By Karl North: After Collapse, What Next?

Cahokia

This essay was written last year by Karl North and published on his site here. Karl offers a hopeful vision for how we might organize ourselves and live a pleasant life after the collapse of industrial civilization, by building on the research of Graeber and Wengrow in their book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity“.

Here is a summary of the book:

“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.”

Many of us, I’m sure, would like to find reasons for optimism.

Karl kindly agreed to write the following introduction to his essay, summarizing the reasons he holds an optimistic view of our future.

Introduction

In this essay I drew extensively on a book by Graeber and Wengrow because it overturns the “small egalitarian bands” conventional wisdom of stone age society to reveal the variety of forms of socio-political and cultural organization that humanity is capable of, despite severe energy and resource constraints. This evidence of the human potential to adapt to a diversity of physical and social environments suggests that human society at some sharply reduced demographics could weather the end of the oil age.

My most persuasive model of the social forms this could take comes from living in a Europe dotted with villages whose centuries-old architecture indicates specific social forms. To survive, these socially dense nodal clusters required a tight social, political and cultural organization that, in turn enabled a Commons managed without tragedy that mitigated the inevitable inequality, family scale agrarian enterprises enhanced with regular inputs from neighbors, for example at harvest time or pig slaughter day, and defense against invaders, all of which maximized the possibilities of community well-being. The village I inhabited with my family for a number of years was typical of the genre, and although partially deserted, still offered constant evidence of how things worked when fully inhabited. 

Typically, these agrarian communities are small enough for the population to be within the Dunbar Number of 150 effective relationships. Even the larger “market towns”, often walled towns like this one, were organized to survive by relying on outlying villages for food and fighters in times of trouble.

All in all, my reading of European history combined with the enduring physical evidence suggests that life in such communities was laborious but provided a satisfying level of material comfort. David and Marcia Pimental’s pioneering work of food and energy cost accounting reveals that while the net energy of industrial agriculture is negative – 10 units of energy expended for one unit gained – the most efficient subsistence agriculture generates a positive net energy ratio of around 3/1. That seems small, but the historical evidence I have exemplified above suggests that with time-tested forms of simple technology and social organization, post-petroleum communities can use that small surplus to go beyond minimal survival to recreate a rewarding and durable life. 

Here is Karl’s original essay.

After Collapse, What Next?

When global empires start to fall apart, the structure of interdependent elements accumulated over the years imparts an inertia that appears to sustain them for a while past their normal collapse date. In the case of the US empire, this illusory momentum, combined with a shocking degree of mendacity and deception in the mass media, is gravely misleading the US public. This is the proverbial Wile E. Coyote effect, where Wile E. has sped off the cliff but is apparently not yet in free fall. But bit by bit what US citizens are actually observing in their daily lives begins to contradict the official narrative from government leaders and media. This creates a foreboding –an inexplicable anxiety, and people cast about for explanations, making the general public an easy prey to the series of fear campaigns we have seen in recent years. However, eventually the contradictions become so sharp as to discredit official narratives, and revolts begin. States are expensive to maintain, and depend on cheap energy sources. As energy and other resource depletion weakens states, and authorities resort to palliatives that only aggravate the crisis, chaos reigns and opportunities arise for breakaway communities to form. What are their possibilities of social organization? What kinds of freedom should they embrace or preclude? This essay draws on a new view of human history to briefly frame discussion of these questions.

The dominant view of the long stretch of human history has humanity progressing stepwise inevitably from unconsciously derived egalitarian bands to statehood as the end of its history of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow’s massive revisionist work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, uses the latest archeology and anthropology to paint a less rigid progression where populations consciously experimented with different forms of social organization, often in sharp contrast to their neighbors. Societies found many ways of gaining freedom from subjugation, either by moving away from oppressive regimes, or at least from their urban centers toward peripheries where they could practice civil disobedience and “consciously shape new social realities”[1]. Framing this trio – escape, revolt and creative social construction – as categories of freedom or liberation, the authors discover many patterns of their expression across history.

According to conventional history, the world has been populated with states of various sorts for several thousand years. Graeber and Wengrow’s investigation reveals that this is only partly true. State structures are impressive, so they receive undue attention in historical narratives. However, states/civilizations have risen and fallen many times in their history of over five millennia. In the intervals after collapse, peoples have experimented with less oppressive forms. Also, even during the most totalitarian regimes, as one moves from centers to peripheries, state power ebbs somewhat. Rulers in many regimes have exercised diminishing power beyond their capital cities. An example is the 30% of the food economy in the latter years of the USSR that developed informally from popular initiative outside the state-run farms. All through history, a focus on fringes or outbacks reveals peasant social structures that present an often-fractious contrast to the more obedient lives of citizens nearer urban centers of power. Geopolitical analyst Rolo Slavskiy observes:

For pretty much all of human history, the elites and specialized classes of warriors have made war on one another for one reason or another while the peasants simply stuck together and did their best to make it through the war in one way or another.

So, as the US imperial juggernaut moves farther into degrowth, the chains of command and supply essential to the ravenous consumption of cities will weaken and finally disintegrate, and chaos and civil unrest will plague metropoles and their suburbs most severely[2]. Populations in rural areas potentially can be the first to profit from failing dominant structures, distance themselves politically from central control and construct the degree of political and economic autarchy that will be necessary to survive.

We can draw insights about the disintegration of Western civilization and its US center in particular from the history of the many civilizations that rose and fell in the last five thousand years. Conventional thinking depicts any emergence of an urban center as the culmination of an evolutionary process in ‘statehood’, which Graeber and Wengrow described as including three essentials – a monopoly on violence, a charismatic leadership, and an administrative bureaucracy.

As a historical model for the collapse of US industrial society, it would be intriguing to use the only large pre-Columbian city that existed in the area that became the United States – Cahokia in the Mississippi valley – which attained a population of forty thousand by the end of the first century AD. Cahokia ruled a large area mainly by violence (warfare and human sacrifice) and great ritual spectacles that drew participants from throughout its empire to enhance the status of elites and create cohesion. States disintegrate at different rates: compared to the Roman empire, Cahokia fell apart relatively rapidly, perhaps partly because it lacked the third essential element of statehood – an administrative bureaucracy.

What is interesting for purposes of comparison is how it fell apart – people just left the region, which, despite its highly fertile alluvial soil, became a kind of no man’s land for generations. As Graeber and Wengrow describe it,

Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 mass defection had depopulated the region. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.

Among the descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a simple project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.[3]

Later in the post-Cahokian Mississippi valley, European explorers found people experimenting with petty chiefdoms and mini-republics governed by village councils that engaged in lengthy political and philosophical debate. Farther north, European invaders found larger scale diplomatic institutions like the League of Five Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, which was preserving a kind of Pax Iroquoiana over a wide territory without anything that could be defined as a state.

Elsewhere in the world, Graeber and Wengrow also find “great hospitality zones” that have existed at various times in history without any administrative or authoritarian hierarchies, held together only by common culture or far-flung trading networks.[4] They describe many regimes throughout history as city-states, in which, as the term suggests, power diminished with distance from the city center. In many city states for instance, outlying satellite communities paid tribute to the central authority but otherwise went their own way and created their own social reality.

Hence, as the US declines as a state, we might consider the loss of administrative control, like the lack of it in Cahokia, as a harbinger of collapse. At the same time, the diversity of social arrangements that replaced Cahokia widens the scope of possibilities and helps frame the question of how to reshape the social space liberated during the US collapse as the opportunity arises.

What Kind of Freedom?

The trio of freedoms concept that Graeber and Wengrow propose initially sounds simple, but the devil is in the rights and duties spelled out or implied in the third freedom – to create a new social reality, as we shall see.

In the polarized US, the advocates of a variety of viewpoints have tossed around the concept of freedom like a political football until it is deflated of any clear meaning. Although most everyone can agree that a social contract should curtail some sorts of freedom, ranging from running stop signs all the way to premeditated murder; beyond that, the question becomes murkier, or at least more complex.

Highly visible at one pole are advocates of “free market capitalism”, which for some self-described conservatives appears to mean that in the domain of the economy just about anything goes, and furthermore, everything that occurs springs from the natural “invisible hand” of anonymous “market forces”. Hence, their logic goes, everyone will enjoy freedom so long as the public (as in government) does not interfere in the “free market”. One might object that the US capitalist system has evolved to the point where monopoly control reigns in every sector of the economy. In other words, most economic decision making, which pretty much shapes our lives, is in the hands of an elite minority that acts mainly in their own private interest, and thus undermines the imagined freedom of the majority. The trouble is, conservatives tend to focus on individual freedoms and overlook over-arching system-level power structures.

An instance of falling into that trap is the libertarian conservative who complained that an oil company’s hostile takeover muscled him out of a small business based on his invention of a more efficient electric battery, and buried the invention so that it would never compete with energy from oil. Had he an elementary knowledge of political economy – the study of power relations in a social system – he might have understood how the unfettered economic freedom he supported was his downfall. Conservatives’ advocacy of an economic system free of government interference also conflicts with their support for government-subsidized industries, expensive foreign wars that underwrite a lucrative weapons industry, protective tariffs, etc.

At another prominent political pole are those, often self-described as liberals, who traditionally champion freedoms defined in the constitutional Bill of Rights, such as speech and assembly, justice by fair trial and control of one’s person and private life. Liberals acknowledge imperfections in the free market system, but count on government regulatory agencies to fix the flaws. However, equally as ignorant as conservatives of power structures at the whole system level, they fail to understand that every such agency long ago fell victim to ‘regulatory capture’ by the very industry it was mandated to regulate. What is worse, liberals are especially prey to the illusion of government as elected servants of the people, whereas, due to the nature of the US structure of power relations, it is more like a stage show, where politicians promise to serve us, but then mostly serve the power elite who fund them. In the succinct synopsis of an early Supreme Court Justice, one can have most of the wealth in the hands of the few, or one can have democracy, but not both.[5]

Complicating the question of freedom these days is that in some ways conservatives and liberals seem to have switched roles, or at least ideals. Driven emotionally by a mass media so politicized against the Trump administration that it dropped all pretense of journalism, liberals have flouted all the civil liberties they used to champion in a frantic attempt to fraudulently remove an elected president whose administration in the end did no more damage to the nation than most others. Both major political parties have practiced electoral fraud for a long time, but once elected, US administrations have rarely experienced such an illegal attempt at removal. Meanwhile, because the media morphed into a weapon as the attack dog of the Democratic Party, it lost all credibility among conservatives. Consequently, when the media all in lockstep obediently trotted out a highly questionable pandemic narrative, conservatives had acquired some immunity against its scare campaign, and thus became the new champions of all the civil liberties that were violated by the pandemic lockdown policies.

In sum, it appears that groups at both poles of the polity are being snookered in different ways. In both cases it stems from the ability of ruling elites to keep the public in the dark regarding the many ways that they exercise their power, or at least deflect our attention from it. It seems to be human nature to easily fall for elaborate hoaxes, false flags, and other fictitious official narratives about how the world works, narratives that elites relentlessly fabricate to deceive us.

It is now an open question who will fall for the next campaign of fear. During another time of tumult, appalled at the frenzied mood of the industrial revolution, a 19th century French poet expressed his revulsion, writing, “Cité, fourmillant de rêves” (the metropole, an anthill swarming with dreams) where “alles ist gleichnis” (all is illusion).[6] Today we live in a similar time of outlandish moods, often indoctrinated, where the most preposterous and fantastical things can happen. Yesterday, no doubt spurred by the anti-Russian hatred spewing from German media and even its leadership, a crowd paraded in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin waving the swastika flag and calling for the genocide of the Russian people. Russians must be thinking: Did 27 million of us die in vain? Meanwhile it is said that here and there on the walls of Ukrainian villages is mysteriously appearing a mural of this babushka of legend; her red flag for most Russians now memorializing their victory over the scorched earth terror of the Nazi Operation Barbarossa.

Is it perhaps true that history moves in cycles, and that we must relive it again and again, “first as tragedy, then as farce”?[7] The present is another time of tumult where elites, desperate to preserve power, subject us to repeated psyops – well planned schemes of psychological conditioning either to fear or to hate – such that whole populations are swept up in episodes of mass psychosis.

Under these circumstances, maybe the question of what freedoms are likely to contribute to building a new form of civilization (and which ones are not) is a discussion better left to await calmer times. Perhaps this essay is only an attempt to set the stage for that conversation by 1) exploring the wreckage of current uses of freedom and 2) raising awareness of advances in the understanding of human history that display a much greater variety in the forms of society that the species has chosen, and thus suggest possibilities for the future. In the course of constructing a new social reality amid the disintegration of the old, I think we will need to take a holistic approach to what freedoms to incorporate, asking how particular freedoms might impact all sectors of society. A critical question will be an old one: how to strike the right balance between private and public rights, between individual liberty and the common good.

[1] Graeber, David and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

[2] North, Karl. 2012. Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

[3] Graeber, Op Cit. p. 469.

[4] Ibid. p.516

[5] Louis Brandeis

[6] Baudelaire

[7] Karl Marx

179 thoughts on “By Karl North: After Collapse, What Next?”

  1. Damn. We really need a leader like Kennedy. Will US citizens wake up?

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  2. I agree with Kurt Cobb’s comments today on AI.

    http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2023/11/ai-information-economy-becomes-ever.html

    I know proponents of AI are telling us how it is going to revolutionize our life by, among other things, making diagnosis and treatment of disease easier; spotting all manner of trends to help businesses, government, educational institutions and individuals make better decisions; and generating text for myriad purposes both mundane (think: instruction manual) and creative (think: movie script).

    In between all that other work I hope AI can solve global warming and the polycrises accompanying it including energy, resource, soil and water depletion; toxic chemical pollution; and biodiversity loss.

    I don’t actually think AI will be much used for such purposes as it will be more profitable to use it to increase the production of all sorts of consumer goods; think of new toxic chemicals to introduce into commerce; and increase the exploitation of all sorts of natural resources needed to expand the aforementioned production of consumer goods including new toxic chemicals.

    The one thing that AI will almost certainly NOT do is bring about a fair, orderly and dramatic reduction in resource use by human society—an absolute necessity if we are going to avoid the seemingly inevitable society-wide collapse in store for us as we continue our exponential economic growth and the resource depletion and climate change that will accompany it. Meanwhile, AI will devour ever more resources for itself.

    I called the weight of the information economy on the physical world “unbearable” 14 years ago. Now that weight is becoming crushing. We are on a trajectory to make ourselves capable of downloading and sending vastly larger amounts of data wirelessly using our cellphones for fun and profit—wired networks are 10 times more efficient at sending data—while it becomes harder and harder to supply clean water, adequate food and basic services because of both climate change and resource depletion.

    AI will almost certainly on balance aggravate these negative trends and likely make them much worse.

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  5. I can’t make up my mind on which is the cause. Perhaps both malice and incompetence?

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  6. Most covid decisions made by most leaders in most industrialized countries were wrong.

    There was and is no opposition from opposition political parties.

    Even today, with unequivocal evidence, they continue to push mRNA with known harms, good reason to suspect unknown harms, and zero benefits.

    It’s just too big and evil to be explained by pharma money. It really makes me wonder if there is some agenda linked to overshoot.

    Norman Pagett today @ OFW:

    I know this is difficult to accept—and I offer this to any other OFW’er who’s waiting for the ”big breakthrough”, but there is no ”next level”.

    We got to where we are by burning fossil fuel—it was a one shot wonder.

    We used fossil fuels to convert everything else on the planet to our own ends—literally everything—humankind created its own supernova, a 300 year flash of heat and light.

    If you don’t ”get that”—look around where you are right now, and mentally remove everything which carries within it an element of oil coal or gas.

    That leaves you sitting on bare earth, starving/freezing to death.

    There is no external force waiting to save you—that’s it, we blew it.

    Governments, elders, elites know this too. They are panicking, contrary to popular belief, some of them are not stupid. They have no more idea of what to do than you or I.

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    1. I don’t understand Norman Pagett’s comment. It is very human-world centric. Remove every-thing fossil based and you still have got the stream of life powered from the sun. Between stepping on the metal, and letting things run their natural course, so many things are possible. There are many material things we could let go of before making choices which imply losing all dignity and most lives.
      I can’t explain this blindness from Norman Pagett and the self-designated “elites” (I prefer the term high-flying-con-artists). Is this because it must all start with confronting aspects of reality our culture wishes to avoid? There truly is a mental lock.

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        1. Hello Mike. Thank you for taking the time to offer an explanation.
          I will try to rephrase it to see if I understood correctly.
          So he means there is nothing left to continue growing the human built world. There is no more ways to continue on producing more artificial artifacts. And with that I completely agree.

          But then, why use language which sounds extreme, such as “That leaves you sitting on bare earth, starving/freezing to death”? I personally don’t see how being unable to grow the artificial world, immediately and necessarily implies starving/freezing to death (+ absence of human-built artifacts is not bare earth). Reality seems to me much more complex, nuanced and gradual than that with lots of room to manoeuvrer. (I am not saying all is rosy either: it’s just we are not focusing on these essentials yet. Many more land and people could be converted to growing land. There are many ways to heat oneself instead of disparaging huge levels of energy. People are able to move around. And, I should have put Rob’s favourite first: humane population reduction)

          Also, why does he says about the “elites” that “They are panicking”? For them it should be the most interesting time: at last they have got some hard decision to make. That’s the position they chose (or at least claimed to in democratic countries). In their own individual worst case, if they believe the gap between what’s feasible in reality and what the masses believe is too large, they could even simply just silently step down to avoid having some parts of their body roll down the floor.

