind.

      I suppose the crunch comes when added complexity fails to open vast gradients of even lower EROEI energy. In this case the complexity and economies of scale fail and collapse ensues.

      Humans do not have to take on many different morphologies in their specialization like ants. Instead humans took on the attributes of RNA, reading information and producing tools, to increase their specialization and the capability to use lower EROEI gradients resulting in our current agricultural regime. Was agriculture a higher EROEI activity as opposed to hunter-gathering? Likely not, but what it lost in EROEI it more than made-up in volume. The specialization that occurs in an ants body which is determined by DNA was not the route that human evolution took. Instead evolution produced a human with a generic type bonding organ (hand) and a generic type brain in which the specialization could occur. The various types of specialized humans like plumber, doctor, lawyer etc. do not require specialized sizes and organs as in ants. The specialization occurs in the brain and depends upon which information in the human societal genome is being used. Typically the amount of time and effort a human RNA puts into mastering a segment of information will determine the amount of money or energy with which they are compensated by the technological cell in which they work.

      It may be, more or less, that we’ve reached the end of complexity’s ability to unlock a lower EROEI energy gradient in much larger amounts to sustain the existing corpus and metabolism of civilization. In that case there will be greater taxation (direct and inflation) and regimentation imposed upon the RNA citizenry as the system strives for even more complexity to unlock the required energy (fusion etc.). At some point, if more energy, even very low EROEI energy at vaster scales, is not unlocked by greater complexity, then the system will collapse. Low EROEI wind and solar at a vast scale would have some potential except that it would require more metals and energy than we have available and would be another blow to a reeling ecosystem.

      The plan it seems is to strip away much of the consumption of the working class through inflation and taxation, fifteen minute cities and “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” Rome seemed to do something similar as it was collapsing as explained by Tainter including watering-down the money supply. The existing technologies, even though they cannot open vast, new, low EROEI sources of energy, they perhaps can eliminate people directly as with bioweapons and vaccines and lock the remainder of marginal producers into poverty and hopelessness with surveillance and incarceration. Even as this is happening and infrastructure is crumbling, the technological and political leaders will continue to make investments in complexity even though most will simply be potentate-enriching boondoggles.

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      1. And Rintrah today elaborates on James’ conclusion above…

        p.s. The comments are worth scanning to understand Rintrah’s core beliefs.

        https://www.rintrah.nl/the-end-of-the-omicron-lull-back-to-virulence/

        The end of the Omicron lull: Back to virulence

        A.2.86 will circulate together now with the XBB family for the foreseeable future. To me this suggest they will be under pressure, to evolve to occupy different niches. For BA.2.86, that pressure will be much higher than for the XBB family.

        In the presence of the XBB family that occupies the upper respiratory tract, I expect that BA.2.86 will adapt to persist in the lower respiratory tract. This of course results in more virulence.

        This is sadly how things progress when our species is uncooperative and seeks to dominate the non-human world. SARS2 tends to kill the elderly and the obese. Other infected people will tend to have neurological and immunological changes, that prohibit them from working. These are effective ways of reducing the impact our species has on the biosphere. But again, I would rather see a more dignified and less cruel solution to the global ecological crisis.

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    2. You’re right, Rob. But I do wonder what a “softer landing zone” would look like. Wouldn’t that require our so-called leaders to acknowledge that industrial technological civilisation is over and the population size can’t be supported? Even if they do that (they won’t), what on earth do they suggest in its place?

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      1. It looks to me like our leaders are on the one hand attempting to take resources and to destroy demand from enemies, and on the other hand, to prepare for the day when they will require tools to prevent their citizens from revolting and eating them.

        If they were wise leaders they would do this:

        What would a wise society do?

        I’m not, but If you’re worried about causing a herd panic, then many things on this list could be done without full disclosure of why.

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        1. They seem like great things to do but they would not provide a landing, soft or otherwise. The collapse would either continue more slowly or be slightly delayed. But there would still be collapse of industrial, technological civilisation. People’s lives, in developed countries at least, would get worse, in their eyes. So those with some semblance of democracy would vote in someone who promises to make it great again.

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  31. Gail Tverberg, being an actuary, is eminently qualified to judge this recent video by Dr. John Campbell.

    …//ourfiniteworld.com/2023/08/31/fossil-fuel-imports-are-already-constrained/comment-page-7/#comment-435567

    This is a very good video. Mortality remains elevated in highly vaccinated countries. (Terrible in Australia.) John Campbell asks the question, “Why isn’t main stream media all over this issue? Why am I the only one talking about it?

    I would like to point out that our collective denial of this is a brilliant example of Varki’s MORT in action.

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    2. I’ve included a link to a recent study comparing mortality rates in unvaccinated vs vaccinated. I’ve been vaccinated seven times so it’s nice to see that vaccination is not associated with all-cause mortality increases at all and offers good protection against mortality from Covid, which has historically always been much higher in the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. Now that the unvaccinated are either dead or have had one or more Covid infections, the mortality rate from Covid is converging with that of the vaccinated.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10073592/

      I was a regular viewer of John Campbell until I started actually reading the papers he referenced in his videos. More and more frequently he misrepresented the conclusions of the paper to the point where his conclusion was nearly the opposite that of the paper. I don’t know why this trend occurred. It may be that he was better able to monetize his videos by using more dramatic language. I have come to the conclusion that Campbell’s motto is more accurately stated as “Lead the evidence to please your followers.”

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      1. It’s great to finally meet someone that is overshoot aware (and therefore probably does not have normal denial genes) with some data that might support government covid policies.

        I’ll do a little digging to see if the paper supports your conclusions, which are completely opposite to my conclusions.

        FYI, I am not vaccinated, have never been tested so do not know if I got covid, and have not had any illness since covid began.

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        1. I know numerous people that chose not to get vaccinated, which I consider a reasonable choice for those under 40 or 50 years old. The death rate for Covid goes up rapidly for every decade over 50, so the risk from Covid to me (I’m 75) with all my vaccinations is greater than for an unvaccinated person under 50 (underlying conditions being equal).

          By September 2022, 96.4% of the US population was sero-positive for Covid antibodies, either from infection or from vaccination. This means that the odds are great that you have had Covid since you have not been vaccinated. You may just not have noticed, which is also quite common, since asymptomatic cases are frequent.

          I have not been sick since the pandemic began either, but without detailed antibody analysis to distinquish between spike protein antibodies from vaccination and antibodies to the other parts of the virus from infection, I won’t know whether I have been infected or not. It is quite likely that I have, but just didn’t get sick.

          As far as government policies for pandemics go, I don’t have many complaints. Early in a pandemic, when the case fatality rate or infection fatality rate are unknown, the safest course is rigorous non-pharmaceutical interventions. This is pretty much what everyone did. Except in a few places, the NPIs kept the hospitalization rate low enough that the extremely ill could get good care and that kept the death rate as low as possible. If governments of countries with rich-world demographics (high proportion of elderly) had decided to do nothing and let the virus rip, the death rates would have been much higher, with most people dying at home without any medical care at all.

          What to me is strange is to observe what happened with lock-downs, masks and all that, see that death rates were kept low, and then claim that since the death rates were very low there had been no need to do anything.

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          1. It is remarkable how intelligent well-intentioned people like you and I can arrive at different conclusions on a science-based issue like covid.

            In the early days of covid I believe the data supported your decision to be vaccinated given that your age put you in the high risk group. Contrary to what we were told, this was solely to reduce the chance of you becoming severely ill, and had no effect on preventing transmission. They never even tested for effectiveness against transmission. Therefore there never was any scientific justification for vaccine mandates. Doubly so for young people who had zero risk from the disease, and which we now know have considerable risk from side effects.

            For me this is just the tip of the iceberg on what our “experts” got wrong on covid. They got every single one of dozens of issues exactly wrong. You can’t explain this by pure incompetence because they would have done better by flipping a coin. Some other force is in play.

            Rather than repeating myself, I compiled a list of things they got wrong here:

            What would you do?

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      2. I am not persuaded to change my views by this paper because:

        1) The only statistic I trust is all cause mortality because we know cause of death data was distorted due to financial incentives to inflate covid deaths, and because of the uncertainty/complexity of assigning cause of death to people with co-morbidities. All cause mortality is clean, simple, and difficult to screw up: you’re either dead or alive. By not focusing on all cause mortality this tells me the authors are probably trying to prove what they already believe to be true.

        2) They reviewed the death rate for vaccinated people and concluded vaccines were safe by observing the trend over 40 weeks to be flat. This is a meaningless conclusion unless you compare the death rate against unvaccinated people for the same period, which they did not do.

        3) They conveniently stopped the study at 44 weeks exactly when the graphs show the start of an upward trend in the death rates.

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        1. Hi Rob and all,

          Hope all are going well and thank you so much for the lively discussion on a wide range of as always, most pertinent topics (well, at least to this little band!)

          I, too, am more than a bit surprised that we can come to completely opposite conclusions over the same issue, but then again maybe not so unexpected given how polarized the Covid chronicles have been.

          If I may add my two cents (or brain synapses) I think there are several factors here that need to remembered when trying to dissect out the useful and robust conclusions from the morass of data. Forgive me for not providing here concrete links to substantiate what I am saying, I know that is an egregious error amongst such company as this but my aim is just to jog your memories of these considerations and there are plenty around (like el gato malo who really rallied to the cause from the first) who have presented it most substantively.

          Firstly, in many of these studies, those who received the vaccine (at any of the doses) were not considered vaccinated until 21 days past the injection. This put all of the initial risk of all adverse effects and the ultimate of all, death, into the unvaccinated arm. The spike in sudden deaths were in the first few days in most age cohorts. You can see how this sleight of hand can skew results of morbidity and mortality greatly.

          Secondly, the goal posts of what was a Covid case and what was due to underlying co-morbidities kept changing. In the beginning, anyone who died that had a positive Covid PCR test was deemed to have died from Covid, rather than from a pre-existing co-morbidity that may or may not have been exacerbated by an active Covid infection. In my medical experience (albeit short but still relevant for understanding the concepts), the primary cause of death was always the long-standing most prominent co-morbidity, such as end-stage heart disease or cancer, and secondarily the infection which may have tipped the balance. On the farthest spectrum of the most non-sensical categorisation, some people who died by homicide or motor vehicle accidents had their deaths registered as Covid deaths, because they had a positive test within a certain time frame of their demise! As we should know by now, the PCR test should never have been used for diagnosis as it effectively hyper-magnified the needle in the haystack so even minute particles of virus can register as a positive result. Later, after the vaccine roll-out, the cause of deaths were again re-aligned with the most salubrious narrative in favor of the vaccine, and co-morbidities were chosen to be referenced rather than Covid, regardless of a positive result.

