Physicist Dr. Tom Murphy is one of the most aware and smart people I know of. He’s also a wise man that cares about things that matter, and tries to set a good example with his lifestyle.
I’ve followed and learned from Dr. Murphy for 15 years, and have watched him grow through stages:
- Learning about energy in preparation for teaching a university course.
- Becoming aware of, and worried about, our total dependence on non-renewable depleting energy.
- Researching renewable energy, building a PV system for his home to gain hands on experience, and realizing an energy transition will be very hard.
- Changing his lifestyle to reduce energy and materials use.
- Doing the Math, concluding there is no solution to continuing modern civilzation, and understanding the dire implications of continued growth if there was an energy solution.
- Writing an important book to communicate all that he had learned.
- Lamenting the probable loss of his life’s work of scientific research after collapse.
- Shifting his focus from collapse of modern civilzation to the damage we are doing to ecosystems and other species.
- Today, in his most recent essay, concluding that science, and his life’s work, contributed to the problem and not the solution.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/12/confessions-of-a-disillusioned-scientist/
Confessions of a Disillusioned Scientist
After a rocket ride through science, I am hanging up the gloves, feeling a little ashamed and embarrassed to have devoted so much of my life to what I now see as a misguided cause that has done more harm than good in this world.
My path away from science involved a number of key elements.
- I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.
- Fossil fuels, upon which we are utterly dependent, would soon taper off, being a finite resource.
- Fertilizer and agriculture critically depend on fossil fuels, so human population could experience a large correction later this century.
- The Limits to Growth work from 1972—which I found to be insightful and credible—reinforced the plausibility of a mid-century major “adjustment.”
- The turbulence of a transition this momentous could be so disruptive (resource wars, economies in ruins) that all my work testing general relativity might be lost and rendered meaningless (as well as all the things my colleagues work on).
- Renewable technologies are not as easy as they sound: fossil fuels do things that the electricity from renewables has a hard time replicating, and the materials demands ramp up extraction and its associated ills.
- Biodiversity loss (extinctions, tragic population declines) spell an ultimate dire fate if we do not heed the warnings: we are obviously now powerful enough to destroy large swaths of the ecosphere and community of life.
- Technology is what created the predicament, and constitutes an inappropriate response, as we will never master all knowledge and will inevitably create unintended consequences.
- An energy substitute for fossil fuels is the last thing we need, as energy is what powers our expanding terminal encroachment on the living world.
- Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.
I now think a significant portion of my adult life has been mis-spent. Scientific institutions (and university STEM departments) are, to me, a sort of day camp for smart people. Our society approves of these institutions and rewards its practitioners, in part based on the misguided notion that this is where solutions to our problems will originate. Instead, science/technology is far more likely to produce the seed corn for another generation of ecological destruction.
In short, I came to realize I was one of the bad guys. I like the saying that everyone is the hero of their own story. Part of me would certainly like to believe so, but no—I’m still a villain, if unwittingly so. The projects I worked on demanded copious energy, resources, and travel far out of line with care for the natural world. The result in no way helped the more-than-human world. I can say the same about virtually all science. It’s extremely focused on short-term, narrow-boundary benefits for humans at the ultimately-unaffordable expense of ecological health. I lament our society’s squandering of talent that presently pushes on the very things that make our situation more precarious.
I suppose an item I could append to the above list of factors contributing to my exit (thus dialing it up to eleven) is: Science, as it is practiced in our society, is a nearly perfect expression of human supremacy. It’s all for us (humans); it’s all about us. Most science is, therefore, in service to the Human Reich. I’m tired of being associated with that team.
As I find myself more on the outside of “team science” these days (I would like to be accepted on “team life,” despite a steady record of crushing losses), I am reminded of a moving song by Dar Williams called The Great Unknown. I recommend listening to it or looking over the lyrics. It’s not a perfect fit, but it hits on some key themes.
I have much less impressive accomplishments in my life but went through similar stages of awareness and I think I know how Murphy feels. I wish him good health and some happiness for the remainder of his life.
un-Denial 
On why the Iraq war, Ukraine war, and mRNA are similar.
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Watching Tucker is always entertaining. Sometimes maddingly so. I watch one recently when he took aim at the hypocrisy of the elites in dealing with climate change. All the rich fools flying to the COP 28 in Dubai in their private jets. Insanity. But many on the right, Tucker included (Denninger also), move from the hypocrisy of the elites on climate change, and the admitted impossibility of the solar, wind replacement of fossil fuels to a denial of climate change. Tucker’s denial was working overtime on climate change. He articulated that those supporting climate change must be an anti-human death cult (and basically said that without fossil fuels our civilization will collapse – and humans will die). So that requires denial of the science very few, including Denninger truly understand.
AJ
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Yes, it’s tough to find anyone that doesn’t have at least one important piece of the puzzle wrong. I’ll bet Tucker and Denninger are also blind to total energy having now peaked with a permanent decline probably starting within 3 years.
Denial is a very powerful force. Meanwhile, all the big names in overshoot scholarship continue to deny MORT.
What’s worse, denying climate change or denying MORT? I’d say the MORT because it means you do not understand why many deny overshoot and why we are accelerating towards a cliff instead of building a softer landing zone.
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I see the argument of zero fossil fuels causing collapse all the time. It’s a true but very narrow view. Civilisation, as currently configured, is bound to collapse for all sorts of reasons. It’s not helpful to point at one of the myriad causes of collapse, in the hope that that cause can be put off for a little longer. Influencers should be trying to start the discussion on how to manage the collapse, not put it off and make the collapse worse.
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Very true.
There was this comment on the “unequal” rintrah’s blog: “I think people deep down absolutely hate this mechanistic nightmare we’ve enslaved ourselves with; which is why no one cares to actually save it. We focus on trite fantasies of sci-fi space colonization rather than actually taking rational steps to save our civilization because we don’t actually want to save our civilization. The fantasies of Star Trek are just a sedative we consume to distract ourselves from the fact everything is falling apart and we like it that way.” (https://www.rintrah.nl/i-read-the-techno-optimist-manifesto-so-you-dont-have-to/#comment-10016)
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There’s also the deep green argument that we should hasten collapse. The sooner civ collapses, the more of the real world will be left to support both human and non-human life …
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Dr. Joe Lee’s still banging on health authorities AND anti-vaxxers. Crickets from both groups. Fascinating to watch.
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Everyday guaranteed to provide a chuckle. Subtle he’s not.
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In case you’re not aware of her, Jessica Hocket is another very interesting person to follow. She’s trying to understand what happened in NYC early in covid which seems central to causing the panic that enabled draconian measures including injecting 5+ billion people with a novel untested technology.
She’s currently leaning to the theory that “15 Days to Slow the Spread!” really meant “Commence the NYC Live-Exercise Simulation!”
It’s an investigation in progress so her opinion may change.
Here is a discussion with Jessica from a few days ago that was banned on YouTube.
https://rumble.com/v3yxzea-interview-w-jessica-hockett-wood-house-76-on-2020-new-york-city-health-data.html
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Another very interesting person to follow is Dr. J.J. Couey. He does a live stream on Twitch every evening that I watch with my dinner. He, like many experts, is super smart but overshoot blind, which means we must filter for incorrect conclusions about correct observations.
Lately he’s been analyzing presentations by the famous covid skeptics and discussing how they may be deliberatley misleading us. Tonight’s analysis of Dr. Robert Malone’s presentation to the UK Parliament was quite good.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1996418452
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(Un?)fortunately, we haven’t had access to rumble from France since at least last year (https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/11/02/692031/Rumble-France-EU-Russia-Ukraine-Musk-Twitter). Here is how a rumble page looks to us :
” Rumble
NOTICE TO USERS IN FRANCE
Because of French government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in France. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.
“
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That sucks. Screw them. Here’s 2 more platforms hosting the Jessica Hockett video:
https://odysee.com/@Housatonic:0/731-ep-246-1:2
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ddEPf9TH7rlv/
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Thank you Rob.
That was an interesting conversation. What a rabbit hole!
In a way it is funny. There are some master illusionists out there framing the narrative. Conspiracy theories are allowed because they provide a frame to permissible thoughts (I love the Russian doll aspect of it all). And then statistics are the ultimate tool to bend reality to one’s whim. Maybe, in the end, we were and still are all being fooled by paper tigers.
These days, I try not to invest too much time on these kinds of interrogations though. In no way am I knowledgeable enough to evaluate the level of plausibility of each narrative. I can’t experiment/reproduce… If we are honest about it, there are so many things we are left with believing, or just ignoring. (The times (if there truly were any :), when we safely could trust authority were convenient, but that’s all over now 🙂
So I constantly try to reduce my focus on things more at hands. For instance, I recently found this course about a new, kinder, way of pruning vine fascinating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljdWFlOMnqs&list=PLJiRpyhyjexAsKbY9491xtDGCTH75HudM. It is based on studies from the 1980s about tree biology by an American scientist, Alex Shigo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Shigo.
I am also kind of intrigued by the whole Phylloxera vineyard crisis of mid-19th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight. Why hastened co-evolution of french varieties with Phylloxera was not tried at the time (via replication by seeds)? Why was it mandated by law to destroy a whole plantation as soon as phylloxera was found on one plant (making it impossible for the plants to try and adapt, resulting in great financial losses)? Why were the two preferred paths of remedy grafting and chemicals?
Maybe that’s just all consequences of the mindset of the day, and we would maybe try things differently today…
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That is insane! Totally nuts. Are you able to get around it with a VPN?
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Hello Perran,
Yes indeed. At least it is official: there is state’s censorship in France 🙂 We actually learn quite early in school that we don’t have complete freedom of speech. We are taught, as illustrated in this official pamphlet for kids https://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/3738-la-liberte-d-expression, that freedom of expression is a right with limits. It sounds reasonable to forbid various kinds of hate speeches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France. But this is a moving line always in the same direction https://www.article19.org/resources/france-freedom-of-expression-in-decline/, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/11/france-is-not-the-free-speech-champion-it-says-it-is-2/ 😦
Well, I kind of anticipated the VPN suggestion to my problem. Thank you.
However, I didn’t try and I would prefer to pass. After some point, piling up (technical) solutions feels too burdensome. I always have the option to disengage from online. It is bound to happen at some point anyway. And it is fine with me.
And who needs a VPN when Rob can come to the rescue 🙂
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Nice. I’d have to think on this some more but he seemed to imply, at one point, that indigenous knowledge is somehow superior to knowledge obtained by science. I would say that they are equivalent but indigenous knowledge hasn’t been honed by rigorous thinking, mathematics and experimentation. Indigenous ways would probably have still led to the destruction of the biosphere but it would have taken a lot longer, perhaps millennia longer. However, this is more a mind experiment since a more rigorous scientific approach did emerge and was probably bound to have emerged. Without knowledge of what we’ve done (and much of that knowledge has been obtained through science) then we can’t try to slow or halt the damage. If the damage was slower (as it would be without science and technology) then it might have taken a lot longer for us to become aware of it. Even though we’re now aware of our impact, we’re still not doing anything to change our behaviour. It’s hard to see how it could have been any different.
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Mike,
I’m not actually convinced that Indigenous ways of culture would have resulted in the destruction of the biosphere? All the civilizations of the past never truly had the opportunity to destroy the whole biosphere as we have. Even if an Indigenous culture had discovered Science and Rationalism and through the insights that they provided developed technology; I doubt they would have been able to do any more than harm regional areas of the biosphere. The thing that has made our world spanning Civilization so destructive is the fossil energy that has allowed us to blow past any limits on our populations that the planet imposes. We used that energy to feed an almost exponential growth in population and its concomitant resource use and waste product generation. No fossil energy means no global spanning Indigenous culture and no destruction of the entire biosphere (and no nuclear weapons)??
AJ
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AJ, whilst I’d like to think that way, too, I can’t see it. All people were indigenous, at one point, yet here we are. What happened was probably inevitable, given the special abilities of our species. It’s certainly true that, if there were no fossil fuels to discover and utilise, damage would have been limited in area. But fossil fuels were available, so the point is moot.
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To bad there was no evolutionary advantage to being wise, only MPP. Yes, the point is moot.
AJ
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This statement does not ring true to me: “we are still not doing anything to change our behaviour”.
I witness a lot of change around me (maybe because this is France and it is collapsing before your region of the world). I would also like to add that it is not necessarily about “doing”, it is first and foremost about the way of being.
I don’t know to when you would trace the roots of the current predicament. But this is a very large and powerful ship with lots of inertia. It’s necessarily going to take some time to change direction.
That’s also the way I am reading Tom: to detach ourselves from human supremacy and the tyranny of reason is part of the work.
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Charles, when I say there is no change of behaviour, I’m referring to our civilisation as a whole. However, when I think of myself, the behaviour change is almost non-existent, when viewed across my whole life-style. That I try to reduce my impact may be good but it is mostly symbolic. Even making a bigger change is too difficult, even if it’s possible. For example, I do use the car for short journeys even though I could walk the 40 minutes each way that such journeys would take. And, there are many conveniences that my wife and myself could really do without but choose not to. I can justify these things to myself but can’t make an objective argument for them.
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Yes, I understood you were referring to the whole civilisation.
I see a lot of change ongoing under the surface. For a variety of reasons: some are fed up and tired, some have no choices, some are listening to other voices, some have different dreams. This is bubbling up and will manifest itself on the whole.
The society is experimenting while the old monolith is failing.
Again, that’s my feeling, in France. It may be different elsewhere. And that’s quite recent, I wouldn’t have said that before covid and even during covid.
On a more personal level, as long as you are not expecting and shooting for material growth, isn’t it already great! The “system” will take care of itself and put increasing pressure on each of us.
I find we still have more power than we think. It’s just that often we don’t even try to do things differently. It seems to me that’s because we can’t even conceptualize outside of fixed mental pathways.
I don’t know and can’t judge your personal situation.
I simply found out that not mowing a lawn, and throwing seeds of fruits I ate would eventually make some trees appear. After a while, there would be some small birds (robin) and small rodents popping up. I don’t consider them as a problem. A stray cat or a small fox appears out of nowhere and takes care of the excess. Some trees give fruits, some are edible, some are sizeable, most are uninteresting. I prune and select.
This may seem like nothing, but these concrete manifestations of a new way of being, if shared by many make a real difference in comparison to the initial empty lot.