          I just don’t understand the binary on/off logic. Maybe I am still missing something or unable to see something.
          To me this rather all reads like, either a fatalist death cult, or more probably a phase in a reluctant mourning process, just before a paradigm shift. Norman and the imaginary “elites” are not yet at the point of letting go of things that are closely linked to their own sense of identity. They could consider (among other things) that the end of industrial civilisation does not necessarily equal their own end.
          (And even if it did, … but that’s another story 🙂

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          1. Well, Charles, Norman’s last paragraph is pure opinion and I, too, disagree. The elites aren’t panicking because they are either in denial, or think that because they have money, that will somehow allow them to buy their way out of a mess.

            But the mental experiment that Norman is performing is to remove everything that involves fossil fuels, today. That leaves people sitting naked on the bare earth (i.e. nothing between your body and the natural earth, whether it is on the grass or the sand, or wherever) with no food (just about everything everyone eats today has involved fossil fuels at some point) and, when it gets cold, no way to warm ourselves (almost no-one knows how to build a fire without fossil fuels, and no-one is wearing clothes). Norman is saying everything around us and everything we do involves fossil fuels, so removing them (instantaneously) would be impossible to live with. Of course, even if fossil fuels go away instantly, not everything that fossil fuels enabled will go away, that would take time. And, no doubt, a few would theoretically be able to figure out how to live without them.

            So, it’s just a mental exercise.

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            1. Ah OK. Thank you for taking the time to explain this in details to me. It is very kind of you. I appreciate it.

              I understand a lot better now. It’s kind of a worst case scenario to understand the lower limit. It is used to shock the audience out of complacency/see through illusionary superficial comfort/stress the reality of our extreme dependency on fossil fuels.
              Then yes, I agree, fossil fuels are pervasive.

              It is a figure of speech. I am reading things too literally. Or maybe this is because English is not my native language.

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    1. It doesn’t surprise me, he’s in denial and probably sees it as an additional income stream. It’s funny though, as I thought that Adam Taggart dealt with that sort of stuff and split from Peak Prosperity to concentrate on that aspect. Maybe it wasn’t an amicable split.

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    2. I see Chris Martenson, who I have followed since his Crash Course appeared, as a mixed bag, but hopefully a work in progress.

      So, I was gratified to see him post a talk by Alan Booker about Complexity, or the science of complex systems, where he applied that worldview to practical problems. Like how to talk to people who are addicted to the narrative of progress. One of his suggestions was, instead of that linear narrative, to start seeing history as circular, which involves nonlinear behavior that is typical of complex systems. Another was to discuss possible scenarios, as the authors of Limits to Growth did decades ago.

      He talked about the concept of ‘paradigm’ as introduced by Thomas Kuhn – a set of assumptions of how the world works that a society adopts to makes sense of what’s happening, and the gradual obsolescence of the paradigm that explains everything by analogy to a machine. And how complexity science is breaking down that paradigm. Because living systems, that exist at scales from organisms to social systems to ecosystems to the biosphere are far more complex than the machine model can handle. Unlike most humanly engineered systems, they are far less predictable.

      i was raised by physical scientists to enjoy science. But over the years I came to see that scientists tend to claim more ability to understand the universe than is really the case.

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  9. Still can’t figure out why Karl is an optimist. Most of the essay itself didn’t really go into what what’s next, after collapse, instead trying to pinpoint much of what’s wrong with this society (in his view). The fact that some communities may have offered an alternative seems largely irrelevant since they didn’t last. I’m sure well see some attempts to form egalitarian communities but they must all eventually fail because we already have the evidence that they did. Why would the future be different?

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    1. I also was a little unclear on the reasons for optimism, hence my request for the introduction. Perhaps there is more in the book by Graeber and Wengrow which I started but did not finish a year ago.

      Karl?

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      1. I see ‘optimism’ as a word that needs qualification to have any real meaning. I am not “optimistic” that communities last because I don’t think any livings system lasts forever, but goes through cycles. Gunderson and Holling propose ‘panarchy’, an interdisciplinary model used to capture dynamics of complex adaptive systems. It is a cycle of growth/exploitation, conservation, collapse/release and reorganization, as in the image linked below. This model should be familiar to students of ecology. Thus, I see ‘sustainability’ as not something achieved, but as only a matter of degree.

        So, the growth and decline of egalitarian communities is not special in this regard, and therefore explains little. My mention of them was not to advocate them as an alternative, but on the contrary to show, citing the work of Graeber and Wengrow, how many alternatives recent archeology and history reveal that humans are capable of, and could make use of for regeneration in a post-oil future. I am optimistic in the sense that I think that humanity has shown itself to be capable of a variety of organizational choices, some more durable than others. A broader study of anthropology will bear this out, I think.

        Moreover, the reason I offered my view of the mythologies that currently plague US across the political spectrum was to focus attention on it as a preliminary challenge to to be overcome before industrial society has disintegrated enough to where regenerative projects of social organization could proliferate beyond current miniscule efforts at building parallel structures.

        Karl

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    2. The alternatives didn’t last, the empires didn’t last. So after and even during the current empire fall, we get to experiment a wide range of possible arrangements. I guess, it is optimistic because we won’t have to imagine the future necessarily only as “a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
      To me it is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It just goes on and changes. And that’s all good.
      Our fears are too static, and already outdated.

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  10. If you rushed a new drug to market for what may have been good reasons at the time, you would expect authorities to step up safety monitoring, but in fact they did the opposite.

    More evidence that our leaders need to go to prison.

    Must watch, if you still care about truth.

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  12. Mac10 today takes a big picture view of reality, sans overshoot awareness.

    https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2023/11/2023-revisiting-reality.html

    Next, let’s talk about inflation and the impending return of deflation. The sources of inflation emanating from the pandemic were first and foremost the unprecedented monetary quantitative easing which dwarfed the stimulus applied after 2008, or any other period in history. QE drove asset prices across the board to ludicrous extremes. Elon Musk saw his wealth increase 10x in less than two years. Yes, you read that right – from $30 billion to $300 billion. Owners of assets – homes, condos, and stocks – were made instant millionaires. Mostly Boomers. Meanwhile younger generations were locked out of over-priced markets and then systematically bilked by rampant pump and dump schemes. Think of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange and Sam Bankman who was just convicted this past week of rampant fraud. The Big Short author Michael Lewis was calling this criminal a “genius” right before FTX collapsed. You can’t make this bull shit up. The amount of fraud in this era eclipses any other era in modern history. Nevertheless, the millionaire/billionaire wealth effect continues to drive inflation across the economy. Meanwhile, retailers are warning that middle class and low income consumers are imploding.

    In summary, the party is over. But the wealthy are still partying like it’s 1929. Because, guess what, for them that’s what this is.

    Position accordingly.

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  13. First covid, then Ukraine, now Gaza. Our western leaders are idiots.

    This is arguably a bigger news than what’s going on in Gaza (as horrifying as it is). In fact there’s no understating how significant this is.

    For the past 2 years we’ve had NATO countries send hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine, a quantity of weapons so enormous it depleted their own reserves, a vast undisclosed amount of mercenary soldiers, and threw everything but the kitchen sink in terms of sanctions to cripple Russia. The result? It simply didn’t work, NATO is now suing for peace and Ukraine will probably end up having lost at least a fifth of its country, a territory half the size of the UK.

    All this after having been told during almost the entire duration of the war that Ukraine was winning…

    Of course people will be told that it’s not a defeat, merely a “stalemate”, that NATO comes out of it reinforced with additional members, that it’s Ukraine or Zelensky’s fault anyhow, blablabla…

    But the crux of the matter is NATO defined an extremely clear objective – which was to “drive Russians back to pre-invasion lines” to directly quote Anthony Blinken – and that failed miserably despite their unprecedented efforts. Which means that the West is much less powerful than they thought they were, they just couldn’t collectively defeat Russia.

    This has immense implications. First of which being: if they can’t defeat Russia, what hope do they have against China which is likely – just looking at metrics (number of people, production capacity, military budget, etc.) – at least 5 times more powerful? The answer is obvious.

    Another one is that all those places around the world who thought they were protected by the US will start (in fact are already starting) asking themselves: “wait a minute… That protection isn’t worth much, is it?” And so we’ll likely witness very significant shifts of alliances and protection arrangements.

    Lastly people in Western countries will at some point wake up from their propagandized haze and ask very simple questions like: why did we ruin ourselves for Ukraine with almost nothing to show for it? Wouldn’t we and the Ukrainians have been better off if we’d respected Minsk 2 and if we hadn’t tried to convert Ukraine into a Western bulwark against Russia? And so this will likely serve as a hard lesson domestically that we’d better be much more humble about our geopolitical ambitions (assuming the West still is capable of learning lessons, which is far from certain).

    All in all, this will undoubtedly be seen by history as the defining event that signified we moved from Western hegemony into a multipolar world. A very long chapter of our collective world history book has just been closed.

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  14. https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/a-deep-dive-into-the-future-eafc8a9513d1

    This article gives a long term picture of the future that awaits us.
    To summarize- Within the next few centuries most of the world will be in middle ages with some pockets still having access to coal that they can use to smelt metals we have pulled to the surface and maintain 19th century industrialization levels.

    A few thousand years from now we will mostly be back to stone ages as the metals we have brought up will start to rust and decay and mining for fresh ores will be impossible as we have exhausted the surface ores long ago and the concentration is so low that manual mining will simply not cut it.

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    1. Excellent.

      Sad to think that high intelligence with its prerequisite denial will be rare “bangs” in the universe. The size of the bang depends on the size of the stored hydrocarbons which depends on many fortuitous things aligning including whether the conditions for growing and burying plants occurs before fungi and bacteria figure out how to eat lignin.

      It’s amazing that we were gifted about 1 cubic mile of oil.

      If you thought the Anthropocene was a truly geological epoch, I have to disappoint you. From a geological perspective this steaming pile of hot mess we have created by tapping into ancient carbon and other mineral resources, as well as the ecological disaster we have unleashed with them, will be seen as nothing more but a dramatic, albeit rather short lived event. Like an asteroid hitting Earth, or an eruption of some super-volcano. Bang. Death. Restart.

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      1. If I am not mistaken the Carboniferous coal was a one time event because of the inability of microorganisms to digest lignin and will not be repeated which means coal will not come back. As far as oil and gas are concerned I think it takes a severe interruption to the carbon cycle for millions of years for enough carbon to to accumulate and then get buried for tens of millions of years to become the source rock. This could still happen in the future but getting source rock back will take 40-50 million years.
        I am not sure about the formation of minerals and the timescales needed for regeneration.

        1 cubic mile is only the oil I think, if we count gas and coal I think it is closer to 3 cubic miles of oil equivalent, truly unbelievable.

        Given the timescales involved it is possible that another species overcame denial or may overcome denial but it is just impossible to know I guess. But as far as our species is concerned this was one and only shot that we had and now we are done. Soon we will start the journey back to where we started from.

        Our incredible accomplishments will become stories that our decedents will tell children around a fire under the night sky ,like how we walked on the moon, flew across oceans and moved the mountains themselves. Of course no will think of them as anything more than just folk lore.

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        1. Thanks for the distinction between coal and oil carbon accumulation.

          If you understand the unusual conditions necessary to form oil a summary would be appreciated. Or, if you’re interested, that would be a superb topic for a guest essay? I don’t recall ever seeing an essay discussing the MIRACLE of 3 cubic miles of fossil carbon.

          I’m thinking that it would be difficult to exploit oil without first exploiting coal because you need steel to drill for oil, and you need coal for steel. So we need a double alignment of fossil carbon fortuitous events, plus of course an improbable super smart ape that denies reality and believes in gods to have an advanced civilization.

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          1. I think you made a very good point to address the Silurian hypothesis. Since the formation of coal is a one time thing that happened in the Carboniferous and early Permian period and it was still practically untapped when we started using it – based on how easily accessible the earliest deposits were and how much of it we have had – it is safe to assume that we are the first ones to use it. This implies that it is unlikely that there was another industrial civilization before us.

            I also wanted to add a quick note about minerals. A quick read reveals that there are three methods of ore formations also known as Ore genesis. These are 1) Internal processes, 2) Hydrothermal processes, and 3) Surficial processes.
            All minerals seem to fall in one of these categories. The timescale seems to be a bit hard to narrow down and seems to be variable with each mineral.

            Lets take our favorite industrial mineral without which Industrial civilization is impossible i.e Iron. There are different geological formations but most deposits date back to Precambrian era which is at least 2 Billion years old!!! For instance the Pilbara deposits in Australia hold the largest Iron ore reserves on the planet were formed 1.8 Billion years ago and at current rate will run out in 30 years. This is another strike against the Silurian hypothesis as we inherited untapped mineral reserves too.

            Oil and gas are mostly made up of plankton (there are different types). To put it briefly dead plankton sinks to the ocean floor, most of it is decomposed by the bacteria but small fraction of it escapes decomposition because of lack of oxygen and is buried under layer of sediment and over the years is cooked to form oil and gas depending on temperature and pressure. This article provides an excellent summary of the process.

            https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation#:~:text=This%20plankton%20consists%20of%20animals,forms%20oil%20over%20many%20years.

            I want to add something very important here, because in normal carbon cycle so little of the plankton actually escapes decomposition that oil cannot be formed this way. So there must be an interruption to the carbon cycle which happens when there is an Anoxic event where oceans are depleted of dissolved O2. This usually lasts a million years allowing plankton to accumulate in massive quantities. Most of the oil used today is from Mesozoic era Anoxic events (150 -200 mya). Unfortunately these Anoxic events also happen to be mass extinction events and devastating for the life on earth. Incidentally we are actually seeing some local Anoxic events today because of our industrial activities.

            So based on all these things we are the only industrial civilization that has existed and will exist because earth only has another 400 million years before it becomes practically uninhabitable due to increasing Solar luminosity.

            Thank you for the kind offer to write the guest post but my knowledge is quite superficial and just bits and pieces I have gathered based on quick reads and videos I have watched of people like Art Berman ,Nate, Simon, Alice and others . I think there are people far more qualified than me to write it.

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            1. Excellent summary, thank you.

              I agree with you that prior industrial civilizations are highly unlikely.

              Your story of oil formation highlights one of dozens of rare characteristics of our planet necessary for life and iPhones. The cycle of growth followed by decomposition will not result in an accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere unless you bury some dead life before it decomposes. This means you need a geologically active planet with plate tectonics for complex life to exist. The same plate tectonics was the energy source that created life 4 billion years ago in hydrothermal vents. Without ozone from oxygen in the atmosphere the oceans would have boiled off into space by now. You need the efficiency of oxygen respiration to have the multi-level food chains that make earth interesting. You also need oxygen for lignin which is necessary for the structure of large plants and animals. A lot therefore hinges on the invention of photosynthesis, which is extraordinarily complex and appears to have been invented only once on this planet, as was the eukaryotic cell necessary for complex life, as was an ape that believes in gods and builds iPhones.

              There is much to be in awe of for us to be having this conversation.

              I highly recommend the book Rare Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee. Also superb is Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World by Nick Lane.

              Given that no one has yet written about the miracle of 3 cubic miles of buried fossil carbon your essay will be the best in the world should you decide to change your mind.

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              1. You are right about geological activity and plate tectonics as they play crucial roles in various ways to push life forward. They are also crucial in formation of ores. Many ores like Copper ore form by volcanic eruptions and plate tectonics.

                Thanks for the recommendations. I am familiar with the postulates of Rare Earth hypothesis which make a case for Earth being exceptional but have not gotten around to read the book. I know it is recommended by everyone. The postulates also attempt to answer the Fermi’s paradox if I am not mistaken.

                Thanks for the offer, I will read a little bit more on the topic of uses of different oil fractions, especially diesel. I am curious myself to know to what extend is coal and gas extraction possible without diesel as this will determine geopolitics of the near future, along with the shelf life of our civilization. I am sure it will take quite some time but if I can write something on that I will let you know.

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        1. 100,000,000 barrels per day =
          36,500,000,000 barrels per year =
          5,803,500,000,000 liters per year =
          1.4 cubic miles per year

          I stand corrected. I could have sworn I read somewhere total oil was about a cubic mile.

          Imagine the amount of life that had to grow and be buried! It’s mind boggling!

          Sure hope Kira or someone else decides to write about this miracle.

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        2. We use around 36 billion barrels of oil along with some 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent of gas and a similar amount in coal. Cumulatively they add up to around 3 Cubic miles of oil equivalent.

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    2. I’ve never heard if this theory before. It implies that intelligence+denial is less improbable to evolve than the eukaryotic cell.