          Thirdly, and in this I have a biggest bone to pick, I am thoroughly over the claim that one can have an asymptomatic infection, especially in light of the PCR technique used which is practically like conjuring up . An analogy would be that if a PCR test given enough cycles could pick out a few rogue cancer cells in my body, (which we all have at any point only to be dealt with by our functioning immune system on its regular cleaning run) then I would be deemed to have cancer, even if completely asymptomatic. The very definition of a disease state is when the body has a homeostasis imbalance and function is compromised, not just because we can isolate certain cells or even particles of cells, even if they are damaged or irregular. If so, then I and everyone else have asymptomatic everything you can name, including heart disease because of course you can find a few heart blood vessel cells in my system that have a bit of thickening. And watch out, I would also be an asymptomatic case of Golden Staph infection, as just about everyone also carries this in our microbiome flora, totally innocuous and probably beneficial until the terrain has changed and balance upset. The definition of infection as a disease state is only reached when the organism becomes symptomatic as particles of virus or bacteria or parasite are shedding, causing typical end tissue alterations and our immune system has been activated. So, counting asymptomatic PCR positive Covid as cases to bolster results for either the vaccinated or unvaccinated is not valid if we are trying to gauge real life disease, not just semantic definition.

          At the end analysis, the proof is in the pudding–all cause mortality. I am very pleased to know that all here who have gotten the shots or not are reporting generally robust health (we doomers must be a tough lot!) but that doesn’t detract from the numbers of others who have caused the graphs to skyrocket, across varied demographics. This must be explained, and the fact that neither government, academia or pharmaceutical are chomping at the bit to figure out why is more than telling. I know it’s only anecdotal, but since the vaccine roll-out in 2021, I personally know 12 people who have lost one or both of their parents. Of course they were elderly but some were previously healthy, although most had co-morbidities. All received their due doses (and here in Australia, the aged were encouraged to take every booster, I think it’s 5 shots for par now). I do not know of any sudden deaths first hand, but 3 cases through friends. The rate of deaths is greater than any other previous periods and I am not the only one to have this kind of experience.

          Just a little shout out to Mike Roberts here at the end of this usual Gaia ramble. I do hear you on sometimes just wishing that the collapse would go a bit slower than the breakneck speed we are on. I, too, am finding it very poignant to look upon the trees I have planted and some are just starting to bear fruit, and knowing that I will not be the one to reap its full bounty. But to have lived and loved and also knowing how to let go and give blessing to all of it is still our ultimate joy and gift to bestow. I cannot ask for more than what is already more than enough.

          Namaste, friends and fellow earthlings.

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          1. All excellent points Gaia however in defense of the paper Joe provided, the authors seemed to deliberately avoid the 21 day deceptive trick that was used to bias most other studies in favor of mRNA. This initially made me think their conclusion might be correct, however when I saw they did not compare against unvaccinated, did not use all cause mortality, and stopped the study when the data started to make them look bad, I changed my mind.

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            1. Thank you Rob for pointing that out to me, I did not read the paper in question but your criteria in analysis are rock-solid sound. My chirrupping was more a general one to perhaps highlight the usual booby traps of drawing conclusions amongst in-built bias.

              Stopping a study when the curve starts to turn against your conclusion is very poor form, indeed. Is the word crafty or even devious?

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              1. Kind of like when they terminated the original mRNA study after (I think) 6 months because of a “huge success” using data manipulated to make it look much better than it was, when all prior vaccines studies required many years to make the same claim, and then vaccinated the control group so there was no means of assessing what happened to effectiveness or safety after 6 months. Later we learned that effectiveness waned after 6 months. What a coincidence. Unethical assholes!

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                1. Argh! Or rather Grrrrrr! Don’t get me started (too late!) on how sickened I am about the whole Covid caper, especially since I have come from a medical background and witnessed the beyond shameful response of that sector which should have been the most upstanding champion of rightful action and dignity. In consolation, it has been a real privilege to have undergone the journey of processing the truth behind the lies with those here, many a time my sanity saved and grief assuaged through the validation, information, and support given. Thank you all.

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      3. On John Campbell, one of the main reasons I respect him is that when he makes a mistake he publicly admits it and attempts to correct going forward.

        Campbell started out a strong advocate for mRNA and then as data slowly emerged that it is neither safe nor effective, and that there are much safer and more effective alternatives, he changed his view.

        Have you attempted to point out to him any of the errors you’ve caught him making in interpreting papers? If you are correct, I’ll bet he’ll admit he made a mistake. If you are incorrect, I’ll bet he’ll politely point out your error.

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      4. Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on the (sadly, sparse) data released on COVID-19 in New Zealand. The data don’t allow a full continuing analysis of deaths but the data in January, which did, showed 96 deaths per 100K unvaccinated and 65 deaths per 100K boosted. So, only about a 50% higher risk for the unvaccinated, compared to boosted. Rather surprisingly, deaths per 100K of those who’ve had only the primary course (2 doses, or 3 for the immuno-compromised) were only 28 per 100K. This kind of comparison is similar for hospitalisations (and the data are better for that). It seems the booster has increased the risk to that of the unvaccinated (more or less). Consequently, I decided not to add to my first booster and I wish you luck.

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    1. Isn’t that normal process for empires in decline? As the “things” fail, attention/interest turns to the “not things”. Maybe they’re just ahead of the curve? I have quite a longing for some sort of religion, but in my heart I think I’m just a boring dogmatic materialist 😦

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    2. Hello Rob,

      It’s so interesting that somehow everything seems to find a time and place at the point in our lives that make the most meaning, or maybe that’s just another definition of denial!

      I may be the one to try to shed some light (or Light, as this group would say) on what I think may drive this even more rarified band than ours. I actually have some familiarity with the Law of One through my earlier explorations, which is the driving spiritual/religious tenant of this group. However, I am still preoccupied with taking care of my mother as we wrap up our holiday (during which she has caught a cold, not Covid I’m sure! and not the happiest camper at the moment, unfortunately) and then we will be returning to Tasmania so I will probably be off-line for a while as I change gears. But I will try to attend to your request as soon as I can, it may fit into another response.

      In any case, I believe the aspect of having a spiritual seeking is very soothing and purposeful at this time. Others whom you admire for their scientific and rational approach have also intimated this, and I know Nate has too, through some of his own comments and his interviewees.

      Namaste. This is not a Law of One ritual greeting per se, but just the word I have chosen to express the “I see you” feeling I wish to cultivate for everyone. That idea is very much part of the Law of One, for all is One.

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    1. OK, last comment from me on Covid (or Ukraine).

      From the Washington Post:

      The newly formulated vaccine is a monovalent, with a single component designed to target an omicron variant called XBB.1.5. Previous boosters, which were bivalents, aimed to counter the original coronavirus strain and the BA.4 and BA.5 variants — all long gone.

      The XBB.1.5 variant accounts for a small proportion of the cases in the United States, but it is closely related to the other XBB variants making up most cases now. That includes EG.5, the most prevalent variant at the moment and responsible for more than 21 percent of cases, according to the CDC. Tests show the new shot will protect against EG.5 and similar variants, health officials said.

      In addition, new data from Pfizer and Moderna and independent scientists suggests the shot will protect against the closely watched BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant that some scientists initially worried could evade protections from vaccines or earlier infections. New studies indicate the variant is not as dangerous as feared.

      My interest in un-Denial is primarily for its coverage of overshoot and civilizational collapse. I’ve been prepping for both for many decades now. My interest is in figuring out the timing of likely tipping points and best practices for advance community preparation for the disintegration of the state (the US for me).

      While Ukraine poses some massive geopolitical risks, those risks would only rival overshoot if they resulted in a big nuclear exchange.

      Covid had modest potential to crash the world economy and instigate collapse, but it didn’t pan out that way (yet?).

      I have my views on both, but to me they are a distraction from more important issues.

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      1. Unfortunately the Washington Post has completely discredited itself on all things covid and cannot be trusted. They print whatever pharma, who buys ads from them, tells them to print.

        Why is the Washington Post not investigating and reporting on:
        – US funding of virus at Wuhan lab
        – Fauci’s involvement in covering up lab leak
        – blocking of safe and effective alternate treatments
        – all-cause mortality vaxed vs. un-vaxxed
        – mRNA harms orders of magnitude higher than any previous vaccine
        – censoring of dissenting experts

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        1. I suppose the same goes for all the other periodicals I subscribe to: NYT, Guardian, Economist, Atlantic, Scientific American, Science News, In These Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian. What print sources do you trust, if any?

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          1. Covid is a unique and VERY troubling issue. Pretty much everything we were told by authorities was not true, and most decisions made were not supported by our epidemic experience or science. There was much unnecessary death and harm.

            Authorities are covering their asses now. For good reason. Many should be in prison.

            I don’t read the journals you listed because they are not focused on the important issues:

            1) who is responsible for the gain of function research that caused covid?
            2) what are we doing to prevent a recurrence?
            3) why did we block safe, effective, and inexpensive alternate treatments that could have prevented most deaths?
            4) why did we vaccinate billions in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine when we knew this would create variants?
            5) why did we force an unproven novel vaccine technology with serious side effects that did not prevent transmission on groups that had zero risk from the virus?
            6) why did we not promote effective prevention measures like vitamin D?
            7) why are we not investigating increased all-cause mortality that appears to be correlated with mRNA vaccination?

            I trust intelligent experts with integrity. These are people that seek truth and that acknowledge and self-correct when they make mistakes. It takes a lot of time and effort to qualify these people.

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      1. Yeah, the last 3 super El Nino’s saw the first year marking a record temperature and the following year exceeding that. It looks like we could end this first year at a large bump in temp, making next year almost unimaginable, if it is a super El Nino. Let’s hope not.

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          1. No, I’m just adding to what Joe said. Although I meant to write “the last 2 super el Ninos” (don’t know about the one before that). In those, global temps reached a new record in the first year but only by a small margin over the previous record. It was the second year which showed the biggest increase. The way things are going, this el Nino might show a big increase over the previous record in the first year and so I’d be wary of what could happen next year, when the full effects would be seen.

            El Nino adds a big temporary boost to temps but on top of an increasing background trend that could make of some scary effects which will be a harbinger of what a more normal year might look like. In some ways, I hope it does produce some horrendous weather events as it just might wake up more people to what is happening. The 2016 record year was actually matched in 2020, so an exceptional temperature didn’t take long to become a “normal” year.

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          2. El Nino is just the warm water of the equatorial Pacific sloshing back and forth. Normal trade winds are east to west and they tend to push warm surface water in the tropics to the west. This water pools in the western Pacific, with much of it being pushed below the surface where it does not interact with the atmosphere. This is La Nina and it results in cooler than average atmospheric temps (or less of an increase from gradual warming due to higher CO2 levels).

            Sometimes the trade winds weaken and westerly winds push the warm blob of water to the east. In so doing, much of the warm water that had been below the surface is pulled up to the surface and exposed to the atmosphere. This is El Nino and it results in warmer than average atmospheric temps.

            As Mike said, all these up and down fluctuations in temperature are against a background of gradually rising temperatures. El Nino gives us a “sneak peak” at what the average temperature will be in a few years.

            The ENSO phenomenon means that in our warming climate the increase in temperature goes up in a kind of stair step rather than a smooth annual increase.
            The main thing is not to confuse the abrupt jump in temperature from El Nino with accelerating background warming or the cooler temperatures of La Nina with “there is no warming”. The super El Nino of 1998 was so extreme that average atmospheric temperatures didn’t “catch up” until almost ten years later and many climate change deniers used the pause as evidence to declare that there was no warming.

            Here’s a somewhat dated (2017) report that shows the effect of El Nino on monthly air temps.

            https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/201703/supplemental/page-2

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  37. Our western leaders have been streaming to Ukraine persuading/preparing them to accept a ceasefire at current battlelines.