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Charles, I could list many things I’m doing to reduce my environmental impact, to reduce my ecological footprint, to regenerate some of nature. Some might even be in awe at what I’ve done and am doing. It will be way more than many and way less than some. But, in the end, it amounts to a tiny fraction of what I could do if I set my mind to it (and if I could persuade other members of my family). I know this and that is why I say that whatever I’ve changed about my lifestyle, it is almost nothing and my impact is still far greater than many people, even most people, in less developed countries. But getting to that level would still not be enough.
We’ve known probably for several decades the effect we’ve been having on our world but the effect has still been multiplied as we go all out for money, convenience and pleasure. (Of course, there are the self-styled “rational optimists” who apparently have a different take.) And yet, almost every measure of deterioration has got worse. We aren’t changing our behaviour. But then we can’t change our behaviour because we’re a species and have no free will!
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It seems we don’t understand each other 🙂
And I am not really sure what you are trying to convince me of.
What you have done is great. I don’t understand the “it amounts to a tiny fraction of what I could do if I set my mind to it”. If you want to do more, just do it. If you don’t, it’s fine.
“But getting to that level would still not be enough.”: not enough for what exactly?
“We’ve known probably for several decades the effect we’ve been having on our world but the effect has still been multiplied”: that’s true. I feel we are changing now, because the constraints have been (conventional oil) or are being reached (food, climate, mineral resources…). The difference lies in feeling the constraint rather than knowing the constraint. In other words, we didn’t anticipate much but we are reacting.
“we go all out for money, convenience and pleasure”: that’s not true. And that may be the most ironic of it: some consume great amounts but it’s not even convenient or pleasurable. (I am under the impression that people who feverishly go after money do it in a quest for meaning)
“Of course, there are the self-styled “rational optimists” who apparently have a different take.”: sorry, I don’t understand this sentence at all. What does a rational optimist claim? Can you give me a concrete example?
“We aren’t changing our behaviour”: what would constitute, to you, a change of behaviour? Isn’t the fall in fertility a major change in behaviour? Isn’t the human species a very adaptable species which changes its behaviour all the times whenever there are hard constraints? Isn’t the group even capable of self-restraint (population control, hunting limitations, nature preservation), to the point that, given the right settings and time frame some kind of equilibrium can be reached for long durations (some tribes of hunter-gatherers, ancient Japan)?
About the we “have no free will” (as a species), I like this:
“For there is suffering, but none who suffers;
Doing exists although there is no doer.
Extinction is but no extinguished person;
Although there is a path, there is no goer.”
To come back to the start of our conversation, I appreciate Tom’s post because it is an invitation to change at the root. Change of identity, story, culture. Then what we do, changes consequently. For him, indigenous ways serve as a trail. Other may have other sources of inspirations. We experiment. It’s fun. The rest we don’t control.
Maybe at the root of our mutual misunderstanding lies the fact that I don’t really like current arrangements and you do? Our culture is at the heart of my repulsion. It’s even in the words we use to talk about things which are alive. For instance, talking about “ecological footprint” feels no different to me than some kind of capitalistic optimization (it immediately summons images of excel spreadsheets). It’s a kind of accounting. A purely rational and mechanistic outlook. This approach is necessarily bound to fail.
In any case, I am thankful to you for this discussion. As this allows me to take time to write down and reflect about things that live inside me.
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Charles, I’m trying to say that despite the appearance that some people seem to be changing their behaviour, there is no change that even begins to address our predicament. I know I could do more but it would require a lot of discomfort (e.g. turning over my house and its associated infrastructure to nature and living hand to mouth on what nature could provide without my wielding tools – but that’s the extreme, though needed, and a lot of lesser options which might help a little but which I can’t bring myself or my family to do). So you may have detected some willingness to change, in France, but whatever that change is, I can virtually guarantee that it is nowhere near enough, even if the change was adopted by everyone.
When I say it’s not enough, I mean it’s not enough to get anywhere near sustainability.
Again, when I talk about us going all out for money, convenience and pleasure, I’m talking generally about humans. Of course, the degree to which individuals are successful at that varies enormously. Smartphones may be the symbol of this drive. Even destitute humans pore over their smartphones, as everything crumbles around them.
By rational optimists, I’m talking about people like Matt Ridley who wonder at our technological innovation. They think there are no limits to human inventiveness and therefore no limits to what humans can achieve and no problems that are too great to solve, especially as we get 80 million new human brains able to apply themselves to those problems every year.
No, I don’t like the current arrangements either. I suspect we’re quite close in how we view our predicament but maybe far apart in what, if anything, can be done about it.
A side note on free will. The notion of truly free will requires a belief in something non-physical, something unnatural. Since every effect has a cause, free will requires no cause, since, if it has a cause, it did not happen spontaneously via some unknown process. It could be that a belief in free will requires a belief in a creator (because a creator can create whatever rules it wishes and could thus give any species free, uncaused, will).
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Hello Mike.
Thank you for taking the time to write this elaborate answer.
Indeed, we agree on much. I am trying to put my finger on the exact thing we don’t. I have to be precise. It’s not necessarily easy.
I agree that life is full of compromises, it does not suit everybody to live up to their own ideals. But isn’t everything going at its own pace? Droplets can not rush faster than the river.
Yes, the scale is such, that I have no illusion about sustainability being achievable. The ball is going to continue rolling down for some time. But sustainability too is a static idea. Is it even desirable?
Thank you for the clarification about the rational optimists.
I think my focus is not on doing in order to achieve a goal, even less at the global level. It’s not even necessarily on doing. Doing flows from something deeper.
In a way, my focus is extremely individual: to act in coherence with the heart. (in opposition to another, previous mode of operation: that of the “obedient”, “polite”, “reasonable” and in the end lifeless individual)
I guess, ultimately, my position is a position of faith (and surrender): that if I let go of the false premise I have been operating on (that of duality, control), then the world will take care of itself.
I guess I simply rejoice, being the witness of every day miracles. (the same miracles you would maybe consider as banality, as everything is in the eye of the beholder)
To me a crow’s cry is a miracle, the gentle look of a dog is a miracle, the rustling of tree leaves is a miracle, rust and the quickening decay of our infrastructure is a miracle, the bigger than expected fall in fertility rate is a miracle, the more relaxed attitude of people after covid is a miracle, the diversity of beings is a miracle. Life finds a way.
I don’t know what’s coming next. After reviewing the immensity of positions. I came to the conclusion that even the most precise, intelligent, honest scientist doesn’t capture the whole.
In a way, I am just like everybody kicking the can down the road. And that’s fine.
All the knowledge in the world about life amounts to nothing in comparison to just living it. (which this conversation is part of 🙂
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Hello again Mike,
I wanted to complement my previous answer. As I said, it is not easy to express in words.
Yes, indeed you are right. I do believe much can and will be done about our current predicament. But “done” is not the right word and the previous sentence is ugly.
We, modern “civilised” humans, have lived as enemies on this planet. We have fought continuous wars against one another and the other forms of life. This is only natural that it cannot work.
When I see the barren landscape of modern agriculture (especially in winter), when I see hydromorphic compacted lifeless soil, when I see the systematic elimination of all “pests”, when I see endless repetition of clone plants without substance, I can’t help but reject the myth that this is the most efficient way to feed ourselves.
I believe beauty and productivity go hand in hand. I have seen the fractal nature of living soil, I have sensed the life force of trees, I have experienced the cooperative interactions of myriads of lifeforms. Fractals are half a higher dimension, so 2D agriculture can’t be compared with 4.5D (the plot is 2D, the depths of the soil and trees add a dimension, longer time frames than the year is 4th and 0.5 for the fractal nature of it all. Yes this is not scientific, just trying to show some options and how they have a multiplicative effect).
Even though I believe James Hansen and al. are probably right in their calculation, I don’t believe +2C is the end of the game at all (it is for this civilisation). At this point, our science does not and seems not very willing to take the dimension of life into account. Admittedly, it is an order of magnitude more complex to take into account in models, as it is not inert. Anyway, as soon as the current destructive ways break down (for lack of energy and materials), there will be major plant regrowth. I believe this has started in Europe already. En masse, plants have a stabilizing effect on the water flows and climate events intensity, they provide a shield against large temperature swings.
I can’t provide numbers. I have no certainty about the outcomes at all. There are no guarantees. Things will be what they will be. Many people are still lost, because they can’t imagine other ways of being, they are still possessed by their belongings, still enthralled in the promises of quick and easy fixes, still enslaved in the power structure. But change has started. It is small at first. The power of the group acting collectively is immensely larger than individuals going against the stream. We have seen nothing yet.
The important change is not about doing something or acquiring something (be it a new skill). It is first and foremost within ourselves. It is about what we truly are in this world. It is about being honest with oneself and rejecting fear. The rest follows naturally.
In short, I simply carry a dream in my heart. The dream of Dune, the dream of the Ewoks, the dream of Pandora, the dream of coexistence, the dream of love, the dream of peace. I know this is not going to be easy. It will most probably feel like the exodus and most won’t make it to the end. But hardships are nothing once one is aligned with truth.
Final notes: this is my truth, today, there is no reason it necessarily generalizes to every body. Everyone make their choices. We are free. It is not a recipe. Also, I wouldn’t have said any of this, just one year ago. But I felt a shift. I can’t put this in words, sorry. In any case, there should be a limit to where we try to bring light.
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hmm you might be right Charles. looks like total energy use has been going down in France since 2005. People must have been getting poorer throughout this time as well …
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/graph_country.php?p=0&c=France&i=energy_use_per_capita
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Hello Monk,
Yes, we have undeniably been getting poorer (the middle class mainly). However, there is no public admission of it. Instead a mix of expedients has maintained the illusion for a while: cooked inflation numbers, debt, imports of goods, lower quality goods (including food), shift of the burden onto the younger generation and immigrants (hard work/low wages). However the effectiveness of these seems to be coming to an end: trust in the institutions is at its lowest, debt is hitting hard limits, globalization has reversed (no more exotic fruits at Christmas), people are simply doing without some goods, trying to keep longer, postponing expenses (a problem when maintenance is needed: in my city, the main road was blocked for a few days after a wall collapsed), repairing, exchanging, downsizing (I see this car more and more: https://www.citroen.co.uk/ami, electric bikes and cargo bikes are on the rise), the younger generation is fed up being called lazy and simply opting out (there is a strange phenomena in the labour market: wages are not really increasing while the labour is still in shortage. For instance, there are often trains or buses cancelled at the last minute for lack of staff), far right is gaining ground.
I like this map too: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
If you hover over a country, there are graphs over time. France has come down, the UK seems even worse off. While China has grown to the level of a European country.
It would be nice if our population were to start levelling off. But that’s not the case yet… Life expectancy and fertility rate have both come down. Immigration numbers are unreliable (maybe cooked: the same number for 3 consecutive years, when it has changed every years before): there is no way to know what’s true there. (see https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2381468, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6687000, https://www.insee.fr/fr/outil-interactif/5367857/europe/20_DEM/21_POP/21G_FigureE1, https://www.insee.fr/fr/outil-interactif/5367857/tableau/20_DEM/21_POP)
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very interesting intel! Thanks for sharing 🙂
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I just want to take a moment to thank you and the many folk who post on un-denial.com. While it doesn’t make going forward more simple, it is refreshing beyond description to find myself part of such an informed group sharing (and usually with the data!) so many diverse aspects of Humanity’s current situation.
I have many milestones in my professional life. I will not recount them here except to note, over the years, that it is increasingly less frequent that someone can “pull the rabbit out of the hat” in a new way I have not seen somewhere before. However, I find that happens frequently as I explore links you and others provide on un-denial.com. Whenever that happens, I love it!
I do not know how this journey will end, but all the un-denial contributors sure make the trip exciting. My professional life was personally exciting. Thanx to one and all for sharing content that I continue to find exciting as I slide down this razor blade of life. Words express only a small part of my appreciation.
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That’s very kind of you Preston. I’m very grateful for the small community of aware and polite people like yourself that hang out here.
Another guest post by you is welcome anytime you have something to say.
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Hi, Preston, and Rob (and Tom, too), I just saw Rob’s post on Max Power—thanks for that. And for the Disillusioned Scientist post. And Dar Williams. Those all go together. And Tom’s words; “day camp for smart people”–all of that inspired me to respond since it all fits so nicely.
Once you see the big systems picture, the energy, and the max power, it’s hard to stay involved in the narrow tools of science. I ended up in healthcare, in nursing, thinking that at least I could be useful to society. But even there, even when deciding care vs cure, my sometimes brutal father pointed out that healthcare was really only contributing just as diligently to the problem of MPP as other areas of science, at least in the US, at least from the big picture perspective. Even more so these days as healthcare is one of the only “thriving” bits of the economy. To know at 20 that your life will be spent in some way contributing to the machine—we’re all there unless we’re camped out off the grid. Or as Tom said, determining “net help vs net harm.” Thanks Dad.
And as Dar said, “I’m just trying to put the atom back together (Bring your family, bring your family) It’s the great unknown.” If Max power is the fourth law, then materials like nuclear isotopes invoke the 6th law of material cycling. What fossil fuels have allowed our narrow mad science to concentrate will be dispersed by Mother Nature again as fossil fuels wane. So no putting those atoms back together, Dar, at least the way they started out.
Howard T. Odum’s contribution to the laws of energy
“The coupling of the biogeochemical cycles to the energy transformation hierarchy explains the skewed distribution [to the right] of material [flux] with concentration. When self organization converges and concentrates high quality energy in centers, materials are also concentrated by the production functions. Because available energy has to be degraded to concentrate materials, the quantity of material flow also has to decrease in each successive step in a series of energy transformations. (Odum, 2000b, p. 235)”
Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark.
thanks. Mary Odum
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Hi Mary, thanks for stopping by. Your father was a great man.
I wonder if after being made aware of Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory your father would have added a 7th law stating something like “humans evolved sufficient intelligence to understand laws 1-6 because they also evolved a tendency to deny these laws apply to them.”?
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MORT theory–denial can be/is such an adaptive defense mechanism, and useful in the short term emergency. It is THE most common defense mechanism of many. But when you put 8 billion anxious people on an overloaded planet, and the narrowing focus of our anxiety (yeah, talking to you, scientists) combines with long-term denial, because what has worked previously has so delightful, especially in the high resource countries, then denial is deadly.
HT already had a 7th law; it was about money, and it is particularly appropriate in this decade. Here are all 7, along with their puckish one-liner ways to remember them.