      According to the Silurian hypothesis at least since the Carboniferous (300–350 million years ago), there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization comparable with our own. This means, that all what I’ve described above might had have already happened once. Or twice. Or many more times… We very well might be just another attempt made at building an industrial society by an intelligent species. The Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (an abrupt climate change 55.8 million years ago) for example could’ve easily been a result of a super intelligent mammal (or bird) species going through their industrial revolution smashing through all limits, only to end up in overshoot. Just like we did.

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    1. Yeah, I read that too. Denninger is so inconsistent. He can be right on Covid, some economics, foreign wars and how the U.S. should reform its governance; but so far into denial and stupidity on Overshoot issues. He makes a great case study for denial.
      AJ

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  16. Another mission accomplished.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/11/06/rope-a-dope/

    There was no reason to suppose that sanctions – even if the Russians hadn’t been preparing for them ever since Victoria Nuland engineered the 2014 coup – would force Putin’s hand. Moreover, the wave of Russophobic western media reporting starting even before the invasion of Ukraine has had the opposite effect, causing most Russians to rally behind the Putin government, with the main opposition now coming from a Russian Communist Party which wants the Russian military to be far more aggressive and the Russian state even more authoritarian. The situation is, however, worse on two counts. First, Russia joined a club of previously sanctioned states like China and Iran, which have every reason to desire the economic enfeeblement of the west. Worse still, former US allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – whose oil now flows primarily to China – have also maintained trade with Russia and China, while being lukewarm at best in their dealings with the west. Second, and far more damaging in the longer-term, western sanctions have backfired. Instead of causing the Russian economy to fail, it is the European (including the UK) economies which are falling apart now that the cheap energy and resources which had underpinned them have gone away. Across Europe, heavy industry, including essential steelworks and metal smelters have been closing because of the unaffordable cost of energy. The same goes for Germany’s wind turbine factories, which have also closed because of high energy prices. Even Europe’s food supply is threatened as domestic hydroponic tomato, pepper, and cucumber farming – which is dependent upon cheap gas for heating, fertiliser, and carbon dioxide – has closed during winter to cut losses.

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  18. What would the world look like if most people lacked the ability to judge a person’s competence?

    What if the assessment tools were all broken?

    You’d probably end up with fields of scammers, charlatans, and buffoons masquerading as competent professionals.

    You’d probably end up with an “expert class” so incompetent that they couldn’t even judge their own competence.

    Heck, you’d probably get state licensing laws mandating that these incompetent professionals dutifully adhere to idiotic practices.

    The blind leading the blind, the sick treating the sick, and the stupid teaching the stupid.

    Haha, what a world that would be!

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    1. https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/harvard-has-been-anti-meat-for-30

      I think we have ourselves a modern day Ancel Keys in Millet. As usual Nina Teicholz is brilliant and I would encourage un-denial readers to read her book The Big Fat Surprise.

      For those readers of un-denial who haven’t read The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick I would strongly recommend you do so. It was this book that was the beginning of the end of my faith in doctors/medicine. Then covid came along…….

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      1. I hope Ancel Keys is enjoying hell.

        I know from personal experience that diet beliefs are impervious to evidence and logic.

        I try to keep my opinions to myself unless someone asks for advice. Tough to do when you suspect close family members are harming themselves. I guess we all make mistakes. I smoked and drank too much for 20 years before seeing the light.

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        2. It could be that Red meat isn’t bad in small amounts but the quantity of red meat eaten by the average American is harmful.

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          1. I don’t remember the details of Dr. Varki’s concerns. He studies the sugars that attach to the membrane of cells. Apparently they have a big impact on health and have been little studied to date. Red meat somehow influences this system (I think). I like red meat but eat little because it is so expensive.

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    1. This is another example of the news media completely missing the important issue.

      Not one word about whether what she said about mRNA was true.

      If she advocated to inject a novel untested gene therapy substance into children that has known risks for lifetime harm and zero benefits, she should expect to be harassed.

      If fact she should go to prison.

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      1. IMO Everything she said was annoyingly simplistic and often just parroted what the Govt said.

        She also tried to get some of her colleagues fired when they wrote an article saying indigenous knowledge is not the same thing as science.

        Seems like she actively campaigns against truth and reality, and is know crying because some people are rightly pissed. Also why should the uni give her security for doing something that wasn’t even in her job description?

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          1. gosh we are so far away from that level of thinking in NZ. We really are a bunch of sheep 😦
            I hope I will be ok after getting vaccinated, I wish I didn’t get it

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            1. The odds seem to be good that you will be ok, especially if you are avoiding the boosters. Risk goes up significantly with each shot. I’ve heard Dr. McCullough has developed a protocol for people wishing to clear mRNA from their systems but I know nothing about it.

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  20. How does William Rees remain so stoic while doing the work that he does and knowing everything that he knows? We all kind of know that the most likely resolution to human overshoot will be hundreds of millions if not billions of premature deaths. Maybe it’s because he is almost 80, and a (relatively) wealthy citizen of a sparsely populated country in the Global North, meaning that there is a decent chance that collapse won’t affect him personally. (For the record, I am in my mid 20s but am still a relatively wealthy citizen of a Global North country). Other overshoot aware people such as Nate Hagens, Richard Heinberg and John Michael Greer all seem a bit more optimistic about the future than Rees.

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    1. I’ve listen to Dr. Rees many times and I’ve detected him being quite upset at times I think.

      It might help him cope if he understood MORT. I’ve tried to introduce him to the theory but it did not catch because he never discusses it.

      In fact I have failed at spreading MORT to a single prominent overshoot aware intellectual. Not one. Nada.

      The famous intellectuals don’t even criticize me and the MORT theory. They ignore it. Or, maybe, they deny it.

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      1. I talked about MORT with many many people of different professions and in different stages of life and showed this CARTA talk a few times. Some think it’s interesting, some embrace it, some disagree about minor points. What they all have in common is that it’s forgotten and never comes up again. I can’t explain it.

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        1. That’s a very interesting point.

          I have persuaded 2 friends to read Varki’s book. We had a brief discussion when they finished and it never came up again. Despite them knowing I think a lot about MORT.

          I have explained MORT to a couple dozen people in real life. Not one has continued the discussion at a later date.

          I succeeded in having Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock interview Dr. Varki. During the episode you can hear that Smith understood MORT and its significance for explaining why most people either deny climate change, or deny what we’d have to do to address it. Alex promptly forgot MORT and spent the next hundreds of episodes wondering why we deny climate change.

          By Alex Smith: Radio Ecoshock interview with Ajit Varki

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        1. Thanks for the tip! Here are some excerpts from Heinberg’s book.

          This idea is central to the essay I wrote that launched un-Denial.

          There are two more solutions to the Fermi Paradox that I consider credible. It is possible that, while the evolution of bacteria and other prokaryotes can get started Relatively easily, the evolution of eukaryotes, and therefore of all multicelled organisms, is really hard to ignite. Nick Lane makes this argument in his book Power, Sex, Suicide. Even if that’s not the case, it may be that, as Ajit Varki and Danny Brower argue in Denial, the evolution of high intelligence—and therefore the awareness of mortality—must lead to a pervasive state of anxiety and cautiousness, and therefore a decisive reduction in evolutionary fitness, unless it is accompanied by the highly unlikely simultaneous evolution of the ability to consciously deny reality. These are not mutually exclusive arguments; both could be true. The upshot is that either high intelligence, or multicelled life in general, or both, are likely to be extremely rare in the universe.

          Here Heinberg introduces an idea to complement the Maximum Power Principle (MPP) I have not heard before: The Optimum Power Principle (OPP). He also mentions the Overton Window which may explain the very slow growth of un-Denial. He then goes on to list other behaviors a la Nate Hagens that contribute to overshoot. I observe that Heinberg does not place MORT front and center as the primary culprit for overshoot, nor the existence of our unique species. He concludes with a hopeful message that after collapse we will re-emerge with a new ability to limit growth and thus override the Fermi Paradox. I skimmed his argument (not copied here) for this optimism but saw no evidence for why he thinks high intelligence can exist without denial so I suspect his optimism is not grounded in reality. It is probably hard to sell books without a hopeful message.

          Denial, Optimism Bias, and Irrational Exuberance

          In this chapter we have seen that the ability to limit power is rooted in biology and has a long history in all human societies; further, engineers routinely find ways to incorporate power-limiting mechanisms in technologies of all sorts. I have proposed the optimum power principle—the observation that organisms often curb their power in the present as a way to maximize power over the long run—as an addendum to the maximum power principle. Even prisoner’s dilemmas have solutions. If the existential crises we surveyed in Chapter 5 are indeed the result of too much power, there is no reason (in principle, at least) why humanity cannot power down to solve them. So, given the capacity and innumerable opportunities for power moderation, why do we humans still appear to be running headlong toward a global catastrophe driven by power excesses and abuses?

          The adaptive cycle tells us that temporary imbalances in nature and human societies are natural and inevitable; over time, rebalancing occurs. however, those temporary imbalances are sometimes particularly large; that is, the growth phase of the cycle can sometimes swing to extremes. Humanity’s access to fossil fuels has propelled us on growth and conservation phases that are utterly unprecedented in terms of the levels of power and population size that we have achieved. With so many opportunities for growth, we’ve tended to set aside ancient cultural attitudes and practices promoting self restraint, even if doing so blinds us to the overwhelming likelihood of a cyclical collapse/release phase of unprecedented magnitude, and makes it harder for us to do things that would reduce the scale of the impending calamity.

          But there’s more. We are inherently subject to a set of collective and individual psychological mechanisms that make it easy for a large power imbalance to appear, but difficult for us to recognize and minimize that imbalance before serious problems occur. These mechanisms take the forms of denial, optimism bias, our tendency to lie to ourselves and others, the Overton Window, our genetically based pursuit of status, our addiction to novelty, our tendency to discount the future, and the lottery winner’s syndrome. Let’s look briefly at each of these, and see how and why they all tend to keep us from limiting our power excesses.

          The phrase “climate denial” may trigger thoughts of efforts by fossil fuel companies to sow public doubt about the reality of global warming. These efforts are certainly real, but they have been successful largely because denial itself is a deeply entrenched human capacity. In their book Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind, Ajit Varki and Danny Brower suggest that the awareness of our own mortality (which arose along with the development of language sometime in the Pleistocene) might have stopped human evolution in its tracks. That is, our expectation of personal extinction would have made us so depressed and so cautious that we probably wouldn’t have been able to compete successfully with other species, or other members of our own species who were not so burdened, if not for the simultaneous appearance of a fortuitous adaptation— our ability to deny death and other unpleasant realities.44 As we became aware of the inevitability of our own death, we quickly learned to deny that awareness so we could get on with our day-to-day business. Denial thus served an evolutionary function as an essential tool of terror management. Over time, our denial muscle probably strengthened—and it has arguably done so especially in recent decades.

          If individual mortality is terror-inducing, coming to terms emotionally with collective death is utterly beyond us. scientists have been aware of species extinctions for the past couple of hundred years, since the beginnings of modern biology and paleontology.45 We have therefore also become aware of the possibility of our own species’ extinction. That awareness has become more acute during the past 70 years or so, since the start of the global nuclear arms race. But human extinction is a subject few people wish to consider, let alone bring up in polite conversation (although apocalyptic novels and movies are becoming Increasingly popular). While we know that each of us will eventually die, we implicitly count on the persistence of future generations, and the survival of human culture, in order to maintain our psychological equilibrium. The thought that the entire human enterprise, supporting all our collective dreams and accomplishments, could disappear in a cloud of smoke or an endless stream of carbon emissions is unbearable. So, we psychically bury the prospect of human extinction, even as we go about creating the means for its occurrence.

          Denial of climate change is therefore more than just a political tool for maintaining corporate profits (though this it certainly is). It is also a collective coping mechanism.

          The most common form of denial—whether of death or climate change—is mental compartmenting. We create a mental compartment for death and another for climate change; but there are also compartments for favorite old movies, recipes, opinions about politics, and so on. We aren’t literally denying the reality of death or climate change; it’s right there, in its compartment. Every so often we look in that compartment and feel fearful. But the amount of time we spend looking in any particular compartment is Typically proportional not to its actual importance, but to its ability to satisfy our interests and emotional needs. Sooner or later an event (perhaps a visit to the doctor’s office) forces us to look into the death compartment; but by then the damage from years of smoking or other unhealthful habits is already done. Much the same will likely be true with climate change.

          The individual and cultural coping mechanism of denial has a flipside—an optimism bias that again leads us to believe that we are less likely to experience a negative event than we actually are. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot, in her book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, cites surveys and experiments showing that the phenomenon is real and pervasive.46 Its mirror image, pessimism bias, affects people suffering from clinical depression, but is otherwise rare. This natural tendency toward optimism has served an evolutionary purpose—it encourages us to take risks in order to reap rewards. But it also steeply increases our vulnerability and hobbles our ability to respond in the era of climate change and other converging crises.

          Sometimes collective optimism bias feeds back on itself, resulting in mania, bubbles, and booms. As Scottish journalist Charles MacKay put it in his still-relevant 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “Men…think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan used the phrase “irrational exuberance” to describe the dot-com stock market bubble of the 1990s, but many bubbles preceded that one, and more bubbles have followed, including the fracking frenzy of the 2010s. Collective manias spread and intensify because no one wants to miss out on the “next big thing.” We may rationally know that the boom can’t last forever, but we don’t want to be the one who gets left behind. In a sense, the Great Acceleration can be thought of as the grandest popular delusion in the history of our species: from the outset it was obvious that fossil fuels would eventually deplete, but we treated them as though they would last forever.

          Both denial and optimism bias depend on deception, including self-deception. Yuval Noah Harari, in his popular book Sapiens, makes the point that our development of language back in the Pleistocene gave us the capacity to create myths and useful fictions. language enabled us to talk about things that don’t exist—which is an essential ability if you want to design a new machine from scratch or create a new company. But we have gotten so good at creating fictional entities that the real world has become easy to deny and ignore. As Harari puts it:

          Ever since the Cognitive revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.47

          Collective denial and optimism bias make it difficult to talk to friends and relatives about the looming climate crisis, resource depletion, and other trends that imperil our future. We are sensitive to one another’s subtle cues, and change the subject when it’s clear that the discussion has touched a nerve. The same is true on a national level: there are some things we just don’t want to talk about. The range of acceptable public discourse is called the Overton Window, named for Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range of acceptability, not on its inherent truth or usefulness. According to Overton, this window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend, or ideas she can talk about, without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office.

          As a result of decades of sustained collective effort, the scientific community has brought climate change within the Overton Window—at least some of the time, and in most nations. however, one important and necessary response to climate change is still well beyond the window—a deliberate policy of degrowth. As discussed in Chapter 5, continued annual growth in population and consumption makes it ever harder for the world’s nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to minimize climate change. An obvious solution would be to reduce population and consumption. That would, of course, pose a challenge in a world that has come to see growth as essential to the economic health of nations. nevertheless, the logical necessity of degrowth is inescapable, and a few economists have proposed ways of dealing with the difficulties it would pose.48 As a gauge of degrowth’s proximity to the window, consider this fact: the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations periodically produces hundreds of models to show how government policies of various kinds would impact emissions and global warming. But degrowth has never been included among those policies.

          Incidentally, the truth-telling ability of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist who was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019, is (in her view, and that of some psychologists as well) partly due to her autism—which makes her less aware of social cues and hence less prone to hypocrisy. If no one but Thunberg has had the courage to tell world leaders to their faces, “We are in the beginning of mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” that’s largely because people with autism are less aware of the Overton Window.49

          Another psychological mechanism making it difficult for us to rein in our powers so as to avert global crisis is the pursuit of status. Throughout the evolution of complex organisms, notably vertebrates, status has served as a way of minimizing the costs of competition. Animals compete for mates and food, but competition carries costs. Signals of status within a species establish which individuals are more or less likely to be successfully challenged, so overall there is less energy wasted in competition. Tendencies among modern humans to acquire status symbols—expensive cars, clothes, and houses—are therefore deeply rooted in evolution.50 If we’re told that big, powerful automobiles and jet vacations are sealing the fate of future generations, that message has to overcome the lure of status in order to get our attention and change our behavior.

          We humans are also wired to respond to novelty—to notice anything in our environment that is out of place or unexpected and that might signal a potential threat or reward. Most types of reward increase the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine within the brain. experiments have found that if an animal’s dopamine receptor genes are removed, it explores less and take fewer risks—and without some exploration and risk taking, individuals have reduced chances of survival. But the brain’s dopamine reward system, which evolved to serve this practical function, can be hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors. This is especially problematic in a culture full of novel stimuli specifically designed to attract our interest—such as the hundreds of advertising messages the average child sees each day.

          Addictions to shopping or to acquiring status symbols are hard to overcome because they are reinforced by our innate brain chemistry. They can be as hard to defeat as a drug dependency. If our environment is filled with potential dopamine reward system hijackers (which it is, primarily due to cheap energy and profit-maximizing consumer capitalism, magnified by the reward systems built into social media), then it stands to reason that more of us are likely to end up spending much of our lives chasing after momentary feelgood experiences that soon turn sour. That’s why our society is overwhelmed with high levels of drug, gambling, sugar, television, social media, and pornography addiction.