    No one seems to have thought it might be a good idea to ask the Russians what they think about this idea.

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-says-ukraine-only-likely-092608302.html

    Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday indicated he was bracing for a long war in Ukraine, saying that Kyiv could use any ceasefire to rearm and that Washington would continue to see Russia as an enemy no matter who won the 2024 U.S. election.

    Speaking for several hours at an economic forum in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok, Putin said Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian forces had so far failed and the Ukrainian army had sustained heavy losses of 71,000 men in the attacks.

    Only when Ukraine was exhausted when it came to men, equipment and ammunition would it talk peace, he said in reply to questions from a Russian television presenter acting as a moderator.

    Our western leaders are morons.

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  39. The unspeakable evil continues. Our “leaders” make me sick.

    Has anyone seen any rational explanation for injecting a new untested version of mRNA who’s predecessor has known serious side-effects into children who have zero risk of serious illness from the virus?

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  40. Xraymike79 today with a recap of climate change & overshoot.

    Homo Sapiens Are Working Overtime to Join ‘The Great Silence’

    Surely no one in charge can truly believe with a strait face that humans can maintain their overpopulated numbers even to mid century, let alone sustain any sort of organized society by century’s end. At least one scientist is on the right track in voicing the inevitability of a major human population correction. We’ll leave behind a rather toxic but interesting fossil layer in the geologic strata for the Anthropocene epoch of Fire and Flood.

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    1. Thanks. The essay seemed balanced and there was nothing I disagreed with. They did not however address what I consider to be the key issue in the Ukraine conflict.

      Our goal should be to avoid a shooting war between the superpowers because that could lead to a nuclear war that would destroy us all. Every superpower has red lines that must not be crossed.

      We know from history that a red line for the US is Russian weapons in Cuba. I expect Russian weapons in Canada or Mexico would also be red lines.

      One of Russia’s red lines is western weapons in Ukraine. They warned us many times not to cross this red line and we ignored them.

      I expect US military activity in Taiwan is a red line for China.

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    1. I take it soot from increased forest fires is not enough to compensate for us removing Sulphur from ship fuel?

      It will be interesting to see what happens when we enter a deep depression and aerosols decrease further because much industry shuts down.

      “This is crazy,” you must be saying, “why don’t you measure the aerosol climate forcing, instead of this round-about inference via detailed effect on EEI and absorbed solar energy?”

      Good question.

      The short answer is that we (the first author and others) tried, but, in career-long failure could not persuade NASA to fly a small satellite with the two instruments (a high precision polarimeter and an infrared spectrometer) needed to monitor the aerosol and cloud microphysics that define the aerosol climate forcing. The short explanation is that NASA preferred large, slow, multi-billion dollar missions as needed to support the budgets of the large NASA Centers. Throw in a climate denier NASA Administrator, who, in angry response to our persistence, struck out the first line of the NASA Mission Statement “To Understand and Protect the Home Planet.”

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  43. What an amazing mind Dr. Robert Sapolsky has! It’s also clear Sapolsky is overshoot aware.

    I’m looking forward to his new book on free will. His last book on behavior was superb.

    This interview is deep and will require many listens.

    My assignment is to try to integrate Dr. Varki’s MORT theory with Sapolsky’s no free will theory because I’m pretty sure both are true and must be related.

    P.S. Sapolsky offered some interesting food for thought on Ukraine. He says the war has nothing to do with NATO encroachment and has everything to do with Slavic tribes hating each other. Although I suppose Ukraine’s desire to join NATO and Russia’s desire to prevent it has everything to do with them hating each other. Too bad Sapolsky did not elaborate.

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    1. This was spectacular. His book is on my must read next list after I finish Bright Green Lies. My wife took a class from him 50 years ago. She liked him but vehemently disagrees with his ideas on Free Will (of course she would, that is how they train lawyers (how I was trained in law also)). I can see his empirical marshalling of data as the basis for his refutation of any religion, soul, agency, or Free Will. As much as I emotionally don’t like what he is saying it makes intellectual sense. It would be interesting if he would be amenable to MORT (since we are only physical and our brains (and actions) are an emergent property of them)?
      I think his comment on Ukraine was just a toss off and was not looking at other motivations that are also present.
      AJ

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    2. I loved the free will bit. If it’s true (and I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be) then it doesn’t even matter if people understood MORT. Nothing can be changed, except by external forces (e.g. environmental collapse) and understanding the drivers will not change things. Of course, in the detail, the knowledge will change the course of events somewhat but the ultimate course will remain unaltered. We will never know what awareness of “no free will” and of MORT by everyone in the world would do, but that is well into the hypothetical/speculation area. I think Sapolsky’s ideas on this fit in very well with my thoughts on humans being a species, acting like other species.

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    3. I just wanted to add one thing, with logical reasoning “why can’t both be true?” Ukraine and Russia can have BOTH Slavic tribal tensions and NATO interference. In fact (well demonstrated through colonial history) empires often exploit tribal conflict to their own advantage…..

      As that little kid on TV always said, “Porque no los dos?”

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  44. He’d be less angry if he understood MORT.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/its-already-here-but-youre-too-dumb-to-see-it/

    It’s already here, but you’re too dumb to see it

    What amazes me is that people are not worried. So far, Canada’s wildfires have emitted 410 megatons of carbon. The previous record was in 2014, when the fires emitted 138 megaton. The wildfires in Canada this year emitted more carbon than German fossil fuels do. They tell you that the carbon will be sucked up again when the trees regrow. But this takes decades to happen. Before that time you’re going to be faced with more fires like this.

    As you lose the trees, the carbon in the soil becomes vulnerable. Canada has 384 billion tonnes carbon stored in peatland and other soils. So far, humanity has burned 681 billion tonnes of carbon through fossil fuels. In other words, Canada has huge amounts of carbon in its soils that it can introduce into the atmosphere, once the trees that keep this carbon in place are lost.

    But the bigger question to ask yourselves is what happens to all these black carbon particles, the dark soot that enters the air. When the forests in Canada burn, black soot tends to end up on the Greenland ice sheet. This absorbs sunlight, thus warming up the ice sheet and increasing surface melt.

    Canada has now lost 5% of its forest coverage, in a single year. Outside Canada, hardly anyone is paying attention to this. We hear about Greece, Libya and Maui, because people are dying there. But in Canada, the nightmares of tomorrow are being born right now. This is positive feedback. It’s what we were being warned about decades ago.

    This is why the original goal more than thirty years ago was to keep global warming below 1 degree Celsius. Above 1 degree Celsius they realized there was a risk of setting off chain reactions by destabilizing ecosystems. Unfortunately, the world went with Nordhaus’ 2 degree target. This target was not based on scientific understanding of how ecosystems function. It was based on an economist doing some back of the envelope math.

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  45. https://metatron.substack.com/p/massive-mortality-signal-in-young

    … the actual number of deaths in 15 to 44 year olds that occurred that week was 405 (up from 293 in 2018 and 2019)…

    This is a 6-sigma event.

    This is “unprecedented”. The chance of this happening without something causing it would be 500 million-to-1.

    So, what did cause it?

    Here’s a clue: it wasn’t COVID.

    Here’s another clue: it was the “vaccine”.

    And finally, why won’t this question be answered by the ONS? Because they never asked the question. If you don’t look (properly), there’s never anything to see.

    The first false narrative was the virus is unassailable, we have to stay in lockdown and be fearful. The second false narrative is take a vaccine, it’s safe and effective. We are now seeing a third false narrative. The third false narrative is: it’s not the vaccine causing these problems, it’s covid.

    Don’t fall for the false narrative. The medical literature at this point in time is compelling. The Bradford-Hill criteria for causality have been fulfilled. The vaccines are causing this enormous wave of illness.

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  46. Hi Karl

    You might like this podcast from Death In the Garden:
    https://deathinthegarden.substack.com/p/56-chris-smaje-being-a-good-keystone#details

    “On this episode of “Death in The Garden,” we spoke to author and farmer Chris Smaje about his new book Saying No to a Farm-Free Future which was written in response to George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. We talk about the dangers of the ecomodernist worldview, about how the narrative of progress inhibits practical solutions, and we discuss at length the importance of moving towards agrarian localism as a lifeway in order to weather the coming storms. We talk about the precariousness of urbanization, and how moving toward a more rural, local society offers resiliency. We talk about the issue of decoupling humans from nature, and how it’s imperative that we re-couple humans with nature in order to create a sustainable society. We talk about the problems with precision fermentation, as well as transitioning to a carbon-free society under the high-energy lifestyles we have today. We discuss at length what it means to become a good keystone species, and how doing so simultaneously heals our spiritual and cultural ills while also healing the environment. We discuss all of these topics in relation to Maren’s essay, The Quantitative Cosmology.”

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  47. So many feedback loops…

    resource depletion -> rising energy price -> excess debt -> reduced growth -> money printing -> inflation -> higher interest rates -> deflation -> money printing -> deflation -> money printing – > BOOM

    energy scarcity -> lockdowns -> work from home -> commercial real estate crisis -> debt defaults -> money printing -> BOOM

    energy scarcity -> attempt Russia regime change -> Ukraine war -> Russia winning -> NATO escalates -> nuclear weapons -> BOOM

    climate chaos – > food shortages -> refugees -> social unrest -> despot -> war -> BOOM

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  48. Kunstler nails the key question that I have been asking for a long time.

    Are our leaders idiots or evil?

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/boldly-into-the-chaos/

    It’s hard to say which of their insults is the worst, they are all so gross and arrant, but the untruths around the Covid-19 vaccine operation seem the most conspicuously sinister. CDC director Mandy K. Cohen is still pushing these shots for all Americans down to six-month-old babies, despite a freight train of evidence that they are useless for preventing the disease and blatantly harmful, especially for children. She is either very stupid, dangerously wicked, or insane. You decide:

    The Ukraine war caper has pretty clearly lost its appeal as a supposed crusade for “democracy.” The yellow and blue flags vanished from the front porches and car bumpers months ago. It was a lie from the get-go that we have any national interest in that sad sack country. Our own government engineered the fiasco, and from every angle it has been a dead loss for all parties on our side. Ukraine has been reduced to a failed state in-waiting; Euroland has sacrificed its industrial economy for nothing; and the USA has squandered its last bits of prestige among other nations in this ignominious game of Lets You and Him Fight. Also, Americans have begun to notice that the billions funneled into Mr. Zelensky’s cadre of neo-Nazis and kleptocrats is money that is not going to places like East Palestine, Ohio, Lahaina, Maui, and the towns along our tortured southern border from Matamoros to Tijuana. Even the people who supposedly elected “Joe Biden” are becoming a little concerned about blundering into World War Three over the mess created by Victoria Nuland & Company.

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    1. She might have been doing it from the beginning of the video – I noticed at the 4 minute 10 second mark, that she is speaking positively about the vaccines “… right now you can get your updated covid vaccine, can get your flu shot and for older adults you can get protected against RSV ….” but her head is emphatically nodding “NO”.

      So I’m leaning toward she is profoundly, comprehensively, evil. The whole system is catastrophically broken.

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    2. I don’t think she’s evil. I think she just denies reality because reality is unpleasant. You could show her studies that give weight to the argument that covid vaccines are useless and probably harmful and her eyes would glaze over. It’s no different than trying to teach a creationists about evolution.