Energy Laws
1.The First Law of Energy Conservation states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; rather, the amount of energy lost in a steady state process cannot be greater than the amount of energy gained. That is, you cannot get something for nothing, because matter and energy are conserved. Thus, the energy flowing into a system (and a systems diagram) must either be accounted for in outflows out of the boundaries of the system or in storage within the system. As restated by CP Snow:
You cannot win
2.The Second Law, Entropy, states that entropy in an isolated system at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium; systems have a tendency to increase their entropy over time. Energy is transformed by work. Thus, dispersed energy cannot do any more work and leaves the defined system degraded, depicted in diagrams as a heat sink. You cannot return to the same energy state during work, because there is always an increase in disorder; some heat is wasted in all processes as the availability of potential energy is lost. As restated by Snow:
You cannot break even
3.As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum. Entropy is temperature dependent and leads to the formulation of the idea of absolute zero, which is unattainable. In other words, you can’t change the system, or, as Snow restates:
You cannot get out of the game
Proposed Laws or Principles
4. A fourth proposed law of energetics, the Maximum Power Principle: “In the competition among self-organizing processes, network designs that maximize empower will prevail” (Odum, 1996). “Because designs with greater performance prevail, self-organization selects network connections that feed back transformed energy to increase inflow of resources or to use them more efficiently” (Odum, 2000). Energy drives complexity by transformation through work into higher and higher hierarchies of complexity and order, reinforcing production through maximized available energy acquisition. The reformulation, Maximum (Em)Power, describes the maximum rate of emergy acquisition. “In time, through the process of trial and error, complex patterns of structure and processes have evolved…the successful ones surviving because they use materials and energies well in their own maintenance, and compete well with other patterns that chance interposes” (Odum).
You cannot play for long unless you steal your opponents’ game pieces
A fifth proposed principle of energy hierarchy or Transformity states that the energy quality factor increases hierarchically. Simply stated, energy of different kinds form a hierarchy of quality. Why? Because this design maximizes empower.
You shorten the cumulative length of the game the more you steal
A sixth proposed hierarchy of materials states that material cycles have hierarchical patterns measured by the emergy/ mass ratio that determines its zone, amplitude, and pulse frequency in the energy hierarchy. Materials are coupled to the energy transformation hierarchy and circulate towards centers of hierarchical concentration, recycling to dispersed background concentrations.
The object of the game is to make the game last as long as possible
Odum also proposed the Hierarchy of Money as a 7th law (Odum, 2000, p. 12). Money is coupled to energy transformation series (energy hierarchy) and is constrained by the properties of the hierarchy. Its properties change in passing to higher centers of concentration, the cities. At the low levels on the left are free environmental transformations with no money. At each higher step there is value added, and thus the money concentration increases as does the energy/ money ratio. The energy per unit money decreases, and vice versa, the money per unit energy (price) rises. In the centers, the circulation of money is more concentrated but the buying power of money is less (Odum, 2000, p. 11).
The money for the game is counterfeit
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That’s a fair point, that your “sometimes brutal father” mentioned. Though I’ve benefitted from improved healthcare, it’s hard to deny that a doubling of average life-spans in not much more than a century has contributed to overshoot and also left us with a skewed population demographic. It’s a bitter truth that will be hard to swallow.
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It’s OK. It’s only a bitter truth, as long as we believe having a long life is a good thing. That’s just arbitrary.
Don’t worry about what has been.
Either we have no choice, then all is fine. Or we have a choice, then we just have to live consistently with ourselves. In any case, where is there any room for regret?
🙂
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Uncomfortably numbing.
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Good for a chuckle because the world’s so crazy there’s nothing else to do but laugh.
Canadian Prepper today turns up to 11 his WWIII hyperbolic doom porn.
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Some important insights today from Jessica Hockett.
So many layers to the puzzle.
Why? Is it well intentioned overshoot collapse prep? Or good old fashioned evil power?
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1984.
I would like to make the case that it is not “well intentioned overshoot collapse prep”. If it were, there could be both the stick and the carrot. But there is no sign of a carrot, only stick.
I don’t see any ounce of benevolence or planning. Only more of the same: more technology, more concentration of power, increased surveillance, more dumbing down, more financial plays making most people poorer.
For instance, there could be a mandatory one day off for everybody to learn a new skill: growing food, animal husbandry, woodwork… (that would be both a stick and a carrot)
There could be financial incentive to spread the population near agriculture sites, or to reduce the number of children. Even classes in MORT 🙂
Many facilities could be shared, our culture is extremely self-centered.
It’s probable that the individuals in positions of power (seemingly) have no choice at this point (the situation is too complex, there are too many vested interest, every decision is going to be criticized, they don’t want to risk their positions). But there is no benevolence, no foresight and no integrity.
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As someone who recently graduated college in a technical field, this post really hits close to home.
I agree with pretty much everything in the post. Especially this
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To celebrate his 100th episode Nate Hagens turned the table and had Kate Raworth interview him. The discussion was wide, deep, and very interesting.
A few points stood out for me:
1) Nate is very worried about the next “event” and wants to kick the can as long as possible. He does not want to do anything that might prick the bubble now, like for example, reducing debt or carbon taxes. He does want our leaders to have policies ready for when the “event” occurs. I disagree with this because a bigger bubble will result in more suffering and the goal should be to minimize future suffering. We’ve been doing exactly what Nate wants us to keep doing for 50 years and it’s created a disaster that is growing.
2) Many important issues were discussed but NOT ONE WORD on the only policy that would improve every one of the many threats Nate is worried about: population reduction.
3) Many causes of our predicament were discussed but NOT ONE WORD on the most important behavior that must be confronted before any progress can be made: genetic reality denial as explained by MORT.
4) I am an example of a frequent feature of his audience that Nate dislikes because I focus on issues that we disagree on: population and MORT.
5) Kate Raworth is a perfect example of someone who refuses to accept the reality of our predicament. Thermodynamics does not negotiate.
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I haven’t watched the video yet, (I will probably watch it over the next few days).
I agree with you on that. I think it is time to rip the band-aid off. It will hurt in the short term but our descendants and other species will be better off for it. I also wonder why Nate Hagens doesn’t talk about the need for population reduction. I suspect that many of he and his viewers (including myself) know that as oil age winds down, the human population will necessarily decline.
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Is the American Empire declining? (Note that this video is from a socialist leaning perspective)
A few things.
1) It strongly reminds me of John Michael Greer’s the Long descent.
2) 7:14 and 10:21 in the video made me realize something about the reason for the MRNA vaccines. It takes years to properly develop a vaccine, and that process was rushed mainly for economic reasons. Business leaders wanted to return to business as usual as soon as possible, and they could not do that if they had adequately tested the vaccines.
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NOT ONE WORD on the “policy” that cannot possibly even exist: population reduction.
It is impossible to deliberately reduce population on any relevant timescale, save for by way of mass murder (all-out nuclear war, etc.). Population is on a trajectory toward spontaneous reduction, over half-centuries or so, following the demographic transition which has already drastically reduced population growth. But there is no way to deliberately speed it up. It is already racing forward.
But it does not even matter, since gross population is not driving any ecological damage or other harm. Population OF THE RICH, SPECIFICALLY, is driving stuff, but not gross or aggregate population.
Speaking of population reduction as a solution to environmental problems is ignorant and foolish. Unless, again, one is speaking specifically about rich people.
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I’m a nobody on Twitter. The posts about MORT, which are the ones I care about, never generate any interest.
This post about Sam Harris is my all time most popular post. Very sad.
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I missed this when it was released earlier this year. Really good. Brought a tear to my eye.
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Dr. Joe Lee is finally getting some traction thanks to @kalashnikity with some knowledge and prior art that supports Lee’s String Theory. Let the games begin.
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A 4 minute must listen recount of the most amazing 26 days in the entire history of science.
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I listened to the entire episode on my walk today and it’s even more amazing in a bad way. They are certain all aspects of overshoot are a hoax and covid was an evil malthusian plot to depopulate the world. I seem to be one of the only overshoot aware people with defective denial genes trying to make sense of the evidence.
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I know the feeling rob. I really do. It amazes me how people like Zoe Harcombe can see through all the bullshit of government nutritional guidelines and yet are in full denial mode about overshoot and climate change. Ivor Cummins is another prime example.
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The only one who really listens to me is my dog. And when I’m done ranting she says “throw the ball for fetch”?
AJ
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Ah ah ah… That was good. Thanks.
I know the feeling. Wise dog.
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There’s a few of us here that enjoy listening to you.
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Hello Rob,
Your answer to that twitter post was excellent. When you speak true statements such as this one that go against the belief system of your interlocutor, does it (at least sometimes) get across?
If my understanding is correct, you could also have added that, according to James Hansen, this won’t even be enough to limit warning below 2°C.
Which just shows the scale of the predicament.
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Hi Charles, these are my little MORT experiments. They are almost always ignored as MORT predicts.
I agree with your 2C point. I should have added it.
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Fun experiment 🙂
I finished listening to the video you pointed us to earlier by Jonathan Jay Couey (GigaOhm https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1996418452). I listened until the end, partly because I liked his voice, partly because he seems an extremely intelligent man (although maybe a bit on the crazy edge). That was interesting. And yes I agree, the covid episode was extremely fishy. It’s as if, the empire of lies ends with the greatest Hollywood movie (in the style of a scenario loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick) of all times, where we all appear as extras 🙂
However, these are incredible claims from J. J. Couey. Especially, I don’t know what to make of the “why are they doing this” slide at 1:1525. Maybe there is a bit of paranoïa in J. J. Couey. It’s interesting that he links this episode with population degrowth though.
I might remember wrongly, but I think way back in the middle of covid, after he flip flopped on some topic, you made some comment where you said you wouldn’t listen to J. J. Couey any more. (if I have got some time, I will try to look it up, but I think there is no easy way to search the whole set of comments on your blog)
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Couey does speaks a little too cryptically at times, and first impressions can suggest he’s a little crazy. I’ve been listening to him carefully for a couple weeks and I’m coming around to agreeing with his hypothesis of what happened, however because he denies overshoot, I differ somewhat on the why. I followed him in the early days when he was J.C. On a Bike and dropped him after he changed his mind too often for my liking. In hindsight I made a mistake. He changed his mind often because we were all being deliberately deceived and nothing made sense. It’s taken a long time to figure out what’s going on but it’s slowly becomeing clear, and I put my money on the intelligence, expertise, and integrity of Couey and friends. If they’re wrong I’m confident they will change their hypothesis. I’m writing a post to explain my new beliefs.
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I often say this on LinkedIn for my own amusement. Tends to fall on deaf ears
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2 minute summary of Denis Rancourt’s recent study that shows mRNA has killed 17 million so far.
https://rumble.com/v3zh5r9-trailer-17-million-deaths-after-covid-vaccine-rollout-dr.-denis-rancourt-m.html
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Surprised no-one has posted this latest video from Bill Rees, Rex Weyler and Nandita Bajaj. It’s along the thinking of most here.
View at Medium.com
I’m one of those long time lurkers Rob. Thanks for all your efforts, you have one of the few sane places left in the world..
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Thanks for dropping by, and thanks for the link to Bill Rees, one of the world’s great men.
If you have something to say, I welcome guest posts.
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Tom Murphy today with a nice story about looking after some wasps.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/12/wasp-wisdom/
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Greetings fellow travellers. I’m more a reader than contributor, but have to share an anecdote from a visit I made today to my sister’s home as we were getting together pre Christmas. I’m in SW UK, by the way.
My brother-in-law is a “successful” businessman, techno utopian as well as being a petrolhead. At some point in the afternoon, he invited me to see his garage toys. Well, my sister has a big, new Audi, my B-i-L has a Porsche (his run around), a Lotus (his “track car”), a 580hp Aston Martin and a large motorbike, all par for the course, perhaps.
His line of work is in large scale solar pv installations and he described the latest project:
Industrial scale setup in Scotland to electrolyse water into Hydrogen for producing Ammonium Nitrate via Bosch Haber. The intended production is not only of synthetic fertiliser, but also as a fuel for shipping,apparently. However, there is a small problem. The process requires a lot of water but there is insufficient rainfall. Solution? We’ll run a desalination plant off it all as well(!)
Perhaps not the right occasion to raise collapse. I came home and had a bowl of home grown pumpkin soup by the woodburner
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Welcome and nice to meet you. Your story is a perfect example of how alternate energy adds to our bonfire rather than replacing some fire.
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https://interimhumanity.substack.com/p/the-plan-for-peak-oil-meme-share
https://www.youtube.com/@InterimHumanity/videos
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I wish there was a laugh react on WordPress
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Welcome back monk. Hope you had a nice honeymoon. When someone likes a comment on un-Denial my phone makes a ding. When I here a sequence of dings that sounds like a short song I always know monk is active on the site. 🙂
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Thank you! I hope the dings are not too annoying. I use the like to check I’ve read all the comments LOL
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The dings make me smile because I know it’s you.
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aw!! here’s another ding for you haha 🙂
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Very good. I was thinking of writing a post on this theme. Pretty rare to think of something these days that someone has not already covered.
To the list you could add:
ZIRP: keep the economy growing a little longer with oil imposed limits to growth
unsustainable public debt: keep the economy growing a little longer with oil imposed limits to growth
open US borders: create growth with cheaper labor to offset higher oil prices
digital currencies: tool for rationing scarce resources
mRNA: population obedience + maybe population reduction
diesel car phase out to reduce pollution: save scarce diesel for trucks and tractors
ethanol: substitute natural gas (via fertilizer) for crude oil in gasoline
tar sands: convert natural gas to crude oil
SpaceX: bug-out plan for peak oil collapse
Ukraine war: capture Russian energy resources
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Where did the December 8th post go?
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….and comments section?
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I saw Dr. Couey do something I really did not like last night. I’m trying to decide what to do. I may edit the post to dial down my endorsement of him. There is something very strange and ugly going on between the leading covid dissidents. I’m just an observer trying to figure out what is true. It’s very difficult. There are so many complicated threads and big egos.
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So you’re leaving the post from 8th Dec in limbo while you work out what’s real. OK thanks
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What was the post about?
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I said recent work by Dr. Couey had made me re-think everything I thought was true about covid.
And I posted this video which is an excellent summary of his hypothesis. Skip ahead to 7:29.
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I listened to about 40 minutes worth but, to be honest, most of it was gibberish to me. 30,000 feet seems to be not high enough to make it understandable to me. I wasn’t impressed with his little video, a little into the presentation, where he seemed to be claiming that this was all some kind of plan by persons unknown to foment riot, or somesuch. Seemed like a post-hoc rationalisation of an opinion. If I could understand most of what he’s saying, maybe I’d come up with a different view but this was not something, in its current form, to influence my views.