          As we’ve seen in this chapter, human societies have learned to tame biologically rooted reward-seeking behavior with culturally learned behaviors geared toward self-restraint and compassion for others. Prudence, thrift, and the willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the community are functions of the neocortex—the part of the brain unique to mammals; and even though they are rooted in evolutionary imperatives, they are also at least partly learned by way of example. Most pre-industrial human societies expended a great deal of effort to provide moral guidance, often through myths and stories, to foster pro-social behavior. When a culture ceases providing this needed educational effort—either because self-restraint and empathy are no longer seen as important, or because the society is so overcome with basic survival challenges that it simply doesn’t have the resources to devote toward educating the next generation—then these values can become seriously eroded.

          Consumerism, the economic system that was invented to solve the problem of overproduction, hijacked our brains’ reward pathways for status and novelty, and it has also deliberately eroded our learned social adaptations for restraint and compassion. It reduced the perceived social value of thrift and sacrifice on behalf of community in order to promote the ideal of individual gratification through consumption. Again, this system was put in place with what industrial and governmental leaders regarded as the best of intentions— that is, with the hope of expanding markets, creating jobs, maximizing profits, and increasing tax revenues so that governments could provide more services. But consumerism makes it harder for us to address converging global crises.

          We also have an innate tendency, when making decisions, to give more weight to present threats and opportunities than to future ones. This is called discounting the future—and it makes it hard to sacrifice now to overcome an enormous future risk such as climate change. The immediate reward of vacationing in another country, for example, is likely to overwhelm our concern about the greenhouse gas footprint of our airline flight. Multiply that tendency by billions of individual decisions with climate repercussions, and supercharge it with a systemic drive to maximize each company’s quarterly profit margins, and you can see why it’s difficult to actually reduce total greenhouse gas emissions.

          To make matters even worse, many of us in wealthy nations suffer from lottery winner’s syndrome.51 Sociological studies of lottery winners show that many actually experience a reduction in happiness and well-being: they’re overwhelmed by choice and excess, their relationships become discolored by jealousy and suspicion, and they often become more socially isolated and feel less empathy toward others. Some end up gambling their money away, divorcing, or turning to drugs or alcohol. In a sense, the people who benefitted most from the fossil-fueled Great Acceleration (i.e., middle and upper-class citizens) are like lottery winners: they have collectively experienced a vast and rapid increase in wealth. They have been encouraged to think that they must somehow deserve this level of wealth, and their sense of empathy toward poorer communities— both domestically and globally—has shriveled. They may also feel more isolated, and are more likely to pursue high-risk behaviors with a high potential reward so as to extend and repeat the initial high they got when they realized they had the winning ticket.

          Two final barriers to collective self-limitation in the modern world need to be mentioned, and they are perhaps the most obdurate of all; they are less psychological in nature, more structural. First: nationalism and patriotism tend to hide our common humanity behind divisive notions of global rivalry and national chauvinism. Hence governments and peoples insist on mistrusting each other, and on refusing to cooperate in rationally facing our collective overshoot predicament.

          Second: any collective effort to degrow the economy in order to halt climate change, or for any other reason, must confront the relentless logic of capital expansion. interest must be paid on existing debt to avoid default; and expectations of higher incomes must be met if politicians are to maintain their approval ratings. In short, the maintenance and reproduction of the system require ever more accumulation of capital and social power.

          These two factors support and reinforce each other (even if they occasionally come into conflict). In tandem, they create a cultural matrix that encourages feelings, attitudes, urges, beliefs, actions, and ideas that promote accumulation and growth, while discouraging those that undermine accumulation and growth. Anyone who wants to rein in the depredations of a system that has already grown too big to be maintained over the long term must swim upstream against this powerful current.

          Of course, not everyone is in denial, not everyone suffers from optimism bias, and not everyone discounts the future and suffers from the lottery winner’s syndrome. Some of us, like Greta Thunberg, are even immune to the Overton Window. But in all, we have formidable barriers to overcome if we are collectively to understand and respond to the global crises that our way of life is provoking.

          ♦    ♦    ♦

          The maximum power principle would seem to suggest there’s little a species like ours can do if it faces problems created by the accumulation of too much power. It’s in our genes, after all, to gain and apply as much power as we can. If we don’t do it, the next organism (or person, or country, or company) will, and we will fall by the wayside in life’s evolutionary struggle.

          As we’ve seen in this chapter, self-limitation is in fact widespread and essential in nature. The maximum power principle is a true and useful concept, but it requires a supplement—the optimum power principle—which adds the element of time. Organisms routinely limit power in the present so as to have and use more of it in the long run. There is plenty of precedent for self-regulation in nature and human history.

          Nevertheless, as a result of the fossil-fueled Great Acceleration, we have gotten so used to growth in population and consumption (two self-reinforcing feedbacks) that we think such growth is normal and essential. Potential checks on power, which could stop or reverse not only climate change but economic inequality, resource depletion, and other deepening crises, have a lot of momentum to overcome.

          Given our current levels of denial, and the vested interests of our elites, the overwhelming likelihood is that humanity is in for a release phase (in terms of the adaptive cycle) that will be unprecedented in its severity. however, that could ultimately help clear the way for a different way of being—the second solution to the Fermi Paradox discussed at the start of this chapter. We could learn to focus our attention on beauty and happiness rather than acquisition of material wealth. We could excel in self-control, rather than seeking to further control nature and other people.

          Will we flame out or learn to live within limits? In the next and final chapter, we’ll look to the future of humanity, and the future of power.

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        1. My guess is it’s outside the Overton Window to discuss an evolutionary reason for why we are the only species that believes in life after death (aka God) and why despite uniquely high intelligence we deny an obvious extreme state of overshoot that will kill or harm most of our children.

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  21. HHH @ POB today.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/us-august-oil-production-at-record-high/#comment-765732

    Central banks are selling treasuries to get dollars. Because it’s cheaper than trying to borrow those dollars through REPO.

    Dollar shortage is real and it’s huge. And no FED can’t provide dollar liquidity in Eurodollar market. Which is why we will continue seeing dollar denominated reserves disappear. Globally!

    A lot of these newly issued treasuries are getting locked up by money market funds and just aren’t going to be available for use.

    Just because they issued a massive amount of new collateral doesn’t mean it available and available to those who need it most to rollover debts.

    Inflation and excessive money creation isn’t The problem. Lack of collateral and cost to borrow collateral and cost of using collateral to borrow dollars is the problem.

    My $25 oil call has always been based on the potential and likelihood of the REPO market having an absolute meltdown and interest rates blowing out in REPO due to collateral. It’s hard to nail down exact timing. But I think we are a whole lot closer than we were say 2 months ago.

    It’s going to become prohibitively expensive to borrow dollars via collateral via REPO.

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  22. el gato malo today with a deep dive into the causes of mask insanity.

    nothing is obvious to scared people

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/of-masks-and-masquarades

    masks are trying to make a comeback.

    despite the absolutely staggering amount of data refuting the idea that they work to stop any kind of respiratory virus (or even bacteria), it just will not go away.

    i think it’s always going to be with us. the damage was too deep and there is a certain sort of person who is just never going to let it go.

    because this was their happy place.

    “your mask protects me” was made up science but it was phenomenal propaganda.

    this pseudo-moralistic psyop probably cannot ever be cured among the anxious and authority craving. it was just too perfect.

    it’s a societal spirochete penetrating the blood brain barrier and making mad those it infects. honestly, it’s worse. it’s basically herpes. and herpes is forever.

    every time you get run down, it’s there, waiting to flare up.

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          1. I don’t know what it was like in your country but this is what happened in Canada:

            • there was no requirement to wear N95 masks
            • N95 masks were in very short supply and the few that could be bought all had exhaust vents that bypassed the filter making them useless for preventing transmission
            • the government made no effort to send N95 masks to households
            • there was no requirement to be clean shaven
            • there was no training from the government on how to wear a mask
            • the government did not inform citizens that wearing any type of mask was not helpful outdoors and so we had a majority wearing masks outside (and often in cars by themselves 😦 )
            • security guards checking for masks outside businesses did not inspect mask type or proper use

            In summary, the mask mandate was a make-believe charade that accomplished nothing and our health care professionals have forever ruined their reputations for not calling out the insanity.

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            1. I agree. Even in New Zealand, the message was all over the place. The single bright spot was the incoming police commissioner had a beard but shaved it off with the explicit intention of getting a good fit with masks. There was a belated update to official advice to wear quality masks, as the others were next to useless, but there was never any hammering home that message nor any advice on beards. Some idiots, even doctors, had bushy beards and a flimsy mask over it. I’ve always said, humans are stupid.

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      2. Mike,
        sometimes you astound me. Have a look at exactly the masks that are used by labs studying these viruses. Anything less than a full body suit with external filtered air will not do.

        You are still sucked into the cult’s vortex. Get out before it kills you.

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            1. Well, despite your beliefs, people have been discussing it for some time and there is research which appears to support both sides. For me, it’s obvious that blocking or restricting entry to virus particles would reduce the chances of infection (since infection arises from such particles entering the air ways. The only question is whether the right quality and fit are used.

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  23. Dr. Tom Murphy today on the value of bugs.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/11/nothing-without-bugs/

    A while back I wrote a post pointing out a way to see that animals are worth more than their weight in gold. The concept was cute, but not fully defensible in detail. Yet, the many orders-of-magnitude difference in market value of animals vs. their gold-equivalent value at least indicated that we might have something wrong, on the basis that we can’t live without the animals, but could live without gold.

    In this post, I will follow a similar path to arrive at what I think is even a more stark result: that the economic value of arthropods (e.g., insects) is something like $10,000 per kilogram.

    Therefore, no bugs, no humans. No them, no us.

    Wake the Fup!

    This is really simple and obvious. What we might call modernity, civilization, or the “world made by humans” is a layer built on top of fundamental prerequisites like air, water, materials, and life. Humans cannot exist in ecological isolation. Our context is unfathomably deep in time and in biodiversity. The hierarchy is crystal clear: humans require ecological health rather than the reverse. This means all our constructs, which do not exist without us, cannot exist without a functioning ecology. We might be forgiven for taking a prerequisite for granted—like oxygen in the atmosphere—except when we are actively destroying the prerequisite with marvelous efficiency.

    The globally-dominant culture preaches the opposite hierarchy, either out of ignorance or arrogance: that humans and our constructs are of primary concern—the rest being incidental background noise. For the human supremacist (most people in our culture, unknowingly), biophysical considerations only enter in the context of energy, materials, extraction, exploitation, and in short, market value.

    Let’s be clear: the culture has it terribly wrong. Such an attitude can appear to work for a time, but the accompanying fate of the biophysical world is steady decline as one commodity after another is monetized, displacing the community of life and making various creatures’ existence progressively more difficult and dismal to the point of non-viability and extinction. Our culture might view this as unfortunate and unintended collateral damage, but not more correctly as an existential threat of our own making.

    What I am saying is that a system powerful enough to destroy ecological health and biodiversity—which we have demonstrated in spades—cannot survive unless it deliberately refrains from using this power. It must invert the cultural hierarchy and place ecosystem health—the vitality of the biodiverse planet—above all other considerations…ABOVE ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS, to hammer the point.

    We have abundant evidence that we can destroy life, at large scale, up to and including a ballooning number of permanent extinctions. It is far beyond our power to create biodiversity and life—especially pre-tuned to play a viable ecological role in the context of all other life. Only life can create itself, and only long exposure to the full world-as-it-is can shape life to work in the long term, via multi-level selection processes. While we can’t create and shape life to our whims, what we can do is get out of its way: let life do what it does best. Give it room. Make it a priority. Respect it. Live in awe of it. See it as the only thing that allows us to be who we are. Without it, we are nothing. If a person is naïve enough to think that we can engineer what we need as a replacement, then at least we can hope they have the decency to keep quiet, lest they unwittingly advocate the demise of everything they themselves hold dear. Sir: please take your hand off the saw, and carefully step back to safety, for the good of us all.

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    1. Nice essay. I do note that Tom falls into the human trap, with his last paragraph where he’s treating humans as different from other life (we should “get out of its way”) but it is hard to do otherwise when writing about this, and he has done the opposite in other essays.

      Sadly, I think many humans probably think we can do fine without the rest of the natural world, because we have technology. We can grow food in the lab. We can take virtual trips, seeing the world’s wonders without actually travelling and we’ll have untold leisure time to do what we want.

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  24. Billions of People at Risk from Wet Bulb Temperature’s Rendering Major Cities Uninhabitable

    Although the theoretical limit of the human body to tolerate heat and humidity is a wet bulb temperature of 35 C (with 100% humidity), practical empirical studies show that the limit for healthy, young, individuals is more like 30.6 C (with 100% humidity). Thus, our human body is nowhere near as resilient to heat and humidity as we previously thought.

    Also, very bad is the fact that the elderly, the very young, people on medications like antidepressants, the obese, those with medical conditions, and people exercising outside, and exposed to sunlight, are much less resilient than those healthy, young individuals in the study, so the heat and humidity combination for them to collapse is even lower than 30.6 C with 100% humidity.

    Not good.

    The new study that I chat about is:
    “Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence ofempirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance”
    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas…

    Basically, this study used the empirical body resilience wet bulb numbers to see which regions of the planet will become uninhabitable first.

    Climate models project warming and humidity conditions into the future for various warming levels, and show that billions of people will soon be exposed to temperature-humidity conditions not conducive to survival outside. They will have to stay indoors with air conditioning, unless they burrow underground or wear spacesuit like chill suits to be outside for any length of time.

    You may ask: What is the world coming to?

    I am trying to tell you.

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    1. Reminds me of the novel by Phillip K. Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”. So much of his science fiction is prescient of now (or some iteration of Now). In the book it is impossible to go outside buildings without special suits because of how hot the planet is.
      AJ

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  25. With extreme heat and debt and inflation and mRNA and WHO and Ukraine and Gaza and Taiwan it’s easy to miss the biggest threat: nuclear war.

    The world believes (for good reason) that the US is agreement incapable.

    On this episode, Nate is re-joined by risk expert Chuck Watson for a candid discussion of recent news regarding the nuclear developments between Russia and the United States. As the world’s attention is focused on the events in the Middle East, US testing and development of new nuclear weapons and Russia’s decision to pull out of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last week have been overlooked and underreported by major media. Yet, in the bigger picture these trends represent some of the most imminent risks to life on Earth as we know it. What is the history behind this framework of trust that took decades to develop, and how quickly might our current fear spiral destroy it? Are the people in positions of power aware of the dangers of this situation and acting with appropriate caution? What should concerned individuals and leaders understand and advocate for to minimize this truly existential risk?

    About Chuck Watson:

    Chuck Watson has had a long career in military and intelligence work, with a specialty in natural and human made disaster modeling. He worked for the US Air Force, was an attache to US Ambassadors to the Middle East Robert McFarland, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a Soviet expert. Chuck has worked as an advisor to the military for over four decades with a particular emphasis on big data, open source intelligence, with an emphasis on the Soviet Union and Russia. Chuck is also the founder and Director of Research and Development of Enki Holdings, LLC, which designs computer models for phenomena ranging from tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and other weather phenomena, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as well as anthropogenic hazards such as industrial accidents, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.

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    1. Copied in full here because what Chuck Watson says is important.

      Nuclear arms race 2.0: more dangerous than the original?

      I’m sure a lot of you are saying “Not This Again!” … or the likely corollary, “Not Him Again!” when you hear I’ve done another podcast with Nate Hagens at The Great Simplification (link to program). That’s certainly my reaction – as noted I really don’t like doing podcasts. However, I think that despite all the coverage of Ukraine, Gaza, the potential conflict with China over Taiwan, Climate, or even the latest Taylor Swift news, this may well be seen in hindsight as the most important issue of our time. So here are some notes and more extensive comments to supplement the program. Yes, it will be long … 😛 all of this is horribly complex, and crosses many disparate fields of international law, military science, as well as the obscure and complex area of nuclear weapons design and development.

      Several major events happened in the last few weeks that may have gotten lost in all of the coverage of the events in the Middle East. Yet in many respects they may be of more importance for the longer term future of humanity.

      1) October 18th, the US conducted a nuclear weapons test at the Nevada test range. The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) asserts the experiment used chemical high explosives and radiotracers in an underground tunnel on Oct. 18 to “validate new predictive explosive models” to improve the U.S. ability to detect low-yield nuclear explosions around the world. However, such tests raised concerns that it was “dual use” and was a even sub-critical test of some kind that could aid nuclear weapons development. Konstantin Kosachyov, deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said on Oct. 20 that there should be an international assessment to determine whether the NNSA’s announced experiment was compliant with the CTBT. “We do not know what exactly the Americans have blown up underground.” For what it’s worth I take NNSA’s assertions at face value, and perhaps the Russian concerns are posturing, but given the existing mutual suspicions it’s not a good situation if they aren’t confident they know what we’re up to.