      The whole covid debacle makes me angry but I feel pity and sadness at the same time. Cohen is really no different than my mother or many close friends. I think she genuinely believes bullshit.

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      1. Good point. It was a brilliant sales strategy to name the novel mRNA technology a vaccine when it had zero in common with the traditional vaccines that we learned to trust over the last century. But now they have destroyed trust in all vaccines for many including myself. I no longer believe a word they say about anything. That’s a very bad thing for society.

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        1. It’s one thing to lie, for example, about statin efficacy and safety when the only person you harm is the person that believes your lie.

          It’s another thing to lie about mRNA efficacy and safety and thus destroy trust in all vaccines which could harm everyone if we someday encounter a deadly virus.

          Shame on them all.

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          1. Rintrah advises us to stay focused on the core mRNA issue. Other comments on this thread are also interesting.

            https://www.rintrah.nl/the-first-signs-of-increasing-virulence/#comment-8676

            Honestly, you’re all so worried about the vaccines not being what you’re told they are, that you seem to be missing the stupidity and recklessness of what they actually are.

            That’s why you’re all wandering into what are effectively dead end streets: Graphene, myocarditis in teenage boys, genome integration, DNA in the shots, hot loads, etcetera.

            The real problem is that these vaccines are doing exactly what they are designed to do: Induce an IgG antibody response against the Wuhan spike protein, at supraphysiological levels high enough to prevent infection.

            But what they are designed to do is extremely stupid, so stupid it almost looks like malice.

            What they are designed to do is not how your body protects you from an RNA respiratory virus capable of potent interferon suppression and rapid reinfection.

            That’s why this virus keeps reinfecting everyone. It’s also why we have millions of deaths and millions of disabled people.

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  49. Have you noticed that many of our best overshoot minds are spending a lot a time discussing genetic reality denial without realizing that’s what they’re discussing?

    So sad so few understand the biology of our behavior as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki.

    Today it’s Dr. Tim Morgan’s turn.

    #261: The post-truth economy

    #261: The post-truth economy

    THE UNTENABLE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

    There’s a plausible case to be made that we’re living in a “post-truth” age, and have been doing so since well before that term was “word of the year” for 2016 in the Oxford English Dictionary.
    This is certainly true of the economy. The consensus narrative – propounded by decision-makers in government and business, supported by the economic orthodoxy, seldom questioned by the mainstream media and seemingly accepted by a majority of the general public – is that we can rely on an infinite continuity of economic growth.

    Today’s economic problems, we are told, stem from the simple bad luck of a pandemic and a war in Eastern Europe. There is, then, no connection to a quarter-century of economic deceleration which we have tried to counter with ever more reckless financial policies.

    It’s important to note that, whilst increasing numbers of people question the fairness, and indeed the honesty, with which the proceeds of growth are distributed, few seem to doubt the supposed underlying reality of economic growth itself.

    This ‘consensus narrative’ is based on four propositions, each of which is false. The first of these ‘props’ is the assurance of the economic orthodoxy that sustained (as opposed to temporary) economic contraction not only isn’t happening, but can’t happen. The second prop, backing up the first, is the assertion that, aside from temporary interruptions, we’ve been experiencing near-continuous growth for as long as anyone can remember, and are still enjoying this same growth today.

    The third prop is that renewable energy will carry on getting cheaper almost indefinitely, enabling us to transition away from climate-harming fossil fuels without any impairment to economic prosperity. Much of this assurance rests on the fourth prop, which is unbounded faith in the limitless potential of technology.

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  50. Congrats, America 🥂We Made it! Government Debt Spikes past $33 Trillion: +$1.6 Trillion since Debt Ceiling, +$2.2 Trillion from Year Ago

    The total US national debt spiked by $1.58 trillion since the debt ceiling was lifted, and by $2.16 trillion from a year ago, to $33.04 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s figures this afternoon.

    This $2.2 trillion added debt over the past 12 months reflects the current tsunami of deficit-spending. Deficit spending is stimulative for the economy, so this is great news for economic growth – if that’s all you look at – but this additional demand also adds fuel to inflation, and the debt pileup is an intractable horror show for the future.

    If the government runs those kinds of deficits where the debt spikes by $2.2 trillion in 12 months, what will the debt do if there ever is an economic downturn, when deficits typically blow out further as outlays rise and tax receipts plunge? That was a rhetorical question.

    To what extent do interest payments eat up tax revenues? That’s the measure that matters the most. The measure of tax revenues in the chart below – total tax revenues minus contributions to social insurance and some other factors – is what’s available to pay for regular government expenditures, including interest expense. The ratio spiked to 36.2% in Q2 – we discussed this and other factors of the burden of interest payments here.

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  51. Dr. Tom Murphy today explores whether civilization and modernity were inevitable.

    He dislikes the term “anthropocene” because modernity will be such a brief event in the geologic record, much like an asteroid impact, that our modern lifestyles will appear as a think black line in future sediments and thus do not represent an era.

    His most interesting observation was that we didn’t need fossil energy for our population to become a problem. Agriculture alone was enough, it just would have taken longer.

    I note that all good paths require population control.

    I wanted to ask Murphy if he thought modernity could be sustainable al la Alpert if we could find a way to reduce and constrain our population. Unfortunately he has disabled comments on his site.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/was-modernity-inevitable/

    Let’s now turn to the question of whether modernity had to develop. For me, the start of agriculture marks the most important break with earlier ways, setting the stage for modernity. I say this largely because of the speed with which things changed once agriculture had taken root. It took only several thousand years for the “technology” of agriculture to explode into modernity, whereas fire, for instance, has been used by humans for over a million years without a similar result.

    Was agriculture itself inevitable? The fact that it started independently in various regions during the most recent period of post-glacial climate stability says something. Also, humans have always had a close relationship to plants, from which all nutrition springs. Humans are observant creatures, and have long known what seeds do. So it seems bizarre to me to think that no humans would eventually experiment with agriculture and elaborate it to the stage where most nutrition came from that channel.

    The point I want to make is that even without the advances of recent centuries, population growth was on track for human domination of the planet (thus, large scale ecological harm) in a time that is still short compared to the duration of hunter-gatherer humans on the planet. Agriculture lit a fuse. The various advancements in more recent times simply accelerated the process—dramatically.

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    1. I disagree somewhat with Murphy. My definition of “modernity” includes industrializing by the use of exosomatic energy from heat engines. Heat engines were possible without fossil fuels, but they could never have become a dominant force in economic activity if they had to be fueled by wood.

      Wood was already becoming scarce prior to the fossil fuel era and using wood to fire heat engines would have rapidly caused extensive environmental destruction and the collapse of any culture that tried to use wood for heat engines at scale.

      The use of wood as the primary source of heat is therefore self-limiting and localized, meaning that environmental destruction is not likely to occur over the entire planet at any one time. A society may expand its population, industrialize a little, burn up all the available forests and collapse. After collapse, the regional forests would regrow. Other societies, on the other side of the world, would be at different stages in the process. The net loss of carbon to the atmosphere from wood burning would be limited and unlikely to cause significant climate warming.

      Fossil fuels change the entire dynamic. They allow heat engines, and modernity, to expand to such a gigantic scale that global population soars and environmental destruction happens all over the world. Without fossil fuels, the planet would have accommodated humans, and their agriculture, just fine.

      So, while “modernity” might have been inevitable, without fossil fuels it would never have made a big impact on the life of the average person, or the ecosphere.

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      1. There is abundant evidence that agriculture is the start of a process that ends in ruin. Look at what remains now of the fertile crescent,or the eroded rocky hills of the mediterranean that tourists find so pleasing, that were once densely forested with deep soils in place. If the rate of soil erosion is greater than the rate of soil formation, the end is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time. Whether the erosion is by wind or water, few regions do not face this predicament. When combined with irrigation in low rainfall regions, soil salination is another soil-destroying process . One with Nineveh. Combine that with the resource sinks of cities that developed after agriculture, and the end of the civilisation that developed from that agricultural base is inevitable.
        The hunter-horticultural societies, such as those in the amazon, with no cities and small pockets
        of bananas or cassava or seeds of selected fruit trees planted through the forest, are a different category.
        David Higham.

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        1. The informed estimates of the rate of planetary soil erosion of agricultural land are between 25 and 75 billion tonnes per year The informed estimates of the rate of soil formation of that same area are around 2.5 billion tonnes per year.
          D.H.

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        2. You’re right, David, about the destructive potential for agriculture, but like wood-powered modernity, a destructive agricultural civilization is likely to be localized. And some agricultural civilizations have been able to last for many thousands of years without destroying the land that underpinned them (China and Egypt for example).

          In any case, we wouldn’t need to have this conversation if the world were in the condition it was in 1700, even after thousands of years of sometimes destructive agriculture. If the ecosphere could be returned to that condition, everyone would breath a big sigh of relief.

          It’s also important to remember that even with all the environmental destruction humans were causing since the beginning of the Holocene, oceans and forests around the world were still soaking up carbon and temperatures were gradually declining, which would have eventually led to new ice age. If humans are not doing enough to muck up Milankovitch cycles, everything is probably OK.

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          1. A couple of points which you no doubt know, but I’ll just state them here :
            Re. China: They evidently were aware of the trap of cities converting cyclic nutrient systems
            into linear systems, and attempted to mitigate this with the laborious process of transporting human waste from the cities back to the agricultural land which supplied
            the food to those cities. When you take into consideration the other resources supplying those cities none of which can ever be be recycled to the source with 100% efficiency,
            it would still be a process of eventual decline.

            Re. Egypt. It’s true that the agricultural system there would have continued for a very long time, as the Nile floods deposited soil eroded from the Ethiopian highlands each year
            The exception rather than the rule.

            And of course, many cities have been built on formerly productive agricultural land near rivers. What works in a smaller scale system (a village near a river ) doesn’t work when
            the land near the river is not supplying the food anymore.
            D.H.

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    2. There are essentially two requirements for sustainability. The first is to not consume any resource beyond its renewal rate. The second is that environmental damage is kept to a level that nature can assimilate.

      The first requirement means that any society that relies on consumption of non-renewable resources can’t be sustainable. It also means that renewable resource consumption must be kept below the renewal rate. This may have to be adjusted from time to time, so there would need to be good science on the current renewal rate of all resources the society relies on. The second requirement may be more difficult to pin down but I think it implies that we have to stop any damage, periodically, to allow nature to recover. That may mean a nomadic existence.

      I just can’t see how a modern society can be made sustainable but would be happy to be shown that it’s possible.

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      1. I think time needs to be included in the definition of sustainability.

        Using your definition nothing in the universe is sustainable because the stars are consuming non-renewable hydrogen.

        Compare an advanced civilization of 100 million people reliant on fossil fuels that would be exhausted in 16,000 years with the current 8 billion people reliant on fossil fuels that will be exhausted in 200 years. I consider the former reasonably sustainable. A lot can happen in 16,000 years, including possibly mastering fusion. If we fail at fusion and have to revert to wood there will be plenty of forests with 100M people.

        The solution to pollution is dilution. On a finite planet dilution requires a small population. As long as we behaved responsibly with our really toxic waste the planet could handle the waste of 100M people, even without sewage treatment plants. CO2 would be no problem.