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His key points are 1) there is no evidence in the literature that RNA viruses retain sufficient fidelity while reproducing to cause contagious spread; 2) it’s a myth that dangerous contagious corona viruses can be engineered in a lab – the bioweapons guys gave up a decade ago but keep the myth alive to keep the money flowing; 3) covid panic was engineered to accelerate deployment of the mRNA platform; 4) the mRNA concept is and always will be too risky for use in healthy people.
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A different spin on the same theme.
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A chuckle every day guaranteed from Dr. Joe Lee. Today he’s banging on the NIH and National Cancer Institue.
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Video at 1:47:00.. JJ shares his views on the over-arching goal of the Covid operation regarding Individual Sovereignty.
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Personally I’d like to drop the whole covid thing. I’m beginning to feel like it is the mother of all rabbit holes. Just my two cents
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Some days I feel like you. It is a rabbit hole. It’s also likely to happen again and be even more difficult to resist if we let them get away with it.
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So much of the covid shenanigans just makes me wild. It’s not good for my mental health mainly because there is nothing I can do about it. Thinking about the topic just leaves me feeling angry, frustrated and powerless. I’ve just got to let it go for my own sanity.
On another topic I’ve just gotten rid of nearly every screen in the house. It’s not going to go down well when my boys get home but i don’t care. Screens have been an unmitigated disaster for my two boys. Since I don’t want to be hypercritical I’ll be spending considerably less time on my devices. You’ll be hearing a lot less from me.
Keep up the good work.
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Very smart move Perran. I’m thinking about closing my Twitter account and quiting YouTube. I spend too much time trying to figure out what is going, as you say with things that make me angry and that I have no control over, and I could use that time for accomplishing more in my life. I remember I felt much better several years ago when I closed my Facebook account.
Maybe you could come back in the future with a guest essay discussing your experience unplugging?
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Rob,
I kinda gave up on the Covid thing myself. Too many voices going down their own rabbit holes. I remember one of the best things I learned getting my undergraduate degree in biology was Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and trying to disprove your theory rather than following confirmation bias to support it.
I feel that way too many of the “scientists” in Covid (and non-scientist “experts”) are into their own theories and then rather than attempting to disprove (falsification is the gold standard of proof) them go looking for all the data they can find to support it. I think (feel) that there probably was a virus, not that virulent, Lab manufactured that escaped the lab and then there was a massive cover-up with most of the pharma/medical establishment following the herd to make money and preserve their positions. The vax was just crap technology reused to make money for pharma that they didn’t think would harm anyone. And it probably still does continuing harm.
Sure this leaves out a lot. Were some individuals evil, yeah probably. Is the system that supports this evil, most definitely but that’s the result of a civilizational obsession with neoliberal capitalist economics. Lots of people just went along because that’s what we are – a herd.
This gets me on to my recent obsession – nutrition.
After 40+ years of being a vegetarian (for believed health benefits and environmental benefits), I have switched to a low cal high fat diet. AND now am not quite so sure that is right/smart/ecologically sustainable (not that anything is?). Everyone in the nutrition field seems the same as the Covid field to me. Everyone is “pruning their own hedge”. Everyone from the most militant vegans (Blue zone, 7th Day Adventists) to Kendrick, Denninger, and Ivor Cummins have reams of “scientific” results to back of their positions. All I know is that our ancestors (back before civilization) ate everything they could get their hands on. None of them ate a purely vegetarian diet and nobody was eating a high saturated fat low carb diet (very few high fat animals running around either). So, where does that leave us. High fat (or high protien) low carb diets simply didn’t exist prior to civilization. What is a environmentally sustainable nutritionally adequate diet? Any ideas?
AJ
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you might be surprised how much meat indigenous people eat / did eat
https://togetherwomenrise.org/customsandcuisine/kakenya-center-for-excellence-3/#:~:text=The%20Maasai%20heavily%20depend%20on,mixed%20with%20fresh%20cattle%20blood.
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Nice plausible covid summary AJ.
The covid skeptics all have a favorite idea, usually grounded in some conspiracy theory, all are overshoot blind, few try to integrate or compare different theories, and they squabble and discredit each other. What a mess.
On diet, I’m trying to keep my beliefs simple, and on what I think is solid ground, and somewhat compatible with post collapse world.
There seem to be good reasons to believe that eating all the time is bad, and that periodic fasting is good. Plus, most of us probably eat more than we need. So I’m sticking with two meals a day, and fasting between dinner and a late lunch.
I’m pretty sure too much sugar is bad, so I’ve cut out most of it. My body seems happy because I’ve lost weight, and it greatly simplifies shopping and prepping.
I suspect highly manufactured fats are bad, plus I like the flavor of natural fats better, so I eat food with butter, coconut oil, and olive oil. Post collapse it’ll probably be a little butter and lard, when lucky.
I suspect pesticide and herbicide residues are bad, so I try to buy organic foods that are known to have high residues, like oats, carrots, potatoes, and strawberries. I don’t however obsess over this because I’m old and I also value inexpensive food.
It’s likely we don’t understand what is an optimal diet, so I hedge by having a lot of variety in what I eat. This also makes meals much more intertesting and enjoyable.
My favorite technique for achieving variety, food and energy economy, and avoiding waste, is to make a big pot of soup for lunches every 7 days that contains a large variety of vegetables, proteins, whole grains, spices, and any food I have at risk of going off. Turning a collection of whatever you happen to have on hand into several delicious meals, using minimal energy, will be a very useful skill in the future. I make my soup thick so it can be stretched, if needed, by adding water when reheated.
I supplement with vitamin D, C with zinc, and recently added magnesium.
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Sage Hana substack is digging into the “something very strange and ugly going on between the leading Covid dissidents. The writing style is a cross between Hunter S. Thompson, G.I. Gurdjieff, Vonnegut and Robert Anton Wilson. Comes across as troll posting but effectively makes light of the long emergency, media censorship complex, strategic philanthropy and controlled opposition regarding the Covid op.
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Thanks for the tip on Sage Hana. Yikes! another deep rabbit hole.
I wish I could find a covid skeptic that understands the severity of our overshoot predicament. Many skeptics see possible connections to resource rationing, civil order control, population reduction etc. and assume some evil plot. If you are overshoot aware you understand that doing nothing to prepare for overshoot collapse is also evil.
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William Rees on Overpopulation
At about 38:00 He says that nearly all European countries are in serious excess of their carrying capacities and that Europe’s current level of prosperity is achieved by importing resources. The same is true for the Middle East and East Asia. He talks about how globalization is basically a wealth pump. By the way, William Rees turns 80 tomorrow.
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Loved this podcast. Rees at his best and most succinct. It was a pleasure listening to interviewers who understood that population is one of the BIG drivers of overshoot. It might be worth listening to again!!
AJ
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Standardized houses, bicycles or any tool. Car companies carrying dozens of models, even bike companies means huge supply chains everywhere. We could get around for years most places on standardized E Bikes like the bikes they use in Holland. Use same tires, batteries, wheel bearings. This means parts could be built and recycled in the same country.
Post WW2 the Canadian Government built war time bungalows. Basic 750 square foot house, 1 bathroom and a second floor with 2 bedrooms. I owned one of these houses years ago and people raised families with 4 children in these houses.
This of course means a command economy and the end of entitlement (no you can’t have an electric hummer) But it would save enormous amounts of resources.
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Yes there are a lot of wise things we could do, but we won’t because we can’t even discuss what’s going on.
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We will have to do this when cars become unaffordable to the majority of people. I think electric bikes could be a good first step, especially in cities without good public transit (e.g. most cities in the American Sun Belt).
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The trouble with any supposed solution is that they still try to cling to modernity and have it in almost every location on the planet. It will still be unsustainable but perhaps could persist for centuries or millennia, but only if there are way less than a billion people on the planet.
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A comment on r/Collapse by u/EatRamenInHell
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/18kgrkf/comment/kdtvqxl/
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Very true. It’s similar to the argument about two tribes living next to each other and competing for the same resources. As their populations grow resources will become scarce and there will be a fight. The tribe with the biggest population usually wins. The lesson is even though population growth causes resource scarcity you have to grow your population faster than your competitors.
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Is that not what we are seeing in Israel and Palestine?
https://overpopulation-project.com/the-catalyst-of-overpopulation-in-the-gaza-conflict/
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For sure. I’ve been to Israel several times. There is not enough water and land for the people that want to live there.
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B is on the bulls-eye today. He asks:
I would answer, the economy has the same goal as the universe, to dissipate energy gradients as quickly as possible. To be the champions at degrading energy, our species needed to evolve a uniquely powerful intelligence capable of exploiting fossil and nuclear energy, combined with a tendency to deny unpleasant realities, so that our intelligence remains blind to the implications, and does not override, what we’re doing.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-the-economy-can
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Dr. Tim Morgan wrote a nice essay today on genetic reality denial, except he’s not aware that’s what he’s writing about.
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marromai, what is going on?
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Wasting more precious fuel on protests, oh their iron knees
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What is an iron knee?
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irony – probably sounds funnier in a kiwi accent
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Hello Rob,
Farmers are protesting because the government has decided to cut diesel subsidies for them. German farmers are barely internationally competitive anyway, and if they now have to pay even more for their diesel, many may have to close their farms.
The background to this is the 60 billion euro hole that the government has to plug in the short term. To this end, they have announced far-reaching tax increases for the coming year and cut state subsidies virtually overnight (e.g. also the bonus on electric cars – which you only get back after registering the vehicle – that will also affect many green utopist people who have just ordered an e-car, lol).
Germany’s outlook is not very bright. We are too many people, don’t have ressources, have no remaining relevant industrial or technological lead and we have to import both, food and energy. As any collapse-aware thinker should recognize, this is a very unsustainable situation… I think we will be one of the first to go down the bumpy road of a failing first-world society.
The current governmental actions will accelerate this descent, but anyway, there is nothing that a more conservative government could repair in Germany – We already have the highest taxes and energy costs in the world (if you add up all the multiple taxes, social security contributions, etc., you easily get to 70%) – Industry is forclosing or moving away, the shrinking working class is paying horrendous taxes to finance all of the rest: The growing army of civil servants and the lobbyists of the green utopia. They have to work for all others but themselves. At the same time, millions of migrants who will never pay a cent into the welfare system are being brought into the country and pampered with amounts of money a normal German worker will never get for his honest work. Also gigantic amounts of money are given to other countries, such as Ukraine or “development aid” to China and India… Soon the Laffer curve will hit: despite increasing taxation, tax income will fall as taxpayers are no longer willing to work even harder for “their state”. They will either emigrate or deliberately become unemployed and the black market will grow enormously. Germany is on the brink of civil war, bankruptcy or structural collapse – it will be one of these.
As I said some time ago: Stupidity is not enough to explain the actions of our government, so it must be maleficent. Since it is an open secret, that our politiciancs are marionettes of the US, I tend to say: After the third attempt, the Anglo-Saxons have finally destroyed their arch-enemy Germany. Mission accomplished.
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Thank you marromai for explaining what’s going on.
It makes me sad. I visited Germany 20 years ago and was very impressed with your country. Everything was clean, well maintained, and on time. The industry, especially mechanical engineering and precision metal machining, was very impressive. Factories provided beer for the worker’s lunch! I was impressed that Germany was one of the few countries in the world that made an honest effort to do something about climate change. Of course the “green” transition did not help, but at least they tried, which is more than can be said about Canada and the US.
I am shocked today that German citizens accepted the US blowing up a pipeline vital to their country’s prosperity, and that they support the Nazis in Ukraine.
I wonder if there is some agreement Germany signed after WWII requiring it to accept orders from the US?
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Simon Michaux has been speaking with a lot of senior people about his analysis showing the hoped for energy transition is impossible. All acknowledge the validity of his work but are paralyzed because to act on the information would cause them to lose their jobs.
Michaux is going to work around the establishment by building a sustainable small city as a pilot project in collaboration with the Venus project. Michaux’s first task is to raise 3-5 billion dollars in funding.
They are going to locate in a South American desert and produce water for drinking and agriculture with a Thorium reactor.
I think I can already hear the air hissing out of his plan, but I wish him good luck.
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Sounds like denial is strong in Simon. The very idea of a sustainable city, particularly within an unsustainable global economy is a dream (IMO cities can never be sustainable). Is this the bargaining stage of grief?
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Yes, that’s what it looks like to me.
Contrast with Jack Alpert’s plan that starts with the requirement of a global population no greater than about 100M, and builds cities in areas with good agriculture land and rainfall, powered by existing hydro electricity, and then pray that fusion can be worked out within a few generations before the dams silt it and become useless.
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Jack Alpert’s plan will obviously never happen as people just keep denying the inevitable.
On the remotest chance that the elites eventually decided it’s the only option and went down that path, how long, as in how many generations until it all falls to pieces and people decide to leave one of the cities (IIRC he has 3?), to set up with their small group ‘somewhere else’, then of course start the whole human civilization experiment all over again.
I would expect this to happen as the utopia cities started to break down due to any number of massive problems, mostly associated with lack of energy and resources, drought, crop failure, disease etc.
Every single plan that tries to decide the future for people is doomed to failure, for exactly the same reason we have reached this point of overshoot. Difference of opinion, failure to look at the whole system, failure to accept anything inevitable if it looks bad, so yes Rob it’s denial everywhere.
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I agree Alpert’s plan will never happen.
My point was that if your goal is to retain the best elements of our science and technology in a civilzation that could continue indefinately after fossil energy is gone, then Alpert’s plan is the only plan that might be feasable.
Building in a desert and counting on a nuclear reactor that does not exist to make it work is lunacy.
Which means we won’t retain our best accomplishments, which I accept as reality, but it is a shame.
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I think the fact that the cities would be populated by people tells us all we need to know about how that will work out.
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Mike in my opinion sustainable city is an oxymoron no better than fighting for peace. I don’t think any type of city or settlement can be sustainable.
First problem is metals, we get the highest grades first, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a modern city or the Mesopitamian city of Ur, eventually an unsustainable amount of energy gets poured into getting lower and lower grades of ore. Entropy works it’s magic dissipating all metals that humans refine into shiny things.
Second problem farming within walking distance of city, eventually, even with every nutrient recycled, some important trace element gets washed down the river and Liebig’s law of the minimum scuttles the city, with the population losing their health due to the first important element unavailable in the diet.
