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. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. “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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  15. 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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  17. 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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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. 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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  23. 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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  24. 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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  25. 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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