      2) Russia has deratified the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This was not a rash reaction to the test, but something that has been building since the mid 2000’s. Russia ratified the treaty in 1996 but the US Senate never ratified the treaty – the US has “voluntary abided by” the treaty. The last straw from the Russian perspective was the US test the 18th of October, which they argue is setting the state for a resumption of testing, something desperately wanted by some in the US. The Duma passed the revocation over a month ago, Putin held off signing, and Russia demanded the US cancel or at least further explain the test. When it didn’t, Russia went ahead with the final revocation of their ratification, placing them on an equal status with the US. The literal impact of the withdrawal can (and has) been exaggerated – Russia has stated that it will continue to abide by the terms of the treaty on the same basis that the US does, but it is definitely a step in the wrong direction.

      3) The US has announced the 27th of October that it is developing a new variant in the B61 aircraft delivered nuclear bomb series, the B61-13. In one sense this is not a big deal, it is mostly replacing older, existing systems. But viewed in context it is a serious escalation, reversing the trend towards smaller yield weapons. Especially worrisome is the rationale being given for the development: “The B61-13 will provide the President with additional options against certain harder and large-area military targets, even while the Department works to retire legacy systems such as the B83-1 and the B61-7.” The phrase “Large Area Military Targets” is often a euphemism in nuclear-targeting speak for industrial sites and ports, among other things. In other words, cities.

      These three events and others like the Rapid Dragon test in August, and the long expected news on November 6th and 7th that both NATO and Russia are stepping back from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), a treaty to limit threatening conventional military build-ups on the borders between Russia and NATO, are all indications that we are entering an dangerous spiral that is making the world a much more dangerous place. The lull in the US-Soviet Nuclear Arms Race, that peaked with something like 64,000 nuclear weapons in 1985 and has dropped to under 14,000 today, seems to be reversed. The loss of CFE means there is incentive to build up conventional forces as well as theater tactical nuclear systems to counter them.

      But it’s worse than that: the new generation of bombs and, just as critically, the systems (aircraft, missiles, and submarines) used to deploy them, is making these weapons more lethal and politically “usable”. In other words, reducing the nuclear threshold. So for many reasons, Arms Race 2.0 may be more dangerous than the original. That realization by Nate was the reason for his insistence at doing an urgent update, because none of the other issues he considers vital to humanity’s future – energy, environment, resource depletion, economics – matter at all if global war breaks out. Especially if it goes nuclear.

      My biggest concern is the ongoing collapse of the system of treaties and international law that has helped guide international relations for the last 100 years or so. This is a broader problem than just nuclear arms control, but that area is the most apparent and dangerous. The nuclear related treaties were put in place over time from the early 1960’s through the early 1990’s and reduced the numbers of warheads, but more importantly in some respects reduced their potential for use. Another concern are changes in nuclear weapons technology and doctrine that are related to the loss of treaty restrictions and are interacting in frightening ways. Lets look at each in turn.


      Castle Bravo – contamination from this test was one of the drivers of the LTBT

      By the early 1960’s nuclear weapons development had clearly gotten out of hand. Atmospheric testing was causing widespread contamination downwind, and testing in space was causing significant electrical effects with major potential impacts on the use of space for peaceful purposes. The first major arms control treaty was the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 between the US and Soviet Union. This led to additional treaties, in particular the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) of 1972, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) of the 1970’s, and Intermediate range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, and finally the more recent CTBT, START and SORT agreements that stopped all testing, reduced the numbers of warheads, and how many can be put on any given missile. ABM and INF are especially critical as will be discussed below, but the net result was the create of a framework to both reducing the numbers as well as danger of nuclear capable systems.

      After the fall of the Soviet Union, the treaty structures came under increasing stress. Third parties not included in the treaties such as China, North Korea, and Iran began to develop capabilities that the parties (the US and Russia, who inherited them from the Soviet Union) felt presented dangers, but could not be addressed due to the mutual treaty obligations. Russia’s approach was to try to involve those third parties or work cooperatively with the US, whereas the preferred US approach was to withdraw from the treaties and proceed unilaterally.

      Each accused the other of violating the treaties as a reasons for withdrawal,. In any international agreement there are disputes and “noise” around the edges, but in my opinion there were in reality few serious violations by either side, the problems were with culture, and how those alleged violations and limitations should be addressed in an increasingly complex world. The US (and particularly the Neoconservative movement that took over the Foreign Policy approach of both political parties) felt, after the collapse of the Cold War, that the US had a unique opportunity to take an aggressive lead in reshaping the world, and did not need the encumbrance of treaties that (in their minds) limited US actions at the expense of strategic and tactical flexibility.

      Another aspect of the breakdown of global arms treaties, as well as other important agreements, is cultural. This is a gross simplification, but Russia tends towards a legalistic interpretation of treaties. The US often takes a less literal and more “spirit of the agreement” view, states its interpretation of them, and accuses Russia and others of violating a treaty when in fact they simply interpret it differently. This is a huge problem when there is a change of administrations in D.C., as each administration interprets a given treaty differently from its predecessor. This is a frustration not only for Russia, but the rest of the world as well.

      A related issue is the US constitution and political system. Under that system, in order to become law there are two steps – the executive branch must sign a treaty, and the Senate must ratify it with a 2/3rds vote. And there is the problem: getting a 2/3rds vote with the current near 50/50 split between the Democratic and Republican Parties is difficult. Even good treaties get caught up in domestic politics. So numerous treaties have been signed by the US, and the US is abiding by them to a greater or lessor extent, but since the Senate has not ratified them they do not carry the force of law or commit future administrations. The 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT, noted above) is just such a treaty. The US signed it but the Senate has never ratified it. Other important treaties have also gone unsigned for a variety of reasons such as Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. There’s even a Wikipedia page listing some of them.

      So Russia (and many other countries, including major US allies) are increasingly frustrated with the US because negotiating agreements is hard enough, but getting a long term legal commitment out of the US through ratification is almost impossible. Indeed, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said at the UN recently “We have concluded for ourselves: they are absolutely incompetent.” Russians have a compound word for it – Недоговороспособны: Not capable of agreement.

      This is not to say that the Russians or anybody else are faultless; indeed, Russians are masters at negotiation and process manipulation. However, for the most part, Russia has kept to its agreements and within the process in a way that, I’m sad to say, the US has not, at least since the early to mid 1990’s. The issue is that holding other countries to agreements that the US itself has not ratified, or simply ignores at its own convenience, is grossly hypocritical.

      So what about the second point, that changes to weapons themselves and how we plan on using them has made things more dangerous? Well, this already long post would be book length to fully explore that aspect, but here are a couple of brief (yeah, right) aspects.

      It has to be kept in mind how different nuclear weapons are from conventional weapons. Much has been made in the media that Israel has dropped roughly the equivalent amount of explosives to a tactical nuclear bomb (20,000 tons of TNT). But the impacts of a nuclear bomb are literally an order of magnitude larger. Had Israel dropped a single 20kt nuclear weapon on Gaza City (and they apparently have that capacity), there would not be 10,000 dead over 30 days of bombing (as of 6 November), there would be nearly 230,000 dead in a single day, with the fate of most sealed within milliseconds to a few seconds of the detonation.

      Given that, the issue of targeting and weapons selection is both obscure (for security) and complex, and has interactions with treaty obligations as well. For example, a port being used to ship out military supplies would certainly be a legitimate target. If that port is located in a city, and there is a risk of hitting nearby civilian infrastructure, even homes, that fact would not in an of itself make bombing it illegitimate if due care was taken to limit blast effects or collateral damage outside the port area. With modern conventional munitions that’s much easier to do with many targets than it used to be. In World War II, although the Norden Bombsight had a theoretical accuracy of 75 ft (23 meters), the average practical error in a bombing run was more like 1200 ft (370 meters), and a massed formation of bombers often had bombs missing the target by miles. So even the Allies resorted to bombing out entire cities, a clear violation of the Hague Conventions in effect at the time. By comparison modern systems have errors of less than 15 feet (5 meters) even under combat conditions, but the temptation to bomb cities remains strong, if only to inflict pain on the civilian population in order to overthrow an adversary’s government. That is a gross violation of international norms and laws, but it was a key factor in WW II bombings, and even the modern US tactic of economic sanctions to destabilize other countries.

      Referring to this John Bolton, the well known neoconservative and US ambassador to the UN under the Bush II administration, said “Indeed, if anything, a straightforward reading of the language probably indicates that the court would find the United States guilty. A fortiori, these provisions seem to imply that the United States would have been guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Sadly, he goes on to add “This is intolerable and unacceptable.” In other words, in his worldview, making illegal the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in order to destroy a military target that probably could have been destroyed without that collateral damage is “intolerable.” Many people find that view extreme, yet it is the stated Military and Foreign Policy of the US of both political parties, something I suspect most Americans are unaware of.

      The problem is that even today with conventional munitions to truly disable a large facility like a port would take multiple sorties and lots of bombs. If it is defended by layered air defenses, and manned bombers are needed, you’ll lose a lot of aircraft and crews doing it. But a single tactical nuke could do it, although there would certainly be effects outside the port itself, especially radiation, fallout, and likely blast effects. So … is a port in a city a legitimate target for a nuclear weapon? AP1 of the Geneva convention says no (and again note the US did not ratify it in part for this reason), but the US would likely consider it valid, especially with the new B61-13 or W76-2 devices. Now, these would be less destructive than weapons available even a decade ago, but that’s a problem. The bottom line is that these weapons are designed to be more usable (recall the quote from the Pentagon press release above) – making nuclear war more likely.

      This “improved” technology interacts with the breakdown in international law and treaties. Treaties like ABM and INF were designed to make the limited use of nuclear weapons more difficult and dangerous. ABM was designed to ensure the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction was in play by preventing one or the other party from gambling their defenses could intercept enough incoming missiles to launch an attack and ride out the counterstrike, as well making the need for more and more missiles and warheads (to ensure at least some got through) also unnecessary, thus limiting the arms race. INF was a vital component of stability as well – less warning (from shorter range, faster traveling missiles) means you have less time to decide what to do, which when dealing with any crisis is a bad thing. The loss of these two pillars of late cold war stability has changed the nature of planning for nuclear war – and spurred another technological race to develop new systems to take advantage of the reduced restrictions.

      So, international law and treaties are breaking down, and technology (and the doctrine that governs how and when it is used) is making the use of nuclear weapons more practical. Together this is a very dangerous trend, and the podcast title has a double meaning, given it is the West (led by the US) that is mostly responsible for the deteriorating situation. I often quote Karl Schurz, the Civil War General and later US Senator who said “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Those who argue Russia did this or China did that miss the point. What Russia or some other country may or may not do is absolutely relevant to our practical policies, but should never be relevant to our ethics or integrity.

      Many consider JFK and Reagan to be among our greatest presidents, a view I agree with. Kennedy said in his Inauguration speech, “So let us begin anew … remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Nearly thirty years later in his farewell speech Reagan said “As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours….” That, patience, remaining firm where we should and compromising when we have to, along with the beacon of that “shining city of the hill” will serve us better than forcing a potentially catastrophic confrontation through the risky use of the ultimate weapon.

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      1. Humans are fools led by even greater fools. Homo Stupid. I despair for the immediate future. I have been focused on these wars for the last couple of years and it gets worse and worse daily. I might just have to start drinking again.
        AJ

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  26. Tim Watkins has written a new book. Looks very promising.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/11/08/breakdown/

    Suppose I told you there was a “pin” which burst every major economic bubble of the industrial age. And suppose that “pin” left a signal in data preceding the ensuing economic crash. Suppose that prior to 1929, 1973, 1980, and 2008, that “pin” appeared months and sometimes years before the crisis went mainstream.

    In Breakdown: The economic impact of peak oil, Tim Watkins argues that the “pin” was a shortage of the world’s primary energy source. In 1927, a global coal shortage caused prices to spike upward, raising costs across the economy and – particularly in the USA – bringing the boom of the “roaring twenties” to an end. The 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s followed. In the late 1960s, as US oil production reached its peak, the Texas Railroad Commission cartel lost its ability to fix world prices. As the oil price rose, inflation hit those western states which had been deficit spending on everything from social programs to wars. The consequence was the end of the post-war currency system and the arrival of the OPEC cartel, whose October 1973 oil embargo gave the west – which was a lot less dependent on oil in those days – a taste of how difficult life would be if the oil stopped flowing. In 1979, it was the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War (not St. Paul Volcker) which drove oil prices up, triggering the depression which brought inflation (but not stagnation) to an end.

    This time is different

    These crises were each temporary. By 1929, the USA was leading the way to the oil age. The developed world would follow between 1945 and 1973. And even with the arrival of OPEC, there was no appetite for depriving the world economy of oil. Indeed, despite the rate of oil production falling after 1973, the volume continued to grow right up to November 2018. But in 2005, conventional crude had peaked, setting in chain the events leading to the 2008 crash… which inadvertently created the conditions for the brief expansion of the US fracking industry. But by the end of 2018, all oil production – including condensates and natural gas liquids – was in decline. Even without the pandemic lockdowns, we would have had a recession. But with growing evidence that we have passed peak oil production, and with no energy-dense alternative power source, not only is a deep recession inevitable, but – barring an energy miracle – the western way of life is over. A shrinking economy is now inevitable.

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  28. I’m not vouching for Dr. Joe Lee, yet. But I am monitoring him closely because he has a novel theory that if true has profound implications. I have yet to see a scientific rebuttal of his String Theory. If you come across something that shows he is wrong, please let us know.

    https://healthallianceaustralia.org/webinars/joe-lee/

    The String Theory Will Take Down Half the Vaccines on Earth

    In this episode Dr Joe Lee explains, The String theory which dismantles the Science that antibodies kill viruses and that vaccines provide immunity because if anti-bodies are not the mechanism to kill viruses, then vaccines are all harm and no benefit.

    The String theory explains white fibrous clotting, sudden deaths especially of athletes, why boosters are particularly bad and ischaemia as the mechanism for brain, organ and tissue damage.

    Also to be discussed in this video, the corruption of Fauci, and other players in this fraud, how the body actually heals from infectious disease, the power of fasting, RNase enzymes the true hero of the pandemic, inflammo-thrombolic response as the cause of harm in the body, how data is manipulated, interleukin and interferon, holding the medical establishment accountable for misconduct which nullifies their immunity.

    A truly revolutionary podcast that will not only change the way you see healing but also completely dismantles The Science of Vaccination.

    When you have been taught something verbatim as the truth, it can come as a shock to realize that the model that medicine is based off; that is antibodies confer immunity and are good to have in the blood, is actually untrue. Antibodies are a waste product of infection and serve no purpose to heal but actually become harmful when they cause the blood to become sticky and coagulated, leading to oxygen deprivation in the tissues, organs and body. That in the worse case scenario leads to death.

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    1. Wow. Must watch. This guy is not a crank.

      He makes a compelling case that vaccine “experts” don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They don’t even understand how their own products work.

      The mRNA may have been helpful for some people, but that effectiveness came from a side effect that could have been obtained via other more safe methods.

      He explains the clotting mechanism and why risk goes up substantially with each booster.

      He explains that not everyone gets clots because, among other reasons, the vaccine manufacturers are unable to control the dose of their product.

      You can’t make this shit up.

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      1. We’ve seen this pattern before:
        1) diet-heart hypothesis (fat and cholesterol are bad)
        2) obesity and diabetes epidemic is not caused by sugar
        3) statins save lives

        The health care profession is a disgrace.

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        1. same with cancer. Cancer is not a genetic malfunction but a metabolic malfunction that then creates genetic secondary effects. Main stream medicine rejects this even though metabolic tratment has profound effects.

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              1. I’ll check him out. I see he’s a Keto advocate. I quite sugar last February. A couple months ago I also cut carbs, not to zero, but most meals I only have veg, protein and fat. Still doing a mini-fast ever day by skipping breakfast. I feel good.

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              2. Thomas is the best resource.

                What clinched it for me were the experiments where they interchanged mitochondria and nuclei between cancer and healthy cells. Cancer cells with replaced healthy mitos became normal and healthy cells replaced with bad mitos became cancerous. These experiments where done in Texas uni back in the 80s. THey have known a long time. NO money in it.

                Cancer feeds on to things. Glucose and glutamine for its energy and metabolites.

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                1. Interesting.

                  Dr. Joe Lee says the best treatment for covid is to fast because dropping blood sugar increases blood oxygen which activates the RNase enzymes that destroys the RNA virus. There’s no need to add anti-bodies to our system (plus they cause clotting with half of the world’s vaccines and are probably to blame for the increased autism we see in children because brain cells deprived of oxygen due to a clot do not re-grow, ditto for damaged heart cells which is called myocarditis). Proof is that 19 million people got covid in the early days and recovered perfectly without anti-bodies.

                  Our grandmothers knew to starve a cold and feed a fever.

                  You might also appreciate Dr. Nick Lane because he looks at cancer from the perspective of the “miracle” evolutionary origin of mitochondria that created the eukaryotic cell. Nick Lane does not focus on cancer and just mentions it in passing when discussing the many effects on health of proper mitochondrial function.