We have never had a city last 10,000 years with the land around it supplying all nutrition, all within walking distance, let alone thinking ‘long term’ like a million years.
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I listened to the first 20 minutes. My initial reaction is that he has lost his mind. 10,000 people is way beyond the Monkeysphere for those living there so there will be the normal social issues associated with large groups. As Mike said “the fact that the cities would be populated by people tells us all we need to know about how that will work out.”
Then there’s all the technology required which seems to fly in the face of all his research. He talked about circular economy, steady state, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and degrowth which are all good things but how do you build a city that size from scratch in the desert and call it degrowth? Am I just too pessimistic?
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I think you’re seeing things very clearly. I saw the first cracks of him losing his mind when he started taking about the need to explore Tesla’s work on vibration energy. Anyone thinking about growing food without a good source of water that does not require a lot of energy to get it is crazy.
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Nate Hagens makes some predictions for 2024:
1) Good chance we’ll hit +2C by summer with serious implications.
2) False flags probable in Ukraine conflict.
3) Gaza conflict will escalate to protect shipping through Suez & Strait of Hormuz, critical disruptions to global trade are possible.
4) Our screens will use AI to hi-jack more of our brains.
5) Social unrest due to wealth inequality will increase.
6) Political polarization and nastiness will increase.
7) Expect another banking crisis.
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Excellent! talk by Nate. He did a good job of laying out all the big risks coming at us this year, except AI, which I think is blown out of proportion. His first and biggest risk is rapid climate change, which if you’ve listened to Paul Beckwith lately or read the most recent Hansen report could actually tip over to 2 degrees C this summer because of the inadvertent experiment we have been performing on the atmosphere by arbitrarily removing sulfur from bunker fuel on ships; that was increasing the albedo of clouds and has now been removed. That would be a catastrophic first.
AJ
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Has anyone read Depressive Realism by Colin Feltham?
Following is a synopsis:
Depressive Realism argues that people with mild-to-moderate depression have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressives. Depressive realism is a worldview of human existence that is essentially negative, and which challenges assumptions about the value of life and the institutions claiming to answer life’s problems. Drawing from central observations from various disciplines, this book argues that a radical honesty about human suffering might initiate wholly new ways of thinking, in everyday life and in clinical practice for mental health, as well as in academia.
Some(?) depressed people might just be people with a non-working denial gene? Any thoughts?
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And also very interestingly, the book mentions MORT (page 14)
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Thanks for the tip. I added it to my library. I recall Varki speculating that depression may be caused by defective denial genes, and my guess is that hypothesis is correct for some people, like myself.
Here is the only discussion of MORT I could find in the book:
This is typical of what I see over and over with people that discuss MORT. It’s a superficial restating of the theory with no suggestion the author agrees with the theory, nor understands its implications. If the author really understood what Varki is saying, the idea would not be confined to one paragraph in a book that discusses a probable symptom of MORT.
As I’ve said in the past:
“MORT is a classic Catch-22 because MORT predicts that MORT will be denied and therefore if MORT is correct then MORT will never be acknowledged. I still value MORT because it keeps me sane by explaining why so many intelligent people are so blind to so much that is so obvious and so important.”
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Rob,
I’ve read the book twice. And while I’m convinced by the argument for MORT my problem has always been the difficulty of any attempt to falsify it experimentally. It is way too easy to fall into the “pruning the hedge” mentality of finding support for a theory. Since Science never “proves” anything directly and only with successive failed attempts to disprove a theory are closer approximations to reality found in a theory. (A prime example would be Darwin’s original formulation of the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Although pretty good for it’s original printing it has been tweaked again and again over time until now it almost has the force of Law (as in Physics)).
MORT is almost a tautology? I know that there are no known examples of religions that deny life after death.
Would a true falsifiable experimental test be to find a MORT gene and disable it in a fetus then see what kind of person develops (would that have the potential to falsify MORT?)?
Or perhaps actually communicate with an animal that has a human like theory of mind and find no development of religion or a belief in life after death (and them not being depressed to the point of suicide)?
What falsifiable experiment would you propose?
AJ
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How about this? Identify the genes associated with a mutation for fear suppression, probably in the amygdala, that occured around the time that behaviorally modern humans emerged. Take a random sample of DNA from humans in each major race/geography, and if the mutation is not present in all, MORT is false. Look for the mutation in DNA samples from earlier and different lines of hominids, and if the mutation is present, MORT is false. Look for the mutation in the handful of people that understand and believe MORT to be true, and if it exists, MORT is false.
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Suppose MORT was falsified. Would that change anything? Would humans then be free to act in the best long term interests of its species? And would they so act? If so, would they still be regarded as a species?
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If MORT was falsified I would look for another explantion to explain the denial of obvious realities by people educated and intelligent enough to know better.
For me, why is important.
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Right, but, whatever the technical explanation, our species acts like a species and so would always display denial of the wider picture, in favour of immediate gratification.
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Many years ago I remember someone describing modern human civilization as being equivalent to a grain truck overturning and then mice having a party. Today Dr. Tom Murphy extends that idea into a detailed story.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/12/a-story-of-mice-and-men/
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Yeah, I think Paul Beckwith has gone over this when he reviewed the Hansen report recently. It is infuriating when the climate change deniers talk about this. This data is what caught Nate’s attention too. This summer might just be hell here in the PNW (here’s looking at you too Rob). I have recently started to loath the Winter Solstice because it means SUMMER and HEAT/FIRES are coming our way again. (I used to look forward to Summer!)
Are we falling victim to fear mongering (like listening to McPherson used to be?)? Are you as concerned as I?
AJ
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Honestly, I’m feeling kind of numb these days about climate. Probably because there’s nothing we can do about it now. What will be, will be, and I’m not moving.
Of all the threats I suppose I think most about the steady escalation towards a big war, and I’m angry that this is mainly due to the actions of my country and its allies, and these actions are supported by the majority of citizens, including my family and friends. Almost nobody knows or cares about actual history.
I’m also angry that the covid criminals are getting away with it, thanks to the majority of citizens, which includes my family and friends. Almost nobody knows or cares what actually happened.
Spot the common thread? Anger at my team. Not good.
How about others lurking here? How are you feeling?
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Oddly enough, my anger at my species has largely gone. I think this may be due to the realisation that humans are a species and that free will doesn’t exist. Many still expect humans to rise above typical species behaviour and somehow start exhibiting free will, making rational decisions for the good of all life. That isn’t going to happen, no matter how angry I get.
I’m glad I moved to New Zealand, nearly 20 years ago, but nowhere is safe from the impacts of acting like a species with a seemingly infinite resource (not that it would matter if the resource “seemed” infinite or not, species use what they can access, regardless).
I still have the luxury of being angry at individuals and groups but just because they don’t comply with my morality, even though they can’t help it.
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I’m mostly with you on MPP driven overshoot issues like ignoring over population, our debt bubble, and doing nothing to prepare for energy scarcity.
But I disagree on issues like ignoring reasonable warnings from the Russians that we shouldn’t put weapons on their borders.
Or allowing our health authorities to inject billions of people with a novel mRNA transfection technology based on about 200 positive (and highly dubious) PCR tests out of 10,000 test subjects, and then continuing to push injections when the data said they did not stop transmission or infection, caused serious adverse events, and have killed 17 million people so far. This is not a MORT issue. This is a capital crime.
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I didn’t mention anything about Russia or COVID but none of that is a surprise. People can’t act rationally and, even if they appeared to for a limited period, it would all change eventually as new actors emerged. Nothing stays the same.
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So the next time you go for an operation, say to have your cateracts removed, you will assume the surgeon will not act rationally?
Bullshit.
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I’m talking big picture stuff, of course. People can learn skills and utilise them on specific projects. But you, yourself, know that people don’t act rationally, in general. Hence Russia, hence COVID. Of course, one person’s rational is another person’s idiocy.
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Decisions are made before we become aware of making them. https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112
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Humans actually did address overpopulation in some places, like China’s one child policy for example. Personally, think the whole world should have a one child policy similar to China’s.
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John Mearsheimer: Israel is choosing ‘apartheid’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ | The Bottom Line
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I respect Mearsheimer very much.
Based on first hand experience doing business with Israelis, I used to respect them very much for their intelligence and determination to win, although not so much for their teamwork with non-Israelis. Then they lost their minds and decided to lead the world with mRNA injections. Now I no longer respect them. I’m very sad about Gaza because there is no solution.
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Hi Rob and All,
Since you asked, how I am feeling:
My counselor neighbor says there are five main feelings, with everything else being a sub-heading.
) Fear – at 67, I’m not particularly fearful. I have had a fair run at life, and if it ends today, ok.
As a sober, tall, old, ‘white’ man, I have a fair amount of privilege in my culture, am not an instant target, and am smart enough to keep out of the way of many small harms.
Our culture seems to say we should fear everybody and everything. This is easy to fall in to and
I’m working on being more aware of the difference between real and imagined fears, and trying to share this perspective with others.
) Sadness – Much sadness. So much divisiveness.
Media appears to be largely hyping small differences between different groups of humans and minimizing large similarities and common interests.
There is so much good, useful information about our world, from natural and indigenous wisdom to the latest high-quality science, yet there appear to be so many agendas using the old tobacco industry ‘create doubt’ tactics to muddy the waters.
Am really curious if there is anybody with wealth and power working a long game toward a more sustainable future, or if they are all just greedy and power hungry.
Biodiversity loss is so rapid and large scale.
If we had started powering down in the 1970s there would be so much less suffering now and coming soon.
) Anger – In the moment I can get angry at mean, rude, thoughtless people. But looking at my own foibles, I can’t hold that anger long.
I’m angry at the rich and powerful choosing making a killing over making a living,. That they don’t see the little people as equal to than them, and deserving of fresh air, clean water, healthy food, natural spaces, meaningful work, dignity. (Part of my answer to this is working toward being less a part of the ‘system’, and working with and supporting natural systems.)
) Regrets Many regrets. A big one is not listening to my body from an early age, resulting in self-inflicted damage.(But that damage kept me out of the Vietnam war…)
Not listening more attentively to the stories of grandparents, parents and elders.
At times in my life, I took more than I gave. Still do this a bit.
Letting perfectionism limit me from doing good.
I could have treated so many people in my life better, with less judgment and self-righteousness.
In the past could have better used my gifts/talents.
Years ago I found a very sweet area to live and did not move there then.
) Happy I’m still alive and able to work at rectify many regrets, and reducing suffering.
I have some really sweet, amazing people in my life.
A relative is helping me buy a small house in a small town in that above-note sweet area.
The house is a fixer upper, well within my skill-set, south facing, with a big space for a garden and I’m a good gardener. There’s a nice park and community center within a quarter mile where I can share and be useful with neighbors. I can still ride a bicycle and get to many places I need to go under pedal power.
Much of my work has been with my hands so I have good, sell/trade-able skills.
When I was fifteen, a family of notable environmentalists moved next door. I talked with them, read many of their books, including The Population Bomb, and decided to have only one child.
In the past two decades, I’ve only been on a plane twice. Both of those trips were optional, and I’m fine with all the other trips I missed.
Observations:
Plants and other natural forces have amazing resilience and abilities for healing Earth.
Tolkien’s Ents had a remarkably effective way of dampening(accurate use of the word!) the fires of war.
I met JMGreer almost ten years ago and appreciate his interesting and useful historical perspectives.
His view of stair-stepping down till we get to a balanced energy-in / energy-out way of living makes sense.
He says it isn’t different this time from any other major cultural shift in the past, and maybe looked at over a long-term perspective this is accurate.
But in the short-term, there have never been so many factors affecting life on such a large, planetary scale.
It appears to me that we are headed toward a big first step down in energy use, complexity, population and more, with many smaller steps to follow.
Earth will go on.
MORT makes sense to me and I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.
Though I’m not a churchy person, I believe in a higher power, and can hold both of these things in my mind at the same time.
Not either/or, but and .
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Thank you 🙂
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Hi Charles,
If the thank you is for me, you’re welcome.
As a teenager, I wanted to be a runner(short track).
I trained past the point where my knees were complaining and damaged both.
But this kept me out of the Vietnam war, so maybe both a bad and good thing?
And I can still ride a bicycle!
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Yes, the thank you is for you 🙂
I liked your comment and what I could imagine of its writer’s character by reading it.
I guess I am grateful to acknowledge we have not yet all transformed into profit-maximising, survival-of-the-fittest, lobotomized, life-eating undeads 🙂
I am sorry about your knees. If this is of any comfort, it seems to me, at some point, whatever one’s lifestyle, the body decays anyway. I was born after the Vietnam war, so I have only a cinematographic knowledge of it. Good for you for not becoming a rogue veteran, being shot by friendly fire or losing your mind in the horror 🙂
Also, it’s fun how you mentioned the Ents just at this moment. I thought about them a few days ago. I know someone who hears the voice of some individual trees (literally: it’s not that he learned through long observation to understand the structure of a tree).
And I am inclined to believe him. I find there are many things we can’t establish either the veracity or falsity of. Life is sometimes like a book of the Fantastique genre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastique), of which “La Vénus d’Ille” is a well-crafted short example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_V%C3%A9nus_d%27Ille).
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Thanks from me too Weogo. You are a wise and aware man. I share many of your feelings.
One big regret and flaw I have is an inability to forgive, both others and myself.
Good luck with your new home. It sounds lovely.
Rob
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Hi Folks,
Thanks for the kind words.
To me, Fossil Carbon is amazingly precious, to the point of being near magical.
Maybe five years ago, there was an interesting report published on fossil carbon subsidies.
I wish I had bookmarked it!
This was about the cost of various militaries to maintain access to these materials, roads and rail lines, pipelines, infrastructure at ports, shipping, etc.
There were several externalized costs, like increased health costs, that went in to the equation, that are often left out.
The numbers added up to many billions of dollars per year, many hours of labor, and a significant amount of energy.
The reality is fossil fuels are subsidized.
From my read of the numbers, small electric cars, like many sold in China, over their useful life, will have a lower environmental footprint than gas/diesel cars.
Great! Except the reality is they BOTH have significantly high impacts.
Overall, we need to use far less energy, period.
1946 was the peak of passenger rail miles in the USA.
More than twenty years ago Kunstler was pushing for a rail revival.
Here’s a group that is doing effective solar at a fairly low budget level, only running power equipment when the sun is shining:
https://livingenergyfarm.org/
Charles, very cool that your friend is hearing trees!
I feel for all the trees that are going to be cut when Earth’s large population of humans can no longer afford other energy sources.