        All good paths start with rapid population reduction.

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        1. The point about time is a good one. You can define sustainability for a certain period of time.
          Just as in science and technology, where some things are viewed linearly in sections to make them easier. Temporarily, societies can be viewed as sustainable.

          But in the long run, there can never be such a thing as sustainability because the whole universe is a dissipative system and consumes itself. This is because the dynamics in the world are driven by imbalances that strive to balance each other out. Without imbalances there is no dynamic, no flow. Without potential there is no voltage, without voltage there is no current. And when all imbalances are balanced, the world is dead and undefinable.

          The second law trumps sustainability.

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          1. True, nothing can ever be sustainable for the life of the planet. The resource use and environmental damage factors would need to be reviewed on an ongoing basis. Eventually, the environment will be perturbed by external forces that humans have no agency over, and the notion of sustainability will be pointless. But that’s a very long way ahead (probably far longer than 16,000 years!).

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        2. Well, yes, if sustainability over some period of time is the goal then a higher non-renewable resource consumption may be possible but not renewable resource consumption or the environmental damage factor. However, such a society then condemns those who come later (16,000 years later) to having to figure out a truly sustainable life. Of course, trying to think about such a long term is hard, so it’s easier not to. A lot can happen in 16,000 years but no-one know what. Our situation could be a lot worse. In fact, we know that mastering fusion, in your example, could be disastrous for other species. But with only 100m of our species, maybe not.

          The upshot is that without some way to know the future, it’s best not to apply a time limit to sustainability. If society is sustainable, that means it can continue indefinitely and its members don’t have to keep their fingers crossed that someone in the future will think of something. Population is not a factor in a sustainable society because it will have to be at sustainable levels, depending on the state of the local environment in which that society exists.

          Not that a sustainable society could ever be considered modern. It would be part of a climax ecosystem, that’s all. It’s a pipe-dream, of course.

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  52. We often hear about the risks of nuclear power plants when we become too poor or lack diesel to properly maintain them.

    You don’t hear too much about hydro dam risks. This video does a nice job of explaining the risks created by old age, insufficient funds for maintenance, and increased rainfall due to climate change.

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  53. I wonder if the Mormons would let me join them given that I know God was created by a mutation in an ape to deny mortality (and other unpleasant realties)?

    https://energyskeptic.com/2023/want-to-survive-peak-everything-become-a-mormon/

    This post excerpts the parts about the Mormons, who are better prepared than preppers because they are a community, they are organized, many families have a year of food stocked up, the LDS church is one of the largest farm and ranch owners in the U.S., and their culture and belief system are wired towards survival after their difficult history of attacks from Christians wherever they moved.

    This ultra patriarchial men-get-their-own-planet-and-many-wives sci-fi religion may not appeal to most people, but other aspects of helping one another, sharing, cooperation and more will be key to not only surviving the endless depression ahead, but to making it meaningful, rewarding, and in many ways better than the texting on phone social media isolation of today.

    What Koppel misses though is that this is a permanent emergency, the grid can’t stay up without fossil fuels, especially natural gas to balance and provide peak power. But also coal to make steel and other metals, and above all oil, for mining trucks and supply chains. If oil peaked in 2018 then the end of the grid is in sight. No matter how much freeze-dried food or MRE’s were stockpiled, that doesn’t get around the carrying capacity of the U.S. being around 100 million or less without fossil fuels.

    The only real actions to take are limiting immigration to 100,000 a year or less, encouraging one child per woman (or less), organic agriculture, breeding horses and oxen. That is politically impossible, nor would people give up their Star Trek hopes, and capitalism depends on endless growth, perhaps unable to cope with shrinkage, which is what is required above all – less consumption.

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  54. Diesel is one of the most important things to watch because everything we need to survive depends on it.

    https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/russia-imposes-temporary-restrictions-fuel-exports-2023-09-21/

    Russia has temporarily banned exports of gasoline and diesel to all countries outside a circle of four ex-Soviet states with immediate effect in order to stabilise the domestic market, the government said on Thursday.

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    1. When SHTF I can imagine much gasoline that can be conserved such as using public transit or bicycles, work from home, no more Sunday drives, park all the sports boats, power toys, snowmobiles, etc.

      I don’t see similar easy savings for diesel.

      I’m thinking a little diesel scarcity may produce big impacts quickly.

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      1. In a world where each county/region cuts global supply chains? The U. S./Canada is set pretty well.

        Smaller ( and some not so small) tractors are often gas powered, and a transition to less fossil fuels will likely mean shifting ag equipment so more of them are gas powered as the diesel fraction declines (until it all runs out and we then farm with horses). Most U.S. crude is too light to distill much diesel, we get a lot of that from the oil we import.

        Cold chains- yes, cold stored food will become rare and different as electrical costs go up, or electricity gets sporadic or goes away. We have a root cellar, which helps with root crops, but we will need to start canning meat or smoke cure.

        At the individual level, we can produce from our garden, dehydrate, and store grain and dry beans in sealed buckets, so it’s pretty easy to work on personal (short term) food security. Our fruit and nut trees and large garden are our long term food resource.

        The other key Mormon strategy is local cooperation/coordination. Us heathens would do well to emulate that part of their doctrine. There will be no help from on high.

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        2. We use a gasoline powered BCS walk behind tractor at the farm I assist. It works well but I can’t see us feeding 8 billion if all farms switched away from their giant diesel tractors and combines.

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          1. Our tractor is a walk behind BCS, with the efficient Honda engine. I love it.

            But there are bigger tractors that are gas fueled, just not the giant ones. As a kid, our “big” tractor could pull a four bottom plow, and that was big enough. A transition back is doable, and would extend fossil fueled ag for another while, as TPTB will try mightily to keep everyone fed.

            And no we can’t feed 8 billion, with peak phosphorus, increasing cost of Haber Bosch inputs, all the other limits we are up against, but then, we won’t have to………..

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  55. This is heady news indeed, sure to cause immediate repercussions and possibly signalling of other countries sooner than later withholding their needed resources, such as India with their rice. It makes sense that in times of scarcity and further eroding of the monetary system, each country keeps what they need in their own hoard, being a real physical asset already in their control. What will imaginary number dollars actually represent when SHTF, better to have the goods in hand than sent off to another country that may end up an adversary?

    I am relatively new to the fossil fuel processing flowchart but to my understanding, gasoline is the first cab off the rank in the refining process so no matter how much diesel we need, we will still have gasoline as a product, am I correct in this? Unfortunately, most of our trucks and heavy machinery for agriculture and mining are diesel based. So perhaps a wise thing to do is to think about repurposing our Sunday pleasure vehicles into usable farm machinery? Surely a little car engine that harnesses a couple hundred horsepower can be outfitted to pull a plow? We will need the grunt as we don’t and won’t have hundreds of millions of draft animals at the ready. I know I’m just spinning my wheels here at the fortune of doom but since we can still use our brains and other remaining resources to make things less bad, we may as well try to come up with ideas with that intention.

    I haven’t forgotten about my offer to explain the Law of One, Rob, but I see you are being fickle with your religious persuasions and are now tempted into joining the Latter Day Saints. (Big smiley face here) There is a very robust Mormon presence around us in this area of Tasmania and I know for a fact they are well stocked for any immediate crisis (minus the guns of those in America, thankfully!) However, it is still short term thinking when total collapse is the scenario. Here we also have many cattle and sheep so I can imagine there will be plenty of char-grilling of meat to feed hungry hordes, as the Bible states many times, this produces a pleasant scent to offer up to Yahweh. Apparently, God appreciates a good BBQ.

    Namaste, friends.

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  56. “Add old and expensive fridges to a long list of problems for food suppliers.

    Fresh produce from fruit and vegetables to dairy and meat needs to be stored and chilled somewhere before it reaches retailers and consumers. But it’s becoming more and more expensive, the capacity is outdated and climate change is adding to the strain.

    While numbers are hard to come by, a recently published survey by the Global Coalition of Fresh Produce showed average global storage costs jumped 25% in the past two years, with electricity bills surging 40%. Cooling processes alone can make up 60% to 70% of the total power demand in a refrigerated warehouse, so those estimates are a good proxy.

    “It is not abnormal to see a cold storage facility spending over a million dollars a year on energy alone,” said Ben Rubin, the CEO of SnoFox, a startup that offers energy saving analytics for the industry. “If they are spending less than half a million dollars, they are doing well.”

    That’s another headache for food suppliers who are having to grapple with everything from extreme weather to higher costs for inputs like labor and fertilizers.

    Changing weather is making it worse. Rising temperatures force the systems to work even harder, adding to electricity costs, putting a strain on equipment and shortening its lifespan, according to Rubin.

    “When ambient temperatures start to go crazy, the equipment starts to behave in really troublesome ways,” he said. “The actual cost to replace this equipment can be extremely high.”

    That’s particularly important given that cold storage facilities in America are estimated to be on average 42 years old. Some 78% of cold storage warehouses were built before 2000. That’s a lot of fridges and freezers that can break.

    In Spain, which is used to the heat by now, soaring insurance costs are also adding to the expense of keeping things cool, according to Marcos Badenes, the secretary general of Aldefe, the country’s cold store association. However, smaller harvests have meant less needs to be stored. That’s in contrast to pandemic times when restaurant shutdowns left all that uneaten produce in need of a fridge.”

    From a Bloomberg newsletter. A very nice example of complexity rearing it’s ugly head. But I’m sure somehow rewables are going to fix it lol

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  57. The truth about the US government’s and Fauci’s involvement in creating the covid virus is slowly coming out.

    Over a million people died.

    Rational adults would punish those responsible and take steps to prevent a recurrence.

    Doubly so since the people who created the virus also aggressively blocked the use of safe repurposed drugs that would have prevented most of those million deaths, so that billions could be coerced to inject via emergency use authorization a novel untested mRNA technology, that may end up killing more people than the virus.

    It’s mind boggling and most citizens don’t want to know.

    It’s also one of the most impressive examples of our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

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  58. I completed the irrigation pond expansion project today with a fence to prevent farm workers from drowning and coco mats to control erosion.

    First time I’ve worked with coco mats. That sounds like a nice sustainable product I said to myself. Nope. It’s plant fiber woven into a plastic mesh. 😦

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    1. Yes, it’s so disappointing that even when you try to do the right thing, you can’t. Still, good work. What are you irrigating?

      I’ve been digging, too, by hand, to install a (yeuk) plastic pond for our ducks, with bottom drain added, so I don’t have to pump it out. I’ve also tried drainage around the pond to avoid its becoming a mud heap in their pen. We’ll see how it goes.

      That made me think about kefir, Rob. After all of that digging, for the pond and the drainage into another part of the property, I didn’t feel fatigued or sore (or only slightly, for a short time) and it made me wonder if the daily kefir made any difference to your aches and pains. It would be great if it has wider applicability than just me.

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      1. We use that pond to irrigate most of our 5 or so acres of field vegetable crops.

        We use a well for our 5 greenhouses and the blueberries, black currents, and hazelnuts.

        Thanks for the kefir reminder. I enjoyed the flavor of kefir but did not buy more after the first 2L because it’s a little pricey and I felt I was getting enough protein from other meat and dairy sources.