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                  1. If you guys are interested i mito health, I would suggest looking into the Root Cause Protocol and into pro-metabolic eating. Interesting that the cutting edge of nutrition is looking at what powers a healthy cell. Which makes sense, a healthy cell is a healthy person. The role of minerals cannot be overstated. So much focus went into macros, cholesterol, even sugar; at the expense of what minerals do our cells need to function. Our modern food is nutritionally deficient in certain minerals. In NZ for example we have no selenium in our soil. Older soils may have lost minerals over time due to over farming.

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                    1. When I stepped up my intake of fresh veg from the farm I stopped taking a multi-vitamin because I didn’t think I needed it for minerals. Do you think that was a mistake?

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                    2. It depends what the mineral status is of where you get vegetables. Apparently a lot of people are low in copper and too high in iron, and this can impact the electricity of the cell (I can’t explain it LOL). You can easily get toxic overload taking unnecessary minerals too. It’s quite tricky. Some of the highlights of advice:
                      – Take bee pollen and eat flowers for bio available copper.
                      – Have bone broth and cartilage with lean meats.
                      – Eat raw carrot to help move toxins through the body, thanks to the fibre.
                      – Avoid processed seed oils (these are always rancid, and oxidising the cells). Limit olive oil to a few tablespoons a day. Western diet is too much omega 6 to omega 3.
                      – Men and post-menopause women should check their iron levels. Giving blood to help lower iron.
                      – Well-cooked mushrooms (boil them for a long time). Helps clear estrogen.
                      – Ideally carbohydrates are fermented. Eat ferments every day.
                      – Don’t supplement calcium. I can’t remember why, it interfered with some process in the cell.
                      – Measure your body temperature daily to check thyroid health. If you are always cold, have cold hands and feet, have a slow system, that is not good.
                      – In NZ we also have to supplement with iodine. The soils in NZ are geologically young. These lack of minerals are possibly why certain chancers and depression occur in high rates in NZ.

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                    3. Thanks monk! I’m doing 2/3 of the things on your list. Don’t want to go near the “health” care system unless I’m near death so testing and blood donations are out.

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                    4. I forgot two things, eat liver once a week.
                      And they make this drink with orange juice (freshly squeezed), salt and cream of tartar – for an electrolyte boost

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                    6. I like liver but where I shop it’s not sold in a form suitable for 1 person trying not to waste food. I’d like to buy discounted big size fresh and then wrap as single servings and freeze. But it’s only sold frozen in packs too big for me to eat in 1 or 2 sittings.

                      I stay away from all fruit juices. In my opinion they’re no different than Coca-Cola with some added vitamin C.

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                    7. Yea I just watched the Diary of a CEO podcast on calories. The professor was saying he thinks fruit juice is worse than coca-cola because at least you know a coke isn’t healthy and you don’t drink so much of it.

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                  2. Hi Rob,
                    Glad to hear you’re feeling good and healthy metabolically speaking!

                    Just a quick two cents, I believe the saying is actually “feed a cold, starve a fever”, which makes sense homeostatically as during a more acute and serious metabolic process which can present with fever (usually acute bacterial infection), the body’s energies are channelled into dealing with it through inflammation and the body is generally in a catabolic state, the immune system is fully activated and breaking down compounds releasing toxins, debris, and thus energy and also heat. Digestion, which is an assimilation anabolic process, requires a lot of energy and is put on the back burner during the acute immunoresponsive phase.

                    So fasting is actually a very useful energetic tool to help the body marshal its energies into fighting the infection, cancer, whatever state of imbalance. All animals instinctively know this, which is why when sick or injured, they stop eating and even drinking for a few days and just curl up in a sheltered place until the body’s defences re-establish balance. This is why we also feel “sick” and don’t feel like eating much when really ill, it’s the proper response to just shut down some less immediately critical processes and rest whilst the body gets on with dealing with it. The main theme here, as with much on this site, is energy usage and how to achieve that balance of expenditure and creation using the resources at hand to maximise the functioning of the organism. Our bodies, being a construct of nature, necessarily follow the same rules, even if our disconnected Homo sapiens’ brains think it does not have to.

                    Sorry, that’s not the short reply I was intending but I hope you get my drift and yes, our grandmothers did have a lot of wisdom that is now in danger of being lost along with everything else. Sigh. Our ancestors have earned doctorates in common sense, which no longer seems to exist.

                    Namaste, friends.

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                    1. Thanks Gaia, that’s my mistake, not Dr. Joe Lee’s mistake.

                      Google says the science is not solid for starving a fever. Scientific American says to feed a fever.

                      I believe you because you provided a good reason.

                      Liked by 1 person

        2. Here is another rabbit hole.

          Dr. Jay Couey here makes the case that there never was a deadly virus and a panic was deliberately created with inappropriate tests (PCR, LFT, etc), or by re-assigning normal deaths to covid, and all excess deaths were caused by deadly treatments (ventilators, remdesivir, no antibiotics, opioids, do not resuscitate orders, mRNA clotting, etc).

          Couey is definitely smart with deep domain knowledge and high integrity. I do not know if he is correct but will continue to monitor his progress at unpicking the puzzle.

          https://rumble.com/v3tx2xg-2023-10-24-more-of-the-same-24-oct-2023-brief-twitch1959626860.html

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  29. Today’s episode of Radio Ecoshock covers the new paper by James Hansen et al saying 2 degrees is a done deal and we’re on our way to 5 degrees.

    My first thought was I wonder if they’ve modeled a 50% drop in economic activity by 2030, which I think is likely.

    Then they said stopping fossil energy use today will not change the outcome. 😦

    https://www.ecoshock.org/2023/11/james-hansen-super-warming-in-the-pipeline.html

    Global warming is accelerating, at double the rate just a dozen years ago. The target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is “dead as a door-nail”. Earth will warm not 3 degrees, but 4.8 degrees C – 10 degrees F. – according to former NASA scientist James Hansen in his new paper “Global Warming in the Pipeline”. Press Conference Nov. 2 NYC. Then Dr. Kaitlin Naughten from the British Antarctic Survey, lead author of a new paper revealing Antarctic melting now cannot be stopped.

    All this and more according to a stunning new peer-reviewed paper led by famous NASA scientist James Hansen. Other top scientists disagree. Is Hansen right this time?

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    1. It’s hard to see a functioning economy well before 2°C warming is reached. Consequently, I don’t think 4.8°C of warming will happen. Fossil fuel use will have been eliminated before then and GHGs in the atmosphere will be declining. Whether it will be measured and reported by then is also doubtful, but I hope I live to see the trend falling.

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      1. Hello Mike,

        I sure hope you are right. Yet it’s hard for me to reconcile different viewpoints:
        – just what you and Rob said: fossil fuel extraction will decline, maybe quite drastically pretty soon,
        – however CO2 is said to remain very long in the atmosphere (this page from the NASA says 300-1000 years https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-handle-on-carbon-dioxide/),
        – there are feedback loops (changing forest behaviour, mega-fires, methane) that are kicking in, buffers (ocean) that are overflowing, and shields (ice, aerosols) that are thinning,
        – and there are some (like Anastassia M. Makarieva) who claim we greatly underestimate life’s impact on the temperature and who think the preservation of old-growth forest is more effective than emissions reduction.

        I don’t know if the climate reacts like a switch in that we reached some threshold which will bring earth to another point of attraction.
        Or if the system is constantly trying to get back to the pre-industrial equilibrium, so that as soon as emissions decline, the course starts in reverse.

        To me, it does not seem improbable that life on the planet could accommodate and even thrive under greatly higher temperatures, so that it is now contributing to the whole shifting process.

        My overall guess/intuition (it has not much more value than opinion) is that once the economy collapses world-wide, life will have the upper hand in (slowly at first) restoring homeostasis. But it does not mean that CO2 concentrations will decline before a long time. And it does not necessarily mean temperatures will decline at all either. I believe life will however try to somehow shield itself against the violence of the most extreme weather events (and will succeed better than inert human buildings at that). With higher temperatures, I am under the impression (maybe false) that all life activity will accelerate (more rapid vegetation growth, shorter generations)

        Climate change is such a complex subject.

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        1. Hi Charles. Yes, it’s complex. I’m certainly no expert but I understand that the current thinking is that carbon sinks will start to reduce carbon in the atmosphere once artificial emissions cease. It’s a slow process (centuries) but it should ensure that heating does peak fairly quickly (years or decades) then level out for a longer period.

          If collapse of industrial civilisation doesn’t happen for many decades, those higher warming scenarios will become more likely. The good news is that crude oil production still shows a peak back in November 2018, so, unless new huge sources are found or developed, industrial civilisation is on the downslope now though governments around the world will be doing their best to ensure that downslope is gentle as they struggle to find ways to grow their economies.

          There is no target goal for life or for climate. There is no long-term equilibrium. Civilisation has only been possible due to an anomalously stable period for climate that could never have continued indefinitely, even without human intervention. As the climate changes, it will be good for some life-forms and bad for others. I’m not expecting all life activity to accelerate due to warming – there are always limits.

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          1. Mike, you may be discounting too much:
            – ocean CO2 sinks filling
            – deforestation
            – methane from melting ice
            – soot reduction from de-industrialization
            – fresh water melt
            – delay between CO2 increase and temperature response

            I think this is why Hansen et al say it’s too late for fossil carbon reduction to prevent 2C+.

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            1. Some good points, Rob. However, I was expecting industrial civilisation to collapse well before we reach 2°C. Though ocean uptake declines, I don’t think it will get to zero anytime soon and deforestation will slow, halt or even reverse. Melting permafrost and clathrates is a worry but we don’t know enough to say whether some tipping point will be reached there. Most of the temperature response to a CO2 perturbation takes place in the first couple of decades (about 60%, if I recall correctly) but with atmospheric CO2 starting to decline there may be some give and take there. I agree that 2°C is almost certain but I was saying that 4.8°C isn’t because emissions will be quickly go to zero on civilisational collapse. That will be bad enough, of course, and many cities may be lost to inundation but the climate deterioration will slow to more manageable levels.

              All my opinion, of course. It’s going to be bad and I have no idea how I’ll cope if I’m still alive but it will, at least, be interesting!

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              1. Agree, to my eyes 1C is already pretty bad. I doubt we need to go much past 2C to have a really big problem. I wonder how much carbon 8 billion people will release trying to survive without fossil fuels? What happens after we burn all the forests?

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          2. I hope you are right about the temperature peak part. I don’t know. We will see…
            I agree wholly about November 2018. It may turn out to be the most important date in industrial human history (even though it seems to me society felt the full effect and “decided” to cover it under another explanation one year later). There is definitely now a switch of gears (which can’t be denied in Europe at least).

            About the target goal for life, we may disagree. If life on the planet is integrated enough as to be (/behave as) a whole organism, then there is some goal (which the individual components may be unaware of). If you prefer, I can use the term “emerging collective behaviour”. A kind of homeostasis, in the same way our bodies try to keep inner temperature within a safe range. I am not necessarily saying this homeostasis can be understood through the temperature proxy only. But life is seeking overall conditions which ensures its own continuation.

            If life on the planet is just the scattered sum of individuals which are not able to collaborate tightly enough, then there may well be no search for homeostasis for life at this point. But that’s not what I believe. (Even though the industrial civilisation is trying to achieve this through its actions: divide and conquer on a profound level. Rendering soil inert, eliminating forest covers, stopping water flows…)

            There is the Gaia hypothesis. And, as you most probably know, there are evidences that point towards this hypothesis. Such as the existence and composition of our atmosphere which is generated and maintained by life processes. Temperature of the planet without it would be -18°C. It also ensures water does not leak into space. Some go even further in their vision of the world as a fractal Russian doll imbrication of organisms. I particularly appreciate the way Ernst Zürcher frames it. Sorry, there are not many resources in English from this Swiss forester and researcher. But, if you’ll excuse my French, in this video (https://youtu.be/tlyZE7y0BY8?t=251), he describes this imbricated tower of life and stresses the importance of the envelope to understand organisms: starting from a single cell membrane, the multicellular organism skin, the natural forest canopy and edge, and ultimately Earth itself with forest covers (in particular around the tropics to protect from the maximum solar impact). In the tropics, it is not that tree grow well because it’s hot and humid but rather that it’s humid because of the tree cover.

            This last paragraph will only be bold extrapolation on my part. But, following the organism analogy. The recent acceleration in heating of the planet (consequent of sulphur emissions decrease https://youtu.be/NXDWpBlPCY8?t=2297) may be the first phase of its healing process. A bit like temperature increase and skin rashes are signalling the body is eliminating foreign elements.

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            1. Charles, the earth has had very varied climates during its existence and even during the period when it has had life. Ecosystems have been very varied. One of the drivers of evolution is a changing environment. So I don’t believe in a goal of homeostasis. But, of course, I have no control over physical laws, so what will be will be.

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  30. Looks like Sam Mitchell may be exiting the doomisphere. Same age as me. Similar feelings. Perhaps I’m not as depressed as he is because MORT gave me a mission, and I’ve got an anchor at the farm, and I have a few hobbies I really enjoy.

    There’s something very powerful about overshoot awareness. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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    1. One needs things to enjoy and perspective. THe ultimate end state for everyone reading this is heat death, just as it is for this planet and all its life. Enjoy the time you have regardless because there are no redos. It’s a one time deal. HAving a farm and being close to nature helps significantly. PLaying music and bring creative just for the sake of being creative does too.

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  31. I thought I was following WWIII fairly closely but completely missed this dimension. Apparently Iraq has declared war on and is attacking the US, and the US does not have the means to respond with force so they are remaining silent to not embarrass themselves.

    Quite remarkable given the size of the US military budget. I’m thinking there’s an overshoot story here with the cost of maintaining a large complex system eventually overwhelming the ability to operate and renew it.

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  32. Top 10 Mass Delusions and (and their Biophysical Realities)
    https://climatehealers.org/blog/the-top-ten-mass-delusions/

    10. Only humans have souls, while other animals are soulless automatons: The scientific revolution originated with this assumption and hence, the mostly unnecessary mass experimentation on animals that is still going on in academia. However, scientists are slowly beginning to unearth concrete evidence that other animals have feelings and remember experiences, as any layman who has ever lived with a dog or a cat could have told them ages ago. Yes, sometimes, scientists are among the slowest to latch on to biophysical reality.

    6. Humans are superior to other animals in terms of intelligence: This is part of the human exceptionalism that William Rees identifies as one of the most important roots of the ecological catastrophes unfolding at the moment. The biophysical reality is that humans are good at some tasks, for example, making tools, and bad at other tasks, for example, sniffing out a predator. All claims of superior human intelligence are based on the former kinds of tasks devised by human beings. If dogs were to devise intelligence tests based on sniffing abilities, humans would perhaps rank dead last among animals in terms of intelligence.

    5. The pursuit of happiness necessitates consuming more and more stuff: Modern society depends upon this mass delusion as we are flooded with thousands of advertisements each day purportedly to increase our happiness. The biophysical reality is that beyond the bare necessities of life – food, clothing and basic shelter – happiness is largely decoupled from consumption.

    3. The earth is an infinite source of raw materials for our global industrial civilization and an infinite sink for the waste that it produces: This common delusion is falsified by the pressing need for deep sea mining at the moment to extract rare minerals for the “Green New Deal” electric transport transformation, even as there are mounting piles of landfill waste and the Great Pacific Garbage patch assumes gargantuan proportions.

    2. There is an invisible hand that turns the rank self-interest of individuals into the best interests of society: There is a common delusion within capitalist societies that greed somehow turns into social well being through an invisible hand. The biophysical reality is that rank self-interest is destructive to society since it misallocates planetary resources.

    1. Technology will overcome any biophysical limitations on economic growth imposed by a finite planet: What can we say about this one? The biophysical reality is that billionaires are building spaceships to high tail it out of planet Earth, knowing that this is a delusion.

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  34. Kunstler is good today articulating how every institution has broken and people are going crazy. As usual he manages to ruin a good essay by stoking left/right tensions.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/party-party-2/

    Have you lost count yet of the number of things in our country that are broken? The justice system. Public safety. Education. Medicine. Money. Transportation. Housing. The food supply. The border. The News business. The arts. Our relations with other countries. That’s just the big institutional stuff. At the personal scale its an overwhelming plunge in living standards, loss of incomes, careers, chattels, liberties. . . poor health (especially mental health). . . and failing confidence in any plausible future.

    The reasons behind all that failure and loss are pretty straightforward. The business model for operating a high-tech industrial economy is broken. That includes especially the business model for affordable energy: oil, gas, nuclear, and the electric grid that runs on all that. We opted out of an economy that produced things of real value. We replaced that with a financial matrix of banking fakery. That racket made a very few people supernaturally wealthy while incrementally dissolving the middle-class. We destroyed local and regional business and scaled up what was left into super-giant predatory companies that can no longer maintain their supply chains. Fragility everywhere in everything.

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    1. Yeah, he really has come out for Civil War in the U.S. His fiction books are replete with collapse scenarios where there has been a collapse with/and a U.S. Civil War. (of course he is for Trump’s side) I only agree with him that the left became deranged when Trump was elected and the left decided to weaponize the Deep State against Trump AND his supporters. I along with Chris Hedges worry that if Trump was elected again (if the world/economy lasts that long) he would “pay back” the left by going complete Fascist in concert with right-wing “Christian” fundamentalists.
      BUT, I’m not sure we have that much time left.
      AJ

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        1. I like him too, BUT he has come out for Israel. He seems educatable and generally rational and compared to either Biden or Trump would be the only choice who is sane.
          AJ

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          1. He no doubt also denies overshoot, certain economic collapse, peak oil, the intractability of climate change, etc., etc. but he’s still the best choice by far. We might be able to enjoy collapse without radiation if he gets elected.