Rob, I’m certain you can forgive yourself. And you deserve it.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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McKibben thinks if you say something that violates the laws of thermodynamics over and over again the laws will change.
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Rob, you are correct again. For me the telling sign is his belief in religion/god/heaven, which means denial about his own future. He basically believes in solar, wind, equals good and heaven; oil, coal, gas equals bad and hell. We cannot get through to people like this that have a religious belief in anything.
He actually stated near the beginning that the material mining would be less with solar and wind than fossil fuels. Plus something about we need the materials. This despite it is very well known that ‘renewables’ require 10 times the materials of coal and gas power plants, before we bother counting batteries, EVs etc.
I actually get a disconnect in a lot he states, like the people in the South needing and expecting a better life (meaning more like western lifestyles, education, health, food, jobs etc) while thinking it can be done with less fossil fuels, but doesn’t relate the modern western lifestyle as being only possible with fossil fuels, which is how we got here.
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Good points.
He also said lithium lasts for 25 years in batteries so what’s the problem?
He talked a lot about defending democracy which I suspect means ensuring the party he supports gets elected.
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Rob one aspect I always ask myself about any of these environmental gurus is where do they think the EROEI is of renewables. Most tend to be believers that it is ‘good’ and getting better, without doing any work on this themselves..
Bill McKibben seems to fit in this mold..
As I mentioned earlier, despite being aware of limits for nearly 5 decades now, I was a believer in solar, in particular (no moving parts) until I did some work on the actual numbers a couple of years ago. I know a fair bit about mining from decades of investment, looking at every detail, visiting mines being built etc.
I couldn’t go close to making a mine work (as in the economics) using solar power only, plus batteries or pumped hydro), even if I allowed it to be half the actual cost at the time. Then the Haru oni project came along, turning wind and captured CO2 into synthetic fuels, at a very pathetic efficiency rate, despite being in the best location for wind energy in the world!! It made me go and work out a method to compare the EROEI of different energy producers in a consistent way..
On POB page in a discussion with Nick G, something he stated the other day is still ringing in my head. “We can argue about the boundaries of EROEI analysis”. All I think of is boundaries!! There shouldn’t be any. Every energy input counts as part of the energy cost, including all those ‘hard to measure’ bits.
Since I worked out my own methodology of measuring EROEI, my eyes have been opened to lots of misinformation throughout the academic world. My own analysis gives the huge EROEI returns that oil and gas have given us over time, and I was personally shocked at how poor nuclear really is. I use to believe the EROEI of over100, but was coming to terms that it might be the only way forward, despite the waste problem
Anyway I’d love to do a post on EROEI sometime, if you’ll consider it. It will take a bit of time for me to put it together, with full explanations and hopefully not too long. It may end up being a couple of posts…
For me the EROEI is the most critical aspect that everyone should focus on, as everything about our modern future depends upon it. Understanding how poor the future looks, whether from fossil fuels as their EROEI continues to fall or anything else that’s very low, plus our overly bloated population leaves us nowhere to go. The denial of looking at reality staggers me. Everyone wants everything to go on normally, so refuse to look at problems.
I must have defective genes like you and others here…
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Hi Hideaway, I don’t think people like McKibben go deep on any of these issues. They read in the news that PV price is coming down and installation rate is going up and they assume the transition is feasible and the only problem is it needs to go faster. There’s probably a big dose of genetic denial at play here because it was clear in the interview that Hagens has attempted to educate McKibben on reality in the past without success.
I’m with you that there should be no boundaries on EROEI analysis. Boundaries are a way of hiding fossil energy dependencies.
I don’t have the skills or interest to do the calculation but I am confident that PV/wind will not stand on their own because I believe what I see. We don’t even come close to building PV with PV. Also, anything that can be done for a profit is already being done. Something that does not generate a profit nor pays taxes without subsidies will not work in the long term.
A post by you someday on EROEI would be excellent. Sounds like you have done some unique and interesting work.
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Thanks Rob, will start preparing. Be warned that with the exception of most people on this site, no-one will like the numbers I’ve come up with, lots of people will proclaim I’m wrong, but then be unable to show where and will try to deflect to something different, as in change the topic altogether. That’s been my experience with people in general, when I go through these numbers.
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Your paper will fit in nicely here. Almost no one likes MORT despite all relevant facts supporting it and no known facts contradicting it.
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I am looking forward to reading your post(s).
I hope you will not only show the EROEI results, but also explain the method to compute them (so that we can try and reproduce by ourselves). And I hope I will be able to understand the maths.
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The maths is simple, it is the reasoning that is the hard part to write up. What it does is give a simple way to compare different energy production units on a consistent basis.
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Simple? well, I hope so. I’ve looked at papers like this one, where systems folks are trying to bring some detail to Odom’s work with emergy, and my head spins. Looking forward to seeing your approach.
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/11/917
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Hi Scarr0w, one aspect I noticed about academic papers decades ago was the propensity to use big words, then put them together in confusing sentences. I can remember reading medical papers 25 years ago with a medical dictionary and thesaurus next to me to interpret them. Eventually I understood that the more confusing the paper with hard to understand language, the more bullshit was in it.
This paper of Murphy’s is full of bullshit, using terms like “economy-environment boundary”. WTF?
The economy and environment are not separate with any type of boundary, they are totally intertwined with the economy being a human made portion of the environment. If there was no environment there would be no economy.
How would I summarise the paper? It would be along the lines of …… ‘Let’s change the parameters of how EROI is measured because existing work by those outside the academic world are coming up with answers that don’t show the results we want shown. (i.e. renewables are better)’
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One of the things that convinces me that the EROEI of renewables must be worse than fossil fuel plants is that fossil fuel plants continue to be built, and at a high rate in some important countries. Why do that if the EROEI of renewables is so good? It may be that those operators know that the real EROEI of renewables isn’t that great.
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Very good point Mike. It’s a bit like certain African countries leapfrogging the fixed line telephone system ( which they didn’t have) and going straight to a mobile network when it became available. Why would anyone do differently when the new technology was so much cheaper and better?
Although I suspect that a fully built out fixed line system will survive, in parts, longer than mobile networks during the collapse.
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Another hint on EROEI is profitability of the energy providing source. There are plenty of oil billionaires let alone whole countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar Norway that make huge profits from oil and gas, because of the net energy thrown off, that the rest of the world needs and pays handsomely for.
I’ve yet to hear of a wind farm, solar farm or nuclear power station that throws off huge profits. By itself the profitability tells a lot about the excess energy..
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Exactly.
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not to forget, the huge taxation of fossil fuels!
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Yes, fossil fuels are the source of ALL of our surplus including taxes. Which means ALL of our surplus is depleting and will soon decline.
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Rob, I raised that exact issue of taxes and royalties on POB with Dennis, plus raised the issue of why do renewables need subsidies if they are so much better than coal?
The issue gets ignored as irrelevant, which of course is totally wrong. If renewables had a better EROEI than fossil fuels, no-one would bother with fossil fuels because of simple economics, they would be more profitable and governments would be taxing them, not providing them with subsidies.
Hmm.. I might go and re-question the promoters of renewables by posting about this over there again.
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I guess, on materials, he’s referring to the huge amount of overburden and actual fuels that are mined for coal, oil and gas, rather than mining for minerals used in fossil fuelled energy systems and plants. But it is a poor reason: that renewables is less damaging overall. Overshoot is overshoot. Unsustainable is unsustainable.
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Canadian Prepper (@PrepperCanadian) thinks he was duped by an AI.
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I watched the episode. He was duped by several books relevant to prepping that were written by AIs, and reading reviews about the books that were also written by AIs. He interviewed the “author” for 2 hours and sensed something was off but only after many hours of editing the interview did they become suspicious enough to dig more deeply into the books and discover they were written by an AI.
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Greetings to anyone who is reading this.
Thank you Rob Mielcarski for hosting this platform.
The topics presented and discussed on this site have been tremendously exhilarating.
Info:
– 28 years
– Male
– Nordic
Depression, anxiety, apathetic thoughts and behaviour have occurred as of late due to the realisations of highly probable immense disruptive events to come due to causality.
The question is, what’s next?
– Surviving alone might be plausible, yet it would seem counter productive as we are a social species whom evolved and survived via co-operation.
I contacted Professor William Rees whom provided wisdom in the form of advice while sharing his recent publishings elaborating the observed ecological trends.
Two days ago, on the 19.12 I had the privilege and opportunity to meet with Associate Professor Simon Michaux and we conversed for around 60 minutes.
A variety of topics were discussed, unfortunately due to the time constraint MORT was not included.
From this brief discussion observed from a face value perspective there is zero doubt of an astutely profound awareness of the poly crisis and the risks posed by various highly probable (if not unstoppable) catastrophic chain linked consequences and implosions which are likely to occur in the near future, if not much sooner than anyone expects!
Considering the predicament which is volatile, dire, catastrophic, detrimental, doomed, hopeless etc.
Considering the response which is something akin to
could, should, have, had, need(ed), would, want, didn’t, don’t, did this or that:
– Things will happen.
The fundamental idea supposedly is that all solutions are now on the table.
This is a matter of survival.
The focus is to collaborate with like minded people, whatever that might entail.
A thought experiment:
Whatever the cause, if 99% of H.Sapiens perished.
Whom would you want to co-operate with until that actually happens?
What can be done to prevent the worst possible scenarios?
What happens afterwards, who are the ones left in the aftermath?
A wild guess:
Associate Professor Simon Michaux does not have a problem utilising Palaeolithic or Neolithic methods to survive.
However, it can be assumed that a person from the modern era has a preference for modern amenities.
The only thing that can be done is to go one step at a time, whatever the choice of direction may be.
The proposed and presented idea could be debated for an eternity.
Having Nate Hagens, Tom Murphy, Daniel Schmachtenberger, William Rees, Simon Michaux, Robert Sapolsky, Ajit Varki, Ugo Bardi, William Stanley Jevons, Marromai, David Korowicz, Paul Stamets, Karl
North, Joseph Tainter, Ruben Nelson and others engage in a series of panel discussions would be nothing short of an epic!
To summarise.
WASF, absolutely affirmative.
Prepare for when SHTF.
1. Survival
2. Store knowledge
3. A cultural transformation (Acknowledgement and nourishment of all lifeforms)
Difficult?
– Extremely, likely impossible.
Impossible?
- Highly probable.
Hopeless?
– Highly probable.
Futile?
- Highly probable.
Accept defeat, take no action?
– ”Selfish” genes combined with billions of years of evolution and survival instincts + MORT means a few will, many likely won’t.
Even if everything comes to an end.
Beyond the Atlantic Ocean there is a sage who promotes systems, resilience, simplification and kindness.
Conformist within:
– I wish anyone reading this a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
Nonconformist within:
– As Jacque Fresco would have presented it: ”Have a good life.”
Thank you for reading.
With a warm and kind regards,
ABC
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Hi ABC, nice to meet you and thanks for stopping by.
Your thought experiment is interesting and revealing for me: “If 99% of H.Sapiens perished, whom would you want to co-operate with until that actually happens?”
Thanks to covid there are several people that were in my inner circle that I want nothing to do with in a crisis because covid proved they do not think rationally or ethically. Fortunatley my little group of friends at the farm I assist did not push me to get transfected despite doing so themselves.
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Dear Rob,
thank you for your swift reply.
I can relate, this period of time did indeed show the true colours of massive misdirection, lack of integrity and extreme control mechanisms which will probably become far more severe in the future.
I have younger sibling who went to work for the UN.
– He had to take all of the medical procedures to be able to go to work.
I warned him.
– So far nothing has yet occurred, only time will tell…
It is with a devastated spirit I write this;
– The vast majority of H.Sapiens are not capable of critical thinking due to a strong need to conform,
combined with the distorted values derived from cultural conditioning and MORT.
It is a cruel twisted fate for the ignorant subjects, yet it’s far worse for the observer who experiences the insanity constantly and cannot escape it.
The observer suffers in solitude and if ever a conversation arises,
the reactions are often met with hostility and the observer is made to be the odd one.
We are living in a dystopian decaying sphere and the worst is yet to come,
the waves of calamities will cause suffering beyond comprehension.
I grieve for all the life which H.Sapiens has snuffed out, yet I can only pity the foolish H.Sapiens as the “ascension to the skies above” cost it everything worth existing for.
Dear Rob, this platform has provided a sense of relief and knowledge for a fool such as myself.
I commend your diligence and insights, you have my sincerest gratitude.
With a warm and kind regard,
ABC
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Thanks ABC. Nice to know there are a few people that have similar feelings.
In real life, if you want to embrace reality, you’d better like your own company.
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Peter Watts @ No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons occasionally writes an excellent rant about climate change. I showcased his work and a few of his good quotes five years ago here:
Today he ripped the COP28 meeting. Like most people who worry about climate change, Watts doesn’t understand the implications of a big reduction in CO2 emissions, but it’s still a good rant at the hypocrisy of our leaders.
h**ps://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10873
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Deindustrialization is a fuzzy word that conjures images of rural life and farming.
What struck me in this chart is how many times the word ammonia (aka fertilizer) shows up.
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Thankfully, Europe is the continent with the slowest population growth. In fact, without immigration most European countries would have a declining population. In light of this, should Europe be allowing in more migrants, when its ability to feed itself may be in peril in the near future?
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The latest LtG paper published last month.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375610074_Recalibration_of_limits_to_growth_An_update_of_the_World3_model
Some highlights…
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Thanks Campbell. I added the image and bullets.
The work of Dana and Dennis Meadows is holding up very well with each fresh look at their model. Each update also re-validates that Varki is right.
I’ve posted this in the past, but in case you missed it, this 3 part podcast on the history of the LtG study is superb.
https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/
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Thanks for tidying that up. I have listened to that LtG podcast series and will listen again.
Denial and Varki came to mind as I read the second last bullet point.
I also stumbled across this paper the other day.
Footprints to singularity: A global population model explains late 20th century slow-down and predicts peak within ten years – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247214
Sounds pretty grim particularly for those in cities without land to grow food. We live at the end of a dead end unsealed road around 10km from the nearest small town. We have 20 acres of good volcanic soil and a water source that runs all year round. We have abundant timber for cooking and heating, and our food forest is starting to produce a few crops. I am starting to stockpile a few food essentials like rice and legumes. We’re still a long way from self-suffiency though.
If the supermarket system crashed tomorrow our diet would have to change radically overnight and we’d be looking for ways to catch and eat the many rabbits, pheasants, turkeys and possums that cross our land. Your prep tips / questions are excellent challenges for our situation and thinking here.