        I haven’t discussed it here but I’ve had some poor health starting in the spring with pain walking. I initially thought it was a back problem but now think it may be early onset of a hip problem. It really depressed me because my vision and dream for old age was walking every day with the occasional overnight hiking adventure.

        Maybe I should try kefir again given your good results. I’ll add it to my shopping list.

        Good luck with your ducks!

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        1. Gosh, I hope it’s not an indication of a hip problem.

          If you can get hold of some kefir grains (a bit of a misnomer as they look more like cauliflower florets), it’s very simple to make (just toss the grains into any quantity of milk and leave for a few days. I usually, now, only make about a litre every couple of weeks but have some every day on my mixed fruit salad, along with coconut yoghurt (also home made), though I drank much more of it when I first started on it. Both the yoghurt and kefir are cheap when made at home.

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            1. That seems very expensive. is in the US but ships to Canada and this Canadian site ships free or local pick-up. The first ships dormant dehydrated grains, so it will survive several days in shipment. Not really sure how long live active grains will last. Over here, I can source some at a fraction of those prices so I think there must be cheaper options around.

              You only have to buy them once, though. I hope you manage to source some. I can give more tips if and when you get some.

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        2. I empathize with your physical disabilities. I too have had some depressing ones. I figured that having been a vegetarian for 45 years and and active runner/bike rider I would remain healthy forever? (the exercise just wore out some parts (knees, back)). After a serious knee injury 3 months ago I have resigned myself to never running again. I have make it back to walking 5 miles every other day, which is ok. I also have abandoned vegetarianism and am trying a low carb diet (after reading Malcom Kendrick’s book). The diet is a work in progress.
          But still at 70 I won’t be around much longer.
          AJ

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        3. For humans, there are actually some neat things about the modern world. One of them is Youtube instructional videos. There are lot of good physical therapy practitioners that can help self-diagnose injuries, or provide good rehab routines for particular injuries. I have mostly fixed my own hip problem using Youtube videos. (Strengthening the glute medius and hamstring was key). Got better information from Youtube than from the local physical therapy folks. I did have to sift through some chaff however.

          Another thing about the industrial civilization is that you can get a new hip. Last 20 years or more. If you do need a new hip, you might want to get in the next few years. Maybe sooner. I am myself thinking about some minor shoulder surgery I have put off for years.

          To your health Rob, and I hope you can keep posting pics of your hiking adventures for many more years. Cheers.

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          1. Thanks kindly Shawn. I would be grateful for the YouTube channels that you found helpful for hip therapy.

            My cousin who is 5 years older than me just had a hip replaced. I think I’ll have to be a lot worse than I am before I’ll qualify here in Canada.

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            1. Im glad it’s improving. There have been a few hip replacements in the older generation of my family. Often you are waiting a long time for the health system though

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    1. Thank you for posting this. I’d rate this a must watch.

      I have very conflicted feelings about Schmachtenberger.

      On the one hand, he is incredibly intelligent, articulate, and overshoot aware.

      On the other hand, he is making himself and his audience crazy by discussing ad nauseum the complexity and intractability of our overshoot predicament. Yet he NEVER communicates the only thing that matters if you want to make our future less bad: We must focus on rapidly reducing our population.

      Now, I’m not saying rapid population reduction is possible, but I am saying nothing else will help, and I am saying reducing our population will improve every one of the things that depresses Schmachtenberger.

      Therefore population reduction is the only thing worth discussing, and by all of us discussing it, we just might increase the probability of us agreeing to do it a little above zero.

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      1. A program of population reduction that would provide near-term help with overshoot is certainly possible but not without a significantly increased death rate. The decline in recent decades of total fertility rate (TFR – total number of kids per woman) is helping some but is far too gradual to result in an actual decline in population before several more decades.

        Korea has a TFR of 0.8, which is one of the lowest in the world and well below replacement, (the global rate is 2.3) but Korea won’t see any significant reduction in population until well after 2050. It takes a long time, even without many kids being born, for the bulk of the population to get old enough for the death rate to increase enough to really reduce population. People younger than 70 just don’t die very much, so most demographic profiles have a LOT of inertia.

        What this means is that any fairly rapid reduction in population (starting soon) won’t happen without a big increase in the death rate. This is why nobody wants to discuss it. Who ya gonna kill? And how?

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        1. True but you also said in a comment @ POB (which I copied below) that a ban on having children would help. That’s the essence of Jack Alpert’s plan and I support it because there is no alternative that is not horrific.

          We should of course also make it easier for old people to voluntarily exit. I tried to buy some nembutal for my preps and it’s much harder to get that drug than heroin. WTF?

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        2. As I’ve said before, increasing the death rate is probably the best overall strategy for a viable, but smaller, population. The question is how to do that without increasing suffering. The only way I can think of is to remove all medical interventions except pain relief and assisted dying. I’ve been the recipient of medical interventions (not, technically, life saving but probably life extending), so I’d find it hard to accept this strategy though I just couldn’t, in all honesty, argue against it.

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          1. I’m so disgusted with the poor ethics and incompetency of health “professionals” during covid that I will happily forgo all future medical interventions provided that they give me a nice supply of morphine and nembutal.

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  61. Yesterday’s post at Peak Oil Barrel and the comments are very interesting.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-september-2023/

    It provides a very nice update on OPEC oil reserves. The experts think we should expect about 2% less oil each year starting now.

    My personal belief is that the decline rate will be higher due to Seneca cliff effects (like water injection), economic problems caused by de-growth, and war.

    Comment by Kengeo:

    Between late 1980s and 2008 oil production increased at a rate of ~1.4% annually. By 2008 oil production plateaued and remained there until 2012 when US tight oil growth helped drive annual growth of 1.6%. Since 2018, there has been no additional growth (5 years).

    In order to remove the US tight oil we can exclude US production from the overall picture.

    Doing so confirms a plateau ranging 2009 to 2016.

    The current production level excluding US is likely at it’s lowest level since ~2000.

    Another way to think about this is that we had two waves, the first being the overall world oil production wave that crested in the early 2000s and a second wave that built up in 2010 and is cresting now (US shale). It’s tempting to combine them but they will both behave much differently (and one is 6 times bigger than the other). The big wave has a much longer period/timescale than the small wave. The small wave (US shale) has a much shorter period, it will also decline much faster.

    Taking all of these factors into consideration, I would break this down into several segments/periods:
    Pre-global peak – 2000 to 2007
    Global peak – 2008
    Global plateau – 2009 to 2016
    US shale peak – 2018
    Post-peak decline transition – 2019 to 2022
    Post-peak decline – 2023
    TBD but 2024 to 2030 will likely be decline of 1-2% annually.

    Comment by Ron Patterson:

    Well, I am slowly fading away. I will be posting less and less from now on. I am working on another book, my very last one. This one will cover the subjects more deeply than the other two. And the last chapter will cover the coming collapse of civilization as we know it. I will try to explain why it is inevitable. Also, I will try to explain why the average citizen of the world has no idea what is about to happen and wouldn’t believe it even if they were presented with overwhelming proof of the coming catastrophe.

    Comment by Joe Clarkson:

    Even if the world total fertility rate ramps down to zero over the next 60 years, the population will not decline by then, rather it would level off at over 10 billion and would be near that level by the end of this century. The demographic transition only slows the rate of increase and lowers the total population at the plateau. The only thing that will reduce world population this century is an increase in the death rate. To get the population to a reasonable level (1 or 2 billion) by the end of the century would require excess deaths per year that would make WW2 look like nothing.

    This discussion about prospective declines in oil production glosses over the tight correlation between energy production and population. If oil really does decline per the modeling discussed here and coal-to-liquids or gas-to-liquids can’t replace it, the human population will decline accordingly. 2% of 8 billion is 160 million excess deaths per year. The deaths would come from lack of food.

    …given the situation the world is in now with human population overshoot and the need for that overshoot to be resolved as soon as possible, relying on the demographic transition is not going to save the day. If you want to rely on birth rates to be a significant part of overshoot resolution, only a worldwide ban on having babies will do much. And even that will take some time to work. The global death rate is now only 0.77% and although, as the population average age increases, the death rate will go up, it doesn’t get much above 1% until people are older than 60, so it will take some time for the population to “age out” and die. Admittedly, rich countries have a much older starting demographic profile, which would ensure much more rapid population declines with zero births.

    But a real-world situation, like Korea, with a TFR of 0.8 and an older demographic profile is not going to have much of a decline in population until after 2040 (only 1.6 million down from its peak of 51.8 million in 2020) and will still have 37.7 million people in 2070.

    Demographic transitions are very slow, especially when the only variable is birth rate.

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    1. Yes, I saw this too. Very interesting comments. It’s my sentiment too that we are on the edge of the energy roller-coaster precipice.
      Frankly, to me, that’s a good thing (I am well aware about what this most probably means). Yet, think about the alternative which is what this culture and many still want: free unlimited energy, so that the human expansion can continue unabated. But wouldn’t it just mean the utter destruction of the living conditions on the planet? (This system we find ourselves with does not seem to know self-restraint.)

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  62. Peak demand is nearly hit. And when it drops resource scarcity is a non-issue. Caused by switching to renewables and EV’s and demographic collapse (pop). (wink wink)

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      1. Do you think that all of this talk about “peak oil demand” is a a way to talk about peak oil without acknowledging limits to growth?

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      1. It’s not just the US. There has been a big drop in the competency and intelligence of Canadian and European politicians and civil servants.

        It’s like all the C- social studies students from universities that could not get jobs in the private sector have taken over our governments and now only hire each other.

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  65. If you know someone that is seeking to understand more about mRNA risks this 4 minute summary by Alex Berenson is excellent.

    As is this 10 point summary by Berenson explaining how mRNA differs from traditional vaccines.

    https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/a-10-point-primer-on-why-the-mrna

    1: mRNAs are not vaccines in any traditional sense. They work in a very different way.

    2: Before 2020 mRNA biotechnology was – at best – several years from use outside clinical trials. The scientists working on it were struggling with the risks of repeated dosing.

    3: The two large clinical trials in 2020 from Pfizer and Moderna that led to the approval of the mRNAs did NOT show that they reduced deaths from Covid, or from other causes.

    4: mRNAs were not proven to work better or to be safer than – or even as safe as – traditional vaccines. They were not and have never been tested head-to-head against traditional vaccines.

    5: The clinical trials showed the mRNAs caused more and more severe side effects than most traditional vaccines, especially flu shots. Real-world experience confirmed the trial findings.

    6: The major clinical trials were effectively stopped in early 2021, and as a result we do not have long-term placebo-controlled safety data on the mRNAs.

    7: We also do not have long-term controlled data on their effectiveness. This gap matters less, though, since everyone now agrees that – at best – they worked against Covid infection or transmission for a few months in 2021.

    8: The evidence health authorities offer for their claims that the shots work against severe disease and death – even after they fail against infection – comes from “observational” studies. Those are hopelessly untrustworthy. The reason is that people are generally not vaccinated if they are on or near their deathbeds – and terminally ill people are obviously at very high risk of death from all causes, including Covid.

    In essence, the people who receive vaccinations cannot be compared to those who do not. Health authorities are well aware of this issue, but they ignore it, because it enables them to claim the vaccines work.