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  35. I’m enjoying watching Dr. Joe Lee’s one-man war. None of the famous mRNA critics are helping him. Why?

    Possible explanations:
    1) Dr. Lee is wrong. It’s odd that no one that I can find has explained why Lee is wrong.
    2) All the big name mRNA critics have egos too large to admit they missed the key argument against mRNA.
    3) All the big name mRNA critics are unwilling to admit (aka deny) that the 50% of other vaccines they enthusiastically injected into themselves and their children cause clots.

    I have a feeling we are witnessing another example of Varki’s MORT in action.

    If anyone finds a scientific rebuttal against Dr. Joe Lee please post it here.

    https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/to-the-current-nih-director-monica

    Dear FDA Directors,

    If your email is on the cc or bcc list, this email is also directed at you. Most of you received a lot of emails from me early in the pandemic. http://www.lungvirus.com

    All of you infuriated me because I told you, if not one scientist at the FDA can explain how a gargantuan 145,000 Dalton IgG COVID antibody molecule could pass through the lung barrier, which can stop water molecules, then the COVID vaccine hypothesis of a neutralizing antibody in the lung space is BROKEN. But, that’s yesterday’s news. Now, I found something even more serious that affects half the vaccines on earth.

    This email discloses a simple mechanism that shows exactly how clots form after a COVID mRNA vaccine booster. This mechanism shows that CLOT formation is almost guaranteed, the only uncertainty is how LARGE the clots will be.

    I am fairly certain that if you don’t do the correct thing, by the time the public finds out you were informed, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep your job.

    Sorry in advance because none of you did the right thing when I sent you my prior information regarding the blood lung barrier and antibody size. Now? I have no sympathy for you when the public decides that you should no longer be a director at the FDA.

    Regards,

    Joe Lee

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    2. Dr. Lee is relentless. His latest attack on the NIH Director made me smile.

      “Throw Fauci under the bus and be a hero.”

      https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/director-of-nih-ask-your-two-boys

      @NIHDirector @NIH M7. Got all the legal stuff out of the way and the main facts for posterity, all published so you can NOT run away from accountability. I will keep posting until you see the truth. I hope your BOYS look at your profile. They will SIDE WITH ME. even YOUR BOYS!

      @NIHDirector @NIH M8. Let me explain the RISK/BENEFIT ratio of the COVID mRNA vaccine.

      You didn’t think there was that much RISK. I show that CLOTS are the MAIN EFFECT of the COVID vaccine booster. and this is the way science works. If I present a PERFECT mechanism and you don’t rebut it?

      @NIHDirector @NIH M9. It IS the science UNTIL YOU REBUT IT. But LOOK at what I start with for the ANTIBODY STRING THEORY. ONLY YOUR ANTIGEN. NOTHING ELSE. And then? I ONLY use YOUR BEST SCIENCE, that an ANTIBODY WILL stick to its antigen. There is NOTHING TO REBUT. YOU all just MISSED IT.

      @NIHDirector @NIH M10. So, the COVID antibody from the FIRST vaccine, what are the chances it STICKs to the SPIKE antigen from the booster vaccine? ALMOST GUARANTEED. It IS the MAIN EFFECT.

      What are the chances this antibody sticks to a virus in the blood? ONE IN A MILLION?

      @NIHDirector @NIH M11. Do you SEE? Why I say that the “MAIN EFFECT” of the BOOSTER vaccine is to create STRANDS of alternating antibodies, GLUED TOGETHER by your SPIKE ANTIGEN?

      Then, the RISK is INFINITELY greater than you THOUGHT. If you have NO SCIENTIFIC REBUTTAL, the ONLY next step? STOP.

      @NIHDirector @NIH M12. The ONLY NEXT STEP is to STOP THE COVID VACCINE.

      Now, the BENEFIT of the COVID vaccine, via a neutralizing antibody in the LUNG air space. You have a PROBLEM, the LUNG BARRIER which can stop TINY water molecules of 18 daltons and your antibody? a 145,000 Daltons!!!!

      @NIHDirector @NIH M13. And I TOLD FAUCI in OCT 2020 and again in FEB 2021, in 73 pages. THERE IS NO OUT FOR FAUCI.

      THROW FAUCI UNDER THE BUS AND BE A HERO.

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      1. The attacks continue on the NIH Director: 😂😂😂

        https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/director-of-nih-monica-you-may-be

        @NIHDirector @NIH and see how the @AmerAcadPeds is DEATHLY afraid to BLOCK ME? Let me do the MATH.

        If there were only 10 children who developed autism EVERY MONTH while you DEBATE what to do.

        Each child could SUE the NIH directly becuz COVERING UP this nightmare flaw IS WILLFUL MISCONDUCT

        @NIHDirector @NIH @AmerAcadPeds and “willful misconduct” means the “legal immunity” provided the NIH is NEGATED. Yes, read the PREP ACT. Oh, SO long since anyone was able to SUE based on vaccines, you think it can’t be done?? TIMES ARE CHANGING. KEEP UP.

        @NIHDirector @NIH @AmerAcadPeds Now, each child who develops autism this month, WILL BE ABLE TO SUE THE NIH DIRECTLY and let’s say the jury awards the family $20 million for a lifetime of care and for the loss/sadness. You basically ENDED someone’s genetic lineage. BUT, it gets WORSE. TREBLE DAMAGES why??

        @NIHDirector @NIH @AmerAcadPeds Because of WILLFUL MISCONDUCT. A JUDGE is well within their right to provide a summary judgment award TRIPLING DAMAGES, that is now $60 million per family. Since I mentioned 10 new autistic cases a month, that is $600 million. But, it could EASILY be a 100 cases a month.

        @NIHDirector @NIH @AmerAcadPeds we’re up to $6 BILLION a month. But, what if it were a 1000 cases a month? that could EASILY be the case. That is now $60 billion a month that the NIH has to PAY OUT to families for WILLFUL MISCONDUCT.

        And an attack on the Harvard Medical school: 🤣🤣🤣

        https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/harvard-medical-students-are-stunned

        @harvardmed THIS is the MOST INCREDIBLE scientific AND Medical discovery THIS YEAR and THIS CENTURY.

        aw come on. Harvard Medical Students. Take on the Challenge!!!

        Provide a SCIENTIFIC REBUTTAL for the ANTIBODY STRING THEORY!!!

        @harvardmed aren’t you guys supposed to be the BEST and BRIGHTEST? THIS is a REAL LIFE PARADIGM SHIFT in FRONT OF YOUR VERY EYES!!!!!!!

        My thoughts? NO ONE should be able to be called an M.D. if they can’t explain this SIMPLE ONE DIAGRAM.

        And attacks on RFK Jr.:

        https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/rfkjr-do-the-right-thing-now-is-the

        @RobertKennedyJr what matters most to YOU? Children’s health? or POPULARITY?

        I hand you the @AmerAcadPeds on a PLATTER, they are ON THE ROPES, they can’t provide a scientific rebuttal to the STRING THEORY which shows the MASSIVE OVERSIGHT/MISTAKE in half their vaccines, and you do NOTHING?

        @RobertKennedyJr @AmerAcadPeds and if you DO BLOCK ME, RFKjr, you are HELPING the AAPeds cover up the most MASSIVE mistake in medical history.

        @RobertKennedyJr @AmerAcadPeds The MAIN EFFECT OF BOOSTE VACCINES IS TO CAUSE CLOTS. And HALF the vaccines on earth would be DESTROYED. And you would have done a GREAT THING and you would have paid BACK the CHILDREN for helping u get to where you were.

        @RobertKennedyJr @AmerAcadPeds and then? All the compromises you made in your life to get where you are? you can then RATIONALIZE all those questionable decisions you made. Because you DO REALIZE? YOU will NEVER BE ELECTED if you can NOT DO THIS HUGE GREAT THING RIGHT NOW.

        @RobertKennedyJr @AmerAcadPeds THIS THING, calling the GENERAL PUBLICs attention to the AAPeds that I have DELIVERED TO YOU and ALL you have to do is ASK THEM, WHERE IS THAT REBUTTAL FOR THE STRING THEORY?

        That ONE sentence is what you OWE the CHILDREN for LYING and PRETENDING that you were their DEFENSE.

        https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/rfk-robert-i-know-how-leaders-got

        ah RFK. You think I forgot what happened last time? in March? I was writing a thread exposing you and right in the middle of typing, I LOST MY ACCOUNT. It was YOU and YOUR people that did that. and I lost my 50K account and my 50K tweets that I earned in 4 months.

        But THIS time, your people don’t want to cooperate with you, do they. They even wonder why you are SO evil to me. You are LOSING FAITH among all those at Children’s Health Defense. They are NICE to you to your face, but they are SENSING THE TRUTH.

        You are NOT NEARLY the man they thought you were. And they won’t listen to you. You can’t have me BANNED this time. Even YOUR people know I have TOO MUCH science for you to just toss away. This is why I have to take a shower after I think about leaders.

        deboost me all you want. Your conscience should be pricked. every one on earth, if they were watching our conversation, you would be LESS than FECES to them. and see? I can’t even make the decision to LIE to YOUR face right now and pretend that you’re a good man.

        and being this UNCOMPROMISING is what led me to this TRUTH that will SET THE CHILDREN FREE FROM VACCINES for millions of generations of humans, if we ever last that long.

        So, fuck you robert. Go and drown yourself in liquor and know that everyone that works for you doubts your sincerity now. and every child that looks at you, you should never meet their gaze becuz you are RISKING children’s lives for your little political games.

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        1. iatrogenesis
          noun
          iat·​ro·​gen·​e·​sis (ˌ)ī-ˌa-trō-ˈje-nə-səs
          : the unintentional causation of an unfavorable health condition (such as disease, injury, infection, or an adverse drug reaction) during the process of providing medical care (such as surgery, drug treatment, hospitalization, or diagnostic testing)

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          1. Sugar is poisonous when we consume far more of it than nature intended. I admit that I have a serious sweet tooth and I consume more sugar than I should.

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            1. My wife and I also had a sweet tooth but after the pain of getting rid of almost all sugar out of our diet, we lost that sweet tooth and now most desserts are far too sweet for us. The most regular sweetish thing I have a a bit of home-made chocolate, with no sugar (but sweetened by using some carob powder).

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              1. I have a sweet tooth! So hard to cut back sugar. I crave it after savory meals.
                I’ve seen some doctors speculating that there’s a bacteria in our stomachs that makes us crave sugar. If you starve that bacteria it stops making you want sugar

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                1. It’s the Candida albicans that is being fed by the sugar. Getting rid of sugar starves the candida and so it dies. The death of candida and the toxins it releases means getting off sugar can be difficult but, afterwards, you won’t crave those deserts after savoury meals. I found taking a maximum strength probiotic eased the symptoms of withdrawal.

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        2. Even Fast Eddy’s not all over Dr. Joe Lee’s string theory.

          It’s all very strange.

          Maybe Lee is being shadow banned but because I’m a nobody that believes in fringe theories like peak oil they let me through so I tarnish his reputation?

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  36. This interview with Russian Colonel Vladimir Trukhan provides good insight to the Russian perspective on the war.

    No bullshit, clear thinking, clear answers, clear goals, and clear strategy for winning.

    War may go on for another year unless US support wains or Ukraine military collapses which is possible but impossible to predict.

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  37. Nice update from Simplicius the Thinker today. Fingers crossed that he’s right and it’s all a bluff.

    https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-111023-israeli-economy-buckles

    I’ve already opined before that all this may be a bluff, however there are certainly factions within the deepstate that are likely pushing for the situation to escalate, particularly because their top-echelon financial cabal globalist overlords demand for them to incite a major global war in order to reset the spiraling monetary system. But those voices would still technically be the minority and for the most part drowned out by the vast fear presently being conveyed from the bowels of the entire establishment. For the most part, much of the force posture may simply be brought about by pressure to act within an understood role, so as not to appear weak—but in reality, much of the U.S. establishment fears potential escalations.

    This ‘fear’ is not only of ‘losing support’ of the entire MidEast, as referenced before, but the fear of embroiling the U.S. into a quagmire which will see it nearly defenseless on the dual Russia and China fronts. The insiders sense U.S. can’t take on 3 fronts simultaneously, so why risk regional war with Iran then lose Europe to Russia and Taiwan and the west Pacific to China.

    On that count, one line of reasoning is that U.S. is trying to foist Ukraine off on Europe, sticking them with the ‘bill’. This is most recently evidenced by EU’s announcement they’re now discussing ways to bypass Hungary’s veto and give Ukraine a massive $50B subsidy, which is almost exactly the amount shortfalled ($60B) from Biden’s planned budget, now bogged down in Congress.

    In short, the U.S. isn’t a monolith—it’s being torn from the inside out by disagreement and partisanship. The sailing of its giant armadas to the MidEast represents a sort of absent-minded, reflexive action of a bygone superpower whose senses push it into making a ‘show of force’ for no better reason than mimicking its own perceived stereotype, like an old Alzheimers patient going through the foggy motions of something he ‘feels’ he should be doing, but no longer quite knows why.

    That doesn’t mean there still isn’t danger for major things to erupt, but simply that for the first time, it appears Iran and its axis are in the driver’s seat.

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    1. “there are certainly factions within the deepstate that are likely pushing for the situation to escalate, particularly because their top-echelon financial cabal globalist overlords demand for them to incite a major global war in order to reset the spiraling monetary system.”

      As a student of critical political economy, it is gratifying for me to finally see statements like this one, because it corresponds to the analysis of how power works in the globalized capitalist system that I think best explains historical and current policy patterns. In this analysis, the role of a deep state or shadow government is to act as the agent of global private capital in the political institutions of nations under capitalism.

      https://cdn.sanity.io/images/599r6htc/localized/53a3e2b23d7b8082b925ca147a93c11009cfff52-1920×1920.png?w=1200&q=70&fit=max&auto=format

      Simplicius sees growing factionalism in Western governments. I would describe the faction that has mostly dominated US foreign policy in recent decades as follows. It is a loose alliance with overlapping interests (as in the Zenn diagram) composed of not only the Zionist/neocons (and their Christian Zionist useful idiots) he evokes, but also two others. One is the neoliberals or old school imperialists who support a somewhat less militaristic approach to worldwide hegemony. The other is the military-industrial complex, which includes not only the weapons industry and its backers in the military high command, but also the majority of elected politicians, all of whom can be counted on to support US wars anywhere in the world.

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      1. Somehow pharma and bioweapons are mixed into this toxic soup. One of the reasons they got away with so much during covid, and why very strange things happened like an unimaginably powerful force synchronizing every western government and all of their news and social media, and why every vaccine manufacturer used the same spike protein genetic sequence, and why every sane medical protocol was overridden, was that the whole thing was coordinated by the US military and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

        I’m thinking this also explains why Fauci was left in charge of fixing the problem he created. He’s not in charge and is just doing what he is told to do.

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  38. The latest from Nate Hagens really pissed me off. I left the following comment.

    You asked a specific question: How will we feed 8 billion without fossil fuels? Not one of your guests answered the question or even attempted to answer the question. None of the key issues were addressed like source of NPK, or how inputs to the farm and food from the farm will be transported, or where will we get the land to feed the livestock necessary for work and transport, all while the climate is spinning out of control.

    We were on the verge of starvation with 2 billion when the guano deposits were running out before Haber figured out how to make nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. And that was with undepleted soils, full aquifers, and a stable climate.

    If you forced your guests to answer the damn question it would become instantly clear that we need to focus on population reduction.

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    1. A few possible places to start
      1) Reducing food waste. Nearly 40% of food grown in the U.S. is wasted.
      2) Remove all subsidies for corn ethanol. It has a terrible EROEI, and I suspect that the biggest reason why the U.S. subsidizes it is lobbying (i.e. legalized bribery).
      3) Slash meat consumption in the Global North. The higher you eat on the trophic pyramid, the less food is available.

      These strategies do not obviate the need for population reduction, but they could give us more breathing room.

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    2. I understand and share your frustration, Rob. I’ve only listened the the first half hour but the opening question was largely (but not completely) ignored in favour of “what’s wrong with agriculture today”. Vandana Shiva seems to think that there are farmers in India who are growing food without fossil fuels (ignoring the other aspects of food delivery) so not using powered farming equipment, not using hybrid or GM seeds, not using even modern hand tools, not sending animals to slaughter and not using any fossil fuels in their own lifestyles. She is mistaken and almost certainly talking about one aspect of farming, though I’m not sure what aspect that is. Daniel Zeta thinks 16 billion can be fed using less land but more intensive and biodiverse crops. He may be right, technically, but not practically.

      As Stellarwind72 says, there are some ways to reduce the impact but I still haven’t heard a description of how nutritious food is grown and distributed without fossil fuels. Some may envisage an all electric world using renewable energy but fail to explain how that renewable energy gets built and rebuilt.