Merry Christmas (not that we celebrate it in our house) to you and all the rest of the Un-denial family. Thanks for keeping this site going another year. It, and the contributions from everyone else lurking here, adds value to my days. Cheers
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Hi Campbell, I remember you posted links here to a video tour of your property. You’ve accomplished a lot and should be very proud.
Your second bullet made me chuckle and I forgot to mention why: “The connections in the model and the recalibration are only valid for the rising edge, as many of the variables and equations represented in the model are not physical but socio-economic. It is to be expected that the complex socio-economic relationships will be rearranged and reconnected in the event of a collapse.”
Those are fancy academic words for: “It’s going to be a gong show on the downslope.”
Best wishes to you and your family.
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Yes the food forest is my happy place. Our bananas are fruiting steadily now and also providing nectar for my favourite native bird the Tui. It’s a nice place to sit and be at peace with the world.
I also smiled at that point you mentioned. The word clusterf#@k came to mind for me. 🙂
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Nice. What type of banana is it? I tried to grow banana at my last place but only got some leaves, and not many of those. I guess it wasn’t in an ideal location. I’d like to try again at my new place (effectively, South Auckland) but have had difficulty sourcing the plants.
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Hi Mike. We’re growing mainly Misi Luki Lady Finger currently. There are lots of bananas being grown here in the Far North and so they are easy and cheap to get hold of. Here’s a link to a short video of our 2 year old plantings.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/NtweBgpNyLvqDqGGA
South Auckland should be pretty easy growing for them from what I’ve heard if you have a frost free sheltered spot on your land.
Friends of our at Permadynamics are banana gurus. Here’s a good propagation video from them. They’re heavy feeders so lots of manure and greenwaste.
Good luck sourcing some plants.
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One of the great mysteries is why an apple grown locally costs about $1.00 and a banana grown 7000 Km away costs about $0.25.
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Preptip:
Will money lose value?
Will supply chains become unreliable?
Do you use it regularly?
Do you need it to survive and/or would life be less pleasant without it?
Does your community import it?
Does it have a good shelf life?
If yes to all, then stock a bunch of it.
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Chuck Watson summarizes what he thinks is significant:
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Here are 6 covid stories I have detected.
Which one is true?
1) The majority believe a deadly contagious novel virus created in a lab escaped and killed millions, and some heroes employed by pharma developed a new amazing mRNA vaccine in record time that saved many more millions from death, and that we will need this mRNA technology to respond to similar future threats.
2) Most skeptics believe the virus was real and engineered, but only dangerous to vulnerable people, like the elderly and obese, unfortunately the side effects of the mRNA vaccine killed and harmed more than they saved, however the mRNA technology can be fixed and will have a bright future protecting us from future threats.
3) A few skeptics believe there is no virus and are mostly silent on all other issues.
4) A few skeptics believe the virus was not contagious or deadly, but was engineered and deliberately spread in a few locations to cause a panic amplified by invalid PCR tests and medical procedures that killed people with illnesses like pneumonia and opioid addictions, with the goal of bypassing normal drug approval processes, to inject billions of people with a gene therapy transfection platform that is inherently unsafe, and to eliminate the control group, so that this mRNA platform can be used for all future vaccines and many illness therapies.
5) One skeptic believes about half of all vaccines, including mRNA, are unsafe due to a guaranteed tendency to cause blood clots, that was missed by all experts.
6) A few extreme skeptics believe the goal was population reduction and control, and that the crimes committed by our healthcare institutions call into question the safety and efficacy of all vaccines.
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My 2 cents for what it is worth.
The sars cov2 virus exists. It is the result of over a decade of tinkering by military and scientists to understand virological events and outcomes. The motivation for this ranges from those concerned with deadly viruses and wanting to prevent them killing us through to the opposite – weaponising them for the next generation of warfare.
The evidence for this littered throughout journals showing the small increments of progress made in both the technology to enable the work and the modification and chymerification of the virus/es.
Eventually these things get out because humans are either stupid and lazy at some point or a weapon has been released. Guessing the motivations for that are guesses at best but those releasing it would most likely believe that they are able to fight it or they know it is a very tame virus that would peter out but allows for the next stage in the plan which is to implement population control experiments to see what can be tolerated by the populations.
The vaccines were the next step in that experiment. What it showed mostly is that most people will blindly trust authority when pressured or scared. Even taking something that was so painfully obvious had zero credibility to do what it was said to do. Again this leads to the next experiment which is to see what the mRNA tech does to populations over the NEXT TEN YEARS at least. Once you have been genetically altered there is no reversing of that and if the germ cells have been altered then the next generation carries that change.
Authority is taking very good notes on our responses and the results of these experiments. Make no mistake it is refining its strategy for the next round. The reason for this is that democracy has no choice but to disappear in an energy contracting environment. Authoritarianism or totalitarianism are the natural followers. The one thing you can always count on elites to do is cling onto power no matter what. Also we know we can’t vote ourselves a future free lunch for everyone. Things are going to keep picking up speed from here.
One thing to keep in mind though, even if so much of this is a planned experiment humans excel at two things – stupidity and laziness. This usually lays waste to all best laid plans. So expect a wild ride ahead and stop worrying about the population issue, it is being dealt with and we should be down to under a billion by the end of the century.
Merry Clitoris everybody and wishing you all a happy penis for the new year.
Take care.
Niko
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I agree sars cov2 exists and was engineered. Are you aware of any evidence that people infected with sars cov2 are contagious? Are you aware of any evidence that any contagious bioweapon has been successfully developed? There’s no doubt they’ve made stuff that will kill people. But is it contagious?
That’s the big question JJ Couey, Denis Rancourt, Jessica Hockett, and Mark Kulacz have made me think about. Epidemics caused by bioweapons may be a myth to keep money flowing to the MIC, and to keep us in fear so they can fast track acceptance of the mRNA platform.
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When I had covid and it was very different to all the colds and flus I have had before. I caught it off my partner and she caught it from her children. We then purposefully gave it to another person who wanted to get it for natural infection so that they didn’t need to get a vaccine (mandate crap). They came down with it two days later. All of us thought it was very different to other flus.
Then there is the whole diamond princess saga. The disease spreads, it was just not very lethal. That was known back in 2020 but ignored.
Modifying DNA and RNA is well established. The production of bioweapons just like chemo weapons is what I would consider a given. What is not a given is their accurately determinable and controllable use.
This may make them redundant. Lets hope so
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Thanks. That’s strong evidence I did not see in my personal life. I’ll pay closer attention to Couey et. al. Maybe they’re wrong or maybe I have misunderstood their story.
I wonder why Rancourt’s analysis of all-cause motality shows no evidence of spread? Ditto for Hockett’s NYC analysis.
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This excellent essay discusses how difficult it is to diagnose covid and how easy it is to confuse covid with other ailments.
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/a-closer-look-at-spikeopathy-as-the
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Hi Rob, I’ve been reading your site for quite a few years, since well before Covid. Not sure why I didn’t start commenting here until recently, but probably to do with the fact people here ‘get it’. We are in massive overshoot..
I’m wondering if the whole Covid drama is a result of the powers that be understanding how far we are into overshoot and ‘set up’ for a disease to decimate the human population, so they panicked, bringing anything that looked like a good idea by ‘experts’. Of course making decisions in panic mode meant they were just about all wrong.
Of particular notice here in Australia, where the state Premiers were the leaders in all decision making, during Covid, not the federal government, those that survived elections have all resigned, leaving politics. To me it’s a type of admission they knew they made lots of mistakes, probably due to faulty information given to them by ‘experts’, and just wanted to get out of politics altogether. They were way too young for retirement, Dan Andrews here in Victoria is only 51, but retired as Premier and politics..
For me I don’t dispute lots and lots went wrong with the whole Covid episode, but relative to the big issue of overshoot, it is just a minor side show, possibly even gave us hints of what will happen when there are real declines in oil and everything else as a result. The leaders will receive poor information from ‘experts’ to act upon.
A couple of decades ago I was working with the highest level of the public service and ministerial level politicians. My take was they are just like everyone else, often having to make decisions based on faulty information. They are very scared of being seen to make a poor decision, as it will likely destroy their career. If you have ever seen the British comedy Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, it really is like that!!
In the last dozen or so years I’ve seen many Environmentalists that get the big picture, be sidetracked by smaller issues, where there is clearly something wrong. Even all the climate change discussion and looking for answers has taken peoples minds off the real problem, all 8 billion of us and what we are doing to the planet. Even the greenest of green, now seem to be advocates for more mining, only they don’t frame it that way, it’s of course ‘more renewables’.
My observation is that you have been very distracted by all the shenanigans of Covid. Yes lots is wrong, but so what? I mean there is lots wrong in many areas, we should all be protesting against the ‘renewable’ future as it means so much pollution from all the copper mining necessary. Or protesting against all the immigration as it means already overpopulated places (everywhere!!) just get more overpopulated damaging local environment more.
It’s obvious to me that the areas of mistakes will increase, they will get more obvious and rules and regulations on ordinary people will get far tougher, often for no obvious reason, as we go down the slope of energy depletion and increasing environment damage. We should all expect the bad and poor decision making to get worse, in regard to everything, as the whole of modern civilization is all connected. I expect to be lied to by our leaders, by the media, by experts, in all fields. Why expect anything different in a civilization that has no future?? The truth and reality of our situation means our leaders have been lying to us for generations…
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Hi Hideaway, I’m pleased you are becoming a regular here.
I understand your disappointment in me wasting too much time on covid. I’m probably also disappointed that I’ve wasted so much energy on it. After all, what’s the problem? I resisted the pressure and remain in the control group.
I’m not saying you are wrong, but here are the reasons I tell myself covid is an important issue:
– Some close family members and friends injected mRNA despite my warnings. I’m worried.
– I don’t have many close friends in my life and lost about half of them over covid.
– I was once proud of the Canadian healthcare system. I know the healthcare system will scale down with depleting energy, but I hoped it could still be trusted because it was staffed by competent professionals with good ethics. I now know most are not competent, nor have good ethics. That’s very upsetting, especially for someone that is getting older.
– I think I understand overshoot. I do not yet understand what happened with covid. A lot of people died. Many more might die. It’s a very interesting mystery. I understand why we do not act rationally about overshoot, I do not understand why we are unable to make rational decisions about mRNA.
I’m not an activist on overshoot issues because I’ve come to accept we will not change until forced to do so.
I am an observer trying to understand and explain what we are doing and why. A few people discuss the what honestly. Fewer discuss the why. I’m pretty much the only person who thinks genetic denial a la MORT is an important piece of the why puzzle.
In the early days I had hopes that MORT awareness might improve the effectiveness of activitsts trying make our species less destructive and more sustainable. But overshoot activists are no more interested in MORT than the people they are failing to influence.
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Hi Rob,
Jim Kunstler just released a great interview with David Martin on the supposed pandemic and the COVID 19 vaccine. Martin starts with a bang stating that the WHO is an international criminal cartel by their own charter and bylaws. Too much to summarize after that. Enjoy.
https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/kunstlercast-391-david-martin-up
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Thanks, I started listening to it last night. Martin is a mysterious guy. Do you trust him?
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Hi Rob,
Everything I have been able to verify independently about Martin has checked out. That said, what humanity endured during COVID demands excess caution when assessing any source of information. However, since I distrust institutions of power and privilege to the core of my being, his narrative resonates better than most in circulation on the history of the vaccines and respiratory vaccines specifically. For what it is worth, as I understand things, Martin is an expert on US and international patent law which gives him some expertise when it comes to tracking down and assessing the murky world biological patents.
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I agree, his strength is law and sleuthing patents.
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It is David Martin
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fixed
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I finished the interview. David Martin is an odd mix of brilliant awareness using his law, patent, and history expertise, combined with crazy ideas, possibly due to thermodynamics ignorance and overshoot blindness.
Using different evidence and words, David Martin seems to have arrived at a similar covid story as Jonathan Couey, Jessia Hockett, Mark Kulacz, and Denis Rancourt. Namely that there was no dangerous contagious virus, panic was fomented to inject mRNA, with the objective of reducing the population.
Martin explains covid motives as:
– about 2027 there will be a crisis caused by US social security becoming insolvent and US interest on debt exceeding tax revenue
– wars have been used in the past to deal with similar crises, and they are therefore gearing up for a big war, except this time they know it might not work because the US no longer has a decisive weapons advantage
– therefore population reduction via mRNA is also being used to solve the problem
On energy Martin says:
– we are fast approaching the end of the fossil energy era
– but not to worry, he is the CEO of a company with a secret sauce that will be disclosed in 2024 which will solve our energy problem
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Hi Rob,
Excellent summary.
A few items to add to the mix:
– Presently (2023/2024) the US Federal Government shapes up like this financially
— Annual Expenditures 7 trillion $
— Annual Receipts (taxes, fees, tariffs) 5 trillion $
— Annual structural deficit 2 trillion $
— Accumulated Federal debt 34 trillion $
— Annual Interest on accumulated debt just shy of 1 trillion $
For 2022;
– Mandatory expenditures
— Social Security – 1.2 trillion $
— Medicare – 747 billion $
— Medicaid – 592 billion $
— Welfare (Social Security Programs) – 581 billion $
— Student Loan Programs – 482 billion $
— Other – 520 billion $
– Discretionary expenditures
— DOD – 751 billion $
— Non-DOD – 910 billion $
– Net Interest – 475 billion $
Source: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58888
These numbers are now two years old. Since then the budget has only gotten worse. The full 2024 budget has yet to be completed. However, the DOD budget was just approved before Christmas at a whopping 900 billion $. With inflation over the last three years, there have been reports that interest expense on the National Debt alone is now close to 1 trillion $, roughly a 500 billion $ annual increase in two years.
Effectively, the Unites States of America is bankrupt. It only continues to exist by selling US Treasury Bonds which feeds the annual deficit spending. So, Martin’s analysis of the US financial situation is very solid. We already hear politicians calling for the revocation of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Welfare to continue payments for the US Military and related Pentagon and Intelligence community budgets.
Keep in mind that the largest block of US voters are the elderly who benefit most from Social Security and Medicaid. So, there will be a huge fight to cut these programs. Hence the reason to eliminate as many senior citizens as possible via the MRNA vaccines i.e. government sanctioned democide.
As far as Martin’s hints of a “magic bullet” energy solution in 2024, I am highly skeptical as well.