    9: The mRNAs appear to have zero or negative effectiveness against Omicron infection. Negative effectiveness means they may actually increase the risk of infection. Some studies show that the infection risk RISES with each additional dose.

    10: Data from many countries that used mRNAs shows the booster campaigns in early 2022 and late 2022/early 2023 coincided with increases in all-cause deaths. This correlation is particularly striking in the second campaign, because it cannot be attributed to Covid.

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    1. I see a couple prior attempts by you to post this video were mistakenly spammed by WordPress. Next time if you wait a few hours I’ll probably spot and fix the problem. Sorry I have little control over WordPress’s spam filter.

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  67. Tucker Carlson with some insightful comments on the news media and world affairs.

    https://weltwoche.ch/daily/theyre-all-afraid/

    I’ve worked at a lot of news organizations in the United States, and they’re all the same. They’re all afraid of getting sued or yelled at or fired or humiliated. But interestingly, none of them are very afraid of getting things wrong. That’s not a concern. They’re not worried about accuracy as much as they’re worried about being unfashionable or saying something forbidden. What they’re really worried about is telling the truth.

    You’d think that if you ran a news organization, your main concern would be getting it right and that you’d be terrified if someone would make a mistake. But that’s not their top concern. And not just at Fox. I worked at MSNBC and CNN. I worked at PBS. I spent a year working at ABC. I’ve certainly been around a lot of news companies, and they’re all the same. They’re all fearful people who are making more than they probably should be, and they’re worried about losing their jobs. Occasionally, you’ll find a courageous person, but they are very, very, very rare. Very rare.

    They’re just afraid. They go along with it, absolutely. They’re afraid to say something that will offend the people who run the government, who run the biggest companies and, most of the time, they won’t. And that’s not just a perversion of what they should be doing, it’s an inversion. They exist to hold the people in power accountable. Instead, they do exactly the opposite. They do their bidding.

    For example, they roll out this vaccine in the United States. It has massive consequences for the population. Hundreds of millions of people take it, and no reporting on that vaccine – no real reporting — is allowed. People are, literally, fired from their jobs if they’d question the efficacy and the safety of that vaccine. That’s insane. In a functioning democracy, if you had a mandatory drug where everyone’s required to take it, the news media’s job would be to report out whether or not it’s safe and whether or not it works. They did just the opposite.

    Even the war in Ukraine. This is potentially a nuclear conflict between superpowers. Shouldn’t we know all that we can? “No.” You’re not allowed.

    I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the US government stopped me. So, think about that for a minute. By the way, nobody defended me. I don’t think there was anybody in the news media who said, “Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says.” You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why?

    …if you want to subvert a democracy, you need to control the information that citizens receive. I’d argue that the news media in democracies is far less trustworthy than it is in other countries simply because it matters more in a democracy. People vote on the basis of the information they have. So, if you want to control their votes, you have to control what they know.

    By the way, Joe Biden has dementia and is not running the United States. So, that raises the obvious question: “Who is?”

    I would assume Barack Obama through his cutouts who work for Joe Biden. But I don’t know that. The New York Times hasn’t bothered to report on it, but Joe Biden has dementia. He’s not capable of speaking a complete sentence much less running the largest organization in human history, which is the US government. The whole premise is ridiculous, and now they’re telling us? He’s 80 years old. He can barely speak. He can barely walk. And he’s going to run, again, for president of the United States while there’s a war going on? The whole thing is so demented that we’re moving to the point where they’re not trying to convince anybody. They’re just trying to suppress and arrest people who ask questions. They’ve arrested dozens of people, of political opponents, not for committing crimes, but for opposing them in the past month. Dozens in the past month.

    Our system is collapsing in real time. We’re watching this happen. If you read the American media, it’s stories about Kim Kardashian and lots of irrelevant crap about trannies and all this stuff. The bottom line is the president of the United States is non compos mentis.

    Who is running the government? If you can’t answer that question, you’re not doing your job in the media, it would seem to me. Whatever.

    I also see an awakening of spiritual awareness and religious faith in the United States that I think is great. Not everyone is reaching the same conclusions that I’m reaching, but that’s okay. It’s better than thinking that Amazon’s going to make you happy, because Amazon is not going to make you happy, actually. That’s not true. That’s a lie. And more and more people seem to be concluding that it’s a lie, and I think that’s a great thing.

    There’s this idea that somehow the main threat to our happiness is from religious people. That’s absurd. The main threat to our happiness is from people who think they’re God. They’re the dangerous ones. If you think that you’re God, there’s no limit to what you’ll do because you think you’re the final arbiter, you’re the final judge, you’re all-powerful. That’s terrifying.

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    1. Rob,
      Shame on you for posting stuff from Tucker;)
      I, 5 years ago would have called him a right wing ideologue. Now, I think he is one of the few who call out those fools in power. I have watch quite a bit of him and although I disagree on him about many things (religion, climate, Trump), he appears humble and one of the most self-effacing people I have heard. He seriously reservations about what happened with Covid (lockdowns, masks, shots), why we are trying to start WWIII in Ukraine, why the U.S. is so dysfunctional and why the MSM can’t be trusted.
      An occasional breath of fresh air – to bad he is collapse unaware.
      AJ

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    2. Did anyone read “Manufacturing consent” by Chomsky? Very different political spectrum but eerily similar conclusions regarding our media. If I remember correctly he also said that in a authoritarian state you can just arrest and hurt/kill people who are a threat to you. In a democracy that’s different so in order to stay in power the elite has to control what the people think. Well …

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  68. The last time I felt anything good about my country was when truckers from across the country protested covid policies in our capital. The leader of that protest is being aggressively prosecuted and donations made to the protest by hundreds of thousands of people including me were blocked. Meanwhile, our health ministers that killed 10’s of thousands of people with unscientific and unethical covid policies roam free without prosecution.

    http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/09/aw-so-cute.html

    98 year old 14 Waffen SS Division veteran got emotional and cried while Ze received standing ovation in Canadian parliament during his speech. He (the veteran) fought Russians in WW II. Canadians, enjoy, you lost any claim to victory in WW II, you are collaborators to Auschwitz and Belsen, to massacre of tens of millions of innocent civilians. You wanted it, you got it–the land of escaped Nazis. The US is not far behind, though. Throw away your worthless WW II awards–a logical conclusion for your country which has no honor or decency.

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  69. B today with a fresh view on diesel. He makes the assumption that diesel consumption is the most accurate measure of our material wealth and then reviews per capita trends.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/diesel-downhill

    Since diesel fuel is essential in successfully performing almost all (real) economic activity these days from mining to agriculture and transportation, its actual consumption is a much better metric of growth, than any other financial number you can come up with. As the output of products grow at a factory, for example, so does the number of trucks filled with raw materials arriving to (and leaving from) the plant increase. If we expect the average world citizen to live “better” (purely in capitalist terms), we must assume that he or she will eat, use and dispose of more and more products year after year — all carried around on trucks — and thus drive up the demand for diesel.

    But, but, but…! What about efficiency gains?! Surely you jest. Diesel engines are in use for more than a century now. There is really not a lot of practical efficiency gains left to be made here: the last great advancements in fuel economy were achieved in the 70’s and 80’s, that is half a century ago. Between 2002 and 2016 not an iota of improvement was made in actual on the road fuel consumption of heavy duty trucks.

    According to the EIA distillate fuel oil consumption by the transportation sector peaked in 2007. After growing for more than 30 years it has crashed in the wake of the 2008/2009 financial crisis and has failed to recover ever since, despite a 12% growth in US population (theoretically demanding more food, products and services). Consumption per capita was thus stagnating ever since the great financial crisis, and has been clearly trending downwards since 2019 — with no end in sight. The average citizen, as a result, got poorer, more exploited and less resilient, while the well-to-do, well, became even more well-to-do — but only on paper. Their actual consumption did not appear to grow in line with their wealth.

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  70. They knew they were killing people and they kept doing it.

    Why?

    Kunstler offers a couple explanations, but I’m not sure he’s right. It might instead be some form of collective super powerful denial phenomenon, because it’s not just about our leaders. The majority of citizens and some readers of this blog continue to support unscientific and unethical covid policies.

    I find it deeply troubling and still can’t make sense of it.

    Thankfully many minds more powerful than mine are working hard to unpick the puzzle.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/slouching-towards-beelzebub/

    So, here’s what you might have learned over the weekend if you ventured into the thickets of alt news: in April and May of 2021, the president (“Joe Biden”), the whole White House Covid Response Team (Andy Slavitt & Co), and everyone in the WH communications office, the US Surgeon General (Vivek Murthy), senior officials of the CDC including director Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, head of NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID were all freaking out, holding crisis meetings, and sending blizzards of emails among each other after being informed by a Pfizer safety report that the miraculous new mRNA Covid vaccines produced significant cases of myocarditis and blood-clotting abnormalities.

    All these officials proceeded to craft a campaign to tell the public that this myocarditis was mild, extremely rare, and self-resolving (it wasn’t), and urged all Americans over twelve to keep taking the vaxx shots. Later, they expanded the vaccine program to include children down to six months old. By 2022, all of US public health officialdom had to know that the vaxxes were also ineffective at preventing infection and transmission of Covid. Rochelle Walensky kept pushing the vaccines as “safe and effective” until she resigned in June, 2023. Her replacement, Mandy K. Cohen, is still pushing the latest mRNA booster shots in the face of reports (mainly from the UK and other foreign countries) of a shocking rise in all-causes deaths and disabilities from heart and blood disease, neurological injury, and cancers. The CDC refused this month to release updated information on case numbers of myocarditis and pericarditis in the USA.

    The record of those frantic 2021 doings in the White House and the CDC came from a document dump prompted by a FOIA request by Edward Berkovich, a lawyer associated with Naomi Wolf’s Daily Clout news organization. He requested emails between February and June, 2021, that included the term “myocarditis.” CDC sent 472 pages, followed by an additional 46 pages, (believed to be sent by a whistleblower) that included emails between White House officials up to the president. Of the 47, 37 were entirely redacted (whited-out, not blacked-out, that is, blank pages). Only two pages of the 46 contained no redactions. The redactions were made, the CDC said, pursuant to Exemptions 5 and 6 under code 5 U.S.C. §552, which protects documents received by the president.

    That was a lot to wade through. Apologies. What’s the upshot? From early on, our government lied about the safety of the vaccines, at the same time that they lied and confabulated about the origins of the Covid-19 virus. They continue lying about all of this to this day even as they appear to prepare for a replay of a pandemic. Now that the weekend is over, you will not read about any of this in The New York Times. Why is that? I will offer my theory: that newspaper’s business model, based on pages and pages of print advertising, is completely broken and it is on financial life-support from the CIA and / or DARPA, probably facilitated by private sector cut-outs laundering the money. That’s how dishonorable the flagship of the US news media is.

    And, of course, there is the added layer of government-directed censorship, also through private sector cut-outs, that is aimed at suppressing the truth about Covid from every angle, especially the vaccines. Doesn’t all of this look rather sinister? Choose one of two possible explanations: 1) the Covid-19 episode from the beginning was a fantastic fiasco of blundering incompetence by hundreds of officials from many agencies plus elected leaders, and at every stage was made worse by additional incompetent actions aimed at concealing massive chains of prior misdeeds producing more misdeeds resulting in the wholesale collapse of authority in our country. In other words, an epic clusterfuck.