      I’ve searched for years for good explanations of how we get along without fossil fuels and without destroying the life on this planet. I’m no closer to that goal today.

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      1. Mike, If you read my paper on “farming in nature’s image”, posted here recently, I would be interested in why you think that approach to human survival would not “get along without fossil fuels and without destroying the life on this planet”. Of course it was designed to work at a human consumption/population level that remains below the refresh capacity of the resource base.

        That paper was written originally to target a practicing organic farming readership. So I described only general principles and some of their implications. To understand its potential, perhaps a non-farming audience would need to see it fleshed out in more detail.

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        1. Yes, a good essay, Karl. I’m uneasy about the term “agroecosystem” as that implies some artificial ecosystem, which I feel is unlikely to ever attain a climax state, though such states can only be temporary, anyway, given nature’s tendency to introduce perturbations (e.g. with an earthquake). There also seems to be some discounting of potentially unsustainable aspects (low external inputs and low losses) though it would be impossible to maintain a completely closed food growing system.

          I’m not sure how the various infrastructure would be built and maintained or how compost would be spread on fields but these are minor quibbles. As the essay mentions, it is likely that we get a rapid deterioration in resource and energy supplies, not enabling a controlled move to agroecosystems approach and, along with the likelihood that such an approach would not feed 8-9 billion of us during any transition period, so the idea is largely hypothetical. But I wonder how such a transition would be made anyway, even if the world agreed to do it. Fossil fuels underpins everything today so we also need to transition our whole lives to be independent of fossil fuels. That seems too big of an ask.

          Personally, I think food forests are the way to go, and not relying on annual crops. I think they would offer the best resilience. Again, how we get there is a big question.

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          1. Mike, I see that some clarifications may be in order. I do not think that an agroecosystem is artificial if it does not approximate a climax succession, because I do not see a climax succession as an ideal to strive for in all areas of the managed land resource base. As I said, a viable model needs to include a lot of perennials, such as the food forests you mention. But just as natural ecosystems include a lot of annuals, plants and animals that reseed themselves each year, so viable agroecosystems will make a large place for annuals, as long as they fit into the whole in ways that sustain the health of ecosystem processes.

            Furthermore, I did not propose a model to imply any transition scenario. I think expectations of a planned transition, or even a very orderly one, out of the oil era are wishful thinking in the extreme. On the contrary, the most likely way out will be chaotic and and include painful population shrinkage of a scale that dwarfs the plagues of the middle ages, which killed 1/3 to over half the populations in parts of Europe. Pioneer energy descent writer Jay Hanson (https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/) made an excellent argument for this future over twenty years ago. If the small, isolated groups that result are lucky enough to find a viable models of food and shelter after the end of fossil fuels, it will be by long trial and error. I hold these expectations for a number of reasons.

            First, most people in the “developed” world have little knowledge of how ecosystems work, because we have made education in ecosystem science a low priority. Some of the leaders of the first flowering of ecological awareness in the 1960s, people I learned from at the time, were knowledgeable – Eugene Odum (the first textbook), Howard Odum (a later more developed text), Meadows et al (The limits to Growth), William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity) are examples. But the environmental movement that ensued was generally ignorant of ecosystem science, and still is. Hence, people who will try to design viable agroecosystem will be lucky to find knowledgeable guides. Even my attempts at ecological design as a farmer for forty years are mere baby steps in the direction needed.

            Second, most of industrial society are too domesticated culturally and genetically to survive the end of the oil age.

            Third, most of modern society is psychologically unprepared for what Kunstler called The Long Emergency: an ever-shrinking economy as the depletion of raw materials and the loss of industrial technologies occurs. Hence, they will tend to fight the energy descent all the way down, making it that much more difficult.

            However, many in the “less developed world” are subsistence farming peasants, already more skilled than I will ever be in some of the simple technologies that survival will require in the energy descent. Living in West Africa I saw peasants smelting and forging iron as they had for a thousand years. The yield was very small, but there are ways to make a small amount of iron go a long way. I once acquired a hay wagon built when iron was very expensive. It contained only 1-2% iron, just in the places needed where two moving parts rub against each other, which greatly extends the life of the machine. I have written about the chances of peasant survival in The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth (https://karlnorth.com/?p=1084).

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            1. I agree with most of this, Karl. If one wants to have some form of agriculture post fossil fuels, then this is a good model to follow.

              Although a climax state may not be an aim of agroecosystems, ecosystems that have not reached a climax state are in flux and may not be reliable systems of food production, since the ecosystem could follow some unknown path as it is in constant perturbation. Even food forests may not end up in the configuration one desires but one hopes that they will at least provide a reasonable amount of food over periods appropriate for human lives (and for those of other species).

              Good point with peasant iron. At least there will be resources that can be catabolised as societies crumble.

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    3. Maybe I am reading too much into this but when I listen to Nate I get the feeling that the math that he is doing mentally (he touches on this in his conversations with Art) is that we only need about 20-25 million barrels of oil to grow enough food for 9-10 billion people and provide some necessities like sanitation, basic healthcare and education system and build robust small scale communities, something very similar to what happened in Cuba when they encountered their own artificial peak oil due to the collapse of Soviet Union and had to redesign their entire society.

      Given the sheer amount of energy that we are producing today this leaves a lot of headroom to work with. So what I think he sees in the future is that as soon as it becomes impossible to deny that oil is declining, countries get together and start planning on how to allocate the remaining resources and start the process of redesigning their societies.

      This could work but the elephant in the room is that one country that would prefer to burn the world down to making even the smallest of concessions to the status quo.

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      2. You may be right about what Nate’s thinking.

        But he did not ask his guests how will we feed 10 billion with 20 million barrels of oil a day? He asked, how will we feed 8 billion with no fossil fuels?

        His guests had plenty of time to prepare for the epiosde and not one had anything of substance to say to the question. It was all blah blah blah platitudes for morons.

        Maybe Nate should have found some farmers that know what the hell they’re talking about instead of a permaculture consultant that makes a living flying around the world making videos about sustainability. And a woman’s rights activist who probably has dozens of peasants tending her garden and cooking her meals. Jason Bradford is a very wise man and a good farmer but he seems to have lost his backbone.

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        1. The answer to that question is quite simple – You cannot feed 8 billion people without fossil fuels.

          But I think the frame of reference is important. When we say a world post fossil fuels we are talking about a post industrial world where we simply cannot pull oil and gas out of the ground. Regardless of what we do this point arrives by the end of this century probably even sooner, there is just no getting around this.

          When Nate,Art,Simon and others talk about this they imply that we will be pulling a small amount around 15-20 million barrels and this is also understood by everybody else without the need to explicitly say it out loud because they are all operating on the same wavelength with the same level of denial.

          I quickly want to address a few points that Vandana Shiva made, and also makes on practically every interview.She tries to paint a picture of India where a lot of farmers grow food using draft animals like Ox and use the manure to fertilize the field thereby making the whole endeavor sustainable. This may be the case for a very small number of farmers but is not the norm and is a gross misrepresentation.

          Agriculture sector in India consumes almost 4 Billion gallons of diesel every year and also uses 20% of the entire electricity produced in India which is 3rd largest producer of electricity. The numbers for fertilizers are also comparable to the rest of the world.

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          1. A point I’ve made in the past and that people like Shiva don’t get is that when people are starving because the tractors, combines, and trucks stop running, they won’t give a damn how the food was grown, or whether it is optimally nutricious, or which diet religion it belongs to.

            They’ll be grateful for any and all calories.

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            1. If I am not mistaken Vandana Shiva was a consultant to the Sri Lankan government in their ambitious project to stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The whole endeavor ended up in disaster and the entire agricultural sector collapsed, which then led to the collapse and failure of the entire state.

              https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-lanka-organic-fertilizer-pesticide-agriculture-farming

              Nate should have at least done a simple google search before inviting Ms Shiva for the talk.

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            2. I’m haunted; whenever I eat anything I can’t stop thinking about how much oil/diesel went into growing, preserving, and moving it to me. This has become even a bigger thing for me now since I stopped being a vegetarian (40+ years) and adopted a low carb diet (for health reasons?). Our ancestors (for at least as long as Civilization has been around – 10,000 years?) were only concerned with calories. They ate, what Karl Denninger (a low carb person) derogatorily calls Peasant Food. Our ancestors had no choice – eat carbs, any carbs or die. Sadly, so will our descendants – if we have any.
              I changed some plans for my gardens lately. I have multiple rows of Jerusalem Artichokes instead of Corn. My corn never grew well because it required constant watering in the now drier summers. The Jerusalem Artichokes taste off (to me, but not to most people), but someone on YouTube had a video where they claimed they were 4 times as productive as potatoes, and once in your garden are hard to get rid of. Much more sustainable and much easier calories to grow.
              AJ

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              1. I also think a lot about where my food comes from. Slowing down and eating more intentionally has been a source of pleasure for me.

                The farms I have worked on do not grow corn because it is too heavy a feeder and requires a lot of fertilizer.

                I’ve heard good things about Jerusalem Artichokes but have never tried them.

                We too are expanding perennials. I recently helped double the size of our rhubarb crop by splitting existing plants.

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              2. Yacon are similarly productive AJ. I have Jerusalem artichoke (I quite like them) and yacon. I’m trying to grow lots of tuber type foods. Taro grows wild in our small stream edges. Arrowroot I’m trying and also dahlia tubers are edible. All perennials. Potatoes are also perennial if you leave them in the ground. We have them all through our food forest where we left a few from our early plantings.

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                1. I second yacon. After I moved a few years ago, I forgot to take some yacon tubers, which pissed me off. I got loads of yacon every year. But now I’ve managed to get more and they are in their first season, so I’m looking forward to them running riot.

                  Good point about potatoes. I recently planted some potatoes near where I had some last year and as the new ones came up, there were sprouts from last year’s even though I’m sure I got them all up. It was lucky because they filled a few holes where this year’s plantings didn’t come up.

                  I’d like to get cassava as I’ve heard they’re easy to grow and replant. I fancy trying to make cassava flour.

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          2. Fertilizers made from natural gas (for nitrogen) and diesel to mine and transport minerals are VERY expensive for farmers. No farmer in her right mind would use them if she could make a decent living without them.

            Organic fertilizers are even more expensive and replace the nitrogen from natural gas with nitrogen from “natural” sources like blood and bones from non-organic animals ground up and dried using a lot of fossil energy, which somehow makes the organic farmer’s customers feel better.

            A vegetable farm that composts all of its waste organic material can not even come close to replacing the need for fertilizers.

            A vegetable farm that would like to replace manufactured fertilizer with manure cannot find it for sale where I live because anyone with manure knows it’s gold and uses it for their own crops. If you can find manure for sale, you need a diesel truck to transport it.

            There is no free lunch, and our lunch is paid with fossil fuels.

            Force all the people out of the cities to work in the farm fields so we don’t need diesel for tractors and combines and you still have the problem of fertilizers and transportation to and from the farm.

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            1. Exactly! I think it was Dr Richard Manning, author of “Against the Grain” who summed up the magic of green revolution in one word – DWARFING.

              By dwarfing the plant more of the energy that would be spent on leaves and stem was diverted to produce more grain thereby tripling or even quadrupling yields. But that also meant quadrupling of fertilizer and water requirements. On top of that dwarfing reduced the natural immunity of the plants needing more pesticides.
              No free lunch in nature.

              On some level I understand the refusal to face the truth regarding the overshoot we are in, especially regarding food production. Food shortages conjure up the images of events like North Korean famine, Mao’s Great Leap forward, Stalin’s Holodomor among others. It is too horrifying to contemplate especially if you have kids. If you are above 50 then you might avoid seeing the collapse but your kids will certainly see it so, better to deny it than feel guilty.

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              1. Good points.

                In addition to dwarfing, the green revolution bred for less shattering which increased yields. Today we squeeze a little more yield out by dessicating some crops with glyphosate just before harvest at the expense of making Cheerios toxic.

                A farmer who sees his well going dry will take steps to prepare for less water, like culling livestock, or digging an irrigation pond. We are doing nothing to prepare for less fossil energy. In most cases we are making things worse. Hence my fascination with genetic denial.

                In 1976 peal oil and climate change were not yet things. The big event for my high school class was to travel in a yellow school bus to the west coast of Vancouver Island and hike for 7 days. Now with peak oil behind us and climate change in our face the big event for most high school classes here is to fly to Europe. WTF? Teachers aren’t much higher on my pecking order than “health” care workers. How can you call yourself a teacher when you understand nothing important about how the world works?

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                1. Just like health care workers have to follow what the health department says, teachers now are just delivery mechanisms for the approved curriculum from the education department.

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      1. Thanks. I don’t know Kate Kelland and I don’t believe anyone on covid issues without many hours of assessing integrity. Do you vouch for the integrity of Kate Kelland?

        The article was written in 2020 before we understood that withholding of antibiotics and other effective medications caused many deaths due to lung complications like pneumonia.

        They reference research published in the Lancet which has zero credibility or ethics on covid issues.

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        1. Rob, it was just the first story on long covid that I found. I’m sure you’d be able to find others with a search engine, setting the time period appropriately. The article was written before the vaccine rollouts so confirms that long covid was a thing caused by the disease itself.

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          1. Maybe. It looks to me like it was written to dial up the panic which is consistent with other Lancet unethical behavior.

            I was hoping someone with deep knowledge on the topic would explain what is going on.

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              1. Me too but I’m wondering if intially it was another PCR test dialled up to 11 to panic people and now that people have real long-term complications from mRNA inflamation and clotting they have just relabelled it. I don’t know, want to find someone with integrity that has looked into it.

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  40. B today explains the different colors of hydrogen.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/white-hydrogen-lies

    None of the proponents of these solutions understood however that hydrogen produced by whatever means is not a resource, but a spectacular way of wasting energy. Something which was blatantly obvious decades ago already, yet the idea kept crawling back time after time, growing one rainbow colored head after the other. The fundamental issue is, that you have to invest a lot of energy and use scarce metals to separate hydrogen from its best buddy, oxygen (or carbon in case of methane). All the losses in the form of waste heat and escaped hydrogen molecules occurring during generation, compression, liquification, storage, transportation and end use just come on top as an added bonus paid to the gods of entropy. Finally, when the remaining quantity is converted back into water, roughly one quarter of all the hard earned, high cost energy invested can be turned back into useful work… It’s like sending someone $4 in exchange for $1 —  time after time. Good luck maintaining a complex civilization on such a deeply negative return on energy.

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  41. HHH @ POB today.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/eia-short-term-energy-outlook-and-tight-oil-update-november-2023/#comment-765933

    I’m going to state the obvious. Why would anyone invest in shale oil or renewables or nuclear when the risk free return of government debt is 5%? And you can actually use leverage to make outsized returns on risk free returns?

    Until conditions force interest rates back to near zero where is the money going to come from? Shale oil now has to compete with government debt for dollars.

    While I totally expect interest rates to go back to near zero over time. The conditions required to get them back to zero are not oil price positive. They are actually very negative for oil prices.

    So less capital available to oil ultimately means less oil supply. One would assume higher prices right? But I think oil prices have to go much lower to open up capital via low interest rates.

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  42. I’m helping a friend build a water treatment plant for a small community of off-grid cabins on Upper Campbell lake.

    The existing water system was put in about 50 years ago and consists of a very small dam on a creek exiting a small lake, a screen to filter debris, and a pipe with about 600′ of head. It’s been reliable and no one has ever gotten sick from drinking the water.

    The government has decided it is unsafe and has forced the community to treat their water. We are required to chlorinate the water, disinfect it with UV, and pass it through a micro-pore filter. To do this required about $200K and a lot of non-renewable materials and energy. The system will be quite complex with computers, internet control, valves, piping, tanks, chlorine injectors, LED UV lamps, filters, and propane for electricity generation with solar panel backup.

    FYI, the power line you see in the photo belongs to Strathcona Lodge which generates power with a micro-hydro plant and we are not permitted to use their power. I believe this will be the first off-grid water treatment plant in our province.

    I’ll bet the new system does not last as long as the old system, and maintenance parts will be hard to source in a few years, and the same number of people will not get sick, and the water won’t taste as good.

    Instead of making things simpler in preparation for what’s coming we are doing the opposite. Sigh.

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    1. Question- after the system is up and running, how often, if ever, do authorities check that it is actually being used?

      Where I live, homes are required to have septic systems, and composting toilets are not allowed unless NSF ( read:$$) certified. The home we bought already had septic, but the humanure bucket system is easy to do, and since we are rural, no one sees it. I suggest you install a ( perhaps not on the drawings) bypass line when installing all the technology points of failure they are requiring.

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      1. I’m not an expert on the regulations but I believe there is a requirement for frequent chlorine level testing and reporting of results to the government for the first few years of operation. My friend is not so concerned about SHTF but I like the your idea and will mention it to him.

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  43. People really don’t take it seriously how bad bureaucracy has gotten. 10s of thousands of dollars can easily be wasted by one household just to comply with million stupid rules they come up with. cough cough Joseph Tainter cough cough

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