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Why methanol cannot replace petroleum in shipping.
https://energyskeptic.com/2023/methanol/
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I remember trying to buy methanol for a backup alcohol stove and found it difficult to find at a reasonable price. Not a good emergency fuel in my opinion.
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Hideaway, Sabine Hossenfelder says the construction of small modular nuclear reactors is gaining momentum. She did not say how many are already operational. What do you make of this?
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Hi Rob, I’ll be watching Saturday’s episode with costs of nuclear with a lot of interest. However every cost estimate of nuclear in the past has been blown out of the water and none of the proponents can work out why.
The reason is entropy in the system overall. It takes a long time to build nuclear and the background system is ageing during this time, so are all the workers involved, from planners and designers to concrete pourers and security. The energy cost of the lot is way higher than most think.
You don’t take a random person off the street to be your nuclear physicist. They need to be a trained person. However we don’t take a random person off the street and train them especially to be a nuclear physicist either, as they may not have the ability to understand the physics. It would be a disaster..
Instead, how the world works, is that we train a million young people is a wide range of basics at primary level. There might only be 100,000 that go on to do high school physics. Of those 100,000 only 5,000 might go on to study tertiary physics, with only 1,000 going on to major in it. From those 1,000 only 50 might go on to do a doctorate, with only 1 or 2 choosing nuclear physics.
It takes the entire system to train the best people for the position, not just the energy expended by the person who gets that position.
The entire background system of civilization is part of the energy cost in building everything. Every large project that takes many years to build, has huge overruns of costs, and nobody can ever work out why the original planners were so incorrect with their cost estimates. We currently have that happening here in Australia with hte Snowy pumped hydro storage project, originally forecast at $2B and taking 4-5 years, but now over $12B and taking a decade, for exactly the same initial design.
The background system that all large builds operate in have a massive embedded energy component. As everything is replaced over time due to entropy breaking down existing structures, the ‘new’ has a very high energy cost because energy is no longer cheap and has it’s own internal higher energy cost than 6-8 decades ago. This applies to the new people as well as the structures.
…….
In economics everyone is taught that economies of scale make things cheaper on a per unit basis, so the theory goes that a 100Mw power station will produce energy at a greater cost than a 1,000Mw power station, no matter what the type. Over time considering coal or gas or hydro power for that matter, this rule has shown to be true, the economies of scale work..
Now we are being told that in nuclear smaller reactors will be cheaper than large ones because of using a cooky cutter model in a factory, producing multiple thousands of these units. how many are being produced? One here, one there at great individual cost. The Poland example of 24 will be interesting, but it’s not the scale of producing thousands each year.
A factory can’t be built to turn out thousands of them per year, because we don’t have the orders. I suspect we need the rest of the world, all 8B people to have a western type lifestyle, to be able to pay for the thousands of reactors to be built each year. In other words a catch 22. Nuclear reactors are very complex machines, like an modern cell phone there needs to be huge orders to make them with a competitive price. No-one is going to order thousands until they have proven themselves, yet they wont be able to prove themselves until thousands are built and operating. Look at the NuScale SMR disaster, uncertainty over sales, due to high cost of power, led to cancellation of order. Latest projection of $89/Mwh..
Here is the real problem, the world in 2022 was operating and slowing down on energy cost of oil at $100.98/bbl on average (from IEA). That’s roughly $60/Mwh of oil (~1.7Mwh of energy in bbl). Those barrels of oil were extremely profitable for the producers, plus those barrels of oil produce not only energy but some products as well, that the electricity from any source doesn’t give us.
That oil at $100/bbl and 100Mbbls/d (all liquids) created $3.6T out of the ground in 2022. The cost of accessing that oil was only a fraction of this. The first 65-70M bbls/d, mostly Middle East oil have an average production cost of under $10/bbb or roughly $5.88/Mwh of energy. (From IMF document April 2022)
The NuScale SMR was going to have a cost of $89/Mwh which represents the energy spent on it in all forms. Something at a cost of $89/Mwh cannot compete in a world where the greatest quantity of energy is only costing $5.88/Mwh.
I try to always have an open mind, until the evidence is just too great one way or another, so I’m very interested in the costs Sabine come up with, about the SMR, and the sources. My suspicion is that the theoretical price wont match the actual, and the O&M costs will be relatively high, because of economies of scale issues.
The real problem is that the cost of everything eventually relates back to the cost of oil. When oil goes up because of depletion of the cheap sources, the cost of electricity from complex solutions like nuclear will also go up. Meanwhile in the background the energy cost of mining the metals to build the nuclear reactors (plus every other energy production machine), and the uranium, is going up due to lower grades on average every year.
Even if it was very cheap energy, it would only make the overall degradation of the environment worse until the lot of humanity collapsed anyway a few decades further into the future, after all other life on planet earth had suffered much more, due to worse climate, more extinctions, and greater overall pollution. We have never transitioned away from any energy source, just used more. We, as in humans, used more biomass for energy in 2023 than we did in 1776 right at the earliest phase of the industrial revolution.
Sorry about the length for a quick answer….
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Thanks Hideaway, very interesting!
I like this insight:
Another way of thinking about…
…is that the primary energy used to extract oil is oil. Oil is also the primary energy used to manufacture, install, and maintain nuclear, hydro, PV, and wind.
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You can add this to the debate
https://energyskeptic.com/2023/bill-gates-gen-iv-sodium-cooled-fast-reactor-sfr-in-wyoming/#more-15107
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Climate change to force people indoors earlier than expected.
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I quit following Erik Townsend years ago because I thought he was a techno-optimist in overshoot denial concerned with creating an energy transition message that would sell well via paid subscribers, rather than communicating truth.
I skimmed this new video by Townsend which argues nuclear can solve our fossil energy problems. If you want to check out an optimistic view of the future, by someone that is energy aware (but overshoot & materials blind), this is not bad.
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I had thought that John Campbell was putting a fair case about excess deaths but, to be honest, I never checked his figures. However, a guy called David Hood did (I’ve loosely followed him for a few years and he’s usually been apparently rational) for NZ.
The figures, if adjusted for population rise (which is quite rapid in NZ), show lower death rates for all age groups than pre-COVID. That is no excess deaths.
This prompted me to do a quick check for myself, using the data for Australia (the first country mentioned on the video that Hood was replying to). I first checked what the OECD (from which Campbell was getting his numbers) says about the excess deaths figures and, sure enough, they don’t adjust expected deaths for population rise, stating that the baseline used (2015-2019 average) should be regarded as a lower bound for expected deaths because population rise is not accounted for. Then I did a quick check on what death rate might be expected, given population rise, using the 2019 figure only (as it seemed similar to earlier years) and adjusting for population rise in 2023 (estimate from Worldometer). Sure enough, the deaths given by the OECD numbers show about the same as I calculated for the first 34 weeks (the figures Campbell was talking about). So no significant excess deaths. I don’t have time to check all of Cambell’s figures but it does seem he hasn’t done due diligence and so may have come to the wrong conclusions.
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I left the following message for Dr. Campbell on YouTube and Twitter:
If he replies, I will post his answer here.
I tried to check for conflicts of interest with David Hood but he provides no information on how he makes a living.
I tried to check for critiques of David Hood’s work but he blocks replies on Twitter from people he does not follow, and no comments are permitted on his web site.
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Thanks, Rob. I don’t think Hood has a blanket ban on anyone not following him being barred from commenting. I think it’s a post by post decision. But he uses sources that can be checked, so it doesn’t really matter what his general world view is.
That video from Campbell reminds me of the terrible video that Chris Martenson put up about deaths in NZ matching the roll-out of the vaccines, which was utter garbage that Martenson did no checking on at all. I hope Campbell responds and does a bit more research.
I must admit that I also couldn’t understand why the apparent surge in excess deaths around the world was not being picked up by the media or governments but the explanation could well be the obvious – there is no surge in excess deaths.
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Sorry, I meant a ban on those Hood doesn’t follow, not on those not following him.
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It’s common practice to manipulate health statistics to support a desired outcome, and it’s very difficult for non-experts to detect and to determine the truth.
For example, Dr. Malcolm Kendrick has spent years trying to get to the bottom of dodgy statin data.
That’s why I think it’s important that someone who makes a claim allows public debate about the claim, and Hood is not permitting discussion of his work. Campbell and Martenson, on the other hand, do permit their work to be publicly critiqued.
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Rob, I mentioned that the apparent ban on those he doesn’t follow may be just post specific. I checked a few of his replies and he allows replies on most of them. If there is a post you’d like to reply to, then just quote the post and add your reply. It’ll end up in Hood’s notifications, even if you don’t add his username.
Yes, I agree that it’s not unusual to cherry pick or angle data to show the story one wants. However, I’m pretty sure that his use of the data is reasonable.
As Hamish mentioned, he does seem to accept the party line but still provides information without, as far as I can tell, manipulation to support a line. He provides regular reports here: https://thoughtfulnz.quarto.pub/nzcovidreport/
Hood also posts on Mastodon and Blue Sky Social, with the same handle and allows replies, as far as I can tell.
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On the excess death numbers I am neutral. Hood may be correct.
“… How he makes a living”, most likely retired since he appears to be about 80. Career since university (and school) in the UK, appears to be administration and management in education – so likely not even a little anti-establishment. He appears to accept the authority line on Covid in its entirety.
One of his tweets, January 2021 :
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You might have gotten wind of another David Hood for your description of him (though the tweet is him). From this page, he looks nowhere near 80. I’ve seen local news articles about him, describing him as a “data wonk” meaning he’s all about the data. https://events.otago.ac.nz/covidandwork/speakers
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How does Hood make a living? Does he obtain any income from pharma (grants, advertising, fellowhips, etc.)?
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No idea. Looking at some of the age group deaths on the Stats NZ web site, it looks like Hood is right but there is a lot of data and I may not get round to looking at it in detail and I’m not sure how to calculate age standardized death rates. https://stats.govt.nz/experimental/covid-19-data-portal
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https://www.otago.ac.nz/contacts/letters
Select H then Ctrl+F and Hood gives :
Adviser, IT Training and Development – Human Resources
DDI: +64 3 479 9002
Dunedin
david.hood [the usual character] otago.ac.nz
Mike was correct about me thinking he was retired. I found 3 David Hoods in NZ. Two near Auckland – one elderly (in LinkedIn), one recently deceased (not able to post in 2023), and now a third in Dunedin.
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The University that employs Hood had a strict vaccine policy and also received $121,000 NZD from Pfizer in 2020, surely just a coincidence. The university fired and subsequently had to cough up $53,000 NZD to Louisa Baillie for being vaccine hesitant.
Nothing in any of Hood’s many tweets suggest he is skeptical of the “safe and effective” narrative (at all). For me, his position is one of (gently) promulgating the establishment propaganda.
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Thank you.
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Here is another $16m NZD involving the good university (sarcasm).
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Oh, I know he tows the line mostly. But that doesn’t mean he can’t add up.
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Me above : “On the excess death numbers I am neutral. Hood may be correct.”
You later : “Oh, I know he tows the line mostly. But that doesn’t mean he can’t add up.”
Once again, on the numbers, he may be correct. That does not mean that his interpretation of those (excess mortality) numbers is also correct.
After a pandemic with many deaths, there should ordinarily be a period of reduced all-cause-mortality. This did not appear to happen. He has not mentioned or attempted to explain this, therefore his motivation needs to be examined.
There are too many confounding variables for any meaningful conclusions – e.g. if the population goes up from immigration despite a reduced birth rate, were the increased numbers of deaths because all the immigrants were elderly. What caused life expectancy to reverse?
Hood may be brilliant at programming in R, but that does not mean his conclusions are also valid, even if those conclusions are merely implied or hinted at.
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After injecting the majority with a safe and effective vaccine for a deadly contagious virus, you would also expect all-cause mortality to fall.
After all, if deaths were not up due to the virus, and then did not come back down thanks to the vaccine, why did you pressure everyone to accept the risk of injecting it?
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Hood was responding to Campbell’s naive use of raw data without examining them. Hoods calculations are a lot more relevant than the simplistic one’s by OECD and picked up by Campbell, especially as the OECD page where Campbell got his numbers did say that population growth wasn’t accounted for in the simplistic calculation. I don’t think criticism of Hood for not examining the issue in scientific detail is warranted. Excess deaths for NZ are below what they were pre-covid, when population rise is accounted for.
You may be right that perhaps we should expect an even lower death rate, I don’t know. But Campbell, also, has not considered that angle, though I don’t know how one would quantify that expectation, nearly 4 years after the outbreak started.
On simple calculations, Campbell is wrong and Hood is correct.
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Steve Kirsch today responds to the attempted take-downs of the NZ whistleblower data.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/attempts-to-discredit-the-new-zealand
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Excellent year end essay by B in which he reviews the predictions he made at the start of 2023.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/goodbye-2023-goodbye-old-world
Not gonna happen:
Wise advice from B:
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Dr. Joe Lee has added Middle Man Mechanism (MMM) to his String Theory, as another reason mRNA should immediately be withdrawn from use. The silence from other expert dissidents remains a troubling mystery.
https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/harvard-med-not-impressed-at-all
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Preston Howard here …
Apologies in advance if this is discussed elsewhere on un-denial.com, but I want to call your attention to this Pfizer/Moderna Document Analysis, which resulted from a lengthy court battle with the US FDA. FDA lost and had to release over 450,000 pages of data that it had hoped to keep undisclosed for 75 years. Over 3,200 professional volunteers analyzed the data, and their findings are now available.
I only examined one entry in the lengthy contents (Topic 91: Moderna Substitution, which presents a summary and then links to a more complete analysis of this topic). My first impression is that someone has done their homework. Since the item I examined was only released last November, I didn’t know if the complete analysis had slipped past folk on un-denial or not. Here’s the link:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/uk-situation-room-pfizermoderna-document-analysis
If this is half as good as it appears, it is something I have been seeking for quite a while. I would hate for interested parties on un-denial.com to overlook it. Again, many thanx to Rob and all the others who post.
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Thanks Preston, nice find.
I find it hard to articulate how upsetting I find the whole covid story. Even if you take the most benevolent stance and assume our leaders did the best they could in a time of chaos and panic, making decisions based on the data that was available at the time, you cannot excuse today’s continued push to boost everyone and to inject babies with mRNA.
We have enough civilization ending threats without having to worry whether our leaders are looking for a reason to force us to inject a toxic gene therapy.
Transfection via mRNA is like peak oil. The evidence is overwhelming and yet we do nothing intelligent in response.
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