    Or 2) The entire Covid episode is a chain of crimes committed deliberately with malicious intent to kill and injure large numbers of people while contriving to deprive the survivors of their basic liberties and their property. Because identical events are seen in all the other nations of Western Civ, it would be reasonable to infer some kind of coordination managed by a supervisory force or entity. What we see is a globalist coalition formed of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), The European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), the pharmaceutical industry, the “Five Eyes” intel alliance, the global banking establishment, The Democratic Party, and scores of well-endowed non-governmental agencies such as the George Soros constellation of councils and foundations. What else is unseen?

    One conspicuously strange element of the whole picture is the phantom leadership of the supposed world hegemon USA in the figurehead, “Joe Biden.” Never in history has such a move into tyranny been fronted by such an embarrassingly un-charismatic empty vessel. Never in our country’s history have our affairs whirled in such a mystifying flux of bewildering forces. Even our Civil War was a more straightforward clash of interests. Events are moving quickly now. They’re setting up the steam-table for that banquet of consequences.

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  71. For those of you that don’t know him, Dmitry Orlov a decade ago was one of the preeminent overshoot scholars. He moved back to Russia and is mostly quiet these days.

    In today’s interview he discusses world affairs and what he believes will be the Ukraine outcome.

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  73. Insightful comment by ivanislav @ OFW:

    It’s been frequently noted here that a belief in the possibility of a transition to renewables is important to maintain hope and prevent panic. I want to add that it also induces oil producers (foreign and domestic) to maintain output, because a transition would devalue their resources in the future. If the improbability of a transition were the prevailing view, producers would demand high prices and reduce output simultaneously … bad for the USA.

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  74. Superb new essay from Dr. Tom Murphy today.

    Can Modernity Last?

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/

    After years of using math and physics to analyze and explain human overshoot, Murphy has shifted gears and now says we need to completely change the nature of our species if we are to have a future.

    Put simply, modernity has come at the expense of ecological health and the vitality of the community of life. It is not at all clear if modernity can exist any other way. Modernity could very well be a self-terminating prospect for exactly this reason, as humans can’t survive without a functioning ecosphere. Right now, the ecosphere is gasping for breath. I would say that it’s on life support, or in the ICU. But no—that would imply concern and remedial action. It’s just bleeding out in a ditch as we motor past, largely oblivious to its condition as we inflict even more damage.

    The longevity of our species ultimately depends on the longevity of the broader community of life. Since humans have developed the capability to quickly destroy ecological health, tearing the community of life to shreds, we come to the conclusion that this behavior is not in our species’ own best self-interest. Modernity puts us on the path of destruction, while markets lash the steering wheel in place. All the “goods” we can readily identify from modernity are just one side of a coin whose back-side ills cannot be sliced or wished away. The only way to a better path, as I see it, is to demote humans. Eliminate human supremacist cultural values (the Human Reich, as Eileen Crist calls it in a brilliant piece). Put the community of life first. Trade hubris for humility. Live in service to and in reciprocity with the more-than-human world. If this means the end of gadgets or other unsustainable perks, so be it. What’s more important?

    Murphy answers a question I wanted to ask him. He thinks population reduction is not enough. I wonder if this is yet another excuse for not pushing for population reduction policies? Everyone seems to have a good excuse for not doing what obviously must be done. I think if we had a 100M people concentrated in a small geographic space the remainder of the planet would recover. In addition, even if you mostly care about the humans species, there is the suffering reduction argument.

    Could we, however, dial lifestyles back to a nearly-modern 1750 mode? Or could we find long-term success in a reduction to, say, 100 million affluent humans living modern standards? Maybe we could dilute the “bad” by simply having less of it. In these scenarios, I can’t get past the rotten philosophical foundation. I doubt that a human supremacist culture would limit its bad self in this way and keep itself there. To do so would require putting non-human concerns first. The entire 10,000 year lineage of modernity has held expansionist, exploitative beliefs centered on humans. Those who have rejected such beliefs lived in ways alien to modernity. The ontological basis for modernity is the engine that produces incompatibility. Unless the dynamical foundation changes, why would we expect a different result?

    Any system that puts short-term human concerns above all else—to the exclusion and detriment of the community of life—will surely fail, taking many species down with it.

    Nice recap on the centrality of energy:

    In summary, energy:

    1. is fundamental to modernity;
    2. is responsible for the human population surge and other hockey sticks;
    3. cannot continue increasing into the future;
    4. has been utterly dominated by a temporary spike of fossil energy;
    5. may not permit modernity’s continuance in non-fossil form;
    6. powers ecological devastation, independent of its source.

    Some excellent insights into the alternate energy transition that will not happen:

    The interaction between energy and materials is fundamental. Solar energy means nothing to us until it interacts with matter, for instance. This becomes apparent when assessing the material demands of renewable energy. Because solar and wind are diffuse, low-intensity energy flows, a lot of “stuff” is required to harness their energy. Table 10.4 of the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Report illustrates that renewable energy technologies require an order-of-magnitude more materials than fossil fuels for generating the same amount of electrical energy (not including the fossil fuel material itself, which is considerable). Setting aside the fact that we rely on fossil fuels for material extraction and processing, this means that replacing our fossil fuel habit with renewable energy would require a substantial increase in material extraction (mining, scraping) on the planet—translating to more deforestation, more habitat loss, more pollution (tailings), more processing, and more extinctions.

    Based on the numbers in the DoE table, I computed that replacing global fossil fuel energy with solar would demand a ten-fold increase in global copper production. We can’t get there by recycling, because all those solar panels do not exist yet, so a massive build-out would require a massive increase in mining. And copper is just one of the many material requirements of solar panels. The push for solar is motivated primarily by climate change concerns, driven by CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Thus, we might say that the burning of fossil fuels represents an assault on the air. Switching to renewables would move the war to an all-out (well, intensified) assault on the land—and thus on the community of life that depends on the health of the land.

    What’s more, the material requirements are a function of lifetime energy (not power) delivered, meaning a continuous materials demand going forward, if aiming to preserve the status quo. In practical terms, a solar panel or wind turbine delivers a finite amount of energy before it ages and needs replacement. Perhaps this is 20–40 years, but it’s not indefinite. Then you need the materials all over again, so the ground assault continues. Sure, recycling could ease the pain, after the initial build-out. But let’s not be cavalier about the recycling concept. This is not a playground game of tag, whereby uttering the word “recycling” means you’ve touched base and are no longer vulnerable.

    If the apparatus delivers useful energy over a lifetime of 25 years, for instance, then the initial build-out of a full-scale replacement of fossil fuels will require about 250 times the materials currently required annually to support fossil fuel energy delivery (10 times the material demand over 25 years).

    Because global copper production would also happen to need a 10× boost in the case of solar replacement, we’re talking about 250 years of current global copper production before completing the initial build-out. Only after the first-generation lifetime is up can recycling start to play a role (decades later). Do we even have that much viable ore?

    Besides the vast absolute amount of material required, material extraction rate is another factor. Taking a slow 50 years to complete the project still requires a 5× boost in annual production. A more impatient 10 year plan requires copper mining at 25× the current rate. Is either option even remotely possible? Trends in solar and wind development over the last decade—perceived as rapid and encouraging—would take a few hundred years to reach our present total energy appetite, for reference.

    Now, on the recycling front, we never expect to get 100% return in recycling. Even getting 90% of the copper out of all the solar panels ever built would be a feat. This would mean that to keep the infrastructure up, we’d need to source 10% of the material from the ground on a continuing basis. Since solar replacement demands a 10× increase in copper, a steady 10% “new” replacement means a continuous 1× increase, or basically a doubling over current practices. So, after extracting at 10× the present pace for a few decades, we could settle down to 2× the current pace for the indefinite long haul.

    Copper production today is causing ecological harm in the form of 200× the volume of tailings and the pollution associated with processing the ore. Ramping up at any level is very worrisome. Moreover, the low-hanging fruit is gone, so that copper ore is already an order-of-magnitude poorer concentration than it used to be, and that gets only worse if we grab a few centuries’ worth of copper for a solar build-out. It is essentially like fast-forwarding the ore concentration plot (below) to 250 years in the future. Is copper mining even viable at that point?

    It needs to be understood that renewable energy is not actually about saving the planet: clearly it will ravage more land and habitats in pursuit of materials. It’s really about preserving modernity in the face of CO2. Let’s be clear on the goal, here, and how ultimately narrow/misguided it is. Which is more valuable—modernity or the ecological health of the planet? Which depends on which?

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    1. Great essay. Is Tom Murphy becoming a doomer?

      If where those 100m people are concentrated has any sort of environmental link to the rest of the world (even if it is only obtaining resources), those people would still affect the rest of the world. Also, if those 100m people don’t live sustainably, they will destroy their own part of the planet and I can’t think that wouldn’t have an effect on the rest of the planet though those 100m may well go extinct and give the rest of nature a chance until another species evolves with an opposable thumb and a reasonably large brain. But, additionally, some of the industries we take for granted, many only be affordable or viable at a very large scale. So Tom Murphy is right, population reduction isn’t enough even though it is a prerequisite for allowing nature to heal.

      Growth must continue for modernity (as currently configured) to continue since almost all money is debt based, and attracts interest. If we don’t grow (for more than a few quarters) then lots of bad things start happening. Not that some kind of modern lifestyle can’t be maintained for some, but there would be lots of pain for most.

      I agree with Tom about the materials needed for a renewable transition though I’ve recently become aware of secondary leaching technologies that may help grow copper production (and perhaps production of other elements), possibly without mining much more material, for a while. Not that this would do anything other than delay the inevitable.

      The thing I’d say Tom hasn’t yet figured out is that humans are a species and act like all other species. Although very unusual in its abilities, it is not acting in some considered way (no free will, remember?), it is acting in a species way. So, as a species it can’t change direction. It’s not really putting itself first (human supremicism) but simply acting like a species with unprecedented ability to turbo-charge its inevitable destruction of its environment.

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      1. The word doomer is so negative and implies that a person is a guns and gold conspiracy nut job.

        I suspect Murphy might describe himself as a truth seeking scientist grounded in reality.

        Given the in-your-face overwhelming evidence for overshoot, I describe anyone that is not a doomer as either an idiot or deeply in denial.

        My friend Gail Zawacki, rest in peace, proposed a very nice single word alternative to doomer: Themist.

        Perhaps if we all start using Themist we might cause a world-wide meme to take hold.

        By Gail Zawacki: On Themism and Seeking Scapegoats for Reality

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  75. This article tries to come off optimistic but if you do some simple calculations the result is actually terrible.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-09-raw-material-requirements-global-poverty.html#google_vignette

    “They used an expanded definition of the Decent Living Standards, which defines the minimum requirements for a life above the poverty line.

    According to this definition, a person living just above the poverty line eats about 2,100 kcal per day; has a living space of 15 m² within a four-person household; has mobility of 8,000 km per year; and has access to education and health facilities as well as public services, such as sports halls or administrative buildings. In addition, each person has his or her own cell phone and shares a laptop and router with the other three household members.”

    energetic requirements for this is 1.68 tons of fossil fuel per year.
    1.68 X 8.1 billion people = 13.6 billion tons of fossil fuels per year or ~90% of our current usage.

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